Blog 3704 – 12.26.2025
Merry Christmas Darling
I have shared more that a few time my great good fortune during my three year enlistment in the Army of never having to miss a single Christmas at home with family and friends. I joined the U.S. Army on my eighteen birthday, November 22, 1968 which meant that Christmas fell in the middle of my eight weeks of Basic Training. It was unheard of that basic trainees would be granted a two-week leave and be allowed to go home for Christmas right in the middle of Basic Training and yet that is exactly what happened to the entire training brigade at Fort Campbell, Kentucky that year. I recall standing in a large field with hundreds of soldiers shivering in our new dress uniforms and hairless under our garrison caps awaiting to load onto buses that would take us home for Christmas.
The next year just before Christmas I was a hold over at the Southeast Army Signal School at Fort Gordon Georgia awaiting a security clearance when I received orders to report to Arlington Hall Virginia, Headquarters of The Army Security Agency, to continue waiting the completion of the FBI background security clearance that was required before I could work as a teletype repairman in top secret communications centers. Two days later I was informed that the security clearance was complete and granted another two week leave to spend Christmas at home and then was to report to Oakland Army depot in California for processing to Vietnam on January 6th, 1970.
Upon arriving in Saigon on January tenth, I learned that my security clearance was still not complete and so I spent my first two months in Vietnam at Davis Station on Tan San Nhut Airbase (just outside Saigon,) cutting grass, picking up trash, and staying out of the company First Sergeant’s sight. It was easy duty, still not what I had envisioned. I did finally get my Top Secret Security Clearance and was then allowed to work at my MOS, Military Occupational Skill.
Deployments to Vietnam were for one year so I was not supposed to go home till January 10th, 1971, yet since President Nixon had promised to end the war in Vietnam, several hundred thousand of lucky G.I.(s) got a one month Christmas drop that year and once again I was home for Christmas.
As my three years active duty ended before the next Christmas I never spent a single Christmas away from home. I was about to write that I could not have planned it any better, but remembered that according to my theory that this life is but a dream of our own design, my higher best self, planned it all.
It makes perfect sense to me. Though I might not have understood it at the time and even yet do not always immediately grasp my own responsibility for the way things turn out. I recall the words of a song we sang in church when I was a boy:
“God’s way is best, if human wisdom a fairer was may seem to show, ‘‘tis only that our earth dimmed vision the truth can never clearly know. God’s way is best, I will not murmur, although the end I may not see. Where e’re he leads I’ll meekly follow. God’s way is best, is best for me.”
I believe that my higher power, my God, is my higher and best self, and who better to design the very best adventure in time and space for me than me. So rather than say, “I could not have planned it any better” I must admit that everything is turning out all according to plan. “This is the day that the Lord and I have made. We will rejoice in it.”
I hope you had a Merry Christmas, fellow pilgrims. I certainly did.
Your friend and fellow traveler,
David James White
Merry Christmas, Darling – The Carpenters
theencouragingword 