CHRISTMAS DINNER 1968
Sometimes while watching television when I see a family starving in India or Africa I think to myself ‘Life can’t get any worse than that’. Then I remember a time about 50 years ago when I was in Vietnam about 5 miles from the demilitarized zone, where our company had a fortified bunker right on the air strip in Dong Ha. It was Christmas day and I was there with another crew chief. The pilots that normally stayed over night were back at our home base in Phu Bai.
I think the other crew chief was also from California. We didn’t know one another very well but got along. We had been eating “C” rations right out of the cans for the last couple of days. We could go to an artillery base and eat with them, but I had never gone over there before, didn’t know where it was and had no wheels to get there anyhow. I was usually happy eating the “C” rations.
These “C” rations came in a small box with maybe a main course of one small can of ham or another meat looking stuff or eggs that were crammed into another little can, some crackers, a small can of fruit and a tiny pack of 4 cigarettes. They were nutritious and a guy could actually gain weight eating them. If you could get past the smell and the looks.
Since it was Christmas the officers that were due in that day were going to bring us a hot turkey dinner somehow from Phu Bai. We weren’t sure how they planned on doing this because our little “Birddog” airplanes were so small to begin with, but I guess they could probably stow a couple of dinners on the back seats of the two birds that were due in.
It just happens that the weather was bad this day with about a 300 foot ceiling and visibility was terrible. The other crew chief and I had finished off the “C” rations early that morning, but it didn’t matter that we were completely out of food because they were flying in two, hot turkey dinners for us and all day we were thinking about what a great meal we would have as soon as the planes arrived.
We waited all afternoon and then into the early evening thinking about those dinners arriving anytime. I guess it must have been maybe two hours after sun down when we decided that they weren’t coming and we better think of some way to get something to eat.
We finally realized there was no other way other than digging through the garbage for the unopened “C” rations that we didn’t like and threw away the days before. Some of the “C” rations are really good and we always ate those, but there were the eggs and ham or the mystery meat in one dinner that most everyone threw away.
Well, it looked to me like we were going to have our Christmas dinner with the discarded cans of the very ones we hated. And that’s exactly what we did. We had out Christmas dinner after digging through the garbage finding two or three cans of something that wasn’t turkey I remember that.
As we sat there thousands of miles from our homes, families and friends having our garbage dinner. We couldn’t help but laugh about how we had to dig through the garbage for our Christmas dinner and thinking “Damn, it can’t get any worse than this”
Short Stories