My wife and my daughter and I had left Korea and traveled back to the United States. We were now stationed at Fort Ord, California, in Seaside, California. The Army had assigned me to Fort Ord in July 1980. It was now December 1980, and I was preparing to be reassigned to Lowry Air Force Base in Denver, Colorado, for the Precision Measurement Equipment (Calibration Technician) school. I would be very happy to leave Fort Ord and the 7th Infantry Division behind because I had spent most of the time that I had been at Fort Ord deployed out in the field. I even had to be deployed back and forth from the field to prepare my household goods for shipment to Lowry Air Force Base. Most reasonable Army units would have just allowed me to remain in the rear once I started the out-processing activities associated with a reassignment. Well, that is what most reasonable Army units would have done. But I was not in a reasonable Army unit. Hell, I was not even assigned to a reasonable division. Nor was I assigned to a reasonable Army post. And the commanders at Fort Ord were certainly not reasonable. Oh hell no. Not by any stretch of the imagination. They wanted to make sure that I stayed out in the field until the bitter end. Why? Well, the only reason I could come up with was that the division commander loved misery. In fact, my theory was that he had studied under “Old Blood and Guts” himself (Gen. George S. Patton). Those commanders figured that all soldiers loved to camp out in the mud and snow so that they could freeze their asses. I know that I did. Yeah. Right. Living in the woods and wearing and using pioneer gear. Yeah. You just gotta love it. When we finally deployed back from the field, I was so damn busy cleaning pioneer gear and getting my household goods shipped to Denver that my wife and I damn near missed Christmas all together. As it was, Christmas at Fort Ord was pretty pitiful. We didn’t even have a Christmas tree. Worse yet, our daughter would be turning one-year-old a couple days after Christmas. But we almost missed her birthday as well. How can you miss something as important as your daughter’s birthday? Well, we were so busy with last-minute preparations to get ready for our move that we almost completely forgot about our daughter’s birthday. The people arrived on December 27th to pick up our household goods, and it took them an entire day to inventory and load everything onto their truck. After they had finally finished and left, we remembered that it was our daughter’s birthday. But we had nothing to celebrate with. I rushed out and got a cake. However, that is where my luck ended. I couldn’t find any candles to save my soul. We had to settle on using a big candle that you would normally use to light your house if you lost electricity. But it worked. We gave my daughter the cake. We lit the candle, and we sang happy birthday to her. I had to help my daughter blow out the candle for the birthday cake because she couldn’t quite muster it on her own. Then we gave her the presents that we had purchased for her for Christmas and for her birthday. Overall, my daughter seemed very happy with the birthday party we threw for her, even though it seemed very pitiful by our standards. We drove downtown to see the lights of the Christmas tree down there because we didn’t even have our own Christmas tree or Christmas decorations. But just showing our daughter the Christmas tree downtown and some Christmas decorations made her really happy. We took her to our local church to show her the nativity scene. That also seemed to make her pretty happy. As I said, even though Christmas at Fort Ord was pretty pitiful, we tried to make it the best Christmas we could for our daughter. We also hoped that we would not have any more Christmases like this one in the future. Otherwise, this pitiful Christmas would truly prove to be just another exercise in futility.
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