MOSUL, Iraq – Capt. Mara Boggs was having a long night.
The first bomb went off shortly after her lumbering line of earth-moving equipment, water trucks, cement trucks and armored vehicles rolled off base into the darkened streets of this northern Iraqi city. It missed the convoy.
The next one detonated just after her team spotted it amid bags of cement in the median of a road that was supposed to have been cleared of hidden explosives the previous night. A driver suffered a mild concussion.
Another charge was hidden under that one.
As the Army troops waited for an ordnance-disposal team to conduct a controlled explosion, occasional bursts of gunfire from nearby buildings crackled and tracer bullets flashed overhead.
By the time the area was cleared, and Boggs’ team could start paving over the median to prevent the next round of bombs from being hidden there, it was after midnight.
“Happy Thanksgiving,” Boggs, still calm and smiling, told her soldiers over a crackling radio.
Later, Boggs climbed on top of a truck to cheer her company on in a rowdy football game in the afternoon sun.
“This is my second Thanksgiving here in two years, but this makes it fun,” said Boggs, who is from Keyser, W.Va. “We’re kind of a family, so this makes it like being with the family at home.”
Her husband joined in the game, Being together, he said, “was the only way I knew it was Thanksgiving.”
For most American armed forces stationed across this strife-torn country, Thursday was just another day. But many managed to steal at least a few hours to celebrate – whether over a special meal, at a Turkey Bowl football game or by sleeping in for a change.
For Boggs, 31, the first woman to command her airborne engineer company, the day was special, too. Behind her in the humvee early Thursday was her husband, Maj. Kenneth Boggs, 36, who flew in for a visit from his base in Tikrit.
Most had to make due with phone calls and e-mails to their loved ones.
Clarissa Lewis, 34, a chief warrant officer from St. Croix, Virgin Islands, spoke to her family.
The long separation from her husband and five children is the hardest part of the deployment – her second in Iraq. A webcam helps Lewis bridge the divide.
“I can see the kids there,” she said over dinner. “They ask when I am coming home. That’s when I miss them – when I see them. I wish I was there.”
Before the day was out, armed soldiers in helmets and bullet-proof vests gathered again in a cramped room lined with maps to be briefed for their next mission.
“Every day you and the men around you get up and fight, knowing that you face danger,” their commanding officer, Lt. Col. Barry Huggins, told them. “I am grateful to you. And you should be grateful to the men and women standing next to you. … Happy Thanksgiving.”
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