{"id":3869,"date":"2008-12-24T08:49:00","date_gmt":"2008-12-24T13:49:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=3869"},"modified":"2008-12-24T08:49:00","modified_gmt":"2008-12-24T13:49:00","slug":"people-to-remember-this-christmas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=3869","title":{"rendered":"People To Remember This Christmas"},"content":{"rendered":"

Joe Galloway (via Michael Yon) asks us to remember<\/a>…:<\/p>\n

Even in hard times, this is the holiday season and a time when thoughts turn to home and family and dinner tables covered with food and gaily wrapped presents and bright lights.Save a moment amid the celebrations to give thought to the hundreds of thousands of men and women in uniform in far-flung parts of this world who won’t be sitting down to dinner with their families.<\/p>\n

More than 170,000 men and women of our military will spend their Christmas and New Year’s in Iraq and Afghanistan, where killing and dying never take a day off.<\/p>\n

Oh, Uncle Sam will do his best to see that most of them sit down to a special dinner of hot turkey and dressing and all the trimmings, and even in the most remote outpost some soldier or Marine will jury-rig a tree of sorts with decorations of sorts.<\/p>\n

But it’s a hollow celebration for a lonely soldier so far from home and loved ones, and lonely, too, at that dinner table back home where a chair stands empty at the head of the table.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Galloway – the dean of American war correspondents – remembers more than a few such Christmases:<\/p>\n

Another memory is of Thanksgiving in the Saudi Arabian desert in November of 1990. I’d signed up to go eat turkey and trimmings with some unit, somewhere out among the sand dunes, when I was called to board a bus with two dozen other reporters and photographers…I stepped off literally in the middle of nowhere. A tall captain of artillery stepped up and saluted: “Mr. Galloway, we are C Battery, 1st Battalion, 21st Field Artillery. We call ourselves The Falcons and you will understand why far better than anyone. We provided fire support for the 7th Cavalry at Landing Zone X-Ray in the Ia Drang.”<\/p>\n

I stood there unable to say a word, tears rolling down my cheeks. Then I knew that somewhere in that cold, forbidding institution that is an Army, there was both a memory and a heart, and that heart was as tender as my own.<\/p>\n

I’ve never had so fine a Thanksgiving dinner as that one in an Army mess tent in a cold, windswept desert; never enjoyed the company and camaraderie so much as I did then and there.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Hope this Christmas has you awash in good company and fellowship – and thankful for what you have.\u00a0 As tough as times are, it could be a lot <\/em>worse.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Joe Galloway (via Michael Yon) asks us to remember…: Even in hard times, this is the holiday season and a time when thoughts turn to home and family and dinner tables covered with food and gaily wrapped presents and bright lights.Save a moment amid the celebrations to give thought to the hundreds of thousands of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3869","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-war-on-terror"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3869","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3869"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3869\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3869"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3869"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3869"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}