Home Sweet Home
Deployed personnel conjure clever ways to bring holiday memories to their base in Kabul.
STATIONED 7,000 MILES FROM HOME in Kabul, Afghanistan, Navy Reserve Lt. Cmdr. Randall Hamper longed for homemade comfort as the holiday season approached. If he could get the aroma of freshly baked pie wafting through the base, he knew he could help bring cheer to those in his unit.
With a little ingenuity, Randy devised a way to bake his homemade pies for the 40 military personnel, government civilians and contractors in his unit. “I knew I’d only be able to make enough for people to get a taste,” he says. “But I hoped the smell of freshly baked goods would raise everyone’s spirits.”
Randy recruited a few helpers, ordered a toaster oven online, and asked his wife to send a baking kit with the dry ingredients, canned pumpkin, crusts and evaporated milk needed to make a couple of pumpkin pies. One team member talked the cafeteria into giving her a few eggs. The day before Thanksgiving, they baked two pumpkin pies in their makeshift kitchen. “I can’t say that toaster oven pie was the best I’ve ever had, but I can say it brought tremendous joy to the unit,” says Randy. “Our little baking team started calling them deployment pies.”
When the team wanted to bake cheesecakes, they resorted to inventive tactics. Someone brought ingredients 2,700 miles back from Dubai—except butter, eggs and cream cheese. “We took individual packets of cream cheese meant for bagels from the cafeteria, which we gathered over a few days,” says Randy. “We made a plain and an Oreo cheesecake; both turned out great!
“We joke about our deployment baked goods because, except for the toaster oven, we had to scrounge for everything. We didn’t even have a set of measuring cups or spoons, and we don’t have easy access to ingredients.”
Randy is now home from Afghanistan, but he left the toaster oven behind with the team. As he says, “They enjoy deployment baking, and the whole unit loves the baked goods they make.”