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The other day, I bought a case of MREs from EBay. The box was sealed just fine, and had no visible damage or anything.

When I opened them, I noticed the MREs won't packed like normal cases were. The bags seemed to be flat or "tilted" where one side was very large, the other was very thin and everything had settled off center. The MREs themselves were fine.

One I opened though, looked like it had gone through hell. The tabasco bottle had broken, and leaked in the accessory pack, the included cookie was crumbled all to death, and the box the roast beef was in looked like someone had literally punched it, and then retaped the top. I almost didn't eat it, thinking someone had messed with it, but after checking the packaging everything was still sealed.

Anyone else had this problem? These were 2004 Ameriqual MREs, case #2.

Hi Jenn. Was your case sealed and banded or did it look like it had been repacked? And when I say sealed, I mean were the top flaps glued to the cardboard underneath? Over the years, I've become adept at taking the bands off an MRE box without cutting them so if the box wasn't glued shut, then it's possible it was repacked and rebanded to look brand new.

A number of the cases that I've opened have had strange MRE arrangements. I mean they weren't all packed in there like perfect rectangles - one would be a little tilted to the left and then the one next to it would be titled to the right and they would kind of fit together perfectly. I figured it was due to some MREs having more components than others and thus being "fatter".

But I don't know about that smashed up stuff. If your case wasn't sealed, I'd almost guess that someone just took a bunch of spare MREs that they had lying around and packed them together. Maybe those individual MREs were kicked around/abused/dropped from an airplane.

But if the case was sealed, then who knows? Maybe the whole case was dropped from a height - that might cause enough force to break some of the internal components.

Wow,that almost sounds like some Germans(we all know and Love) are repacking the stuff they found at training grounds.