An All American
Partin, like Hoffa, had come up the hard way. While Hoffa was building his power base in Detroit during the early forties, Partin was drifting around the country getting in and out of trouble with the law. When he was seventeen he received a bad conduct discharge from the Marine Corps in the state of Washington for stealing a watch. One month later he was charged in Roseburg, Oregon, for car theft. The case was dismissed with the stipulation that Partin return to his home in Natchez, Mississippi. Two years later Partin was back on the West Coast where he pleaded guilty to second degree burglary. He served three yeas in the Washington State Reformatory and was parolled in February, 1947. One year later, back in Mississippi, Partin was again in trouble and served ninety days on a plea to a charge of petit larceny. Then he decided to settle down. He joined the Teamsters Union, went to work, and married a quiet, attractive Baton Rouge girl. In 1952 he was elected to the top post in Local 5 in Baton Rouge. When Hoffa pushed his sphere of influence into Louisiana, Partin joined forces and helped to forcibly install Hoffa’s man, Chuck Winters from Chicago, as the head of the Teamsters in New Orleans.
Walter Sheridan in 1972’s “The Fall and Rise of Jimmy Hoffa”
This is a memoir, and to put the week following Wendy’s death into perspective, it was the hardest week of my life. There’s an addage in writing to show, not tell, but I don’t know how to show how much I miss my mom and how much that week hurt and how tired I was other than to tell what happened in the almost thirty years since I left Louisiana, and my thoughts on what it means to be an All American hero, like America had viewed my grandfather around the time I was born.
Wendy had a rough life, and I was in many ways a typical teenager, rebellious and defiant of authority. I asked to be emancipated from both sides of my family the summer of 1989, just after Uncle Bob died. I was declared a legal adult at age 16 and a small mention was made in the Baton Rouge advocate, coincidentally posted by Judge Robert “Bob” Browning, the family court judge of the 19th judicial parish that had placed me back and forth in different custodies in the 1970’s. I promptly joined the army’s delayed entry program, possible as a 16 year old child becaue Judge Bob Browning had made me an adult on paper, and I chose the 82nd Airborne, nicknamed the All Americans since WWI. My grandfather, who had been dubbed an All American hero by the media for years, died on March 11th, 1990, two weeks after I wrestled my final match in high school. I attended his funeral waearing my letterman jacket with badges for wrestling, cross country, swimming, chess, and theater; and I had a chestfull of 36 safety pins, one for each wresting pin that year, grouped in clusters of five, and a back patch that said “Magik” above a large skull weraing what could be interpretted as a magican’s top hat, but was just the logo of Slash, the guitarist of Guns N Roses known for his shaggy hair and black top hat. I was briefly mentioned in the news because of Big Daddy. The LA Times reported:
BATON ROUGE, La. — Edward Grady Partin, the labor leader whose testimony sent Teamsters boss Jimmy Hoffa to prison in 1967 and who himself was convicted of extortion, has died at 66.
Partin, who died Sunday at a nursing home here, suffered from heart disease and diabetes.A native of Woodville, Miss., Partin was business manager of Teamsters Local 5 in Baton Rouge for 30 years.
Partin, a close associate of Hoffa, helped then-Atty. Gen. Robert F. Kennedy convict the Teamsters boss in 1964 of jury tampering. Partin testified that Hoffa had offered him $20,000 to fix the jury at Hoffa’s 1962 trial on charges of taking kickbacks from a trucking company. That trial ended in a hung jury, but Hoffa eventually was convicted of jury tampering and mail fraud and served nearly five years in federal prison.
James Neal, a prosecutor in the jury-tampering trial in Chattanooga, Tenn., said that when Partin walked in the courtroom, Hoffa gasped, “My God, it’s Partin!”
The government later spent several years and three trials prosecuting Partin on labor corruption charges before he went to prison in 1980 for conspiracy to obstruct justice by hiding witnesses and arranging for perjured testimony.
While in prison, he pleaded no contest to conspiracy, racketeering and embezzling $450,000 in union money. He was released to a halfway house in 1986.
Union members at one time voted to continue paying his salary while he was in prison. He was removed from office in 1981.
Survivors include his mother, two brothers, a sister, five daughters, two sons and several grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
I graduated and went on a senior trip and saw the news when the 82nd deployed to the Persian Gulf on August 3rd, 1990. Interestingly, I was on that news, because Big Head Ben Abrams and I drove across country that summer and stopped in New York, where I performed street magic to earn a few dollars for gas outside of the NBC studios and was given tickets to the 11am filming of Late Night with David Letterman. Big Ben and I had to sit a four seats apart but were only a few rows from the front stage and excited to see Dave, the most popular late show hose on Earth back then. Our episode was shown the evening of April 3rd and had a mountain biker opened the show by bouncing down the steps, Robert Dowing Jr. discussing his rehab and return to acting, and the supermodel Cindy Crawford being as stunning as I had imagined. I sat there, googly eyed and wearing an embarassingly juvenille hat with a cheesy mustached magician in a top hat holding an exaggeratedly long wand and saying, “It’s not the lenght of the wand, it’s the magic in it!” The wrestling team had given me that hat and another for The Orlando Magic, which had just formed and LSU’s star basketbally player Shaquille O’Neal had left to join the Magic; as a wrestler with overlapping seasons, I had never watched basketball, and as a 17 year old infatuated with Cindy Crawford I had thought the cheesy magician hat was funny. I sat there with four Kennedy half dollars classic palmed in my right hand, sitting idle but on high alert, ready like the British air force to respond when necessary, and I thought I’d be ready in case Dave called me on stage. He didn’t, but Ben and I still called our friends and his family and asked them to record Late Night with David Letterman on their VCR’s, and then we went to a house party on Long Island with some girls we had met who thought my hat was funny and our accents were charming. In that night’s show, you see Ben’s big head near my juvenille hat; he’s calm as can be, but I’m awkwardly tense and sweating a bit from palming the half dollars for so long; they were post 1968 and were therefore not the silver halves that were easier to palm, and I was concentrating hard on watching Cindy Crawford and not having the mixed metal halves squirt out of my sweaty palm. Just after the camera passes my hat, the show was interrupted by a national news bulletan saying Saddam Hussein had invaded Kuwait and President Bush had sent the 82nd Airborne to stop the world’s largest army. From that day on, daily news showed the build up of troops and drove fear into the hearts of soldiers and parents everywhere with detailed news of Saddam’s chemical weapon stockpile and footage of what had happend to the Kurds he had used Serin on, and basic training would evolve to focus on fighting in full chemical protective gear, including face masks, and using atropine injectors after a chemical attack to hold on to life a few moments more.
A few months later, I wore a maroon beret in place of my cheesy magician hat and arrived in Saudi Arabia in an oversized, XL desert uniform – all that Fort Bragg had due to the rush to create deset uniforms – with a kevelar helmet to replace the beret, and I joined the 82nd in Saudia Arabia. So did many countries: the coallition would reach 560,000 soldiers pitted against approximately 400,000 Iraqis. Interestingly, when I was processed through Fort Bragg, I was told that because of my emancipation I was the youngest out of 560,000 allied soldiers and presumably of out of 400,000 Iraqi soldiers. I was one in a million, an the youngest one at that. After being on international television the day of the invasion and learning that I was one in a million, I sought meaning in every encounter. But there was more to my experience, something I wouldn’t dare tell anyone in the army, that my grandfather was behind the assassination of President Kennedy and the murder of America’s most decorated war hero, Audie Murphy.
I had only realized the part about Kennedy and Audie when Big Ben and I took a detour on our road trip to go to a Comic Con in Washington DC in late July. I had heard the names all my life, but I was so young I didn’t have perspective. I always confused Bobby Kennedy with John F. Kennedy, and I had thought that Audie was just another actor in war films. But, in Washington DC’s Arlington Cemetery, Ben and I overheard a tour group around Kennedy’s tomb talking about conspiracy theories, and of course they mentioned Hoffa, Marcello, and Trafficante, all names I recognized and hadn’t given much thought to. Someone mentioned my grandfather’s role in sending Hoffa to prison and the rumors of him sending Audie’s airplane crashing after Nixon sent Audie to Baton Rouge to negotiate Hoffa’s release. Ben and I followed the tour group, with me joking that we were too cheap to pay for a tour and less interested in the tombs than overhearing people talk about Big Daddy without knowing who I was. The group left Kennedy’s tomb and walked to Audie’s, and that’s when I learned he wasn’t just an actor, but was America’s most decorated war hero and the second most visited tomb in Arlington, second only to John F. Kenndy. Like me, Audie’s dad had run out on him and he learned to shoot by hunting rabits with a .22 and joined the army at age 17; he was turned down by the marines and too small for the new parachute units, but went on to win every award the military could bestow and was immortalized in the film based on his life: To Hell and Back. He went on to star in almost 40 films before dying in a mysterious airplane crash, coincidentally just as Edward Grady Partin Junior was deflowering Wendy Anne Rothdram and I came into being. It was a lot to process, and that was on my mind on August 3rd when Saddam rolled into Kuwait and Big Head Ben and my moment of fame on Late Night with David Letterman would be interrupted by the 82nd drawing a line in the sand.
I had another moment with Kennedy and Audie in Fort Benning, Georgia, just before Airborne school. I had a two day break between AIT, where I became a 11-H, anti armor infantry, and the first accelerated Airborne school in American history: we were to be shortened from three weeks to two, omitting the “drop” phase where you’re dropped from 35 feet in an already open parachute, and going straight from practicing parachute landing falls to jumping out of an airplane from 1,200 feet. That was on my mind, and I hadn’t thought much of Kennedy and Audie since Arlington Cemetery, but on a whim I visited the Fort Benneing Infantry museum near the Iron Mike statue and his shout, “Follow Me!” and not to far from the Airborne school and their logo of “All the Way!” and I wandered aimlessly, interested but not focused, learning about things like M&M candies coming from an army contract to Mars candy in WWII to create chocolate candies that wouldn’t melt in packaged meals or hands of soldiers, requesting what would become a popular catch phrase of “not melt in your hands, but melt in your mouth,” and of a video game simulation that came from a physical machine on display and new math from government grants to translate the motion of a physical platform to nacent computer grafics using a series of sine and cosine angles that I thought I should understand but didn’t, and another math display of direct linear transform developed in WWII to take two 2D photos from airplanes and transform them to a 3D image using the subtle differences in angles between objects, somewhat similar to how our brains make 3D images from our two 2D eyes. All of that was interesting, but what caught my eyes was a wall sized photo of a young J.F Kennedy in Vietnam, non challantly standing on a merchant marine boat armed with an MK-19 grenande launcher, and a room sized exhibit on the special forces that were attributed to President Kennedy. Apparently, he had wanted to keep American involvement in Vietnam to a minimum, less than the 55,000 troops there when he was killed and the 500,000 or so built up by President Johnson in the years after Kennedy’s death; special forces were to be highly trained teacher teams, not blind warriors or solo killers like Rambo. I spent almost an hour pondering why anyone would kill someone like Kennedy, who seemed to make sense to me. As I walked away, I almost bumped into a support column with a display about Audie Murphy and a copy of his memoir, To Hell and Back, and I spent another hour there, flipping though To Hell and Back and reading quotes from celebrities my grandfather’s age that I recognized and who all said that Audie had been their childhood hero, a person they aspired to be. He had overcome diversity and become America’s most decorated war hero and had 278 confirmed kills, and after teh war had become an actor in almost 40 films and was an outspoken advocate of treating Shell Shock and Battle Fatigue, now known as Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome. He had become addicted to sleeping pills and kept a loaded pistol under his pillow because of his PTSD, and to his dying day had advocated for mental health awareness, saying that if he could get it then anyone could. One quote mentioned him and the Kennedy assassination in the context of mental helath, pointing out that the final bill Kennedy had signed into law three weeks before being killed was the Community Mental Healthcare Act and that, ironically, Kennedy was shot and killed by a veteran with mental health issues who was then shot and killed by another veteran with mental health issues, and that they hoped Audie Murphy’s message would be read by more Americans.
I was too confused to process what I was just beginning to understand: my grandfather had been involved in killing the creator of Special Forces and America’s most decorated war veteran, and I was on my way to war. I had no words that could express how I felt, and I was too young to understand the feeling. It was similar to how almost a year before I had asked to be emancipated from my Partin family and, like the army advertisement proclaimed, wanted to be all that I could be. Back then, I had chosen to drop weight and wrestle Hillary Clinton, the three time returning state champion at 145 pounds, just like the actor in the high school coming of age film Vision Quest had decided to wrestle Chute, and how that same actor had portrayed a marine in the epic Vietnam film Full Metal Jacket. The feeling was accepting a self-inspired challenge but learning from those around me. I had had Coach and Mrs. Abrams and a few friends, but I was alone after AIT and wouldn’t known anyone in the 82nd and couldn’t imagine telling anyone my grandfather had helped kill President Kennedy and Audie Murphy, and I felt too many emotions and thoughts to process anything clearly; to fit words to my emotions now would be a lie. I left the Infantry Museum with a feeling, not words in thoughts, that is best defined as determination to succeed in Airborne school and the war. I’d have no regrets. I would not be, as Wendy always said, just like my father and his father. I would chose my own adventure.
I completed my five jumps and earned my blood wings and beret and left Fort Benning for a two day stay in Fort Bragg to turn in my jungle fatigues and receive my desert uniform and head to the 82nd on the front line between Saudi Arabia and Iraq and I came of age in the war, just like kids did in the films I had watched about wrestling and the Vietnam war, and the first words I remember hearing after returning to Fort Bragg in May of 1991, just shy of a year since graduating high school, were:
“Hey, there, Private! What the fuck you wearin?”
Those words were uttered by The Sergeant Major, a somewhat squat African American – for lack of a better term but widely used back then – who spoke with an unlit, half smoked cigar held between his thick lips. His body was strong, and the forearms poked past his rolled up sleeves showed dense and presumably effective muscles, though his belly was slightly paunchy like many older men who had once been in prime shape. His countenance was relaxing even though his words were not, and his question was a combination of authority used to change a situation and universal human curiuosity when faced with something new or unusual or somehow remarkable, and I was remarkable that day. It was my first day back in the United States after the war, and I was walking back from headquarters where I had just changed from my desert fatigues to my old jungle fatigues, which had been held in HQ since before I joined the 82nd in the Persian Gulf. I was carrying a few mail packages that had been held from the weeks before and wearing a uniform that may have shrunk in storage; I couldn’t button the top two buttons of my green camoflauged overshirt, exposing a brown t-shirt so tightly stretched across my chest that my my dog tags and an unauthorized but accepted cross bulged through. It was a warm spring day and my sleeves were rolled up, but only with one roll instead of the mandated two rolls, and I couldn’t fold the cuffs over enough to camoflage my short sleeves. My pants were too short to tuck into my boots and flapped with every step, and my usually baggy cargo pockets were stretched so tightly against my thighs that I couldn’t keep my wallet there and was holding it stacked with my mail packages and letters addressed to Pvt Jason I. Partin (with my ssn, used to send mail before the days of internet fraud), D-Co, 1/504th PIR, Fort Bragg, NC.
The Sergeant Major was Sergeant Major Hoggard, nicknamed Hobo or simply mentioned in a few old Vietnam memoirs from special forces missios. He was responsible for more than 900 paratroopers on one battalion of the President’s quick reaction force, 1st Battallion of the 504th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 82nd Airborne Division, 18th Airborne Corps.
The 82nd was legendary. After WWI, the 82nd Infantry was disbanded but soon reformed in the midst of WWII, and the All Americans became America’s first “paratroop” unit in 1944. The All Americans gained accolades in WWII that are legendary, and they became the president’s quick reaction force, America’s Guard of Honor, on call to deploy anywhere in teh world within two hours and land within eighteen. Since Vietnam, they had deployed to one civil unrest event in Chicago and responded to multiple calls from several presidents to land or drop in around embassies and presidental palaces of Honduras, Grenada, The Dominican Republic, and Panama.
The Sergeant Major had been HMFIC of the 1st/504 for two years. He was a Vietnam conflict veteran and former prisoner of war with a chest full of badges that would impress almost anyone, even someone who didn’t know what they all meant: Master Blaster with three mustard seeds, Pathfinder with the history of being “first in, last out,” Air Assault, and one that I didn’t recognize yet and squeeed below the helicopter with angel wings of Air Assault. His right shoulder wore a special forces combat patch, though his left shoulder only had ranger and airborne tabs above the 82nd Airborne’s “AA,” colloquially referred to as the 82nd All Alcoholics but meaning “All Americans,” because when the 82nd Infantry was formed in WWI it was the first time in American history that a military unit had soldiers from all states; hence, All Americans. At the time, people still recalled the civil war and knew that brothers fought brothers partially because all U.S. military units were local, regional groups of armed men that developed loyalty to whichever patch they wore and leader they followed. To be the highest ranking noncommissioned officer in America’s Guard of Honor was a remarkable achievement, especially for an African American who had been drafted during the American civil rights movement.
He ran a tight ship, so the saying goes. He reported to the battallion commander, who was in charge during deployments, but was in charge of all activities in Fort Bragg including during ardurous readiness inspections for the president’s quick reaction force. The inspection process for DRF-1-3 is perforemed by other battalions and the stakes are real. The 1st/504 had been on DRF-1 when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait with the largest tank army the world had ever seen; President Bush Sr. called the 82nd and 18 hours later the 1st/504th was touching down in Saudie Arabia and drew what was dubbed “The Line in the Sand” that began Desert Shield. Only a year before that, 1st/504 had been on DRF-3 when President Bush Sr. called the 82nd to parachute into Panama and capture President Noriega; the D-Company of heavy arms that was supposed to be on DRF-1 had failed inspection, but The Sergeant Major’s teams seemed to always be ready for real-world deployments rather than just training missions, and AT2 and AT3 of D-Co had parachuted into the jungles of Panama with thier Humvees and .50 cal machine guns instead. I had coincidentally seen my future teammates on televised news, like most of the world, surrounding Noriaga’s presidential palace with machine guns and enormous speakers as if at an outdoor concert, blaring 1980’s heavy metal 24/7 for a week, disrupting Noriega and his guards with humorously selected songs from a bunch of practically teen agers who had just jumped into Panama and chose Van Halen’s “1985” album with the hits “Jump!” and “Panama.” I’d later learn that the air force had opened the jump doors 800 feet over the while blaring Guns N Roses new hit, “Welcome to the Jungle,” and that of course they were all ready for whatever happened, because The Sergeant Major ran a tight ship.
Half of D-Company spent 30 days in the jungle of Panama over Christmans of 1989 and the New Year of 1990, and then deployed to the Persian Gulf on August 3rd, 1990, and spent nine months there. As the line in the sand against the world’s largest tank force, the 900 paratroopers of the 504th were more like a speed bump in the sand. The only practical defense was D-Company, the anti-tank company, with four AT platoons with two Humvees squads each, with each squad having three men armed with M16’s and M203’s and, almost comically, one Berretta 9mm pistol. Each Humvee carried a .50 cal machine gun capable of firing 1,800 armor piercing rounds a minute at an effective distance of 1,800 meters and a TOW-II missle system capable of punching through 38 inches of armored steel from 3,750 meters away; albiet taking 17 seconds to travel that far, long enough for Iraq’s Soviet T-54 and T-55 tanks to fire six to eight rounds. D-Company had been formed to fight in jungles, not open deserts, but as the vice president famously said, you go to war with what you have, not what you want, and they honorably stood their ground. They were hopelessly outgunned and exposed in green uniforms and green painted Humvees that were still so new to the U.S. Army that the gunner sat exposed, without any plating or armor commonly seen by the second Gulf war. But they held the line despite not having the weapons they’d chose, and a few months later a world wide coalition had formed to suppor tthem. America had 560,000 soldiers in Saudi Arabia at the border of Kuwait and Iraq; total allied forces surpassed any armed force in history. On January 4th, 1991, a year after returning from Panama and immediately following the largest coalition air bombing since Dresden, AT4 would follow the French forces across the border and begin Desert Storm. A few months later, 18th Airborne Command leader General “Stormin’” Normin would be credited for a historically relevant clear strategy and exit plan, and Regan funded technology would be credited as facilitating a decisive victory with minimal loss to American lives; in fact, Desert Storm was the first U.S. military action where we didn’t kill more of ourselves in fratricide or to medical error than ever before, including Panama. In the decades that followed, many people may have forgotten that the first line in the sand was held by a group of weary teenagers in green jungle fatigues.
Facing insurmountable odds was part of the 504th’s legacy, something I learned on the incessant news as the allied forces built up to battle Saddam’s tank force. A famous poster in international newspapers and magazines in WWII, and still a poster displayed in practically every airborne leader’s office, including The Sergeant Major’s, epitomized the 82nd soldier of the time: that soldier’s age was around 26, common in WWI and much older than the average age of 19 as in The Sergeant Major’s era, and he was a white male who would have either volunteered for the military or been drafted. Either way, he would have had to have volunteered to be Airborne, and back then Airborne volunteers were a unique and rugged lot. In that photo, the older, rugged, unshaven man is wearing a trenchcoat covered in snow and looking on the edge of death due to fatigue and too many battles in too many consecutive months. He’s carrying a small bazooka, and the reporter who took his photo was documenting America’s best hope against Europe loosing to HiItlers Nazi Germany and their intimidible Panzer tanks dominance was a few scraggly paratroopers in the 82nd and a scattering of 101st troops and a few others. They had been at combat for years, and on that cold winter a few stood their ground, united yet not – the 555th demonstrated that – yet non of that was relevant at that moment. The largest and fiercest armored ground force the world had ever known was headed for a small weakness in the Allied defenses, and The Battle of the Bulge was about to begin. The cameraman captured the paratrooper’s expression just as he had answered the reporter’s question of “who are you?” And the paratrooper had said, “I am the 82nd, and this is as far as those bastards are going.” It was so appropriate for rallying American support of the 82nd drawing a line in the sand that it seemed preordained.
Lesser known from WWII, a company of 82nd paratroopers from the 504th dropped into combat wearing the newly designed Airborne uniform designed with extra large cargo pockets to help carry basic living needs or extra ammo for soldiers jumping behind enemy lines. A captured German officer’s diary exclaimed:
“American paratroopers – devils in baggy pants – are less than 100 meters from my outpost line. I can’t sleep at night; they pop up from nowhere and we never know when or how they will strike next. Seems like the black-hearted devils are everywhere…”
Since then, the 504th has been colloquially known as “The Devils in Baggy Pants,” and my skin tight cargo pockets would have been remarkable. It’s no wonder The Sergeant Major stopped me as I was walking across the commons between HQ and the third floor home to 90 Delta Dawgs. I was remarkable, even to someone who had seen as much as he had.
“At ease,” he said, and I did the best I could with the packages tucked into one arm cradle. As I relaxed, it dawned on me: my uniforms hadn’t shrunk, I had grown.
Before I deployed to the war, I was given the only desert uniforms they had left, size XL, and no one noticed my gradual growth and I must have not noticed no longer needing to roll up my sleeves, or thought my two uniforms were shrinking in all the funk and filth and blood and melted asphalt I had put them through. Upon our arrival back at Fort Bragg, the division commander had ordered everyone to change back to jungle fatigues, something almost everyone did with joy, like snakes shedding their skins after nine months of accumulated filth on their outer skin. I had just returned from supply, where my old uniforms from basic training and Airborne school had been stored, and I was walking back to D-Company’s barracks and pondering the tight fit when the Seargent Major stopped me. I was confused at first, but without the slightest exaggeration I began to understand many things and grew as I stood in front of The Sergeant Major. I was, by every definition, what the media had misapproriately called my grandfather: an All American hero.
The Sergeant Major looked me up and down. He was slightly shorter than I was and had a pudge like a lot of older men who had once been in phenomenal shape and had built out their stomach muscles. His left shoulder had a Ranger tab and then the Airborne and AA. His right shoulder had the legendary Sky Soldiers: as a veteran of 20 years in various combat situations, he had his choice of combat patches, and if you had to choose why not choose the flaming angel wings of the Sky Soldiers? His chest was a mass of patches that I didn’t recognize yet. I had no patches, because my uniform was still my basic training issue and I had transitioned straight from Airborne school to the 82nd on the front line, the original line in the sand that had crept forward like the Battle of the Bulge but with the 82nd and French leading this time.
“I said, what the fuck you wearin, Private?”
“I grew, Sgt. Major.”
I recognized the confidence in my voice that I had felt for a long time but had not realized until that moment, just like I was realizing that I had grown. I was speaking from a source voice of the slightest big of doubt, worry, anxiety, pride, arrogance, or self-consciousness. It felt good. I smiled subtly, and knew that I was smiling as subtly as the b in subtle. I acted and spoke from a good place, and I could do no wrong and I knew it and I was just realizing that, too.
“You fuckin’ grew?” It wasn’t a question, and he chewed on that for a few moments. His lips moved his unlit, half-smoked cigar from one side of his mouth to the other, and he gnawed at it delicately and deliberately, as if that’s how he always collected his thoughts.
Just then, a cherry lietenant walked by wearing an unblemished and highly starched uniform with bright and shiny unscuffed boots. He had a Ranger tab, like any lietenant assigned to the 82nd other than one or two rare exceptions. He was probably just out of West Point: he didn’t even have an EIB yet. The Sergeant Major and I snapped to attention, with me doing the best I could with my packages craddled by my left arm.
“At ease,” the cherry LT said. He nodded at the Sergeant Major, who salluted and said, “All the way, Sir.” I can’t recall what the LT said; the Seargent Major laughed and said he’d get it squared away and reached into his baggy right pants pocket and fished around a bit and said, “Hey there, Sir; you want a cigar? I got one right here…”
The LT declined and glanced up at my eyes again and made a smug sound and told us to carry on. I could have squashed him like a sand gnat or punted him away like a dung bettle dropping in on my cathole the day after a long firefight; I realized the only reason he didn’t realize that was because the army told him otherwise, and he hadn’t learned how little people care about rank in combat. He may have read about fratricide in Vietnam during a West Point class, but he didn’t have the experience to treat each moment as an opportunity to build allies or fascilitate latent animostity that would surface when people were fatigued or mentally stressed to breaking points and willing to kill whatever they saw as the source of their pain, no matter how they had been trained or what rank was on the collar of their pain.
The cherry walked away and I went back to being at ease and the Seargent Major rested his hands on his hips and went back to looking at my up and down. He was almost a hand width shorter than I was.
“You that mother fucker who speaks Sand Nigga’ and does magic tricks and shit, ain’t ya?” He said that rhetorically, I’m sure. I wouldn’t have known what rhetorically meant back then, but I knew from his tone and body language that he hadn’t asked a question and was thinking out loud. I remained as silent as sniper in Vietnam or my dad after being read his Miranda rights during Reagan’s war on drugs.
The Seargent Major’s lips navigated his cigar back to its original location in the far corner of his mouth and continued seamlessly into a bemused smirk. His head continued and cocked slightly and he said, in a way I interpreted as a question of sorts,
“I heard you pretty good with a knife.”
It was true, and someone had taken a photo of the evidence and it had been circulated around because a cherry had won the battalion’s informal Stretch competition, an old 82nd game that provided shit-taking rights between platoons and companies. It was something we did on breaks in combat to unwind and relax, and it involved hurling our bayonets at each other’s feet in alternating turns. If you stuck within a blade length they moved their foot to that spot and stretched out a bit more: hence, Stretch. The winner was the last one standing. I had had an advantage, despite my disproportionately long feet, in that I had been issued the only bayonet left at HQ, a Vietnam era like The Sergeant Major would have used, meant to stab and pierce armor and ribs and tires, not the more modern and thicker tool that assumed the days of trench warfare and hand-to-hand combat were over. I was good with that bayonette, and had been good with all sorts knives for years before that. Todd Abrams, Big Head Ben’s little brother, was one of my closest friends and had taught me a lot and he had ran weekly meetings of the Baton Rouge Knife Throwing club in the Abrams’s back yard. You may recognize his stage name, Jack Dagger, The King of Fling, named after his grandfather, Jack Bennett, Mrs. Abrams dad, because he’s been on television and in movies a bunch since then, including appearances on Conan O’Brien’s late night show where within just a few minutes he taught Conan to throw a knife into a target on stage with millions of people watching. He’s in the Guiness Book of World Records as the fastest knife thrower on Earth, hitting a target eight times within a few seconds, and was the reigning world accuracy champion for years. His hands are in films when actors couldn’t master his methods, and one of my favorties is the Adam Sandler commedy The Zohan, about an Israeli special operations soldier who moves to America to open a hair styling studio and is deadly accurate at flinging styling shears; the hands spining the shears are Todd’s big, hairy hands that had taught me to handle knives when I lived with him and his family before the war. Todd and I had both been in the Baton Rouge newspaper a bunch back then, him for knife throwing and me for magic, and once for a juggling act with knives and meat cleavers we did at Fest for All using his nickname back then, Mace, called “Magik and Mace’s Meatcleaving Mischief and Magical Mahem.” I was no Jack Dagger, but I had no doubt I was pretty good with a knife, especcially after wining the 504th’s stretch competition with my Vietnam era bayonette.
“Yes, I am, Sgt. Major,” I replied with an accidental air of confidence that made the confidence that much more palpable to anyone nearby, including myself. You don’t win stretch between battles against fleets of tanks after learning your grandfather killed the president and America’s most decorated war veteran without gaining some degree of confidence that you can’t explain to just anyone, even The Sergeant Major.
He took out his cigar and erupt into a brief but joyous laugh and exclaimed, “Holy shit, H’uah! That’s what I’m talkin’ ‘bout!” He chuckled and looked me in the eye and deliberately moved his right hand towards his pocket as he said,, “Hey, there, H’uah! You want a cigar?”
He mimed his words with his actions like an experienced magician directing people to where he wanted them to look. He said, “I got one right here…” as he fished around his pocket. He found one and tried to yank it out but it must have been a big one and was stuck.
He yanked hard a few times and said, “Holy shit, H’uah! That ain’t a cigar, it’s my dick! My big, fat, black dick!” He withdrew his hand then and said, “Ha! Just fuckin’ with ya, H’uah,” and he slapped me on the shoulder with the hand that may or may not have just been holding his self-proclaimed, big, fat, black dick.
I dind’t know what to say.
The part about speaking Sand Nigger was exaggerated. I only knew a few phrases and numbers up to ten that I had learned from Mr. Samuels, an old Jewish magician at the Baton Rouge Magic Club, before I had left for basic training; he had told me Israelis and Arabs are more alike than most people realized, and had demonstrated by teaching me a few phrases in both Hebrew and Arabic. But, in the land of blind men, a one eyed man is HMFIC, and I was frequently called upon to help interrogate prisoners by both the 82nd and the French. And because I was from Louisiana and Uncle Bob had taught me a bit of Cajun French two years before, when I had stayed with him as his hospice care, I was surprised to discover I could somewhat communicate with the French and they were pleased with that and I was a translator of sorts in the first few weeks after the air bombardment and up until the March 4th capture of Khamisiyah, when I had the opportunity to interrogate Saddam’s Republican Guard after a skirmish about the length of a round of high school wrestling. Apparently, I was appreciated by higher up and word had filtered back down and The Sergeant Major probably paraphrased someone by saying I spoke Sand Nigger.
AT4 gained a bit of recognition during the capture and destruction of the Khamisiah Airport. At first, we were told to keep everything intact, including the MIGS and experimental tanks and secured silos, for study by higher up and for immediate use by us: we were to prepare for a parachute jump into Bhagdad to either secure an airport or capture Saddam: details would be given as they unfolded. A few hours of fighting later, the command was given to destroy the airport. The Delta Dawgs created a security perimeter and demolition engineers set explosives everywhere and one of our HuMBEE commanders – they were called tank commanders and HUMEE’s were still very new – coordinated a call for two 15,000 pound bombs, each squeezed into a C-130 and strapped to parachutes and timed to detonate above Khamisiah just as the ground bombs detonated, obliterating everything. For good measure, the Air Force was dropping bunker busters all around us, bombs that penetrated 30 meters of bedrock before detonating or exploding in the general vicinity with enough fire to consume all oxygen in all nearby bunkers, and a couple of modified C-130 Spectare Gunships were rattling rattling guns just in case any survivors escaped their bunkers.
That explosion released Sarin nerve agent, and to this day the Veteran’s Administration Medical System says that 60,000 former soldiers have a series of conditions referred to as “Desert Storm Syndrome.” After decades of research comparing symptoms across different demographics, including civilians, multiple independent research groups would show, statistically, that you were 40x more likely to exhibit Desert Storm Syndrome if you had two criteria: were within 100 miles of Khamisiya and had taken the experimental anti-sarin prophalactic oil, Pyridostigmine Bromide (ironically). This would be the subject of fierce reactions from parents, voters, and therefore politicians: my testimony about Khamisiya has been the subject of three different congressional committees over the past three decades. At the time, I was in First Squad, AT4, as the newest, youngest soldier in Desert Shield, and had been assigned as a fourth member of First Squad, an ammo bearer and casualty replacement. At first, I was 5’6” tall and 147 pounds. A lot happened quickly. I ended up with a mention in a small award for when two of us captured 14 of Saddam Husein’s Republican Guard in what was described as hand to hand combat initially, but was really just us deep in pitch black bunker protecting Khamisiay. We were running low on ammunition and entered the bunker with two bayonet’s, a 9mm, a .12 gauge shotgun and a few grenades but with night vision goggles, NOD’s, and that was enough to overcome the odds. The Republican Guard HMFIC had a notebook that became useful to higher up, and I was asked to work with higher up’s men. I still don’t know what that meant, but I had also had a 24 shot disposable film camera, one of the few cameras available in Iraq, even with all of our technology back then. After we blew up Khamisiyah, higher up would have a photo I took of the mushroom cloud over Khamisiyah and a few shots of destroyed bunkers and bodies sprawled around unsuccessful anti-aircraft embankments (and I’d explain a few random photos during rare down time, more than one crass photo taken by others rom when I had set the camera down, and a shot of an enormous lizard nicknamed “Achmed the Lizard” that we had nursed back to health and used as a mascot after some assholes intending to be funny had spray pained his back with the V sign we all wore on our roofs to alert the air force to not kill us; in our photo, we had placed Achmed the Lizard near our reflective IR tape that created a 5 meter safe zone from Specter Gunship 20mm automated gatling machine guns. In addition, I would be questioned about several villages we had, under orders, not protected after the war ostensible ended and Saddam’s forces retaliated by massacring, by my estimate at the time, hundreds of men, women, and children while we watched and then that we tried to save as those forces rolled on to the next village. Since then, photos I took with a 24 exposure disposable camera – the only one on the front line – were used as evidence for Khamisiya, and I’ve spent three decades on three different congressional committes and a VA led study of dozens of thousands of Desert Storm veterans compared to soldiers not deployed compared to civilians, and I also received a small mention in an award for capturing 14 of Saddam’s Republican Guard deep within a bunker that had been protecting Khamisiya before we blew it up. At first, I was a “control” sample, someone not exhibiting symptoms, though many of my symptoms were camoflaged in the bumbs and bruises and aches and pains of a total of seven years of military service and 16 years of wrestling; the VA would assign me a 75% disability rating in 2018, just before I learned Wendy was dying, and it broke her heart to hear and I rarely discussed it.
Back in 1991, on my first day back from the war, I stood at ease with packages and envelopes and my wallet cradled by my left arm as The Seargent Major looked at my name tag, the only patch I had other than US Army and my E2 stripes, and said, “All right, Private Parts. Ha! Just fuckin’ with ya, Partin. Hey, there, H’uah: if RoboTop don’t get you squared away by Monday, you come see me, y’ hear?”
RoboTop was our new Top Sergeant, a nickname for First Sergeant, the top seargeant, and RoboTop was probably the largest, fiercest, and most taciturn human I had ever seen, even after having grown up watching 1980’s pro wrestling on TV. His nickname came from the 80’s eponymous film, Robocop, about an honorable Catholic police officer turned into a cyborg who moved with the same strong precision as RoboTop and maintained the same, wholesome way of speaking. Our RoboTop was known to say few words and never utter a curse word, and practically all of the 82nd looked up to him and his transparent style of leadership that is summarized by the phrase “lead by example.” He had never deployed to combat, though no one would ever call him a REMF. I’d soon learn that even RoboTop looked up to The Sergeant Major and trusted his judgement, and would prioritize whatever was necessary to square away whatever SGM Hoggard felt was important. As Yoda had said, “Size matters not,” and RoboTop respected The Seargent Major. I had already learned that there was more than one way to lead, and I was honored that The Sergeant Major took a perosnal interest in me, just like Coach had only a year before when he helped me train to wrestle Hillary Clinton.
I cocked my head almost unnoticably and looked down at The Seargent Maor and, though I only say this in hindsight, saw RoboTop looking squarely at the Seargent Major. I said what he would have said.
“Yes, Sgt. Major.”
Hoggard’s lips navigated the cigar stub around his mouth like a magician manuevering a Sharpie around his fingers and looked me up and down again and asked me a few questions about what had happened at Khamisiyah and the villages after. He would have read all the reports from Khamisiyah and seen my name and probably made the connections, but the two months after that were undocumented and only known by word of mouth, and by then I was a nicknamed passed three to five kilometers at a time along antiquated radio systems: Scarhead, Dolly, Feet, Secret Agent (because of my Cajun accent across the radio network and a popular James Bond spy film set in Louisiana where the local sherif kept repeating, in doubt of what he had just learned, “See-cr’et A’gent?”), and, finally, “that mother fucker who just beat Parker at Stretch.” Hobo and I chatted a bit as two fellow combat vets, then we parted ways with an obligatory return to attention before I was dismissed to carry on with whatever the fuck I was doin’.
Back in the barracks, I laid out my letters and packages. There was still nothing from Wendy, but I opened the first package from my dad. It was a box of anti-war newspaper clippings and an the frist letter he had written me in almost a year, since my high school graduation. It was a hand-written note telling me how disappointed in me he was that I had gone to war to burn babies and kill villages.He had always swapped words, calling me Justin instead of Jason and confusing Bobby Kennedy with Johnny Kennedy and things like that. I was used to it. Another package was from The Abrams and Mrs. Abrams’s 5th grade class who had written me weekly with updates on what they were learning and reading about the war, and occassionally sending a few snack bars or a book they thought I’d enjoy. I had a letter Cristi with blank paper and a SASE so I could write back – her addressed changed frequently – and a photo from Leah of her and a few of her fellow dancers at The Gold Club who had, by the grace of God, adopted me like Mrs. Abrams’s 5th grade class and ocassionally sent photos they thought I and AT4 would enjoy; they were all right.
Two years later, in the summer of 1992, I was wearing an 82nd combat patch had a chest full of badges and was certified expert in practically every weapon in NATO armorment, from bayonette to pistol to machine gun to missle, and was serving on small experimental team that The Sergeant Major had thrown together with RoboTop’s input and traveling abroad to work with other experimental unites including the new German teams comprised of East and West Germans for the first time since WWII, possible because of Reagan’s cold war and the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. I had developed a reputation for being calm under fire and quickly learning to communicate with foreign forces, and for, in ways I still don’t understand, being very, very good at the new concept of digital communication. The army transitioned from the old school radios to SINCGARS, Single Chanel, Integrated Ground and Airborne Radio Systems that had adapted frequency-shifting technology and was beginning to adapt to satellites and global communications, and I somewhow had begun excelling at new technology and was a trainer of sorts to some early stage adapters in special operations. And because a long-term goal was a unified planatery defense force, we all had to communicate electronically and in person, and by “communicate” we meant not just repeat words but to seek and understand intentions and overlook miscommunications and focus on the situation and what we could do to improve it for everyone, including the humans who may happen to be ignorant and trying to harm us or innocent people at that moment. I had grown a lot more in those two years.
I had a secret clearance and newly elected President Bill Clinton had called upon the 82nd to go to Haiti – my recon team aborted at the last minute and jumped somewhere else in an ill fated mission that put a few of us in the hospital back at Bragg, and that’s when I first heard that the film JFK and Hoffa had been released and that all Americans were clamoring for Clinton to release the top-secret JFK and Martin Luther King Assassination Report, publised shortly after Hoffa disappeared and after almost fifteen years of research and interviews after the 1964 Warren Report had wrongly said that Lee Harvery Oswald acted alone when he shot and killed JFK, and when Jack Ruby shot and killed Oswald in the police station two days later Ruby acted alone: in the 1979 JFK Assassination Report, first released by Clinton in 1992, the committee concluded that there were three main suspects: Hoffa, Marcello, and Trafficante. I read the report again and again, and of course all the books that were being published seemingly every day by insiders hoping for a movie deal or conspirasists focued on uncovering the truth. Most seemed to overlook a critical detail that jumped out to me: the massive report began with a 1962 FBI surveillance report overseen by J. Edgar Hoover, a year before Kennedy’s assassination, that elaborated on my grandfather, Edward Grady Partin, and Jimmy R. Hoffa had plotted to kill the president’s brother, US Attorney General Bobby Kennedy, with explosives – which the world already knew from Life magazine and the 1983 film “Blood Feud” – and concluded with their second, back up plan that smelled suspiciuosly like the president’s murder less than ten months later. In the report, they discuss recruiting a sniper and giving him a rifle outfitted with a scope and having him shoot and kill Bobby Kennedy as Bobboy, whom Hoffa always called “Booby,” as Booby drove through a southern town in his convertible. They chose a southern town because of intense and vociferous opions from right wing people who would either help kill a Kennedy or applaud anyone who did. Hoffa was clear that any shooter should not be able to be connected to the Teamtsers. Of course, I knew the tale: Oswald had been trained in Russian linguistics by the US Army before defecting to Russia and then returning to New Orleans with a wife and child, where he visited Cuba and then moved to Dallas and allegedly shot and killed Kennedy with an Italian surplus carabine retrofitted with a scope by a Dallas gunsmith, and then Ruby unequivocably shot and killed Oswald in the Dallas police station as Oswald was being escorted out in handcuffs and showcased on international live television: the world saw it happen on real time, analog televison. The debates had raged sicne then about if Oswald’s shot were possible and whether or not there was more than one shooter and whether there was a conspiracy. Personally, I knew I could have made the shot and therefor even Oswald, though a horrible shot according to his scores in the Marines; even a blind squirel finds a nut now and then. And I knew I could have orchestrated a team hit on anyone, especially in a convertible surrounded by tall buildings like the infamous 6th floor library where Oswald’s rifle was found under a windowsill with three meticolously displayed 6.5mm rounds, just like the fragments in Kennedy had been and how one surprisingly intact round was found at the hospital where they took his body. The coicidences were obvious. What was less obious was that even in 1992 few people knew that Jack Ruby was indebted, or felt indebted, to Hoffa because Ruby had once been a business agent of a Dallas dumptruck business absorbed, probably merciciously, by the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. Even less obvious, probably because few people recalled the 1968 trial by New Orleans Jim Garrison, and of those even fewer would recall the news reoprts back then that claimed to have photos of Big Daddy and Jack Ruby a month before Kennedy was shot in Dallas and another witness claiming they had seen Big Daddy with Oswald around the same time and had kown Oswald ever since Oswald had trained in the Baton Rouge civil air force by my grandmother’s homes: by the time Garrison wrote his book that would become the film about JFK and the allegged CIA conspiracy to kill John F. Kennedy he had omitted Big Daddy’s part in it, probably because Garrison’s witnesses disappeared and the photo was never found and he decided, perhaps, that as Hoffa’s attorneys would write, my grandfather was a dangerous person. I realized that in 1992 it was likely that I was one of only a few people on Earth to know that my grandfather was behind President Kennedy’s assassination.
I practied the right to remain silent, which is even harder to tempter than the right to free speech and is, to this day, a right I wish more Americans would acknowledge and practice. Nothing would lead me to talk, not even several training courses where I signed waivers for physical and mental consequences of weeks of food and sleep deprevation and experimental interigation methods. I was a natural at defying integration, probably because of my Partin family and a quirk of being “America’s first family of paid informants,” according to a few law historians and because of my background with my dad, wrestling and magic. For example, SERE school – Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape – is challenging for most special ops, but growing up in the woods with my dad led to survival skills, avoiding Clinton County Arkansas sheriffs helped with evasion, wrestlign with resistance, and anyone who had studied Harry Houdini or The Amazing Randi would be better at escape than all of those other guys probably still tied up in their little torture cells. I may have never been coherent after a few days of sleep deprevation, but I could still rotate my wrists to create the longest axis possible and hold them apart almost inperceivably while being tied, and I’m pretty good at picking locks. To this day, I only menion my military experiences and thoughts on the Kennedy assassination among close friends, and I never divluge magic secrets unless I’m teaching someone the basics or writing a memoir about how magic and the military have influenced my life.
Almost three years after the Khamisiya, I had won a few more awards and was soldier of this or that and was asked if I wanted another experimental role as an unarmed Peacekeeper in the Middle East with a diplomatic passport that would allow me to walk across the border of Israel and Egypt as a part in the 17 country coalition created by Jimmy Carter in 1979, the MFO. I was told it was because of Storming’ Normin, who only a few people knew was an amateur magician and member of the International Brotherhood of Magicians All American Ring in Fayetteville, North Carolina, I would spend six months with a lot of privileges and practically no accountability other than to pre agreed upon morals and values and codes of conduct that began with: Thou shall not kill; unless, of course, it’s to save any innocent life this time, unlike the villages we saw slaughtered. Of course I said yes, and I became somewhat of a combination of James Bond, Jason Borne, and MacGuyver. Humorously, my nickname was frequently “Dolly,” just as it had been in middle school until I had begun pronouncing my name in the Cajun accent, Pa’tan, instead of like Dolly Parton. And, coincidentally, I was briefly nicknamed “Bigfoot,” just like middle school, after developing flat feet from so much road marching and parachute falls and my fallen arch stretchd my toes into size 14 Wide boots that stood out with my otherwise slightly above average height and weight, which had stabliized at 5’11” and about 205 pounds except for after each bought of training with food and sleep depervation, where I hoovered near the 191 pound weight class. Dolly seemed to persist more, except for a few SEALS and underwater demolition guys who joked that they couldn’t find fins to fit me, but that with my big feet I shouldn’t need them.
I would have stayed in the military had I not had a negative experience in Egypt due to REMFs either not knowing who I was or understanding the freedoms I had been granted. I had been mistakenly arrested for threating an officer, a cherry captain for whom I had no respect, who wasn’t wearing his glasses the night he cowered in his trailer as a drunken Specialist Parker beat on his door. Parker looked somewhat like me but bigger and more rugged, and he stood next to me in alphabetical lineups; those facts took three weeks to be proven, all while the REMF cherry captain traveled to Israel representing America. In his absense, I was made to do pushups all day until I fatigued – 506 was my record – and to clean latrines all night. I never counted how many toliets I scrubbed before passing out and repeaing the process the next day.
When he returned and I was on trial to be shipped back to the states, a hearing of sorts had been conveyed via faxes and analog radios connected around the world. Before the cherry arrived – he arrived late – a handful of voices crackled through a speaker in Egypt. Apparently, without knowing details, former commanders rallyed to my cause. The REMF first seargeant read the first charge, drunken and disorderly conduct, and the crackled voices errupted in defense; I was known as a teatottler, who during DRF-1 took soldiers accoustomed to barsto The War Zone for coffee and books and magic shows instead.
“Bull mother fuckin’ shit!” crackled The Sergeant Major.
“That doesn’t sound like Specialist Partin,” said RoboTop, a church going family man who never cursed and somehow came through the old speaker loud and clear.
A few other voices crackled agreement.
The REMF first seargent continued reading my charges, “And for disrespecting an officer.”
There was an long silence.
“Well, shit. Fuckin’ Partin.”
“Dagnabbit.”
A round of reluctant acceptance ensued.
Just then, the cherry captain showed up wearing his glasses and, without being prompted, said, “That’s not him,” and within a few minutes we all understood what had happened.
The crackling voices expressed satisfaction at having been right and justified rallying at what would have been 0300 hours at Fort Bragg on my behalf. One voice I did not recognize but have long suspected was Stormin’ Normin’ spoke and all crackling stopped. He reminded everyone in Egypt that I reported to 18th command, not the MFO, and that I had full immunity. He told them to dismiss me, and asked the first seargent and cherry captain to stay. I left and had five months of unrestricted freedom in the Middle East. I never learned what happened to the cherry, but the first sergeant bent over backwards for me the next five months and I never cleaned another latrine in Egypt.
I knew I would never be in a situation where someone could order me to do 506 pushups and clean untold number of latrines, so I took advantage of free time and the MFO’s library and college program through, inexplicably, the East Texas Community College program for soldiers overseas to study the Peterson guide to the SAT and take a few courses in cultural anthropology and reef ecology. I wrote a paper that probably no one ever read about reefs I had seen in the Red Sea while scuba diving, dying from runoff from hotel constrcution in the burgeoning resort town adjacent to the MFO, Sharm El Shiek, and of a unique opportunity to witness the day the 1993 Dead Sea dried up and formed two boddies of water due to irrigation projects in Israel and as a precurser to what was only a phrase murmered by a few people back then: global warming. I used my SAT scores, which were remarkable, to apply to the only 11 American universiteis with environmental engineering programs back then, and was accepted into LSU’s newly formed civil and environmental engineering program. That was serrendipitous, because most universites began spring semester on January 3rd or 4th, but LSU delayed until after the Martin Luther King holiday and would begin January 14th, 1994, two days after I was scheduled to complete my army service. Armed with that knowledge, I pursued my duties in the Middle East was a man who could do no wrong, wanted to live a life without regrets, and knew I had a safety net waiting for me at LSU.
I dont think we achieved peace in the Middle East, but after the MFO I was still idealistic tried out for and earned a spot on the Fort Bragg wrestling team and tried out for the Olympics. I lost gloriously and without ambiguity, beaten by the winner with as much clarity as Jack Ruby unequivocalbly shooting Lee Harvey Oswald. Coincidentallly, his name was Jason, and we had trained together for a few months along with the post martial arts team in response to 1993’s surprising victory of Royce Gracie in the world’s first MMA tournament using his family’s combination of wrestling, judo, karate, kempo, and gumption. Jason was a former collegiate wrestler and bar fighter who could have easily destroyed even Specialist Parker, though he was nothing compared to Hillary Clinton. Years later I’d Jason him on Youtube MMA fights and would have no doubt that I couldn’t have defeated him no matter how much I trained, but I was pretty sure about it back then becasue he had almost beaten me by technical fall, gaining 14 points ahead of me and only needing one more to win, and it took everything I had to fight wihthout breathing for the last few moments and bridge until my neck spasmed in fatigue and the six minutes ended and I lost, 18 to 4. Satisfied that I had done my best in all things I tried, I ended my service with no regrets. I left the army two days early, by their permission, because Martin Luther King’s birthday was a holiday in January of 1994, and drove all night long, 903 miles in 14 hours from Fort Bragg – now Fort Liberty – to LSU’s campus in Baton Rouge. I began my first classes that morning. My only souvenieer washe bayontte I had used in the first Gulf war and a prototype pair of scuba fins made to fit my big feet.
I graduated LSU in May of 1997, spending exactly as long in college as I had been in the military but not growing nearly as much. I graduated summa cum laude, 7th in class out of 40 or 50 thousand kids, an “ambassador” for LSU reporting to the president of LSU, and co-captain of LSU’s revived wrestling club. On the side, I served as an EMT on Regional Ambulance for night shifts and weekend work at NASCAR events, a medic for LSU sports, a magician at the new floating casino downtown, and, as my greatest honor then and now: assistant wrestling coach to Coach Dale Ketelsen at Belaire High School, home of the Belaire Bengals.
I left Louisiana for the final time that year, visiting less and less frequently as the years passed and other responsiblities and choices dominated my thoughts and actions. I wouldn’t grow much again until Wendy died on April 5th, 2019, joking until then end that she had been born WAR and that marrying a Partin WARP’ed her. After eerything I had learned, I couldn’t agree with her more.
In the thirty years since I was emancipated and went to war, Wendy and I became close friends with a shared history and sense of humor few people could understand. She never forgave herself for abandoning me and my emancipation and injuries from the war and more, so I rarely if ever mentioned my service or scars. And, I rarely mentioned my Partin family; she still had PTSD from them, so I rarely mention them even though they are still in the news often. But, I kept an eye on the JFK Assassination report every time a new president released a bit more, and I read books about Hoffa and JFK now and then. It was like a hobby. I’ve had maintained various forms of security clearnance, and occassionally would pry for more but nothing stood out. Not much has changed in my mind, but it’s not a clear answer with a smoking gun and an unequivocably guilty person. As I said, most skilled marksmen I know could have made the shot, most good teams could have orchestrated and obscured a multi-shooter situation and kept a secret, and I’ve never doubted that people in the government and mafia could have set wheels in motion that difused guilt and created what most people perceive as a conspiracy theory but is really nothing more than sychophants agreeing with their perceived superiors or role models and a disease in humans: a disregard for human life. It’s not a disease I share, hence winning a few awards and being granted high level yet ambigous freedoms and being deemed an All American hero, ironically like my grandfather had been dubbed in the 60’s, shortly before Wendy met Ed Partin Jr. and was WARPed. It’s exactly that love of life that was causing me so much pain as I said goodbye to my mother, a loving woman who had done her best and overcome insurmountable odds in a way no one but I knew or understood. May she rest in peace.
An epithat to Wendy exists in my mind: RIPWAR. It’s multi-layered, but I’m sure she’d get it, and if she were alive I’m sure we’d chuckle together about how it sounds.
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