Reunited family embraces the season
Published: December 20, 2005
Staff Sgt. Clarence Booker remembers two things clearly about last Christmas: the long line for dinner at the chow hall at Camp Buehring, a desolate U.S. Army outpost in northern Kuwait, and the fact it was the first Christmas in 23 years he spent away from his wife, Cherylann.
“It was rough,” said Booker, 45. “I missed Thanksgiving, my daughter’s (21st) birthday, Christmas and New Year’s. But Christmas was definitely the roughest.”
Although most of the 50th’s soldiers shipped out for Kuwait in January, then spent 10 months in Iraq before coming home in November, Booker and about two dozen others left for Kuwait two months early.
“There were just a few of us who had to spend Christmas in Kuwait and we joked about it being a Christmas with our ‘new families,’” Booker said. “We made the best of it.”
In Iraq, Booker, a full-time National Guard mechanic, spent nine months overseeing repairs on the 42nd Infantry Division’s equipment, everything from blown truck engines to faulty suspensions on tanks.
He and Cherylann and their daughter, Jennifer, originally thought about spending this Christmas with family in Texas. Instead, they decided to have a quiet Christmas, just the three of them, in Bloomfield.
“It’s going to be real nice,” Booker said. “We all thought of ourselves as family in Iraq, but I think we’re all real glad to be able to spend this Christmas with our real families.”
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