Miles Eats Chinese Meal
By Frank Miles
Kumming, China (IDPA) -- I ate at an army officers mess my first fully Chinese meal: chicken liver soup, cold chopped ham and tomatoes, tomatoes stuffed with meat, small pieces of sweet and sour pork, chicken giblets and walnuts, bamboo shoots, beef and onions, whole stewed chicken with head, egg foo yong, rice, pineapple and tapioca pudding. There were chop sticks for everything save the liquids and dessert. Knives and forks were taboo. I got cramps in my right hand and mussed my chin and shirt front but didn't finish hungry. Cost for 24 dinners was 47,600 dollars Chinese, or a little more than a dollar apiece in American money.
Chinese peasants and laborers keep remarkably sturdy on much less food than average Americans consume. Most of them are good-natured.
"Airplanes and other engines of destruction can be made so much more deadly than they are now future wars might take a terrible toll of American civilians," said Col. Morley F. Slaght, Mount Vernon, Iowa, at the 14th air force headquarters. "We Americans must therefore, if only for our own protection strive to exert every possible effort to keep the world honorably at peace."
Colonel Slaght is American liaison officer with the Chinese air corps. He has been in the regular army since 1928, a year after he was graduated form the State University of Iowa. His father, Dr. William E. Slaght, was a professor at Cornell College from 1920 to 1932, after spending several years as a Methodist minister.
Source: Mount Pleasant News, July 30, 1945
