The Greatest Holiday of All

Being in the military, personnel often miss holidays with their families. I have missed many over my twenty one year’s affiliation with the military. The one that hurts the most to miss for me is Thanksgiving Day. Out of all the holidays, it is the one holiday where there are no expectations from others except food. We spend the whole day preparing for a meal that will press the limitations set the year before. I’ve only missed this holiday once when deployed to Australia and believe it or not, I would have rather been home with my turkey.
A typical Thanksgiving for us starts several weeks before the holiday. Phone calls start coming in from relatives we haven’t heard from in a year. They all operate the same way, “Hi. We were just thinking of you. What have you been up to? What are you guys doing for the holidays? Is Bill cooking the turkey?” Everyone is looking for the same thing, a ring side seat at the table with my famous deep fried turkey. It is, after all, one of the best turkeys you will ever try.
Next, my wife decides on the rest of the menu and starts to advertise to our parents and siblings. We usually get half of them at our house every year. The planning for feeding and berthing everyone is the next big step. I usually go to work and find out which men or women from work are away from their families and invite them out as well. Once the guest list is done, we stage for the big day.
The morning usually starts out with me and my sons getting out all the equipment and setting up the seating for the day. “Game day”, Thanksgiving as it is called, usually involves at least three trips to the store for things we suddenly remembered. The turkey only takes three and a half minutes a pound to cook so besides the marinating, it comes toward the end of preparation. Women dominate the kitchen fixing their favorite dishes and pies for most the morning. Men gather around the grease pot around noon with a healthy supply of beer and begin to talk about everything that happened over the last year while they valiantly stand guard over the temperature controls of the grease pot. At last, the turkey is done and dinner is served.
Dinner is generally the quietest time during the day. Aside from the occasional compliment between chewing, the language shared seems to resemble its own form of sign language. At desert, everyone says they are too full but they always take a serving when it is put in front of them. Men stay seated for another half hour after desert, fearful of moving. Toward the end of the evening, people start to funnel out the front door to head home. There are always two or three grandparents asleep in chairs or couches throughout the house that we have to jumpstart to get them on the road home. When everyone is gone, we always feel so good to be able to conduct a dinner like that. For the next week I get the gift out of the meal, all the turkey sandwiches I want.

My Community

My Coast Guard Engineering group, NESU Seattle, is a community. I look at our group every Monday afternoon at quarters and see Mechanical Technicians, Damage Control, Electrician Mates, Gunners Mates, Electronic Technicians, Chiefs, and Officers listening to our Commanding Officer updating us on what our future holds. We are all leaders of our field in engineering who have been brought together under one roof to achieve a common goal, coordinate and complete required maintenance for forty ships along the west coast. The resources to do our jobs are shared between shops in order to cut cost of contracting and tools, our processes are the same to obtain resources and communicate with our customers, and we are all guided in business by the Coast Guard’s core values of “Honor, Respect, and Devotion to Duty”. At the deck plate level, the Chiefs organize and guide work and processes while the Officers are our connection to headquarters and changes affecting the CG in general. Rank structure provides a structured process for decision making and communication through the community but often can become confrontational due to the non-equality of training, experience, and general personality traits of some individuals especially when things are going wrong. For some examples, many junior enlisted personnel have degrees that well exceed the minimum to be an Officer but choose to stay enlisted and often a brand new officer will be “put in charge” of senior enlisted personnel who have twenty plus years of experience, yet Officer’s tend to respond more to bad decisions suggested from their operational senior command then the right solutions from their lower ranking engineering personnel.

I’m the Senior Chief for 30 Mechanical Technicians, which is the largest group inside the community, and I provide personnel with guidance, training, resources, and coordination with other groups inside the community. I love being a part of this team because it allows me to use my imagination and forces me to be creative. Accomplishing jobs with limited resources that save the organization time and money and having the ability to influence junior personnel who are the up and coming future of our organization is very rewarding to me. My influence and resources touch not only the members at work, but allow me to help them at home with their families when they are having problems. My people must have their personal lives in good order so that they pay attention to detail in the work place otherwise failures are imminent. We have rules, traditions, and personal values that I truly identify with, we assist each other when we need help, we talk the same language about the same problems, and we are closer to each other than most families are.

What's in your wallet?

A detective stands behind the tape of the crime scene and looks down at item flagged as #10 near the edge of the snowy embankment. He puts out his cigarette and snaps his gloves into place as he bends over to pick up the old black wallet from the ground. He slowly walks toward the squad car for light assistance from the headlights as he opens it up to see what it contains. He lays the contents out on the hood of the car and starts to look at each piece individually.

First he looks at my drivers licence with the expiration date of MILITARY which coincides with my military ID and the two dependant ID's from two of my sons, my military emergency contact numbers card and my government driver's license. Obviously, I'm in the military with height of 6'3" and 220 lbs, 38 years old, brown eyes and hair. Next he puts my government visa, my VIP Hlton Honor card, World Mark vacation card and my airline cards together and figures I must travel quite often. He glances briefly at my Borders cash card and deducts that I must buy books for all the traveling time. Next he groups my hydraulic formula card, my air conditioning and refrigeration license, and my air conditioning troubleshoting card together seeing I must be some type of engineer. The next grouping gives him some humor and some confusion as he groups four bank cards, five credit cards, a costco card, a safeway card, and a community vanpool card making him wonder why a guy that looks like he spends money would waste his time with these little saving incentives. Lastly, he sees a picture of my son Billy, a current student card for Everett Community College, and an ASB card from graduation year 1989 and for the first time, the detective is scared. What kind of sick individual holds on to his ASB card for 21 years!
The wallet told him many things, but not any that are too important to me. It did not tell him I am raising five boys and one girl. It did not tell him how I was freshly married to an awesome woman. It did not tell him who I really was to the military, the men that trust me there, or how long I've been there. The wallet could not explain how overloaded I feel sometimes with work, family, and my new school work load and why I just had to stop at that spot earlier in the day and go sleding to clear my head before the crime even happened. Even though the sleding was fun, it did not help that I lost my wallet.

Senior's Forum

My name is Bill and this is my new blog space for english.