When I served as the Commander of the 305th Supply and Services Company in the 227th Maintenance Battalion At Yongsan, Seoul, Korea, my unit mess hall was competing for the Department of the Army Philip A. Connelly Award for Food Service Excellence, and the Thanksgiving day holiday had descended upon us. Since my mess hall had added some amenities such as live music, floral place settings on all of the tables, new curtains on all of the windows, new interior paint for the dining facility, and an improved menu, the daily headcount had increased exponentially. The baby grand piano that we had acquired from the Yongsan Property Disposal Office (PDO) had been the crowning touch. The Army tradition for Thanksgiving was that the company officers and senior NCOs would typically serve the food to the soldiers eating the Thanksgiving meal in the dining facility. I decided to have my entire family partake in that tradition. My wife baked some of her popular cinnamon rolls, which we added to the dessert menu. She enlisted the help of one of the cooks and two NCOs to assist with the baking tasks. My daughter had been learning to play the piano, and she volunteered to play some of the songs that she practiced on a regular basis while the soldiers were eating their Thanksgiving meals. I was dressed in my dress blues uniform, and I worked on the main serving line. I served turkey and dressing to soldiers coming through the line. My son, Wright Junior, even got in on the act. He worked on the dessert line serving dessert to the soldiers. However, I suspected that he ate a good share of cookies while he was serving dessert. Sergeant First Class Ward, my mess Sergeant, didn’t think it was such a good idea to have Wright Junior on the serving line in any capacity because he was so young. But I insisted because I said it would be too hard to leave him out of the festivities. I said that I could keep an eye on him from the main serving line, and that my wife could also watch over him. But the idea was that we had to include him so that he would not feel left out. I said that he would be perfect for handing out saucers of cookies because he was such a great fan of desserts in general and cookies in particular. In fact, when it came to two things, cookies, and donuts, you had to put them way out of reach of Wright Junior otherwise, he would eat every damn one of them. We had to put a chair behind the dessert counter for Wright Junior to stand on so that he could see over the counter to hand the saucers of cookies to the soldiers. I said he would be perfect for the job of handing them out to soldiers. And he was. I had told him that if he didn’t hand them out to the soldiers that there would be hell to pay. He knew what that meant. So, even though I’m sure that he ate his fair share of those cookies, he did a damn fine job of handing out those cookies to the soldiers that wanted them. My family and I stayed on the serving line until the number of soldiers and families coming to the mess hall to dine started to diminish significantly. Then, my family and I went through the serving line to eat our own Thanksgiving meal. One of my soldiers relieved my daughter on the piano so that she could join us while we ate our Thanksgiving meal. Before we ate, we gave thanks and said a family prayer. Then, we went around the table making Thanksgiving toasts using wine and apple cider. My wife had baked several batches of cinnamon rolls before we ate our Thanksgiving meal, so there were actually quite a few cinnamon rolls still left on the dessert line when we went through. I think that my family actually enjoyed that particular Thanksgiving even though they worked in my mess hall serving the Thanksgiving meal to soldiers eating in the dining facility before they celebrated and ate their own Thanksgiving meal. That Thanksgiving holiday was one of the best my family ever celebrated, and it was celebrated without any exercises in futility.
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