Military Thanksgiving - What's it like to vacation in a conflict zone? We asked those deployed as part of the global war on terror.
Chief Warrant Officer Matt Cole was upset. He doesn't feel like eating. Sitting in the left-hand seat of a Black Hawk helicopter on Thanksgiving Day 2005, he announced that he would skip the holiday meal.
Military Thanksgiving
Mr. Cole, a pilot with the 6th Battalion of the 101st Aviation Brigade, was landing in the back of another Black Hawk at Forward Operating Base McKenzie, near Samarra, Iraq, when insurgents fired mortars and ground fire. ground rocket.
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A long day of shuttling the assistant division commander from base to base delayed the general so he could feed the troops a Thanksgiving turkey. Mr. Cole was missing his family, and the brief stop didn't give him time to rotate his crew through the food line so he could eat.
As the helicopter's wheels hit Mackenzie's gravel, the general ordered them to stop the aircraft and eat. Mr Cole refused. He does not want to celebrate a fake holiday. He said he would wait for his flight with a book. His co-pilot tells him to reconsider. "We have nobody here but each other," Mr. Cole recalled him saying. "I'm asking you as a friend: Please have Thanksgiving dinner with me."
Feeling guilty, Mr. Cole followed his friend in line and quietly accepted the tray of food and sat down. He looked up at a big screen TV and saw Tiger Woods broadcast on the Armed Forces Network as he picked up his plastic silverware to eat.
He rushed to the airfield with the Black Hawk crew, and a rocket landed a few feet in front of his plane, stabbing the left side door and windscreen. He escaped injury, and possibly death, by agreeing to sit down on food he didn't want.
U.s. Troops Celebrate Last Thanksgiving In Iraq
This year marks the 19th Thanksgiving since the start of battles, attacks, operations and deployments in what the Pentagon calls the Global War on Terror. During this time and across the country, millions of American service members and those who served with them gathered in large and varied celebrations of the American holiday spent at war.
Soldiers of the 82nd Airborne Division enjoy a Thanksgiving meal at Forward Operating Base Airborne, Afghanistan in 2007. Tyler Hicks/The New York Times
Earlier this year, The Times asked service members, veterans and civilians who celebrated Thanksgiving in a conflict zone to share photos and memories. I specifically looked for veterans of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Together, they submitted photos of their shared meals and stories ranging from nostalgia to hard-hitting.
As with war service, Thanksgiving for soldiers is a very uneven experience. Depending on each place and time, dinners and celebrations vary between scarcity and excess, spectacle and melancholy, isolation and crowding. But common themes inform older memories, including longing for home due to separation from family and lifelong rituals, the bonds many soldiers form with fellow soldiers, and recollections of the rich palettes of emotions associated with the specific conditions soldiers lived in while deployed.
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I was about to eat my Thanksgiving meal when I was called by the area commander to inspect all the troops. I jumped in the truck and hit the road, angry that everyone else ate instead of me. As I was waiting outside a base, I heard a girl calling me in English. He asked me what I got for Ramadan. He got a watch and was excited to show it to me. While we were celebrating Thanksgiving, I found out that our Iraqi colleagues were fasting during Ramadan. He saved thanks for me.
Capt. Colin Vermeulen, second from right, and other Army officers and noncommissioned officers of the 20th Engineer Brigade play flag football on Thanksgiving Day 2007.
I was deployed as part of the surge during Operation Iraqi Freedom. We planned a flag football game for Thanksgiving morning, for which we spent several weeks creating a competition between non-commissioned officer and officer teams against each other. The Officer team was devastated, but not surprisingly, tied the score with a Memorial Day softball game victory a few months later.
I am Baghdad ER. It was a slow day when he worked in an emergency room, so in the late afternoon most of the hospital staff freed themselves to play wiffle ball. Around 5 o'clock we hear a high pitch whistle. A couple of mortars hit before everyone could take cover. After a deafening round we all huddled together and covered our ears wondering if the dam would ever end. The ER saw five or six patients from the attack, but miraculously none were serious.
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I was sent to a remote command post where sailors were excited because Thanksgiving dinner had been specially blown up. Guni opened the first box and found several cases of soda. Turning to the second container, he found more soda. What's worse is that somewhere a group of sailors are eating double or triple the portion of everything.
In the US Army, capable of logical absurdity, some soldiers recreated ice sculptures, chocolate carvings, a human-sized unit insignia made of butter, turkey plates with all the fixings, hot coffee and desserts. Air Force Maj. Maura Harkins, who was assigned to an operations shop at Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar in 2016, remembers celebrating with "a great group of people I deployed with."
"We even got to see Messi's parade that evening!" she said. "Events like this are beautifully set up and help with nostalgia."
Soldiers on medium bases often found that the Army (or their colleagues) were able to pull out traditional spreads and share them with those on duty. Shortly after the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, then-Air Force captain and B-52 crew member Dave Lyle flew over Afghanistan. Flights from Diego Garcia Island in the Indian Ocean to Afghanistan and back will be increased. He was on the U.S.N.S. GSGT Fred W. At the Stockholm base lagoon, he returned late on Thanksgiving to find that the ship's merchant marines had reserved a turkey dinner for the flight crew, which he fondly remembers. "The five of us shared a quiet but exquisite dinner together in the dark galley," he said.
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Tara Hager, an Army intelligence specialist during the 2007 military campaign in Iraq, had a different view. His mother sent him a butternut squash with marshmallows and brown sugar from Wisconsin. "I microwaved them at battalion headquarters," she said. "It smelled all over the building, but I had fresh squash for my Thanksgiving dinner and it was delicious."
In 2013, Ethan Frisch, an aid worker at the Aga Khan Foundation, working on a rural infrastructure development project in Afghanistan, conducted his own fancy search for holiday food. He bought two crispy turkeys in Baghlan province and hauled them in the back of a pickup truck over Kabul's Salang Pass, where he butchered them — a meal closer to an old-school Thanksgiving than steam trays and clamshell tents. "It squirmed, splashing our fingers with a bit of warm blood," he said. "We shredded it, seasoned it with local wild cumin and cilantro, and smoked it on the grill."
In 2004, Marine Maj. Andrew Milburn of the Coalition and Special Warfare Center, assigned to advise the Iraqi Army's 5th Battalion, recalled his fellow Marines taking risks to ensure a holiday meal. In Fallujah he spent the day in a mosque with Iraqi soldiers. Marines ran to him, picking up hot food from the Fallujah camp's dining facility.
"Then the Iraqi government declared Fallujah safe, but the enemy did not get the news and nowhere in the city was still safe," he said. “We built a fire pit — it was freezing outside — and we ate until we were almost comatose. Then we would sit on the plastic chairs in the mosque and smoke and listen to music. It was the best Thanksgiving I've ever had.
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All attempts at a mobile festival of troops in the firing line or at distant outposts failed. Chad Perment, a Marine captain in a tent camp near Iraq's Sinjar Mountains in 2008, remembers a Thanksgiving meal that was "specially blown up."
"Turkey and all the stuffing that goes with it," he said. That was the plan. "Gooney opened the first box to find a few cases of soda," Mr Parment said. Welcome back after a few weeks of lukewarm water.
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