New Years Memories

Seventy-nine New Year’s Holidays consisting of New Year's Eve and New yours Day have come and gone. Unlike Christmas, where I can vividly recall special moments as a child receiving gifts— that first bicycle or motorized airplane— or as an adult providing gifts to my children— the race car set or the 4-wheeler dirt bike— under the magic guise of Santa Claus, New Year's memories are distant and vague. Other than trying to remember to insert the correct year on my checks, New Year's Eves and Days passed with little notice.

 

As a child, I recall that we did not celebrate New Year's Eve at all, or if the adults in the house did, we were asleep. I suppose we were still enjoying Christmas Day and playing with our gifts before we would have to return to school. 

 

I don't recall any time that Mom and I went anywhere for New Year's dinner or a party. Our celebration was generally a glass of wine or some Jack Daniels and turning in for the night long before the clock struck twelve. In the back of my fading memory, I recall being on the road, driving the moving van to some destination with a full load on New Year's Eve. The Christmas and New Year's holidays were generally a busy time for movers as families tried to move when school was out.

 

Vincene and I were also quite reserved when it came to New Year’s celebrations, and cautious about who might be on the road as a drunk driver. Most New Year’s celebrations were spent by our fireplace and watching the Times Square festivities on TV until the ball dropped. Since we were in California, we were three hours behind the big show in New York. The time difference allowed us to say Happy New Year, toast ourselves with a glass of wine, and turn in at a reasonable hour without risking our lives on the highway or spending a fortune to attend a party at a club.

 

Vincene, more than Mom, usually made a special dinner for New Year's Day, normally a ham and a great variety of vegetables. There were a few times Mom made a celebration dinner, too. Except for long-haul days as moving van drivers, New Year's Day was a day off from work. While nothing special went on, I was always grateful for the no-pressure day, an opportunity to watch the college football games, and I could tend to hobbies or some work that interested me. Vincene sometimes shopped on New Year's Day if there were big discount deals.

 

One might say that New Year's Eve and Day were generally blasé and boring compared to the rest of the Holiday Season. Nonetheless, two New Year’s events will always stick in my mind: one that I enjoyed completely and another that was quite terrifying. 

 

In 2022, I spent the New Year with my son Kyle and his family, and they had a joyous party at their house in Salt Lake. I stayed up for the entire celebration, which included music and food, and everyone danced, including the Twins and Mars (I think Mars faked it), but it was great fun. I had my camera gear, and I spent the evening shooting pictures of the guests and family as they enjoyed the festivities. The candid images were quite touching and memorable, something akin to doing a wedding photography shoot. After we shut down for the night, I set up and downloaded all of the images and processed them in Lightroom, and they were ready for social media posting the next morning. I forwarded them to Amy, and she thought they were great. Each image was a memory that she shared with her guests. I was delighted with the response and the notes that some of the guests sent thanking me for the pictures. Perhaps I had helped create a New Year’s memory for them, and I felt that this New Year’s celebration was fun and creative.   I returned to California thinking this year was going to be something special and that this was a New Year’s celebration I would not forget.

 

New Year's in 1967 was a far different affair. I was attached to Bravo Battery Eleventh Marines at a remote outpost on Hill 881 about 50 miles south of Da Nang, Vietnam. The monsoon season was upon us, and we were experiencing torrential rain. Our camp of Hooch tents and a half dozen 105 Howitzers were drenched, the ground a sea of mud. Things were quiet most of the day, and we spent our time cleaning rifles, studying positions in the command center, and enjoying mail call, which came in the afternoon when one of the engineering jeeps made it down from 1^st Mar Div. 

 

When my name was called for inbound mail, I received a package from my sisters Lorraine and Lorreta. I took the package back to my tent, which I shared with a fire team of four, and opened it. It was a tin full of homemade cookies, and the colorful sugar sprinkles were a real treat to the eye. Unfortunately, they had been in the mail for weeks, and each Christmas cookie was rock-hard. Nonetheless, I shared them with the team, and we had a big laugh about their hardness. We washed them down with some C ration instant coffee, each of us enjoying the sugary icing on top. When I got to the bottom of the box, there was a handwritten note from my teenage sister that read: “Happy New Year, Marines. Hope all is well with the war.”

 

Our mission this New Year’s Eve was to support a grunt battalion a mile ahead of us. As darkness fell on the mud hole we called home, we took up night guard duty at various points in the battery. I was positioned on the perimeter as the lead forward observer, responsible for returning fire and calling in short-range artillery if we were attacked.

 

And we were!

 

We were still digesting our cookies when we heard shouts of “Incoming,” the standard shout-out that we were under attack. Charlie blasted us in the New Year’s dark with withering small arms fire, his tracers reflecting like fireflies in the rain, his inbound mortars falling and exploding around us. Returning fire was a crap shoot as it was dark and rainy, and we tried to pinpoint their muzzle flashes as a target, but it was hopeless. We were sitting ducks, and I could not call in air support because of the monsoon weather. I could tell by the occasional screams and shouts for “corpsmen” that we were rapidly taking casualties, and the sandbags in front of me were being ripped to shreds with Chalise’s .30 caliber rounds.

 

As the FO, I had to get creative and do some fancy guesswork and quick. I called in 105 white prosperous ordinance as short rounds so that they would land about 50 yards in front of us. It was a dangerous move, but the battery guys nailed it and dropped them just past our perimeter. The explosives were white-hot and put up a wall of heat that lit everything up like a major Fourth of July event for a minute or two; then, things would go dark until the next Slavo blew up over us. I called “Fire in the Hole” on the radio, so all of us ducked and covered in the sand as our own shrapnel flew over us, and as the light faded, we had just enough illumination to see the VC in the tree line, which allowed us to return rifle and 50 caliber fire. This suppressed the enemy fire to some extent, and several marines on my right stood up and blasted the tree line with M-60’s screaming, “Happy New Year, Motha Fuckers.”

 

Three of the battery guns got turned in their parapets and fired directly into tree lines ahead of us, and the High Explosives quickly crushed the gook fire.  The firefight went on for an hour, and then all was silent again. In the dark, ghostly Corpsmen were dashing around, tending to the wounded and body-bagging the several marines who had just experienced their last New Year’s Eve.

 

So, this is a New Year's Day that I have not forgotten, and I am forever grateful for all the New Year's that have come and gone since that night when 1967 rolled into 1968.