Remembering
Thanksgiving
Probably the Thanksgiving I remember most was also the most
miserable. We were fighting on the Vinh
Te Canal in Vietnam along the Cambodian border. Friends had been killed or wounded, yet that
didn’t stop the war from going on. Every
night, it was our mission to continue to go out on patrol setting up ambush
positions along the border to try to stop the enemy from entering the
country. It was Thanksgiving 1969. There didn’t seem to be much to be thankful
for.
Still, in the midst of that night-after-night fighting, the
U.S. Navy decided that we should have a Thanksgiving dinner. At noon that day, we gathered in our fatigues
and sweaty T-shirts along a dike-line of the canal as a helicopter flew in from
Saigon with hot turkey, mashed potatoes, gravy, cranberry sauce and accompanied
by Admiral Zumwalt, Commander Naval
Forces Vietnam.
Some of the guys grumbled: “Why doesn’t he come down here at midnight and see what this place is
really like, etc.?” But, bringing
Thanksgiving dinner was a good, symbolic gesture by the Navy that day. It reminded us that, as Americans, we still
had a lot to be thankful for.
When you think about it, one of the earliest proclamations
for Thanksgiving came in midst of probably the greatest conflict in our
nation’s history, the Civil War. In
1863, with a country divided and bitter fighting raging, President Lincoln made
his Thanksgiving Proclamation invoking the help of Almighty God: “With humble penitence for our national
perverseness and disobedience… [we] fervently implore the interposition of the
Almighty to heal the wounds of the nation….”
Sometimes you need to be most thankful when adversity seems
to be at its worst.
We are in a war, of
sorts, right now with the resurgence of COVID.
Some of our fellow Americans have decided not to be vaccinated. Hospital beds and ICU’s are filling up again,
this time with the overwhelming numbers being the unvaccinated.
It is a time when we must maintain vigilance and urge
vaccination. We have to rally the troops
and keep up the fight. There was an
article in the paper this week from a retired doctor urging us to again thank
those in the healthcare field who are in the forefront of this fight at the
doors of our hospitals and emergency rooms.
We should be thanking them.
There are others, including people we know, with a recent,
crushing sadness of having lost a spouse or family member. Thanksgiving, this year, has been tough for
them. But, with support from family and
friends, hopefully they were able to dig deep and find those nuggets of life
and memory for which they can still be grateful.
A great old friend, now deceased, gave me some good advice which
also might apply. “Rol,” he said in his
usual drawl and drawn-out voice, “Thank the Lord for the ships you got on, not
the ones you missed.” At the time, I
think he was referring to a business deal that didn’t turn out quite as I had
expected. But, his advice was also solid
as a way of looking at life itself.
Our family, this year, had its own special challenges; but
things have worked out for the good—so we have had much to be grateful for. Thanksgiving remains my favorite holiday of
the year!
