What Was Your Most Memorable Xmas From Your Military Service? What Made It So Memorable?:

It was December 1990. I was at Fort McCoy, WI, getting ready to be deployed to the sandbox for Desert Shield in Saudi Arabia. It was a couple of days before Christmas, and the CIA gave us a briefing. The agent told us that if fighting breaks out over there, 1 out of 3 of us probably won’t come back home. On Christmas Eve, a major snowstorm and ice storm hit the Midwest. Many of our wives were carpooling in a van and driving a great distance to get a chance to see us one last time, which would be on Christmas day since we were deploying right after Christmas. We were allowed to see our wives on Christmas Eve and Christmas night only. On Christmas Eve, my first sergeant called me into his office to let a few other soldiers and me know that the Red Cross had contacted them with bad news. Our wives were in a terrible accident, and the van they were traveling in was involved in a slide-off on the interstate about 4 hours away near Chicago and, tumbled over a couple of times and landed upside down in a ditch. All were taken by ambulance to the hospital; however, we did not know who was injured and how badly injured we already had in the back of our minds we might never see our wives again once we deployed if war were to break out.