What Thanksgiving Looks Like in a War Zone

Chief Warrant Officer Matt Cole was seething. He did not want to eat. Sitting in the left-side seat of a Black Hawk helicopter on Thanksgiving Day in 2005, he announced he would skip the holiday meal.
Mr. Cole, a pilot in the Sixth Battalion of the 101st Aviation Brigade, had just landed behind another Black Hawk on Forward Operating Base MacKenzie, a forlorn and besieged airstrip near Samarra, Iraq, that militants frequently attacked with mortars and ground-to-ground rockets.
It was late in a long day of shuttling the assistant division commander from base to base so the general could serve Thanksgiving turkey to troops. Mr. Cole was missing his family, and the brief stops did not allow time for him to rotate his crew through the food lines so they might eat.
When the helicopters’ wheels settled onto MacKenzie’s gravel, the general told the aircrews to shut down and eat. Mr. Cole refused. He did not want to fake holiday cheer. He said he would wait in his aircraft with a book. His co-pilot asked him to reconsider. “We have no one here but each other,” Mr. Cole remembers him saying. “I’m asking you as a friend: Please come eat Thanksgiving dinner with me.”
Feeling guilt-tripped, Mr. Cole followed his friend through the line, glumly accepted a tray of food and sat down. He looked up at a big-screen TV and saw Tiger Woods on an Armed Forces Network broadcast as he lifted his plastic silverware to eat.
In quick succession, two rockets slammed into MacKenzie and exploded.

The tables around Mr. Cole became a bedlam of shouts, dumped food and fleeing soldiers.
He dashed with the Black Hawk crews onto the airfield and saw that one of the rockets had struck a few feet in front of his aircraft, splattering the left-side door and windscreen with shrapnel. He had been spared injury, maybe death, by agreeing to sit for a meal he did not want.