By Ship’s Historian Rick Erisman, RM3, in Pittsburgh
Ray Pfeiffer, RM3 (70′-’71), and his wife Cris have just returned to Normandy from three weeks on the road with Easy Company and their Band of Brothers tour with Wild Bill Guarnere and Babe Heffron. The tour was very successful and they followed the entire route from London to Austria. Ray and Cris will be in the Washington, DC area next month to visit the WWII Memorial, the Holocaust Museum and they will have a VIP visit to the White House.
03 December 1970 while en route from Rota, Spain to Toulon, France during our Med 3-70 cruise, I wrote a “familygram” which stated, “to say the least, we had a good Thanksgiving dinner and surprisingly enough the trays remained on the tables which is not the usual around here” during our 16 day transit across the Atlantic Ocean.
Ray so disagreed with my recollection of that event that he composed a rebuttal that I want to share with you. Ray stated, “It is weird how you and I have such different memories of Thanksgiving 1970. I will never forget it. Could it be that maybe because we were on different watches we had different experiences? I was one of the first on line and maybe you came an hour or so later and didn’t realize it.” I wrote my memories then, almost 34 years ago. Here’s Ray’s recollection. You decide!