Remembering Christmas
By Robert Kickenweitz

When I was a youth growing up in Scotch Plains, New Jersey, Christmas was
pretty much the same year to year other than the presents we would receive.
Each year my family would watch a variety of Christmas Shows, Ozzie &
Harriet Nelson with David and Ricky, Andy Williams, Perry Como, I Remember
Mamma, and of course The Nativity. On Christmas morning after church, my
Aunt and Uncle would drive out from New York City to spend the day and have
dinner with us, sometimes my Grandmother and Grandfather would be with us
also. My younger brother Edd and I knew that whatever we received as gifts
from my Aunt and Uncle there would always be a new pair of slippersocks for
each of us, we hated slippersocks but we knew we couldn't say anything other
then, "Thank you".

The year I have the most vivid memory of is 1966. This would be my first
Christmas away from home, I would not have my family and friends around me,
and we would not be having dinner together and for once I wished I could be
home to receive slippersocks. December 25, 1966 found me in Xuan Loc,
Vietnam as part of the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment. Our base camp was
located about 65 miles northeast of Saigon, the capital of Vietnam, between
the jungle and a rubber tree plantation, I really was not looking forward to
Christmas that year. I can remember that after dinner on Christmas Eve I
went and took a shower, put on a clean uniform and sat down to listen to
Armed Forces Radio and to write some letters for my family back home. While
listening to Hanoi Hannah later that night, she was saying that the
Vietcong, (you remember the guys in the black pajamas) would be having
Christmas Dinner on the base camp of the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment the
following day. "Great I guess I wouldn't have to think about slippersocks
next year".

At about ten in the evening I got up to go over to the service for Christmas
Mass. Our Chaplain, Father Eggan, his assistant and whoever helped, did a
superb job in preparing an open field into a beautiful place to serve
midnight Mass. They started by taking some beer and soda pallets to
construct a floor for our altar, then nailed some plywood on top of the
pallets to finish the floor. For the rear walls of the altar, they nailed
four by eight sheets of plywood to the floor, then lifting the plywood seven
to eight feet high into the air to create the rear walls of the altar. Blue
spotlights were used to wash light across the back walls of the altar. A
podium with a white cross on the front of it was in the center of the altar.
Off the altar to the left was a confessional with a long line of soldiers
and some nurses. The lines were always long at the confessional, everybody
always took the opportunity when it presented itself, to go to confession.
While more soldiers were filling in the bare spots in the field the
Chaplains assistant was playing Christmas Carols on an organ.  For some
reason while I was sitting on the ground singing with the others around me,
I decided to lay back on the ground. I don't know if it was that we were so
far from any big city lights which block your view, or that I was missing my
family and friends, or if God was telling me in his own way that things were
not that bad. Looking up into the night sky I saw the most beautiful sight I
have ever seen in my life, on the ceiling of our open air church was the
same scene the shepherds must have seen two thousand years before, the only
thing missing was the star of Bethlehem. The grandeur of the Milky Way in
that black sky was breathtaking, with star after star. Every Christmas Eve
when my family and I go to Mass, inevitability sometime during the service I
drift back to that Christmas Eve many years ago and so far away and I'm
filled with a joy only that Christmas could deliver. This year more then any
other, I wish everybody, especially our young men and women of the armed
forces could feel the magic of that Christmas.
Robert Kickenweitz
11th ACR HQ & HQ Troop
   
Oct 66 - Sep 67


Robert Kickenweitz 
Controller
bobk11acr@comcast.net