(NOTE: Yeah, this is a slightly fictionalized version of events. But not by much.)
My favorite holiday, for as long as I can remember, has been Thanksgiving.
From the time I was a little kid, Thanksgiving was always the BEST holiday. Mom started prepping for the big day in advance, with a special trip to Prairie Market to pick up the turkey and all the stuffing and the pumpkin pie ingredients and everything. Special kitchen equipment, only used a few times a year, was dug out from the back of the cupboard. Large serving trays and dishes would be brought in from storage in the garage. The house began to smell GREAT, with the aroma of baking and cooking going on for a few days in advance.
I was the youngest (and I still am, by a considerable margin), so by the time I was in elementary school, my siblings had moved out, but they would all return for Thanksgiving. My oldest brother would return home on leave from the Navy and stand around looking cool, occasionally vanishing for extended periods of time. My other brother came home from college looking like a hippie, with his guitar case painted with the word “Peace” in many languages. My sister and her husband and their baby would come by, and my sister would help cook while I either kept the baby occupied or stopped her from destroying my Legos.
You got FOUR WHOLE DAYS OFF FROM SCHOOL at Thanksgiving, and you got to eat turkey and mashed potatoes and olives and fresh baked rolls and pumpkin pie with Cool Whip (or whatever the five-cents-a-plastic-tub-cheaper equivalent was called). You got to go outside and play football with the big kids, and there was football on TV. Uncles and cousins and other relatives might turn up, and Mom and Dad never kept booze in the house so we never had any embarrassing family squabbles.
Thanksgiving evening was the best. You had turkey sandwiches and pie, and we would play a board game (we could even play Monopoly or Risk without it turning into a major crisis), everyone was in a tryptophan coma, and Mom would pull out the Christmas records and we could start listening to Christmas music. That was the rule: no Christmas music in the house until Thanksgiving evening. (The Christmas tree was usually put up the first Sunday in December. I don’t know who made these rules.)
Every single one of the first seventeen Thanksgivings of my life was pretty awesome, even when I was fifteen or sixteen and fully wrapped up in Sullen New Wave Teenager Mode. (“Life is nothing but nihilism and pain, and you bourgeois OH HEY IS THAT CRANBERRY SAUCE? YEAH, I want some!”) Most of them were at our house, just because it was centrally located and often the only place with enough space, but as the kids got older and had their own homes, sometimes we went there for the day. Each one was total bliss.
Until 1981. In that year, I graduated from high school, and, since it was 1981 and no one in the country had a job, I decided that I might as well join the Air Force and ride it out there until either the economy improved or the Soviets started World War III. It was pretty much even money on either one. I was accepted and sworn in and told to report for boot camp in April of 1982, but then Ronald Reagan got an itchy trigger finger or something and it was decided that a bunch of recruits should be called up early, and so I turned up at Lackland Air Force Base a few days before Thanksgiving 1981.
I’d like to say that I learned a lot about myself and my potential while in Basic Training, but mostly what I remember was being shouted at a lot by enormous men in silly hats and having to learn a lot of ridiculous mnemonics to explain various aspects of this weird new world I was in. I am 53 years old and I can say that I have had a lot of fun in my life, so much fun that I sometimes can’t remember, for example, my address. But I can still remember the mnemonic device, “How Many New Airmen Will Get Sore Feet?” It stands for: Headquarters; Major Command; Numbered Air Force; Wing; Squadron; and Flight; the command structure of the Air Force (and one that is no longer in use, no less). I can remember that I was in the 3702nd Basic Military Training Squadron, slogan: “Second To None,” and that our CO was Major Irby, who sounded just like Richard Nixon. I can remember almost all of that useless crap, but I have less than a thirty percent chance of remember which side of the road I’m supposed to drive on. (The other one.)
And I would sure like to forget that first Thanksgiving at Lackland. Holidays in boot camp are weird. As a recruit, you’re not allowed to go off base, but most of the instructors and staff have the day off, so there’s nothing to do. The best thing would have been just to leave us alone for a day and let us rest, but anyone reading this who has ever been involved with the military knows that’s not how that works. Instead of blasting us awake at 5:00 with reveille and making us scream downstairs and be dressed and in formation in three minutes, a voice came over the intercom at six shouting at us to get out of bed. We did so, got dressed, and were shortly told by an instructor that we were on our own until 6 PM, when we had to return to the barracks.
“Can’t we stay in the barracks and just sleep?” said one brave recruit, asking the question we all had.
“No, you may not,” the TI responded. “You would just make the place messy.”
In the end, it turned out that we were allowed to go to the nearby cinema, or to the recreation hall. I forget what movie was playing, but I remember that it was boring enough to make the rec hall seem like a good idea. I figured that I would go there and use the pay phones to call my parents, and then… I don’t know what. Read a magazine, or something.
I got to the bank of payphones outside the Thunderbird rec hall and realized that pretty much every other recruit had had the same idea about calling parents. I got in line and waited. Some time later, I finally got into a phone booth and dialed home.
“Hi, Mom,” I said. “Happy Thanksgiving.”
“We’re sorry,” the voice said, “all lines are currently busy due to high traffic. Please try again later.”
There was a pounding on the phone booth door. “Give somebody else a chance, foo,” a patient and helpful fellow recruit said.
I visited my fellow airman with a traditional Air Force benediction and went back into the bowling alley part of the rec hall, which had a snack bar. I bought a cheeseburger and a banana pie, and a Big Red, and that was my 1981 Thanksgiving dinner. I ate it without too much enthusiasm, and looked around.
I spotted a videogame machine in the corner.
“Hey. Tempest,” I said to myself, and got five dollars’ worth of quarters from the cashier, and spent the rest of my Thanksgiving playing Tempest, smoking Winstons, and listening to the worst butt-rock that 1981 could possibly generate being blasted out over the shitty snack bar sound system, and thought to myself that maybe atomic war with the Soviet Union might not such a bad thing, after all.
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