I arrived at my mother’s hospital room on April 4th, 2019 with bloodshot eyes and puffy cheeks and three days of grey stubble on my chin. I hadn’t slept since I learned she was dying, and I hadn’t been able to speak with her because she had slipped into a coma. I had waited anxiously for the next flight from my home in San Diego to Baton Rouge, two time zones away, where she was in an intensive care unit I knew well and was waiting for a liver transplant that would probably never happen.

It’s difficult to tell you my family’s history without beginning with the first few years of mine. Fortunately, the first few years of my life are accurately and concisely told in a court report easily found online or on file at the 19th Judicial District Court of East Baton Rouge Parish, Louisiana. I was the minor child, Jason Ian Partin, and four years previously I had been abandoned by my mother and father and placed in the Louisiana foster system under the Guardianship of Mr. and Mrs. Ed White; like much of my family’s history, mine is documented in court records.

My first memory of Wendy Partin and Debbie LeBoux are at PawPaw’s in the late spring of 1975, when azaleas were in full blossom and their scent waifed into every breath. PawPaw had just given Wendy the used car that I’d later recognize as a Datsun, a small hatchback with lots of easily accessed storage that could haul telephone books, like the ubiquitous Yellow Pages that were delivered every spring, listing all the new businesses in town.

In 1992, I learned a lot more about my family and the John F. Kennedy assassination, mostly because of the Oliver Stone film, JFK, that implied Kennedy had been killed by hihg ranking people within the FBI and CIA.

A consequence of the film JFK was a resurgence in public interest, and the public demanded to know more and newly elected President Clinton authorized releasing part of the JFK Assassination Report that had been begun in 1976, soon after Hoffa disappeared. The congressional committee consisted of bipartisan elected officials, and, interestingly, the editor of Time magazine who had worked with Bobby Kennedy and FBI director J. Edgar Hoover to plaster Big Daddy across media after Kennedy’s death. They reopened all files and brought in both FBI and civilian experts in ballistics, forensics, photography forging, espionage, and almost every other aspect that would be involved in the crime of the century. By 1979, the 12 volume congressional JFK Assassination Report reversed the Warren Commissions findings and determined that President Kennedy had probably been killed as part of a larger conspiracy, and that the three main suspects with the motivation and means to orchestrate such a plot were Jimmy Hoffa, Joseph Carlos Marcello, and Sancto Trafficante.

On the morning of January 16th, 1991, almost exactly 18 years after I was conceived, Sergeant Shaq woke us with my beeping watch in his hand and we got into the Humvee and turned the glow plugs and ignited the engine and looked up and saw dozens of bombers and attack aircraft flying overhead, and we followed them over our heads and across the border to Iraq in front of us, and the war began.