The Real, True Story of My Thanksgiving Dinner

For a very long time I believed that I had left my Thanksgiving dinner in the serving line at the mess hall because the flight had been scrambled. I remembered being in the line, had been served part of the meal on the metal trays as the loud speaker announced, “Scramble all flight crews. Scramble all flight crews.”

Like the other flight crew, I left the tray on the rails in front of the servers, and headed for the door. We ran across the road that separated the company area from the Nest where the aircraft were parked. We had what was called the assault strip, which was a blacktop length of “road” parallel to the runway. We climbed into the helicopters and cranked the engine, reporting that we were up and ready to go. Once everyone had reported, Lead said that he was on the go and we lifted off in chalk order.

One the ground maneuvers in preparation for take off. Photo copyright by Kevin Randle.

And while that memory is true. It happened more than once. Sometimes we left the trays on the table or we left the line and headed out. Sometimes we weren’t in the mess hall, but just hanging out in the company area. In fact, one afternoon, as we stood by in the company area, four of us were sitting around a table in the dayroom area of one of the hoochs, playing cards. We had set our revolvers (yes, we had been issued .38s) on the table with the cylinders open. The platoon leader came in and asked about the revolvers. I said, “We’re making sure that no one cheats.” We were scrambled not long after that. The point is that more than once, we had been scrambled for any one of a number of missions.

However, on December 4, 1968, I wrote home about our Thanksgiving in Vietnam. I wrote, “Thanksgiving we spent on an airstrip near Tay Ninh. Third Brigade [I believe that would have been the 3d Brigade of the 25^th ID] said the dinner was on them. It was pretty bad. What made it worst, they made us pay for it. How’s that for the holiday spirit.”

I simply do not remember this mission. I do remember that we spent Christmas shut down in another area, along a road, waiting for a prisoner exchange that never happened. No one volunteered to provide us with a Christmas dinner. We were left with C-Ratios. We used to make little stoves by filling a used ration can, a little larger than those Tuna cans we have today, with JP-4, or using a little bit of C-4, to heat the food. One of our guys accidently kicked one of the cans, momentarily setting his boot on fire.

I do remember reading or hearing about how the Army worked to make sure that every soldier had a good holiday meal at Christmas and Thanksgiving. I also wondered who all those soldiers were because it seemed to have by-passed us… more than once.

I guess the point here is that we were frequently scrambled as there were follow on missions or something went south for a unit in the field and we were the closest aviation company. It was just that we weren’t scrambled during the Thanksgiving meal because we were elsewhere. We were already on a mission.