PECH VALLEY, Afghanistan — A few days before Thanksgiving, Capt. Bo Reynolds gave his cooks a special mission.
“Everything is better fried, and that includes turkey,” Reynolds told his three Army cooks. He then ordered them to figure out a way to fry a 15-pound turkey in their small, dirty field kitchen set at the base of the Hindu Kush Mountains.
Reynolds, who commands a 120-soldier infantry company at Combat Outpost Honaker-Miracle, lost six soldiers earlier this month in a vicious firefight in the nearby Watapor Valley. His men were still recovering from the loss. The 30-yearold commander hoped that a fried turkey would lift spirits, particularly among his troops from the South, where fried turkey is a Thanksgiving delicacy.
Reynolds, who hails from Huntsville, Ala., also was craving a crispy bird.
The order presented his three Army cooks with a series of nearly insurmountable problems. None of them had ever fried a turkey, and they weren’t sure exactly how to do it.
They didn’t have the right equipment for the job. Their kitchen is little more than a plywood shack with a stove and two ovens. Sticky fly strips, coated with all manner of dead bugs, hung from the ceiling. The kitchen’s only fryer was a relatively small device designed for scorching chicken wings and French fries, not 15-pound turkeys. Even if the cooks removed the fryer’s cooking basket to make more room, it wasn’t clear that they could fit the entire bird into the vat of boiling oil.
“The turkey has to be totally submerged in the oil or it won’t fry evenly,” said Spec. David Blocker, a 22-year-old Army cook, who earlier in the day had called his mother in Washington, D.C., looking for some turkey-frying tips. After measuring the turkey and the fryer, Blocker concluded that it was going to be a very tight squeeze.
The other big concern was safety. When a moist turkey is submerged in a vat of oil it can produce an eruption of steam, grease and fire. A Google search for the phrase “fried turkey” revealed dozens of videos of near-catastrophic eruptions with flames leaping as high as 10 feet in the air. A blast even half that size would burn down the combat outpost’s small plywood kitchen in a matter of minutes. Then there would be no Thanksgiving for anyone.
Sgt. Eric Tulgetske, the senior cook at the outpost, decided the explosion risk was manageable. “I don’t think it should blow as long as we make sure the turkey is properly thawed before we put it in the oil,” he told Reynolds.
In today’s Army, field cooks have become something of a rarity. On the big Forward Operating Bases in Afghanistan and Iraq, the military has contracted with companies to run dining facilities for the troops. These days Army cooks ply their trade only on isolated and dangerous combat outposts, where they have to make do with small, mouse-infested kitchens and limited supplies.
The isolation, though, does offer some advantages. “Here you don’t have to follow as many guidelines when you are cooking,” Blocker said. “You can experiment with recipes, and you know that creativity can be a beautiful thing.”
On Wednesday, the day before Thanksgiving, the senior U.S. commander in the Pech Valley threw the cooks one last curveball. The commander decreed that Thanksgiving was going to move to today so that about 150 soldiers who were out in the mountains on a longerthan-expected mission could celebrate the holiday with their fellow soldiers.
The three Army cooks at Combat Outpost Honaker-Miracle work with a staff of four Afghans. However, the Afghan cooks don’t work onFridays, so the three Army cooks would have to handle the meal without any help from their Afghan counterparts.
Tulgetske, the outpost’s senior cook, arrived for work at 5 a.m. on Thanksgiving and planned to stay up for 36 hours straight to get today’s postponed Thanksgiving meal done.
On the other side of the outpost, the soldiers were readying their own Thanksgiving celebrations. Capt. Adam Alexander of Frederick, Md., borrowed two live turkeys from an Afghancontractor so that the troops could e-mail pictures of themselves and the birds to their wives and parents.
Initially, the contractor wanted $50 for the two birds. But Alexander assured the local Afghan businessman that the soldiers only wanted to pose with the turkeys. The confused Afghan let the soldiers borrow the birds for free.
By late Thursday afternoon, the cooks at the combat outpost were preparing spaghetti dinner and making final preparations to fry a U.S. Army-supplied turkeyfor their commander.
Reynolds dropped by the kitchen to check on the cooks’ progress and give them a quick, last-minute pep talk. “I am a guy who likes to eat,” he said. “So I need to know, are you guys going to make this fried turkey happen?”
“We’ll try not to blow anything up,” Tulgetske said.
Blocker was a bit more confident. “Sir, no question we can do it,” he said. “Failure is not an option.”
Front Section, Pages 10 on 11/26/2010