If the Fates Allow: Waco Vets Remember Christmas in Wartime

Left, Randall O’Brien served with the 101st Airborne Infantry in the Republic of South Vietnam in 1971.

By Robert Darden

It is perhaps the saddest Christmas song of all, though it doesn’t seem so now.

It comes from the musical “Meet Me in St. Louis,” and even Judy Garland (as Esther), who sings it so beautifully, at first balked because she thought it was too depressing. But few songs capture the wistfulness of loved ones separated by wartime than “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.”

You remember the story, of course — “Meet Me in St. Louis” is Vincente Minnelli’s love song to America in the early hours of the 20th century. In the film, their daddy is about to move from their beloved St. Louis to New York, so Esther sings this song to comfort her little sister, Tootie, the winsome Margaret O’Brien.

In a year, we all will be together

If the Fates allow

But the viewers in 1944 knew exactly what the song was really about. These are dark days and the Fates would not allow tens of thousands of young men and women to return home — not in a year, not in ten years, not ever.

We’ll just have to muddle through somehow

And have ourselves a merry little Christmas now.

In honor of the Christmas season, we asked a sampling of veterans from recent wars to share their memories of holidays in far-off lands.

For some, the mists of time have clouded their memories — they salvaged tiny snippets of moments from the past, a friend’s touch, a package of stale cookies, a surprise dessert in the mess hall, a moment’s respite on the battlefield.

Still others had no memories at all. Caught up in a brutal struggle, praying to stay alive another day hunkered down in a foxhole or walking point in a forgotten Vietnamese jungle, Christmas was just another day, another day to survive, another day closer to home.

While, for a few, the Christmas season had a poignant urgency, and memories of those days are indelibly burned in their memories.

Only a few veterans of World War I are with us today. The last old soldier will fade away in the next few years. Still, it doesn’t seem right not to include at least a mention of Christmas in the trenches during the War to End All Wars. One excellent source is “The Memoirs of Sr. Edward Hulse,” a very personal history by a much-decorated English officer. It is Hulse who provides the best snapshot of the astonishing events of Christmas Truce of 1914 where, across no-man’s land, German and English soldiers exchanged cigarettes for cigars, showed pictures of families and sweethearts, passed around a covert bottle or two and joined their voices in “Aud Lang Syne.” In the titanic offensives in the days to come, most of these soldiers would kill each other, and only a precious few would ever see Wales or Bavaria again.

Floyd Prather served as operations officer in the Army Air Corps in North Africa and Italy in World War II. He lost many of his fellow pilots as their boat capsized in rough waters as they were attempting to land from their ship off the coast of Africa, just before Christmas of 1942. He spent that Christmas in Casablanca. Some of the troops on the base had bought some flour from a local vendor and collected the ingredients to make a cake for a Christmas celebration. However, just as they were beginning to bake the cake, the unit was ordered to immediately evacuate the airbase. And Prather said he remembered all of the pilots being “profoundly disappointed.”

Prather went on to lead 40 bombers on a successful mission to hit a hidden target in Steyr, Austria, and was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross for that mission.

Former Baylor employee Tom Parrish, himself a noted author, served overseas every Christmas from 1941 to 1944 before he was finally discharged from the Navy on December 15, 1945. On December 7, 1941, he was assigned to the U.S.S. Vestal, which was berthed next to the U.S.S. Arizona at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. He was eating breakfast that fateful morning when the Vestal took two direct hits, immediately losing water-tight integrity.

The first bomb blew Captain Cassin Young overboard and the Officer of the Day issued an order to abandon ship. Miraculously uninjured, Captain Young climbed back on board, counter-manned that order and ordered the ship to steam out of the harbor, where he beached it a mile east of Pearl Harbor. Christmas 1941 found Parrish aboard that badly damaged ship, feverishly making repairs.

“So I spent Christmas 1941 cleaning up the storeroom, which is where I now lived,” Parrish recalled. “It had taken a bomb, and the smoke and fire damage was everywhere. That Christmas I was a mile east of Pearl Harbor on an unnamed beach, staring back at battleship row, where six great ships sat on the bottom of the harbor. That was my Christmas tree — and it was not an encouraging sight.

“It was then that I realized that Christmas is more than the build up, the music, the food, the family, the presents,” Parrish said. Still, the Navy managed to somehow transport turkey out to all of the mess halls that Christmas Day, all over the Pacific. But even the Navy can’t create a Christmas, he said.

“Christmas,” Parrish noted, “has got to come from within.

“For the men and women who were in desperate combat all over the world in December 1941, Christmas hardly meant anything. We didn’t have TV in those days, and we could only get one radio station out of Honolulu. It kept us up on the news, but it didn’t have much time for Christmas music. Honolulu was still blacked out for fear of another attack — and would remain in blackout for quite a while — so there were no Christmas lights.

“So, with none of the trappings, and in the desperate days after Pearl Harbor, the build up for Christmas just wasn’t there. I spent Christmas 1941 down in that dark hold, trying to get that ship ready again.

“It was a dangerous time. That Christmas, we were in a dark tunnel. There was light behind us. We hoped there was a light ahead of us, but we couldn’t see it then.”

More special than Christmas itself that year were the times Parrish met with friends from East Texas. One such friend was a first cousin, a lifelong friend, who worked in the Pearl Harbor PX.

“He had access to just about everything,” Parrish said. “With another lifelong friend, who was in submarines, whenever we could get together, we would. Those were grand, gala occasions and because they were friends, I remember those nights much more vividly than I remember any of the actual Christmas days during the war. Whenever I’d see a familiar face, it was a joyful day. Those days were the most like Christmas — the occasions when you saw someone from home.”

By late 1942, Parrish had been promoted to junior officer, and the United States Navy was still recovering from the great sea battle off Midway Island. Few realized at the time how crucial the Battle of Midway had been. In retrospect, Parrish said, it was more decisive than D-Day in Europe, when Germany had already been beaten on the Eastern Front.

“It was a dark time for me, perhaps the darkest time of all,” he said. “Captain Young, who I greatly admired, had been promoted to command the U.S.S. San Francisco. And during the naval battle of Guadalcanal in November, he had been killed in action. It became personal to me when the San Francisco limped into Pearl Harbor. I saw its bridge and mast blown away. That night, as a communications officer with the Hawaiian Sea Frontier, I had de-coded the Navy’s message from the battle, that Admiral Callaghan, Admiral Scott and Captain Young, among others, had been killed.”

That night, Parrish volunteered to join the dangerous Third Amphibious Corps, and he served the rest of the war as a forward observer during the island invasions, a communications officer who directed close bombings from Allied aircraft and ships.

But the losses, especially Captain Young, meant that Christmas 1942 was a subdued and somber time. For Parrish, perhaps the most dismal of the war.

“It has been too long — I don’t remember specifically where I was in Christmas 1943. Perhaps I was on an island,” he said. “My lone memory of those days is one of utter homesickness during that time. We had a saying back then, ‘The Golden Gate in ’48.’ The war seemed endless to us all, especially in 1943.”

It wasn’t until the Battle of Guam in early July 1944 that Parrish said he began to feel the first inklings of hope. After the battle, he had been sent to New Guinea and was gone two or three weeks before returning to Guam. In that time, the Seabees (the Naval Construction Force) had constructed a huge airfield, and he watched in utter astonishment as row after row of B-29 bombers took off each day and bombed the Japanese homeland.

“In October 1944, my captain looked at my record and saw that I’d been in the Pacific for 37 months without leave, so he sent me home for a month,” Parrish recalled. “I returned to Moscow, in East Texas, where I’d taught and served as superintendent of schools.

“When I returned in December 1944, I was finally sure of victory. I was stationed on the U.S.S. Mt. Vernon off the coast of the Philippines as part of the great force that would invade Luzon. I got up one morning and looked out on deck, and as far as I could see was the invincible invasion force, too many ships and planes to count. I thought, ‘Here we come!’ It was then that I knew the war would end soon. Christmas 1944 was greeted with considerably greater optimism!”

Parrish finally mustered out of the Navy in December 1945 and returned to Moscow. Though he’d been accepted to law school, he agreed to play Santa Claus at the town pageant.

“I didn’t weigh but 138 pounds and was the slenderest Santa Claus you ever saw,” Parrish said. “I’ll always remember one bright little boy who I talked to. He went home and told his momma, ‘Santa Claus has a wrist watch just like Thomas Parrish!’

“Oh, that Christmas 1945 was one to remember. We met as we always had before the war at my grandmother’s. It was unbelievable to be back. All of the family cashed in their coupons, we pooled our resources, and we cooked for days — and what a feast it was. It was a glorious Christmas to be home.”

In recent years, Parrish has had occasion to talk to other vets about their memories, including Christmas. He said that few remember anything specific about Christmas in wartime. In a way, Parrish understands.

“You see, Christmas is a time of nostalgia,” he said, “of a hope for the future. And there was precious little of that in the dark early days. So much of what Christmas is now is the anticipation, the build up. We didn’t have much of that, either. We really didn’t have much time for the outward trappings of Christmas then. I know my friends in the foxholes didn’t.

“But that makes it all the more sweeter now.”

The hot and steamy South Pacific was also Wacoan A.D. Holland’s home during World War II. He operated radar, plotting enemy aircraft and ships, on the U.S.S. Colorado. Along with his buddies, he dreamed of hamburgers and milkshakes while on extended tours, one of which lasted 33 months.

At Christmas in 1944, the Colorado was in for repairs near the coast of Borneo, where the crew enjoyed a rare turkey and dressing dinner with ice cream for dessert while listening to Christmas music, including “Silent Night,” over the ship’s intercom. For most of the soldiers, who were teenagers, Christmas was lonely and more than a little frightening on the other side of the world. Holland’s ship had been hit twice by Kamikaze planes and had suffered 22 direct hits with more than 400 casualties in fierce fighting in the Marianas — which caused them to dock for repairs in December.

More than half a century later, Holland recalled a touching, but eerie moment after the final engagement in the Marianas. Along with the other surviving sailors, he stood and saluted while “Taps” played and 110 sailors were buried at sea.

When Billy C. Logue died on October 13, 2005, he left a hole in the heart of both McLennan County and Baylor that can never be filled. Logue had served as a judge since 1954 and, when he retired in 1999, he was the longest-tenured judge in Texas history.

But during the later stages of World War II, Logue was with Company C, 394th Infantry Regiment, 99th Infantry Division, a relatively untested division that found itself near Lanzerath, Germany in December 1944, as part of the U.S. VIII corps. But the 99th took the brunt of the last desperate German advance, which included eight Panzer divisions, in the early days of the Battle of the Bulge. Despite horrific losses, the 99th held, only to finally surrender, battered and bloody, a week before Christmas, 1944. Private Bill Logue was a prisoner of war.

But for Gloria Logue, Bill’s wife for 54 years, the Battle of the Bulge was only something she read about in books. Bill never spoke about his experiences until a year before his death.

“We were watching a very fine documentary on PBS about prisoners of war,” she recalled. “And, for the only time, he talked about his experiences. We bawled the whole time. It was good release for both of us.”

Bill told Gloria that the Germans had rounded up the POWs and transported them in stinking, crowded boxcars to the prison camp, the infamous Stalag 13. Long days of travel followed, with little food or water. More than one camp refused the trainload of POWs.

“When they finally arrived somewhere, all they’d had all day was a drink of water, no food,” Gloria said. “They’d traveled through Christmas Eve. The Germans unloaded them and the POWs stood around all day in the freezing cold, the coldest winter in decades. Night fell again, and they began to freeze in the dark.

“Then, Bill said, somewhere in the blackness, a soldier began softly singing ‘Silent Night.’ The other soldiers joined him before they were loaded up once again and shipped to their prison camp. He spent the next five months in that prisoner of war camp. I haven’t been able to sing ‘Silent Night’ since he told me that story a year ago.”

According to Gloria, Bill said he was always overcome with emotion when he’d hear “Silent Night.”

“That night in Germany, I’m sure he fought back tears,” Gloria said. “None of them knew what was going to happen to them next, what was ahead, where they were going. And so, every time he heard that song for the rest of his life, I’m sure Bill was very emotional about it. I would think that you would be afraid, scared, a good bit of the time you were a prisoner of war. ‘What’s going to happen to me? Where are they going to take us?’ That song gave him a tiny measure of comfort in those moments.”

After World War II, M.W. Holland found himself stationed in Tagu, Japan, with the First Marine Division, rounding up stray Japanese soldiers, some of whom would hide for years in the mountains. The countryside was devastated and the people were desperately poor. Holland and his two best buddies were particularly touched by the ever-present children, who followed them everywhere.

During one particularly harsh Christmas season, Holland wanted to do something for the children, but Tagu was a long way from the nearest PX or store. His solution? Holland said he joined his friends in acquiring the one thing that was available to them — cases of Coca Cola, which they distributed to the children in the village. The children, he recalled, were thrilled with the gift. And, half a century later, Holland still smiles at the memory.

Charlie C. Jones served as a General Line Officer at a naval air station in Atsugi, Japan, during three Christmases, from 1954-56. He regularly attended Christmas services at the churches in the area, but his most memorable moment came when he heard “Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer” blaring from a tinny hi-fi record player in a Japanese house — and sung in Japanese!

Manuel “Manny” Sustaita, now an outspoken veteran’s rights advocate, was assigned to Delta Company, First Battalion, with the 8th Marines. During the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, he was flown from Camp Lejeune (outside Cherry Point, North Carolina) to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, a flashpoint for the fast-building hostilities between the United States and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

“Where we were, there wasn’t much there,” Sustaita recalled. “At first we had to sleep out under the stars on the side of the mountain. There was no mess hall; we ate our C-rations on the ground. Eventually, the Seabees brought in some perimeter bunkers for us to sleep in. What I remember best are the durn mosquitoes.”

As one of the few Hispanic Marines, Sustaita was assigned to the perimeter fence to encourage the Cuban sentries to defect — while the English-speaking Cuban sentries on the other side did the same to us.

“They were smarter — they had women sentries!” Sustaita said. “It got to be a big joke. We’d cuss a while, make a few hand gestures, then go about our business. We never saw any combat, but this was the closest the U.S. ever got to World War III. It was nerve-wracking.”

This was Sustaita’s first of several Christmases abroad, including one in Vietnam, but the Cuban Missile Crisis made this the most memorable.

“Being away from my big Hispanic family was difficult enough,” he said. “That we were on the brink of a disastrous world war, one that could wipe out the planet, only heightened the memories.

“What I remember best about that Christmas is that the Marines tried to make the season as homey as possible. We didn’t have a mess tent, but they did set up a chow line and served us hot food. We ate off our mess kits while sitting on the ground, but it was a good, hot meal.”

But the Marines had one more Yule surprise for the soldiers. Shortly after Christmas, several trucks took Sustaita and his fellow soldiers to the Guantanamo Bay Naval Station.

“They had a stadium and a stage there and that’s where I saw Perry Como in a revue sponsored by the USO. It was pretty good, although at the time I would have preferred Elvis or Chuck Berry!”

J. Logan Fagner of Valley Mills served in World War II and eventually became a pilot. He went to Korea from 1951-52 and later even served in Vietnam, flying close support helicopter. While serving during the Korean War, Fagner flew helicopters to the front line for evacuations. He remembered spending his first Christmas there on an island off the west coast of Korea. It was a rare mission-free day and — somehow — the mess hall managed to round up enough a turkey for a special Christmas dinner.

Fagner’s memories of Christmas in Vietnam during the war are more piecemeal, though he hoped — as he did every Christmas overseas — that his family would remember to take “lots of pictures and write you and tell all about the wonderful day back home.”

Don Ariail, a long-time Baylor employee, endured two grueling tours in Vietnam. During his first tour, July 1968 to July 1969, he was assigned to the 3rd Brigade of the 82nd Airborne as a 4.2 mortar platoon sergeant, arriving shortly after the harrowing Tet Offensive of January through February 1968. He was later transferred into a rifle company, which operated out of Firebase Birmingham, in the northern highlands of South Vietnam, just south of Hue.

Ariail’s second tour of duty was from July to November 1972.

“I just don’t remember where I was during Christmas 1968,” he said. “During that first tour, we rotated four companies — with three always out in the bush. That means three chances in four I was out in the field on Christmas, doing recon missions at night.

“What we did was fairly routine — search and destroy, ambush missions. I just have no recollection of how I spent that Christmas. I’m sure I spent the day like I spent all other days, waiting to put on the pack and head out into the night.

“One day ran into the other. We didn’t pay much attention to days, except for the days until we returned to base camp — and counting the days to go home.”

Here we are as in olden days

Happy golden days of yore

In the last days of 1971, Randall O’Brien, now the provost of Baylor University and a noted author and professor, was just another grunt with the legendary 101st Airborne Infantry, Company D, peering out from his poncho in the Central Highlands of Vietnam. He returned periodically to Firebase Rakkasan, a semi-permanent campsite on a forgotten mountain, overlooking triple canopy forests swarming with Viet Cong and North Vietnamese regulars.

This was the year President Richard M. Nixon, to bolster his waning popularity, brought home some of the troops early in time for Christmas — although most had been due to rotate home in January or February anyway. O’Brien was one of the lucky ones — he rotated home the week before Christmas. Until then, like Ariail, most of his entire tour of duty was spent in the bush.

“Thanksgiving was C-ration turkey in a can, heated over a heat tab,” O’Brien recalled. “I didn’t drink or smoke and in your C-rations were small packets of cigarettes. So for Thanksgiving, I traded my cigarettes for another small can of fruit cocktail. I had saved several, so I had extra helpings for my Thanksgiving dinner.”

A tour of duty was generally 13 months. But for O’Brien, and many of the “grunts” like him, a year was like four years.

“In the 101st Airborne in the Central Highlands, this seemed non-ending, like time was standing still,” O’Brien said. “The only way many of us even knew we were getting close to home was that many of us carried these little plastic pocket calendars in our ammo boxes or p-boxes (personal boxes), and we’d mark off a day at a time, like we were serving prison time. Where some soldiers could listen to Radio Vietnam — we couldn’t hear it. Even if we could have picked it up, you keep quiet at night or you die. So I never knew what day it was. We were in a different world. And I thought I was going to be there for Christmas.”

But one day, without warning, the call came. O’Brien was one of the chosen few heading home. He was transported to the embattled Ben Hoa airstrip, flown to Ft. Lewis, Washington, where he was debriefed, and then flown again to New Orleans. His family, which then lived in southern Mississippi, picked him up and brought him home.

“That Christmas I suffered from survivor’s guilt,” O’Brien said. “I didn’t have a ‘merry little Christmas’ that first Christmas home. It took me a while to adjust. I couldn’t come from the jungles of Vietnam to Christmas in southern Mississippi with all of the trimmings.

“For a while, I couldn’t stay in the house. My parents lived out in the country, so I actually lived out in the wood behind my parents’ house for a period of time until I could adjust. I came up to the house during the day, to see people and to eat, but I slept outside.

Eventually, my father brought a portable pop-up camper and put it on the edge of our property from February through March before I could live in the house. From there, I eventually re-entered society.”

Like many vets, O’Brien’s return home generated a flood of differing emotions, each of which had to be dealt with in its own time.

“There was great joy at being alive and tremendous joy at being reunited with family and being home for Christmas,” he said. “But I was surprised by guilt. I’d done things in my life that I was guilty of — but not surprised. But I was surprised by this guilt.

“I certainly do remember that Christmas feeling at once both exceedingly grateful for the bounty and family and home and at the same time being halfway absent and back with my buddies. I could picture them sitting on their helmets, cold, wet, listening for sounds in the night. They were still there and I had a hard time being here, eating turkey and dressing and cranberry sauce, with my buddies being there cold and hungry and scared. I remember those emotions even now.”

O’Brien had volunteered for Vietnam. Though raised in the Christian faith, he had gradually drifted away from the church. But Vietnam changed everything.

“In the Army, I let go of my anger and hostility and let God have my life,” he said. “It was in Vietnam that Christ became my Lord. I began to read the Bible cover to cover.

“The first questions new soldiers were asked were designed to determine how they planned to handle the hell they were about to enter. My path was provided by God in Christ. What the Bolshevik Revolution was to the Russians, what the Bastille was to the French, what the Exodus was to the Hebrews, that’s what Vietnam was to me. I set foot there on the path that led me to the Lord. It was a time of liberation for my soul.”

It was that faith that enabled O’Brien to emotionally survive the midnight ambushes, a “Dear John” letter and sleeping on the ground behind his parent’s house.

“I did a lot of praying,” he said. “That was immensely therapeutic to me in my ‘wilderness years’ because I didn’t talk to a lot of other people. I didn’t talk to my parents. I didn’t think anybody could understand.

“But I knew this — Christmas meant everything to me that year. I came back from Vietnam knowing that the hope of the birth of Christ was real. All of us who live in the Christian America, if we’re serious about our faith, wonder — ‘Will it hold up in the really hellish times?’ And I came home knowing that my faith had held. Yes, I still struggled, but the good news was that I felt that God was with me through this time.”

In time, of course, O’Brien did re-enter society. Eventually, he was ordained and taught in the religion department at Baylor University.

But no Christmas before or since has matched the raw emotional, spiritual intensity of that first Christmas back from Vietnam.

“I didn’t have any money that Christmas to buy any gifts, and I had always been known in the family as the one who was a great gift-giver,” he said. “But I can honestly say that that Christmas the gifts didn’t mean what they’d meant before. What did mean a lot to me was family, friends, home.

“Vietnam stripped everything else away.”

Precious friends who are dear to us

Will be near to us

Once more

Let your heart be light

Next year all of our troubles

Will be out of sight.

This Christmas season, take a moment and whisper a prayer of thanks for the “precious friends” who gave their lives to make it so.

And have yourself a merry little Christmas… now.