"Why do you ask?"
Subtitle
A 1918 Policy Devised to Calm Soldiers’ Nerves Sparked a Bad Habit That Was Difficult to Stop .
Yep. I remember the old Vietnam or Korean War C-rats with a little 4 or 5 pack of cigarettes in every meal.
Semper Fi!
Smoking go way back before we were even a country and the US Military is not the nexus of it...
Silliness
“U.S. soldiers used to smoke often in historical footage, so why don’t they anymore?”
Because they are not lying in a foxhole wondering if they will be alive come sunup? In that respect, given the rise of atheism in recent years, the old saying went “There are no atheists in foxholes”.
One of the first things I learned in the suevice went something like this,.
Take five!
You and you aren’t smoking, come with me.
Today's military is very fitness-oriented. Unhealthy vices such as smoking and drinking excessively are frowned upon, especially among leadership.
Yeh right....In Colonial Times....tobacco was used as currency.
My Grandfather started smoking when he was in the Army during WWII. He never stopped until he died of emphysema at the age of 77.
I like to watch old war movies. In the scenes where a soldier is wounded the first thing that his buddies and the medic do to help him is to fire up a cigarette and put it between his lips.
That’s how chewing gum started as well. Chewing gum keeps you awake when tired, so is useful for soldiers in combat who can’t afford to get drowsy.
It permeated movies, TV and offices through the mid-80s. Look at some of the old movies and TV series pre-1986.
In the late 80s/early 90s the anti-smokers got more attention. Companies, for example, started having designated smoking areas. By the mid-90s, smoking was banned inside many office buildings.
I know if I was out there during WW2 after a firefight, I’d be smoking my ass off too. After I made sure everything was still screwed on of course.
LOVED those little C-Rat cig packs- but not for smoking!
Author’s thesis is not quite true. I’ve never smoked and served 22 years active, including getting those C-Rat packs. Those little cigarette were gold to me - my Marines were willing to swap chow. I might even have gotten clean socks a time or two.
Apply the same thesis to the rise of something increasing but initially prohibited in the military or not promoted by the military-industrial complex and see the thesis holds.
Tobacco was a major cash crop of the near South. Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, and the Carolinas were all big tobacco producing states and key states in the ruling Democrat coalition during the two world wars. Wilson and Roosevelt were dependent upon the support of the “solid south”, this was why tobacco was so important.
After an attack one of the first things requested were
ammunition and tobacco. The tobacco was to cover the
smell of the dead.
Also allayed the pangs of hunger.
Yes, I remember the C-ration packs of 4.
MOstly Luckies and Pall Malls.
What a piece, written from the ignorance of an overactive imagination. It’s not “smoking culture.” It’s the lack of sleep!
"Why do you ask?"
I attended college between 1957 and 1962. It seemed that every day at the evening meal a tobacco company rep was at the dining hall offering a 4-cigarrette sample pack to anyone that would take it. In the beginning I did not smoke but took the samples and give them to my roommate who did. Before my freshman year was over, however, I began to avail myself of the samples, and then I was hooked. Remained a smoker from age 18 to about 30. The tobacco companies knew what they were doing. Back then we could smoke in classes. How crazy was that.
Those cigs that came with the C-rats were horrible. I don’t recall anyone who smoked them in Nam. Smokes were only 10cents a pack at the PX.
I call Bull....Hollywood glamorized it...watch any number of old movies...they just want to deflect and blame someone else....again.