Thanksgiving 2001

Camp Rhino Afghanistan/Photo Virtualglobetrotting.com

Was sitting here tonight and thinking about all the things I am thankful for, and thinking about all the Thanksgiving's of the past.  In the 20 years I spent in the navy up to my 16th year I had always been lucky when it came to deployments and the holidays, most people in the military can usually plan on missing allot of holidays, birthdays, and anniversary's yet up to my sixteenth year the only things I was not home for was my own birthday, as unbelievable as it may seem in my 12 deployments prior to 2001 my birthday is the only thing I ever missed.

In 2001 I was stationed on board the USS Dubuque, LPD-8.  This deployment was scheduled to be from Aug 2001-Feb 2002 so we all knew I was going to miss Sandi's birthday, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and our first year wedding anniversary as well as my birthday again, however this was to be my last deployment in my navy career since I was scheduled to transfer to shore duty to Naval Air Station North Island, Ca. as an instructor, and I was expecting it to be almost a pleasure cruise as everything in the world to the most part was pretty calm.

On this deployment we had some pretty good port visits scheduled, some of the place's we were to visit was Hawaii, 3 ports in Australia, Guam, Philippines, Japan, Malaysia, East Timor, Hong Kong, South Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong and Kenya.  Then on 11 Sept 2001 that whole schedule changed and instead of coming home in February we didn't get back until April. 

So now not only did I spend the holidays away from home I ended having an adventure for thanksgiving that year, as most of you know from previous posts we where in Darwin, Australia when the United States was attacked by Al-Qaeda and from there we got our ship back to sea and by Sept 15th we where off the coast of Pakistan.  Now when I was in the navy I was a "AS" or Aviation Support Equipment Technician and on the Dubuque our mission was to support the US Marines landing force and their helicopters. In my department our main job was running the flight deck and sending the marines into combat by helicopter, however the marines did not have their version of an AS on board so I had the honor of going into Afghanistan with the marines.

So from there my last deployment that I thought was going to be a "pleasure" cruise turned out to be far from it, so to the point of my post here was that on thanksgiving 2001 I ended up deployed into Afghanistan with the marines setting up the first in country base called Camp Rhino, at that time of the year it is quite cold in that region of the world, so here we where in a cold desert setting up a camp and small airstrip for helicopters not knowing what was going to happen.  Lucky for me the worst thing that happened was we where all high strung and nervous and yes we had a few shots fired our way, which we determined was just from some locals who didn't care for us being there and one night there was allot of noise around the perimeter and then loud noises scared the heck out of me as something came flying out over the sand dunes, the marines opened fire and ended up shooting and killing 3 wild camels who I guess was coming in to get water, I felt very sorry for the camels but was thankful that day that it wasn't the Taliban or Al-Qaeda fighters coming through because some of us would have lost or life that day, two days after that I was back on the ship, so today I am thankful I made it through thanksgiving 2001.