I have been commanded by faceless internet tyrants to write a post about Thanksgiving. The message just showed up on my Facebook page with no explanation, but containing a hint of threat. Since the people running the internet can now ruin anyone’s life as easily as dropping a towel on their spouse’s nice, clean floor, I’m afraid to say no.
So, here’s the story of the most miserable day in my dad’s life, which he told me about last night as we ate pizza for Thanksgiving. After he came back from the war in Korea, he was stationed with a jillion other marines at Camp Pendleton, near San Diego. His superiors decided to stage a big amphibious landing exercise, just to keep everybody from getting bored.
If you’re part of an amphibious landing, that means you start on a ship, then you climb down the ship’s side on a net as if you were a homicidal howler monkey, carrying everything you need to kill people. At the bottom, you drop into a floating metal box called a landing craft, which takes you to shore and forces you to run onto the beach and fight because part of it falls off, rendering it no longer seaworthy.
That’s how it’s supposed to work.
Someone chose to hold this exercise during the winter. Even though San Diego weather is constantly temperate to the point of catatonia, on this day the temperature was in the 40s. However, the marines were dressed appropriately for invading a tropical island held by the Japanese Army, so it was okay.
After all the marines had climbed down into the landing craft for the exercise, the wind blew up some rough seas. That was no fun for anybody, but it really wasn’t fun for the guys on the first two landing craft that reached the beach and flipped over in the surf.
I like to imagine that somebody said, “Everybody back to the boat!” However, unloading marines so they can climb back up those nets is slow work when the landing craft and the ship are both jumping around like frisky dolphins. Every craft had to wait its turn. Steaming in a circle. Tossing around like Satan’s personal carnival ride.
Now comes the really miserable part. The sea water was 18 inches deep in the bottom of my dad’s landing craft, and every man got seasick except him and one other guy. This added a modest quantity of vomit to the sea water. For the next four hours they went around in a circle, as wet as tadpoles in a windy 40 degrees, propping up helpless seasick men so they wouldn’t drown in their own vomit. Once they did reach the ship, my dad helped tie all the seasick men to bosun’s chairs so they could be hoisted up.
At this point my dad said he and the other survivor “ran up that net like squirrels.”
So in the spirit of the holiday, my dad is thankful that shit isn’t happening today. Happy Thanksgiving!
