Army Lt. Col. Tandy Brown, center, commander of the 7th Special Forces Group, serves a soldier and his daughters during a Thanksgiving Day meal on Eglin Air Force Base, Fla., Nov. 24, 2014.
Many families celebrate Thanksgiving with their extended families. Airports and highways are so crowded that a video of Thanksgiving traffic on a Los Angeles freeway makes an iconic picture of the trek to go home. The song Over the River and Through the Woods vies for top Thanksgiving honors with We Gather Together.
Where do you go, though, when you’ve only been “home” for a few months, or for a couple of years at most? Whose food reminds you of Thanksgiving when Grandma is across an ocean? Where do you make memories if all your dishes are still in transit, wrapped in packing paper, and (the gods willing) unbroken?
If your family is a military family, you may go to the dining facility (DFAC), formerly known as the chow hall, mess hall, or mess deck. What you call where you eat depends on the service to which you (or more likely, your parent) belong.
ARABIAN SEA (Nov. 22, 2012) Culinary Specialist 3rd Class Job David Santiago, from Manila, Philippines, frosts a cake aboard the guided-missile destroyer USS Jason Dunham (DDG 109) on Thanksgiving. Jason Dunham is deployed to the U.S. 5th Fleet area of responsibility conducting maritime security operations, theater security cooperation efforts and support missions for Operation Enduring Freedom. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Deven B. King/Released)
Usually, dining facilities are reserved for service members on active duty. Their primary purpose is to feed the Army that, in the words of Napoleon Bonaparte (or Frederick the Great, depending on your source), marches on its stomach. On Thanksgiving (and sometimes on Christmas), the dining facility is open to family members. This is a treat that many military Brats look forward to when they are children, and reminisce about when they are grown. My sister and I recently rhapsodized about the shrimp cocktails we remember setting on our trays as we moved through the dining facility line.
In Facebook groups for Brats, the talk in this week leading up to Thanksgiving has been about eating at the dining facility. Among the comments were those about tables full of fruit and candy, how the cooks decorated the dining facility even up to ice sculptures, and food that included roast turkey or ham, mashed potatoes and pumpkin pie, in addition to fancy food such as that delicious shrimp cocktail, crab legs, and prime rib. My own favorite memory (in addition to the shrimp) was going to the milk dispenser and lifting the heavy weighted handle so that the milk shot into my glass with enough force to produce bubbles. I must say that, as a basic trainee pulling KP in the mess hall, I wasn’t quite as thrilled to heft the five gallon cartons of milk into the dispenser cabinet — those suckers weigh over 40 pounds.
Army Spc. Matt Squairs shears off a corner from a block of ice he is sculpting into a pumpkin on Eglin Air Force Base, Fla., Nov. 21, 2014. Squairs, a culinary specialist assigned to the 7th Special Forces Group Airborne’s Group Support Battalion, and other cooks spent more than two weeks preparing a Thanksgiving meal held in the unit’s dining facility.
We Brats doted on being allowed into the dining facilities for holidays, but I don’t know that we fully appreciated the work that went into feeding people their daily three square meals, seven days a week, plus holidays — way more people (and food) on the holidays. As someone who has seen both sides of the serving line, I’d like to give all the cooks a rousing cheer, despite the cadence songs we sang about the food. After a day of KP, I felt as if I’d been pulled backwards through a keyhole and my feet …, oh my poor feet how they ached. I can’t imagine the endurance it takes to be a cook.
Army Spc. Trinh Tran, a cook with the Operation Iraqi Freedom Dining Facility at Fort Hood, Texas, covers prepared salads and dressings for the evening meal service, Nov. 21, 2013. Trinh is on a team to assist in preparation of the upcoming Thanksgiving Day dinner. U.S. Army photo by Sgt. Kim Browne
Hooray for the dining facilities and all the cooks in all the services.
I hope they have a restful day-after-Thanksgiving.
All photos are released from the DoD photo archive.
It needs a bird, but none of them cooperated.
Yesterday, I stayed home from a Sisters in Crime meeting because my husband, Handy Harry Homeowner, meant to spare me the noise and commotion of fixing the deck. He’d arranged to do the loud work while I was away for the morning. Ever-confident, he planned to surgically remove a ruined plank from the back deck using an electric saw to dismember the plank instead of prying it out. Handy Homeowners of greater-than-spring-chicken-age need to work smarter, not harder.
I meant to attend our Border Crimes chapter first-Saturday-of-the-month meeting. However, while scrambling to eat my eggs, the maniacal whine of the saw taunted me. I tensed when it slowed to a growl as it bit into the plank’s thickness. My mind, fiction-trained through years of reading how-to-write books (conflict! conflict! conflict!) and conditioned to think of fictional disasters with which to plague characters, could imagine Chekhov’s saw. Don’t show the weapon if you’re not going to use it. One slip and blood would be everywhere. With Handy Harry home alone, I couldn’t chance it. So I stayed.
For an hour, the saw screamed at the plank as if taking revenge for insults to its mother. Handy Harry pulled and pounded with the crowbar — no bit of decking would defeat him. Plank body parts accumulated on the top rail of the deck with rusty nails protruding from them like dragon’s teeth. They looked as if they were waiting to sink into the pink flesh of a carelessly-placed hand. A gap between the remaining planks lay in wait for just one misstep, just one. Sipping tea while working on a story draft (conflict!), I remained watchful.
After Harry had the plank pieces out, of course I needed to create a photo-documentary of his work — that’s how we keep track of which home repairs have happened, and when. Carrying my small camera for the snapshots, I opened the porch door as I’ve done thousands of times over the years. I stepped out, my mind on lens and shutter settings. My foot hit the doormat and, quicker than thought, my left leg shot forward. My right leg remained planted inside the doorway but didn’t support me and bent. My right knee slammed into the porch planks. The doormat had slid when I stepped on it.
(Why is it always the knees? Why? Ever since high school basketball, it’s been the _knees_.)
Harry was engrossed. He noticed nothing. I’d have thought that me cannonballing into the wooden porch would generate a significant boom, but Harry has laser-focus. I wanted tea and sympathy and cries of oh-my-poor-dear, if not a call to 911, but if I sat there in the open door I knew a cat, or two or three, was bound to amble out to the screened-porch. Seeing me-on-the-floor, and being clever, they’d know I couldn’t run interference. The open door would beckon and he, she, or they, would make a break. Waiting for the unlikely event of spousal concern, probably couched as, “What the hell are you doing down there?”, or the likely event of a cat escape that would have me limping after a frisky feline in an OJ Simpson/Bronco highway chase around the backyard, left me with no choice. I had to get up — but not before I took a picture.
Beware the treachery of doormats.
I’d have dressed better if I’d known I’d be blog-worthy.
As a result of the porch-capades, I’m the bearer of a silver-dollar-sized scrape & bruise on my previously-not-injured knee. (the story about the other knee — injured a few months ago — is less interesting than the story of this knee; even doctors yawn and ask if that’s all for now) The camera sustained nothing more than a slight bout of ‘we hit an air-pocket!’ as I descended.
My good deed of missing my meeting just in case a home maintenance project turned into a horror novel wound up with me sporting an ice pack on my knee and acting as the complaint desk for various muscle groups up and down the body. The ribs were annoyed at that twist in the story. The lower back objected to me having followed the clue that the project was wrapping up and needed documenting. The injured knee felt frail and needed hearty applications of the aforementioned tea and sympathy. The other knee whined that life isn’t fair and it wanted a happy ending.
Handy Harry was fine and proceeded to pound nails into the new plank (from the sounds, he and the weighted mallet were working out issues!). The deck looks much better. I, though, was left looking forward to an Epsom salts bath. The cats never showed any interest.
Harry Homeowner’s handiwork
Valerie Bonham 