Happy Thanksgiving!

In 1983, I spent Thanksgiving in Cuba.

Guantanamo Bay, anyway. My new ship was there for training. We had commissioned the ship at Bath Iron Works in Maine, where it had been built. We sailed down the East Coast of the US and into the Caribbean (VERY beautiful down there!), new guys getting used to their new ship, and going to RefTra, Refresher Training, in Cuba.

30 years ago.

The Cold War was still hot. The Soviet Union was the enemy we were training to fight. My ship was a member of the largest class of ships built since WW2, designed to be convoy escorts in the next Big One. A part of "the six hundred ship Navy".  I got on board my ship before it was commissioned, as an engineer getting to know his ship.

Looking around, I thought, "well, I’m gonna die if anything happens".

I was, it turns out, wrong. Those frigates turned out to be pretty tough ships. One hit a mine in the Persian Gulf and was very badly damaged, but it didn’t sink. Another one got hit by two Iraqi Exocet missiles. One went through the aluminum superstructure and did not explode, but the other hit lower in the hull, in one of the berthing areas, and it killed 2 dozen of the crew as they slept. The rest of them fought the fires and pumped the water off the side, and that ship didn’t sink either.

"My" ship, the USS Klakring, FFG 42, was decommissioned last year, after 29 years of service in the US Navy.

Ironically, I heard it was going to be sold to The Ukraine, a former part of The Soviet Union.

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This year, Thanksgiving is in Oregon.

I am Thankful, because I have a job, after a long, long time unemployed.

I am Thankful, because I am working on Thanksgiving.  It pays Double Time.

I am Thankful that I will be able to make that car payment – I can keep my beloved car another month.

I am Thankful I am healthy.  I work in Group Homes now, and there but for the grace of God go I.  I was badly damaged in that car wreck in 1998.  15 or more "new" scars from that adventure.  Broken bones, a coma, a different personality – it could have been worse.

I am Thankful it is not.

***

Onwards.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

*****