Grace: Thanksgiving

"Thanksgiving in camp sketched Thursday 28th 1861,” by Alfred R. Waud. Library of Congress.

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For themselves they were a self-contained universe, a sub culture with its own routine, its own ceremonies, its own music and dress and habits; that whole tedious but obsessive way of life known as ‘soldiering’....

Michael Howard, War in European History

1974

It was Thanksgiving Day. I was commanding an infantry company and I was participating in one of the rituals of my trade. The company was gathered in the mess hall, a wooden building built during the surge of construction in the 40’s. That era’s buildings were all alike and I had lived and worked in them, and would live and work in them, for years. The building was heated by coal-fired boilers’ steam. The company’s First Sergeant meticulously maintained a duty roster of fire guards whose sole task was to spend their windblown winter nights walking from boiler to boiler looking for the fire which, if it came, could sweep through these buildings in a storm of heat and light. Outside a late fall wind rattled the loose window panes.

The mess hall was bedecked with crepe paper streamers and I was in my dress blues. In that time I had three dress uniforms — dress blues, mess blues, and mess whites. The uniforms were, all of them, anachronistic, of another time, of almost another century. I wore a white shirt with a black four-in-hand tie. If it had been evening time, I would wear a bow tie, also black. My trousers were royal blue with a broad yellow stripe down the side. They did not have front pockets, but they did have a watch pocket along the waistband where I carried my grandfather’s Illinois pocket watch. My coat, my “blouse,” was dark blue with shoulder boards encrusted with gold braid. Insignia made of tightly coiled silver wire designated my rank on a light blue background. The light blue background declared me to be an infantryman. On my lapels were pinned small brass and highly polished crossed rifles that also declared me to be an infantryman. I had gold buttons on my coat that could be removed for polishing (and to keep the dry cleaners from screwing them up). I had a plastic name tag on the flap of my right breast pocket and above that the ribbons my unit had been awarded for various campaigns in various wars over the years. On the flap of the left breast pocket were my silver jump wings, polished for this occasion, and above the pocket were the rows of ribbons that I had been awarded. Above the ribbons was my Combat Infantryman’s Badge.

This was my mess hall and I was obligated to be there on this day. The cooks had been there since well before daylight preparing the meal. An immense variety of food — turkey, ham, mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, rolls, salads, vegetables — was about to be placed on the serving line. My four lieutenants, also in their dress blues, and also with the light blue inserts in their shoulder boards, were present. I held the hand of my young daughter. She shone with innocence and beauty in her red gingham dress. She burbled with laughter and shook the ribbons in her hair. My wife stood nearby and kept an eye on her as she chatted with the wives and girlfriends of my officers and men. 

The First Sergeant’s dress blues were a resplendent display of gold stripes that almost covered his arms from shoulder to elbow. He was being watched very carefully by the mess sergeant, since it was the First Sergeant’s opinion that really mattered that day. The rest of the sergeants and all of the soldiers were in Class A uniforms of green wool. Sergeants were not required to have dress uniforms and none except the first sergeant had them. Light glanced off polished brass buttons and spit-shined shoes. A few of the sergeants had collections of ribbons and badges (one or two with quite a few more than I) but most did not.

The chaplain stood beside me. The inserts in his shoulder boards were black, the color of the chaplain corps. He had small crosses on his lapels, which meant he was either Protestant or Catholic; a Jewish chaplain would have had Stars of David. Behind me, near the entrance, was a small table for our dark blue hats with their golden eagles attached.

The real color in the room came from the dresses of the wives and girlfriends and the holiday garb of the children swirling about and spilling the punch from the bowl on a side table set with an elaborate display of fruit and nuts. The music came from a hi-fi. Steam billowed out of the kitchen. This was all, for the length of my command, mine. The cooks delivered the filled pans of food to the serving line. I asked the Chaplain to say grace. The Chaplain stood to the front of the room and the First Sergeant said, in a voice that easily carried over the noise and clamor, “At Ease!” The room was instantly quiet, even the children. Someone took the needle off the record. The Chaplain offered a brief prayer. The meal began.

Army ritual and custom demanded that sergeants and officers eat after the men, so I and my family were the last through the line. The mess crew was sweating and proud of what they had done in the early-morning hours. They made sure the “old man” and “his lady” were served well.

We joined a table of privates and junior NCOs. One very young wife cooed over my daughter, but the rest were uncomfortable around the “old man.” That was appropriate, that was the way it was supposed to be. 

I was only able to have a few bites before the mess hall echoed with a shouted “At Ease!” that was quickly followed by a brisk “As you were!” from a different voice. I looked up to see that the Battalion Commander and his family had arrived, making their rounds of the battalion’s mess halls. I went to greet them. I introduced them to the First Sergeant and his Japanese wife and, at the commander's urging, returned to my meal. They made their way from one long table to another shaking hands and chatting before leaving with a shouted, “Happy Thanksgiving!”

I noticed how very diverse and “American” the room was. One of the cooks was from Mexico and went to special pains to introduce his wife and six children. His English was barely comprehensible and his wife had none at all. Other wives were German, Korean, and Japanese. In a few more years I expected that some of them would be Vietnamese. The men were of all shapes and skin colors. What they had in common was their fitness and, except for the First Sergeant and the Supply Sergeant, their youth. I could take this group of men and turn out an above-average softball team, a so-so flag football team, a not-very-good basketball team, or a brigade-championship volleyball team. They could march twenty-five miles a day for day after day after day — and had done so. They were above average in a bar fight — or so I’d been given to understand.

The really interesting thing was that I could take these men, even into the somewhat civilized former farmlands of the training area, and disappear. We could fade into the landscape. The process would be a stripping down. It would be a peeling off of the badges, the gold and the blue cloth, and anything else that caught the light. It would be a building up of layers of clothing that were baggy and mottled in shades of green and brown. It would be a fastening and taping of everything metal so that nothing clinked or rattled. It would be taking creams and putting them on their hands and faces and necks to mottle and change the reflectivity of the skin. It would be, finally, a stillness.

Or we could be sent to a piece of ground, a piece of dirt, and claim it. We could position our rifles, our machine guns, our mortars, our anti-tank weapons. We could register artillery. And we could dig our foxholes and clear our fields of fire. We would establish our lines of communications to the left and to the right. We would own that dirt. That is what infantrymen do.

This day was the other side of that. This day was the glitter and badges. These men who were like peacocks in their displays in front of their women and children were the same men who would glide silently in the night or dig like foxes into the ground. They must be the same men. It all somehow fit together and made sense.