The Best Cheeseburgers
There I Was...#23
from 
JoeUser Forums
JoeUser Forums
I went to Transportation Corps Senior NCO Course (ANOC) at Fort Eustis Virginia in the fall of 1981. I had been in Germany for more than four years and fully intended to plunge into all the neat stuff you can't get in Germany. The night I arrived I made the mistake of turning on the TV in my BOQ room and discovered cable. In Germany there was one channel (US). When I had left the States, there were three channels and no cable...on this system there were at least 60 channels. I stood there mesmerized for hours flipping from one channel to another. The next day I fell in with some other NCOs who had come in from Germany and we headed to town to get lunch. We stopped at the first burger joint we came to, I am pretty sure it was Burger King, and dove into American burgers. The discussion drifted into comparisons to other burger places and pretty soon we made it our mission to determine who had the best burgers. Over the next few months, we ate at every chain and local lunch room in Denby, Hampton and surrounding areas. We each had a favorite and we argued the merits of the ones we tested.
When school was over and we headed back to Germany, we still hadn't come to a consensus. I got "home" to Stuttgart and after a couple of days rest, got settled back into my routine work schedule. One late-morning shortly after I got back I invited MamaCharlie to join me for lunch at the AAFES snack bar. Patch Barracks is a small place, I'm guessing mayber 40 to 50 acres , if that much. We lived close to the snack bar and it was about half way between my office and home. We met, went through the line, selected our burgers and fries and drinks and sat at a table and began to talk and eat and enjoy each other's company. After about two bites I stopped chewing and looked at my selection...a double AAFES burger with cheese...and realized it was the best burger I had eaten in the last three months. After all the searching and testing and arguing and evaluating...the "hometown burger" from the Army and Air Force Exchange System Snack Bar was the best, no contest.
I thought of this the other day as I was sitting here jonesing for a cheeseburger that someone else made and I thought back over the years to when it was I first had an AAFES burger. As a pre and young teen in Yokosuka, Japan, there was a snack bar and a malt shop where you could get two burgers, fries and a cherry shake for about twenty cents. But that was Navy Exchange. I figure my first AAFES was in basic training. But in basic we didn't get out much...l am not even sure I had a burger until Advanced Individual Training...still at Fort Ord...at the snack bar across from the monster motor pool.
But it wasn't until I got to Bad Kissingen that I became a fan of the snack bar burgers. We rarely got hamburgers in the Mess Hall and when we did they were dried up little hockey pucks. We had a great enlisted men's club, named the "Dew Drop Inn" (now ain't THAT original !). They had a menu that had three items on it, each cost a dollar. Shrimp, Sirloin, or Two Burgers and fries. A beer was 15 cents and a shot was a quarter. But most of us preferred the burgers at the snack bar, two burgers, fries and a coke for about 75 cents. And they were good. So was the chili. The snack bar always had a pot of chili on the stove, 15 cents for a bowl...they had a bowl of those rehydrated onions and a plate full of crackers on the counter. On a cold day you couldn't go wrong with that chili. You could get a burger or a hot dog and a bowl of chili, cross level the chow and have some serious warm 'em up meals.
There came a point in the eighties when Burger King got the contract to modernize all the snack bars in Europe, a pilot program that was so successful that they opened it up to the Army world wide. In the late eighties, while stationed at Baumholder, there was actually both a Burger King and an AAFES snack bar open at the same time. My favorite lunch was a double AAFES burger with cheese, onion rings, a chocolate shake and a Stars & Stripes to read while I sat in my favorite booth and listened to the video juke box playing..."Wild, Wild, West..."...somebodies' Got a Big Ole Butt" and other classics.
I don't know if there are any more snack bars in the system...I think the King has taken over completely. Too bad. 'Cause King or no King...the AAFES Burger was the best.
"
When school was over and we headed back to Germany, we still hadn't come to a consensus. I got "home" to Stuttgart and after a couple of days rest, got settled back into my routine work schedule. One late-morning shortly after I got back I invited MamaCharlie to join me for lunch at the AAFES snack bar. Patch Barracks is a small place, I'm guessing mayber 40 to 50 acres , if that much. We lived close to the snack bar and it was about half way between my office and home. We met, went through the line, selected our burgers and fries and drinks and sat at a table and began to talk and eat and enjoy each other's company. After about two bites I stopped chewing and looked at my selection...a double AAFES burger with cheese...and realized it was the best burger I had eaten in the last three months. After all the searching and testing and arguing and evaluating...the "hometown burger" from the Army and Air Force Exchange System Snack Bar was the best, no contest.
I thought of this the other day as I was sitting here jonesing for a cheeseburger that someone else made and I thought back over the years to when it was I first had an AAFES burger. As a pre and young teen in Yokosuka, Japan, there was a snack bar and a malt shop where you could get two burgers, fries and a cherry shake for about twenty cents. But that was Navy Exchange. I figure my first AAFES was in basic training. But in basic we didn't get out much...l am not even sure I had a burger until Advanced Individual Training...still at Fort Ord...at the snack bar across from the monster motor pool.
But it wasn't until I got to Bad Kissingen that I became a fan of the snack bar burgers. We rarely got hamburgers in the Mess Hall and when we did they were dried up little hockey pucks. We had a great enlisted men's club, named the "Dew Drop Inn" (now ain't THAT original !). They had a menu that had three items on it, each cost a dollar. Shrimp, Sirloin, or Two Burgers and fries. A beer was 15 cents and a shot was a quarter. But most of us preferred the burgers at the snack bar, two burgers, fries and a coke for about 75 cents. And they were good. So was the chili. The snack bar always had a pot of chili on the stove, 15 cents for a bowl...they had a bowl of those rehydrated onions and a plate full of crackers on the counter. On a cold day you couldn't go wrong with that chili. You could get a burger or a hot dog and a bowl of chili, cross level the chow and have some serious warm 'em up meals.
There came a point in the eighties when Burger King got the contract to modernize all the snack bars in Europe, a pilot program that was so successful that they opened it up to the Army world wide. In the late eighties, while stationed at Baumholder, there was actually both a Burger King and an AAFES snack bar open at the same time. My favorite lunch was a double AAFES burger with cheese, onion rings, a chocolate shake and a Stars & Stripes to read while I sat in my favorite booth and listened to the video juke box playing..."Wild, Wild, West..."...somebodies' Got a Big Ole Butt" and other classics.
I don't know if there are any more snack bars in the system...I think the King has taken over completely. Too bad. 'Cause King or no King...the AAFES Burger was the best.
"
