Introduction & Dedication
“Punch them in the gut first. Get it out of the way. Then tell them what to do. And then go from there.”
Jimmy Hoffa: circa October 1971, New Jersey Federal Penitentiary1
This is a true story; it’s a long one, and everything you probably need know about what happened to Jimmy Hoffa, and who killed President Kennedy and why is in the middle third of the preface in 2,000 words of the 10,000 word preface; you could read the whole preface in about thirty minutes.
It starts with my final high school wrestling match in March of 1990, and transitions into my grandfather’s funeral two weeks later. (He was Edward Grady Patin, the Baton Rouge Teamster Leader famous for sending Jimmy Hoffa to prison; he was portrayed as “Big Eddie Patin” in Martin Scorcese’s 2019 “The Irishman,” and as himself by Brian Dennehy in 1983’s “Blood Feud.”) Between the layers of that story, weaved in like a magician secretly slipping a few cards into a deck, is the story of the first Gulf war, and why some people still call it Desert Shield and Desert Storm.
The wrestling match as a metaphor for a combat scene that happens later (in other words, it’s not about more than wrestling match, but to tell you what it’s like fighting for your life deep in a bunker late at night and having friends die, it’s much easier to talk about my final high school wrestling match, and then go from there.
The reoccurring sound is a “boom!” when I hit the mat, which is a metaphor for the two 15,000 pound bombs dropped on Khamisiya by two C-130 Hercules aircraft. But, in a way, it’s really the story of one of the platoons that captured the airport: Anti-Tank Platoon 4 (AT4), Delta-Company (D-Co), 1st Battallion, 504th Parachute Infantry Regiment (1st of the 504, “The Devils in Baggy Pants,”)
Seriously – that’s our logo: Devils in Baggy Pants. You can’t make crazy-sounding things like that up. (We earned that name after a Nazi captain wrote that in his notes, quivering at America’s first paratroopers dropping from the sky and stopping Hitler’s Panzer tanks and much, much more. It was based on our uniforms having baggy pockets to hold all the extra machine gun ammunition we kept handy for when we hit the ground. Not much changed since then, and this is dedicated to The Delta Dawgs, every one, then and now, here and gone; they were my team after the wrestling team my senior year in high school.)
This is a true story about teams (there are a few side plots, but in all sincerity read that 2,000 chunk does explain about Hoffa and Kennedy; that was easy compared to explaining what it was like to be with AT4, and this really is dedicated to them).
This was AT4
And this was the first 15,000 bomb:
This is AT4 again:
And so is this, back in Fort Bragg and after a shitty jump and all-around shitty week in some godforsaken shit hole in a country whose name I still can’t pronounce. I’m the guy in the middle; I inherited my grandfather’s smile, otherwise there’s no resemblance.
In the first photo, I’m the bald guy kneeling down on the left (unfortunately, all of the Kurds in those villages died, including several little girls we failed to save; I don’t have a joke for that).
For the middle two photos, I was holding the 12-photo disposable camera. I may add a few more from that roll here and there in later chapters; it’s actually an interesting story, but this only an introduction to the preface. In all sincerity, I want the story to center around why Kennedy was killed, why wars happen and what we can do to stop them, and why justice matters. But to have that conversation, we’ll need to discuss justice and America, and that’s why I start with my grandfather’s role in sending Hoffa to prison and killing Kennedy; and then we’ll have to both know what it’s like to have killed people and not saved a little girl (again: no joke came to mind).
Peace,
Jason Partin
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Footnotes:
- I made that up. But the rest is true; with a story like that, I couldn’t find a better introduction. ↩︎