Young Marines Adopted For Family Style Thanksgiving

By Alison St John / Reporter

Published November 23, 2011 at 10:09 AM PST

This story was published more than 13 years ago.

More than a thousand young marines who can't go home for Thanksgiving will be adopted for the day by families around San Diego and Orange Counties.

More than 400 cars, vans and even limos will pull up on Camp Pendleton Thanksgiving Day to whisk small groups of young Marines off base for a family-style Thanksgiving dinner.

Suzanne Taburun of the Armed Services YMCA said more than 1,100 young Marines - whose families live more than 50 miles away - signed up. They are currently training in the School of Infantry.

“They’ve all been through bootcamp and they’re Marines now,“ she said, “Those that will go to deployable units, this will be their first deployment. We still have a lot of our young military going into harm's way.”

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A new headquarters command unit will leave Camp Pendleton for Afghanistan in January. Thousands of Marines from the base will depart in the following months for seven month deployments.

Taburun says families as far south as Coronado and as far north as Orange County volunteered to host the Marines. She said she had to disappoint more than 100 volunteer families because there weren't enough young Marines to go around.

In addition to the YMCA program, Junior Seau's in San Diego hosts 50 Marines for Thanksgiving Dinner.

Alison St John

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Alison St John currently serves as a general assignment reporter and occasionally co-hosts KPBS Midday Edition. She fell in love with KPBS Radio when she arrived in San Diego in 1985 and first heard NPR. She has been a voice on KPBS Radio since 1989, and has served as a news reporter for radio, TV and the web, as well as anchoring, hosting, producing and editing. Alison has reported on stories about North County and was based in the KPBS' North County Bureau. Alison covered the metro beat during the critical period of the San Diego City pension crisis, and the education beat while Alan Bersin was the controversial Superintendent of San Diego City School District. She covered health when the industry was converting to managed care and told welfare reform stories in the late 1990s when Clinton was “ending welfare as we know it.” She has covered land use issues extensively, looking at the challenges of meeting a growing population while preserving community character, and developing a better transportation system to meet environmental concerns. She has done many stories on the military in San Diego, and the series she edited on the challenges veterans face returning from active duty to civilian life won “Best of Show” from the San Diego Society of Professional Journalists. She occasionally hosts the KPBS Roundtable and KPBS Midday Edition. Alison has won awards from the San Diego Press Club, the Society of Professional Journalists, the Associated Press TV and Radio Association, and the California Golden Mike Awards. Alison was born in Tanzania, brought up in Scotland, and earned her degree in psychology and sociology from Durham University in England. Her postgraduate diploma is in student counseling. She worked in England, Nigeria, Switzerland, Belgium, India, and Japan before moving to the United States in 1981. She now lives in Oceanside and enjoys how her community is growing and changing.