My friend's package, delivered by chopper out in the jungle in a place his men dubbed 'Christmas Hill,' contained chocolate chip cookies, a laugh box, and a fifth of whiskey.
We were supposed to get beer rations from the Army, but we rarely saw them. The supply sergeant and his buddies in the rear helped themselves, even though a beer at the club must have cost only about a dime (I remember a scotch at the officers' club costng a quarter).
On the rare occasions when they did drop off beer to us, it was warm--and heavenly. Its rarity made it even more special--even for the guys who didn't even like beer.
One time, they sent us ice cream as a reward after our bn. fought an all-night battle against an NVA regiment at the DMZ. In Vietnam's heat the stuff was melted before the choppers got halfway to us. And I'd had my platoon stash our rucks to move during the night, so we had to eat this warm, sweet, melted stuff out of our steel pots after we'd had nothing to eat for 36 hours.
From home, my mom mainly sent me chocolate chip cookies and Swiss Miss hot chocolate packages. The Swiss Miss was my 21st birthday toast on a bad night on a cold hill where we got socked in by fog and couldn't be extracted. That was special, even though it was made with water from bomb craters everybody had been urinating in, with charred splinters from the trees floating in it. We just boiled the water a little longer and strained the splinters with our teeth.
The warm beer, though, was a hallmark of service. To this day, I can still drink a warm beer without complaint. 
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