What I’m Thankful For

Like many Americans — maybe a majority — Thanksgiving looms large in my life.

Ten days before Thanksgiving 1965, when I was two, my father was wounded in Vietnam. He was medevacked to the US and we spent the holiday with him in a hospital in Valley Forge, PA while he was recovering from his gunshot wounds.

Growing up as an Army brat, we ate a lot of Thanksgiving meals in the mess hall — my father in his dress blues — as it’s a tradition for officers to be with their young soldiers, many of whom are far away from home for the first time. We ate a few Thanksgiving dinners at Howard Johnson’s, too, like when my mom and I were alone in Ohio when my dad went back to Vietnam for his second tour.

In the late ’80s, when I was an Army officer myself, stationed in what was then West Germany, my buddies and I endeavored to get four day passes and spend every Thanksgiving in a debauched haze in occupied Berlin, which was the greatest city in the world at the time. (Stories NSFW.)

I spent one Thanksgiving in Ranger School, the Army commando course where the students are denied food and sleep in order to create stress (averaging one meal and two hours of sleep a day for ten weeks). It just so happened that for my class, eight weeks in, Thanksgiving fell on an six hour-break after we finished the course’s Florida phase and before we flew to the…