Christmas, a holy time, a family time, a special time. Yet, it can be so painful to soldiers and veterans. Stationed in Germany, exciting, festive — stationed in the Middle East, dismal, lonely!
I saw both while assigned to Stuttgart, Germany. My first Christmas, the wall in Berlin came down, Germany was united, everything was celebratory. The next year everything was about Desert Storm and the coming war.
The day the Iraqis invaded Kuwait, August 2, 1990, I signed in to Fort Sam Houston, Texas while my family was still back in Germany. It was an anxious time, while attending a school for senior NCO’s, we lost one student after another. As they were each recalled back to their home units, they just stood up in the class and left, no word said, no goodbyes — it was “Saudi duty time!”
Upon returning to Germany in October I was told I would not be deployed to Saudi Arabia as I would be needed for the expansion of 5th General Hospital, Stuttgart. However, a few days later I was given charge of a medical deployment team as part of the efforts to prepare other units to go to the Middle East.
We worked from 6 a.m. to 7 p.m., six days a week. This went on until the end of November. I watched Christmas appear in the stores, the streets, and the city and I looked forward so much to spending some holiday time with my wife and young boys after being unavailable for so long. The team’s only highpoint was paying back to an inefficient finance clerk who screwed up our pay, every immunization shot in the Army’s inventory.
The first Saturday of December, at 1:30 in the morning, I got the call informing me that I had been volunteered to reinforce a deploying field hospital. Once on the ground in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, I was left feeling home-sick for Vietnam.
If I’m at war again so be it — at least Nam was organized. I found something that looked like a store and did my Christmas shopping; with my last few dollars I mailed the two toys back to Stuttgart, in tears.
Once we finished building a field hospital from the ground up, we sat and waited. In a briefing we were told that we could expect 400 casualties a day. A very “green” officer did the math and suggested we could never possibly care for that many injured.
The colonel quietly informed her, our own cots would be used, we would work until we dropped, and there would be a lot of people we could not save. To be back in the infantry in Vietnam was now a pipe-dream.
Christmas day was cold, overcast, and very dreary. The Christmas tree the young enlisted medics brought from Germany had been placed in front of the mess-tent, not a single needle on it.
For dinner we were given a treat, a choice of a white meat or a dark meat, neither of which we knew the source of, but at least it wasn’t MREs. I never would have thought how much I could miss C-rations.
We did not get the hundreds of allied casualties as promised, instead in March we got dozens of Iraqi children, the same age as my own, shot up by their own army during the revolt in Basra.
Our enemy, some still in uniform, had brought their children to us knowing we would give them mercy and compassion.
It was the American way.
Merry Christmas.

Thom Stoddert is a retired Army veteran having been an infantryman in Vietnam and a medic during Desert Storm.