IN S.A., TROOPSHAVE ADAYTOREMEMBER
With the virus keeping them at bases, holiday is unlike previous ones
On Thanksgiving Day 2020, troops around town had a holiday dinner to remember.
Where they might have taken the day off to spend time with families or attend special events put on to honor the troops, the threat of contracting coronavirus forced commanders to keep their trainees close to base.
In a way, that was another round of training, because it was a taste of the future.
Over the years, soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines and Coast Guardsmen sent off to war in distant locales have gathered at dusty dining halls in forward operating bases and smaller, more modest facilities, often using plastic knives and forks and eating on cardboard plates during holidays.
In Ramadi, one of the most violent places in Iraq in 2006 and 2007,
troops were ordered to fill two bags with sand before entering the dining hall.
Though expeditionary and threadbare, those facilities usually had bigscreen TVS with an NFL game on, the blurry humof chowhall conversations
drowning out play-by-play announcers and roaring fans.
The troops, at least, had a slice of civilization and each other. It was the same Thursday at San Antonio’s military installations, but in much nicer
dining halls. They had ceramic plates and real flatware.
Across the Alamo City more than 13,000 military personnel chowed down at 12 Joint Base San Antonio dining facilities at Lackland, Randolph, and Fort Sam Houston.
Call it camaraderie in crisis.
“What I’m always saying is you can’t have a testimony unless you’ve been tested, and they definitely have been tested,” said Col. Michael Newsom, commander of the 737th Training Group, the largest of its kind in the Air Force. “They will remember this Thanksgiving,”
At Lackland, home to Air Force basic training, 4,843 recruits converged on six Lackland dining facilities from 11:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m., joined by 1,000 technical school trainees.
Newsom, a 1996 Officer Training School graduate, was at Dining Facility No. 6 to congratulate 708 newly minted airmen with the 322nd Training Squadron who had graduated the day before.
It was a trip down memory lane. Now 58, he was in this same dining hall in 1982 as a raw recruit trying not to slip up at mealtime as he encountered his military training instructors who sat
at a long table “Snake Pit.”
“You had to walk past it,” he recalled, laughing. “Everybody wanted to strike at you. Don’t make eye contact.”
In the year of COVID-19, the tradition of dining hall feasts was the only one to survive.
Lackland’s Operation Home Cooking and Fort Sam’s Mission Thanksgiving were canceled due to the risk of contracting the virus. Rather than gather early
called
the
Thursday on their bases to meet their adoptive families for the day, the recruits marched in utility uniforms from their dorms to chow halls.
Joint Base San Antonio also closed its dining halls to Defense Department civilians, retirees and family members.
Only last year, 860 soldiers went home with more than 300 families as part of Mission Thanksgiving, which has been in place at Fort Sam since 1983. In its
44th year in 2019, Operation Home Cooking sent thousands off base for the day.
Valero Energy Corp.’s annual Thanksgiving with the Troops at its corporate headquarters also was scratched
Airman Nicholas Depyatic would have been at his grandma’s house in Duquoin, Ill., eating turkey, ham, green beans, potato casserole, and mac and cheese.
It’s “the best time of the year” being with family, he said, but the airman none
theless mood.
The rules, for one thing, were relaxed this day. Lt. Col. Shamekia Toliver, the 322nd Training Squadron commander, said the newly minted airmen could talk and they had more time to eat — as long as 20 minutes as opposed to maybe 15.
They’re not allowed to talk at breakfast, lunch and dinner, but some mutter under their breath.
Yet it was more than that for Depyatic. He and others
was
in
an
upbeat hada roughtime early onafter their flight went into quarantine following the discovery of a trainee who tested positive for the coronavirus, but the recruits bonded as time went on.
“We all connected very, very well,” said Depyatic, who will stay at Lackland to become a Security Forces cop and hopes to one day join the Illinois State Police.
“It’s a brotherhood like no other.”
The decision by commanders to keep their troopsonbase left a big hole for Jan Briggs, who has invited soldiers over to her Spring Branch home for a traditional turkey day dinner 18 years in a row. Last year, she cooked up a brunch and dinner menu that had 30 different dishes for eight soldiers.
Briggs does it because she comes from a rich military tradition.
A brother served in the Marines and National Guard. Her father, John Smelik, 86, served in the Marine Corps, and his older brother, a soldier, was killed during the Korean War. Her husband, Travis Briggs, 68, is a retired Air Force master sergeant, and his youngest son is a retired Green Beret.
“I should be baking right now,” Briggs, 62, said Wednesday. “What I’ve done every day for the last 18 years, and I’m not (doing) today. It feels weird.”
Many trainees hosted by the volunteer families are on their own for the first time, and some are deeply homesick. They’re also stressed from the rigors of basic and technical school training, and love the chance to be far from the prying eyes of instructors.
After calling home on cellphones, they sometimes cry.
On Thursday, they made the best of it in familiar confines, marching from their dorms to a standard-issue dining hall.
Airman Basic Carmen Brave Thunder would be with her parents, grandmother and sister back in Tri-cities, Wash., eating dough bread they put honey or meat on, rice pudding and roasted chicken. They’d would play cribbage and cards.
Though she didn’t have any of that in San Antonio, Thunder, 19, wasn’t homesick.
“I used to go to a boarding school when I was in my earlier teens and I lived away from home for about four years and saw my family very rarely,” she explained.
It was a different story for Airman 1st Class Michelle Quichocho. From the Mariana Islands, she’d be on the beach today with her family barbecuing ribs, playing volleyball on the sand and swimming. They’d spend the entire day there.
“It’s really hard being away from family, not just being away from them but how far they are,” Quichocho, 21, said, noting that when she called home at 10 a.m. Thursday, she woke up her parents.
It was 4 a.m. island time. “It wasn’t as emotional because a lot of my siblings are actually in the military, so they’re used to it, but it is the first time that I’ve spoken with my parents since I’ve been here and so they were pretty happy,” she said. “It was sad, though, because it’s the holidays and we’re not used to being apart.
“I kept it strong, sir. My twin sister did cry.”
Newsom ordinarily would work one of the chowlines at Lackland serving the airmen, a tradition repeated in American military dining facilities this day around the world, but COVID-19 forced a change in the procedure. He limited his participation to greeting the young men and women as they entered.
“We rally together behind something that, especially in this day of COVID, the unseen enemy, you rely on one another,” Newsom said.
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