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.

I arrived at Fort Bragg on a C-5 Galaxy from Fort Benning, and within two days I had been given every vaccination and preventive medication known to the army in an endless series of shots and pills, and they gave us an experimental pill to prevent certain death from nerve agent and reduce it to a something that would be horrible but we’d probably survive long enough to feel more of the pain and misery before being less likely to die; it was pyridostigmine bromide, though I couldn’t pronounce it then and couldn’t recall the name and would have to look it up when writing this, unlike the other injections that I’d get every six months, like the thick and viscous gammu globulin injected into our butt cheeks that took a half hour to dissipate, and the barrage of tetnis, yellow fever, malaria, and other international diseases that America’s Quick Reaction Force regularly received, just in case. The gammu globulin was an immune booster given every six months and was a thick, viscous gel kept refrigerated until injected into our buttocks and made us sit angled for the half hour it took to disolve, so I knew it well. Butt, pun intended, we were never given pyridostigmine bromide again.