MILES O'BRIEN, CNN ANCHOR: Iraq clearly remains a dangerous place for U.S. forces. But for today at least, an effort to give those troops a break and a taste of home. And that includes turkey dinners, some recreation and some phone calls home. In Saddam Hussein's hometown of Tikrit, some U.S. troops will celebrate Thanksgiving in rather opulent style. CNN's Alphonso Van Marsh joining us from Tikrit to explain everything that's on the menu there today. Hello, Alphonso.</s>ALPHONSO VAN MARSH, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Hello. Happy Thanksgiving to you from Tikrit, where some 3,500 U.S. service members are serving in the Tikrit area. Now, as you mentioned a little earlier in the show, Thanksgiving here got started way early with a five-kilometer turkey trot. Now, the turkey trot is actually a race -- five kilometers, as I said -- organized by the U.S. Army here, and the course was actually through one of Saddam Hussein's palace complexes. Now, that's quite a way to work up an appetite. By mid afternoon, service members were cutting through the turkeys, and plenty of them. You see some of those images there. We're told more than 4,200 pounds of bird for the 4th Infantry Division. That's the brigade and the U.S. service members serving in this part of the country. Now, once they got kind of started, something interesting</s>O'BRIEN: Alphonso Van Marsh, happy Thanksgiving to you and the troops out there in Tikrit. Thank you very much.
Thanksgiving Day with Troops in Iraq