IRAQ: From cook to cop and back again

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It’s an enduring joke that the military likes to find the skills a recruit developed in civilian life and then assign him or her to something entirely different. An experienced truck driver is assigned as a computer tech; a computer tech is assigned as a truck driver, etc.

So take Marine Lance Cpl. Jennifer Shell, a reservist from Uniontown, Pa. She graduated from culinary school in New York in 2001 and received a bachelor’s degree in hotel and restaurant management from Penn State in 2005.

So naturally she was assigned to a military police unit, now deployed to an outpost along the Iraqi border with Syria.

But several months into the unit’s deployment, when the Marines began grousing about the monotony of their meals, Shell’s squad leader realized that the solution was at hand. Shell was assigned to supervise the chow hall.

Suddenly, meals were being prepared from scratch. No more the tedium of prepackaged food dropped in boiling water. Gourmet coffee replaced standard-issue. Cleanliness at the chow hall improved.

‘People actually want to sit down and eat there now,’ Gunnery Sgt. Jason Stephens told the American Forces Press Service.

-- Tony Perry in San Diego