Friday, December 28, 2007

Santa's Super Sleigh

Early Christmas morning SGT Tremain and I enlisted the help of SPC Fuentes and PFC Hall to help load care packages we had in my office into the back of a trailer to take with us and distribute to Soldiers. We have received more than a hundred care packages (mostly from strangers) full of tastey treats and creature comforts. We left early Christmas morning as the sun was rising. Our first stop was JSS Sedgwick and the Soldiers of Alpha Company. Their mood was light and festive. The officers had all donned holiday hats and accessories, and sang Felice' Navidad and the Twelve Days of Christmas. Our travels from Sedgwick to Hawas took us through Falujah. (I snapped a picture of a mosque through the window in our gun truck.) At Hawas a Marine Major told me he had three times celebrated the Holidays in combat, and the day's Holiday Service was the best he'd ever attended. "Anytime a Christmas story involves a Harley Davidson Sportster--I'm game."


Our last stop was JSS Zeimer, were they had set up for us in the tent-shelter maintenance bay. We made it back to Camp Blue Diamond in time to enjoy some of the leftovers from the Christmas Dinner served earlier in the day. We ate together with the Commander and Sergeant Major and members of their PSD. Afterwards, we made it back down to the chapel/mayor's cell where all our neighbors were waiting on us to open the gifts we had exchanged with one another. Captain Jonas Anazagasty gave me three books that have been informative in his intellectual development. I gave Sergeant Wheeler the ESPN Encyclopedia of College Football--he seems committed to reading it from cover to cover, one-page-at-a-time. (It's an Oklahoma thing. Where college football predates statehood.)

3 comments:

annegb said...

God bless you all, you are in our prayers.

Anonymous said...

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nmwheeler said...

That was the perfect gift!! He loved it!