Wrestling Hillary Clinton: Part IV

McKeithen is Warned to ‘Lay Off’ Partin

“Gov. John J. McKeithen reportedly received suggestions last month during a trip to Washington not to press the state Labor-Management Commission’s investigation of Baton Rouge Teamster Boss Edward G. Partin.”

“McKeithen said he met with [Walter] Sheridan, who is now an investigator for the National Broadcasting Company, to allay any suspicion that his motives in pressing the Baton Rouge labor investigation were to get Hoffa Free.

The governor said that the meeting was pre-arranged on a mutual basis, with each desiring to talk with the other. He said that Sheridan was a focal point of persons in the Justice Department and “national magazines” interested in seeing that Hoffa is not released.”

“The governor said he felt the recent series of Life Magazine articles on organized crime in Louisianan and the alleged bribe offers to free Hoffa were promoted by Partin. Since then, he said, Life Magazine has placed full confidence in him.”

New Orleans State Times, 08 March 1968

I won my first and only gold medal at the Belaire Christmas tournament in 1989. It was a small event that was scarcely attended; the local teams that showed up were missing their top wrestlers, who used Christmas as a break from practice to spend time with families after two months of nonstop practice. Coach said it was an Iowa tradition, a way to extend practice for those who wanted it, and an opportunity to share time with kids who viewed teams as family.

The coaches who brought teams did so without forcing anyone, so teams were threadbare and filled with second string wrestlers wanting to practice in a real tournament, or wrestlers like I was, who wanted every ounce of competition I could squeeze into my final year. We knew that after March, most of us would never wrestle again; none of us were so blind that we imagined ourselves at the level of Iowa kids or anyone else who could get a college scholarship, much less attend college in a state that depended more on Teamsters, pipe fiters, and journeymen than engineers, drafters, or college graduates without real-world skills.

After everyone left and Coach locked the gym, I donned my letterman jacket and helmet, straddled my motorcycle, started the timer on my Casio digital watch, and rode away. Less than the time of a round of wrestling later, I pulled into the Little Saigon parking lot a mile away. I stopped the watch and smiled; I was remarkably accurate at gaging two minutes. Given the few seconds to stabilize the bike and pull up my sleeves, I had about ten seconds remaining, enough time for adrenaline to kick in and give one final boost of energy to overcome being a point or two behind, or for calm alertness to settle and prevent an opponent who was behind from doing the same.

I walked past the restaurant selling Pho’ and Vietnamese Po’Boys, past the arcade and the bar with veterans smoking inside and out, and into the shop with bootleg cassettes and army t-shirts. I bought two loose cigarettes from the bins by the cash register. One was a filtered Kool, and one was a filterless Camel. They cost twenty five cents each, the price of a video game each, but I knew it would be worth it. I rode back to Belaire.

The parking lot was empty. I parked between two small trailers used as auxiliary buildings for driver’s education, sex ed, and detention. It was out of sight from most houses or from cars driving along Tams Drive. The only house visible was the one my dad had lived in a few summers before, where the bedroom facing Belaire was dedicated to piles of weed. I had been staring at those auxiliary buildings since I was a little kid, and I knew that my motorcycle would be hidden by all but that house and the two neighboring houses.

The house on the left of my old house as I stared at it was where Michael lived. He was the wrestler who had been at our dual meet against Capital, but he had quit the team after mid term progress reports in late November to focus on his grades and shoot for an ROTC scholarship. He had a high B average, but he was sure he could graduate with an A average if he focused for his final semester of school. He wanted to attend West Point on scholarship, like his dad had in the late 1960’s. His father served as a captain in the 75th Ranger battalion, but did something now that I never learned. Michael only spoke about about his dad’s military background, and his dad, who remembered my dad and me from when we were his neighbors, rarely spoke to me. At the time, the early 80’s, the only thing my dad spoke about was the Teamsters, what an asshole President Reagan was, or how my dad had been about to turn 18 at the height of the Vietnam conflict, and he would have fled to Canada or fought anyone who tried to drag him to war. My dad had been 16 when the Mai Lai massacre was showcased across America, and he had a habit of calling anyone who answered their draft notice baby killers, rapists, and dumbasses without a backbone who let Mai Lai happen.

Michael told me that his dad was one of only a handful of African Americans to have gone to West Point, and that’s how he learned about General Colin Luther Powel, who was an ROTC cadet at a small college who outperformed even the West Point guys where it mattered. He would become America’s first African American Secretary of State, and in 1989 he was already known nationally as the advisor to Presidents Reagan and Bush Senior, trying to reshape the entire United States military to adapt to an all-volunteer force after congress finally disbanded the draft in the late 1970’s.

A key part of the future American armed forces was recruiting people today who, ironically, didn’t need the army to be all they could be. Michelle wanted to be one of those future leaders. He spoke about Colin Powel like I spoke about Iowa’s head wrestling coach and the US Olympic coach, Dan Gable, whom Coach spoke of often but I had never met. Michelle and I spoke of mentors to our mentors, like martial artists who list the lineage of their lessons. I understood Michael’s drive.

He was as focused on his grades as I was wrestling, and he told me that he’d be at home studying over the holidays. He knew I sometimes parked my motorcycle between the annex buildings, and I knew he’d keep an eye on it for me without asking why I left it there overnight.

I draped my helmet over the handlebars and loosened the straps from my backpack so I could swing it around and remove the two cigarettes. I put them both in my back right pocket, one one each edge, with about a third of each cigarette poking up. I fished in the small pocket of my backpack and removed a flesh colored metal thumb tip, and placed it in the small front pocket of my jeans, the pocket meant for a watch or Zippo lighter, with the open end facing up and out of site. I walked around the annex and towards the tall outside brick wall of our gym.

Sarge was around the corner, barely in site of where I parked. He was in uniform and smoking a cigarette. I caught a whiff. It wasn’t a menthol, which you could smell and identify all the way from Tams avenue. Camel’s seemed a bit sweeter and more mellow to me; Kools and red-filtered Malboros, as opposed to the neutral white-filtered Malboro lights, seemed a bit harsher and burnt my nose more. I had to be closer to the source to discern which was which.

To practice, I guessed Sarge was smoking a Kool. I walked forward to see.

“What up, Magic Man?” he said with a huge grin and a freshly lit Kool in his hand.

“Man,” he said, “I heard you pull up. You the most dedicated athlete I ever met.”

Sarge put the Kool between his thick smiling lips and took a deep drag.

There must have been an ROTC event for Christmas, because Sarge was wearing his dress greens. He was in the Louisiana national guard and wore his jungle fatigues and green and black patches on most days, but he usually wore his dress uniform when parents were around, like at award ceremonies, homecoming dances, and graduation. Though in the national guard, that patch was on his left shoulder and an 82nd patch on his right shoulder, the red, white, and blue square patch with AA, and a tab over the top with Ariborne. Soldiers save their right shoulder for whichever units they served in combat with, and could wear it for the rest of their lives.

Sarge’s chest had a combat infantry badge, the old revolutionary war musket outlined in infantry blue and with shiny wings behind it, perched above his shiny silver Airborne wings. Above his combat infantryt badge he had stacks of multicolored ribbons and many bronze oak clusters sprinkled here and there for multiple awards of the same badge. He did not have a mustard seed speck on his wings, because the 82nd had not jumped into Vietnam and he was out of active service before Grenada in 1985.

Despite being in dress greens he was not wearing a cap, perhaps because a cap never feels the same as a maroon beret once you wear one for a while. Even the Airborne’s version of a cap, a green taco with a circular glider patch on the front, nothing felt as good as a maroon beret atop dress greens.

His curly black hair was cut in a meticulous military fade, and his boots had a spit shine that no one inspected any more but that he did anyway. He was taller than I was but not remarkably tall, and he was in average physical shape.

He hadn’t changed in the eight years I had been watching him sneak cigarettes between the annex buildings. I never told Sarge that When I was a kid, peering through the blockade of paper towels covering my dad’s windows, I would see him and I thought he was a police officer, trying to catch people like my dad and me. I watched him white bring kids from Little Saigon back to Belaire, which confused me then but made sense after I started at Belaire in the 10th grade.

Sarge led Michelle and a squad of others who chose ROTC as an elective in marching drills, and he inspected their uniforms and taught them to behave like officers. It didn’t pay much, and, like Coach, he had a few other roles to earn a bit more money. He was tasked to get kids who skipped school back in school, and he worked as Belaire’s security guard and was often around campus on holidays, just to check in on the building and test the padlocks on the gym and annex buildings and maintain a presence that probably deterred thieves and vandals. It wasn’t like kids would sneak into school during holidays, so all he really had to do was walk around campus a few times so that anyone watching would see him in uniform at random times.

Despite smoking, I’d sometimes see him in Physical Training garb, a simple grey t-shirt and shorts with white running shoes, jogging around the subdivision before or after school; it was obvious that the clothes were old and had probably fit him better years before. His dress uniform was tailored to fit his aging body. His paunch was hard to hide, but the padded shoulders of his dress greens made it seem as if he were more fit than he was, and he walked with such confidence that when you saw him from a distance he seemed formidable enough that no one would test his resolve.

Sarge was the ideal post-Vietnam ROTC instructor. He could have been on a poster to recruit the Everyman of today’s army, a realistic version of what you could become if you woke up a bit earlier than everyone else, went on a run, and shined your shoes before work. He radiated pride at being the best he could be every day, regardless of the job he was doing. He busted a few kids for smoking and skipping school, the kids who were likely to get in trouble and bring attention to Belaire. But, for most of us who were doing well enough in school or sports and simply wanted to get outside and away from chalk boards for a bit, he could related. He told us to just get better at sneaking away, and to not mess up when back inside or do anything foolish when away.

“I joined the 82nd,” I told him on a whim.

“What?” he said, laughing through a cloud of exhaled smoke. “All right! What’d you ask for?”

“Infantry,” I said.

I loosened my backpack and rotated it around to open the main pocket, and said, “I have my contract here.”

“Let me see that,” he said.

He put his cigarette between his lips and extended a friendly hand. He didn’t carry reading glasses like Coach, so he kept his arms extended and squinted through menthol smelling smoke while he skimmed the front page. His arms were locked forward and his eyebrows squinted in either concentration or for an extra bit of help to read. He flipped to the second page and skimmed it, too.

He knew what he was looking for. He lowered my contract and his face was swollen with words waiting to jump out like a row of paratroopers exiting the door of a C-130. He took out is cigarette and held it between his first two right fingers, gestured towards me with his hand, and said:

“Man! Just wait until that ‘chute opens up for the first time!” He buckled over laughing, caught himself, and stood back up and said: “You think you don’t believe in God, but then that ‘chute opens and you thank whatever just slowed your ass down!”

He laughed again. I stared at the cigarette, hoping it wouldn’t burn too quickly.

“Man! Your first jump is at 1,250 feet.”

Another laugh, then “That bullshit’s for people who just get the badge. At Bragg, you’ll jump at 800 feet. In combat, they scrape the tops of trees and shove your ass out while people shootin’ at you. Shit! 1,250 feet is for pussies.”

Another laugh. He became as serious as a physics teacher telling you a truth that sounded like fantasy, and said, “Look, Magic Man. You takin’ physics. Ask that man about terminal velocity. You can only fall that fast. Remember that civilian from the watch commercial jumping from 10,000 feet? He fell just as fast as you will from 800.”

He took a drag and continued talking as smoke came from his mouth.

“It takes 250 feet for the static line to open.” He burst into laughter again and all the smoke left his lungs. “Man! Tuck your shit. Tuck your shit. The straps will smash your balls when that line yanks you the first time.”

He stopped laughing but kept smiling and said, “And then it takes another 250 feet to slow down. And you’re wearing 80 pounds of shit strapped to your waist. You hit the ground at 22 feet a second. It’s like jumping off that building.”

He pointed to our two-story gym.

“But with 80 pounds or more strapped to your ass. That shit hurts. A Parachute Landing Fall helps, buy that shit still hurts.”

He chuckled and let slip something about teachers, which he rarely did. “Ask that physics teacher what it feels like.”

“All you youngsters draw that shit on the chalk board,” he said, waving his hand at an imaginary chalkboard in the air, “and you can tell me how fast you fallin’, but you don’t know what it feels like. You’ll practice PLF’s all day every day in Airborne school. But one real jump at Bragg, not that Airborne school stuff at Benning, and you’ll know more than if you spent a year talking about it.”

He replaced his cigarette between his lips and held out my contract again. He squinted through a haze of smoke and scanned the verbose contract as if knowing what he was looking for.

He lowered his arms and removed his cigarette and said, “Man, you gettin’ $36,000 for college? Shit! They drafted our ass and we had to volunteer to get into Airborne just to get away from those dumb mother fuckers smokin’ all their dope and gettin’ each other killed. All of us got out back then and didn’t get shit, and that’s why you see these men around here sittin’ around wearing those shirts talkin’ about what good soldiers they was. You gonna do all right, Magic Man.”

He took another drag and the cigarette dwindled to about half length. I was running out of time.

I had requested the college fund. Not everyone did, because it cost you $100 per month taken from each paycheck. I had talked about that with Uncle Bob and, per his request, calculated the return on investment; it was around 3,000%, which Uncle Bob said sounded good and I agreed. It was an unfathomable amount of money to me, so it might as well have been a million dollars. But even with $100 missing from my pacheck, I’d still earn more per month than an entire summer of hustling magic shows.

I also asked for $100 per month removed from each paycheck to go towards Series EE savings bonds, which would be tax-free profits if used while in college. My mom’s mom, Granny, had suggested that, and not even the recruiter seemed to know about Series EE savings bonds. I never learned how she, a Canadian citizen, knew so much about American savings bonds, but I assumed she could buy them at her secretarial job at CoPolymer, which gave her a retirement plan after 25 years, not unlike the army promised for the same time in service. By then, the recruiter said, I’d earn up to 70% of my paycheck for the rest of my life; that was his goal, I assumed, which made me not want to sit around waiting for the future, but to attack the army like I attacked every opponent when I stepped on the mat.

My contract guaranteed infantry, but I had to pass Airborne school to be assigned to the 82nd. If I failed Airborne school, I’d go to a leg unit instead, but the army would still honor my college fund and Series EE savings bonds. And they’d pay for my health insurance and room and board, and Fort Bragg had a wrestling team I could try out for when I got there. I had requested so much to my contract that the recruiter had to type an extra page.

Sarge exhaled and said, “Get your pussy now, Magic Man. Get your pussy now.”

He laughed at a joke in his head and bent over and rested his hands on his quadriceps. He stood back up and said, “Fort Bragg is the only place in America where fat girls can be choosy.” He bent over again and laughed with old friends who still lived in his mind, kids only a year or two older than I was and his team in Vietnam.

“They got 45,000 swingin’ dicks there,” he explained. “The 82nd, Ariborne command, and Special Forces. A few nurses, and a college an hour away.”

He chuckled and said, just in case I forgot, “Get your pussy now.”

I laughed and said I’d try. There was a lull with nothing more to say, so I practiced my Miranda Rights.

“Hey Magic Man,” Sarge said. “You got anything new to show me?”

Finally.

I removed my backpack and set it on the ground said I was working on something with a cigarette. That got him to stop taking drags. He held it at attention, upright between us, and waited for instructions.

I focused on the smoldering cigarette and adjusted my jeans, a logical thing to do after twisting to remove my backpack. While focused on the cigarette, I wiggled my belt line with both hands and tucked my right thumb into the small pocket in my jeans. It slipped into the metal thumb tip.

I removed my hands and pulled up the right sleeve of my hoodie with my left hand, then my left sleeve with my right, hiding the tip behind a fold of blue sweatshirt. I reached forward with my left hand palm-up, making it obvious nothing was there without saying a word, and lowered my right hand as if only my left hand were important; though flesh colored, it was still obvious to anyone who looked closely enough.

I asked for his cigarette, and he handed it to me and kept his gaze on my left hand as if he were a sniper tracking a moving target.

“A filter?” I asked with an arrogant look of disdain.

I smirked and said: “Sissy.”

He burst into laughter. I used that moment to reach up and break off the offending filter with my right fingers and leave the thumb tip in my cupped left hand. I tossed the filter towards the ground. Sarge’s gaze followed the filter for a moment, but quickly returned to the still-burning but now-filterless cigarette in left hand. My right hand was open and obviously empty.

I knew when he remembered what he saw he’d swear he stared at both hands and they were empty. I had learned that logic and the joke about calling someone a sissy from Paul Diamond of Diamond’s magic shop, which traveled to Baton Rouge for annual conventions and sold things like metal thumb tips. A filter wouldn’t crush inside a tip, so you needed either a logical or a funny reason to remove it. I had listened to the lectures and read the books, but this was as new trick for me. I had as much real world knowledge about it as my physics teacher did about hitting the ground at 22 feet per second and with 80 pounds of gear on.

I moved my right hand in front of my left and carefully took the now filterless half cigarette from my left hand, leaving the thumb tip in left finger palm. I held up the burning stub and stared at it and was silent, so that Sarge wouldn’t laugh and look away, and slowly put the cigarette out into my closed left fist. His eyes went wide, but his smile remained and he never lost site of my hands.

I feigned fighting the burn and kept staring at my left hand as my right hand, with the thumb tip, moved up and to eye level. My palm was obviously empty, and the tip was pointing towards sarge to minimize surface area and make him, without him realizing it, choose on focusing on either my palm or the thump tip. I lowered my right hand and crumbled the imaginary cigarette in my left, trying like a method actor to envision it there and make my motions and face expressions follow my belief. I had learned that from Tommy Wonder, the legendary Danish close up and stage performer who gave a lecture at the same magic convention where Paul Diamond sold me the thumb tip. His books, The Books of Wonder, are still on my bookshelf to this day, and he has a two-page article about adding conviction to every motion by using techniques from theater actors. I’ve learned this from experience: if you believe in your magic deeply enough, your body will show it and people will believe you with more conviction than if you used words.

When I opened my hand, I felt, not just acted, happy to see that it had actually disappeared, and Sarge had no doubt that it vanished like Jimmy Hoffa from a Detroit parking lot. He shit a brick and burst into laughter so hard that he held one hand against his stomach to keep the laughs from herniating though, and he rested his other hand against the brick wall to keep from falling over. I had all the time in the world to adjust my pants and put the thumb tip back in the little Zippo pocket.

His laughter slowed down and stopped spilling through every pore in his skin, and he looked back and forth at my hands and then burst back into laughter. I lowered my hands and laughed with him, and stole the filtered cigarette from my pocket by clipping it between my thumb and first finger with the brown filter barely showing through the folds of my skin and the white cigarette hidden behind my palm.

“My Man Magic Man! You don’t need to go to college. You could have one of those shows like David Copperfield and make millions doing that stuff.”

David Copperfield was the world’s most famous magician and America’s highest paid performer, earning around $81 Million dollars in the 1980’s, when that was more money than anyone could imagine. He had annual television shows where he made the Statue of Liberty disappear, walked through The Great Wall of China, and made a jet airplane disappear from the middle of a paved airport runway. He came to Baton Rouge once a year and performed at The Centroplex, our 10,000 seat indoor theater next to the old state capital, and he lingered in town longer than in other cities because of two reasons that only the Baton Rouge magic club knew. His young and beautiful female assistant for a stage illusion had a twin sister, and they had both had graduated from a Saint Joseph’s all-girl Catholic school in Baton Rouge only three years before. And, because David was an avid collector of magic memorabilia and knowledge, he joined us in sessions with Jon Racherbaumer, the hefty erudite with a deep and booming voice who lived in New Orleans and came to town for lectures Dr. Z funded. Even David learned from people, and I happened to live where those people lived. He didn’t have a college degree, yet married a supermodel and bought a small Carribbean island for magic retreats.

David started a program called Project Magic that had tricks designed to teach kids stuck in hospitals with diseases and missing limbs how to do things other kids couldn’t; he said it could develop confidence, being able to do something uninjured or otherwise healthy kids with all limbs could not, and that practicing sleight of hand could help with hand-eye coordination during physical rehabilitation, something that required self-discipline and was a lesson in itself. I wasn’t a part in Project Magic, but David had mentioned it to me when Uncle Bob was in the hospital, and his staff gave me a sample pamphlet from the program. Nothing there was hard or, in my mind, entertaining, so I made my own version for the kids floor. That led to the newspaper article I showed Judge Bob when I petitioned for emancipation, and added to my conviction that I didn’t need read about more magic in Dr. Z’s library, or to sketch more ideas on a chalk board. If David could do it, so could I, if I focused on it like I was focusing on wrestling.

“I know,” I said to Sarge.

“I may try to do that one day,” I said. “But I think I’d like to try college first.”

That was the first time I said those words. I don’t know where they came from. I was surprised at how true they felt.

“Hey Sarge,” I said, snapping back into the moment. I stared at a spot in the air between us and slightly to my left. He looked there, too.

I slowly reached out with my right hand, and then at the last moment my arm snatched at something like a rattlesnake biting prey. That big motion camoflaged the smaller motion of pulling the cigarette from thumb palm, and when it suddenly snapped to attention between my first and second fingers, Sarge shit another brick.

It took about thirty seconds for him to calm down, and he was still chuckling when he accepted the filtered Kool from my hand.

“As good as new,” I said with a huge smile.

“Shit,” he said. He lit the Kool with a simple Bic lighter from deep inside his jacket pocket.

I don’t recall the color of his Bic, but I remember thinking I should have something ready with a few different colored Bics for next time. In one of Tommy Wonder’s Books of Wonder, he thumbs a lighter that won’t light a few times, then turns it into a box of matches that he opens and removes a match and lights it, instead. I had seen him do that at an all-night practice session the year before, and he never said a word, he just acted and imagined what a real magician would do if his lighter wouldn’t work. I wondered how I could swap Sarge’s Bic for one that didn’t work, just to set up Tommy Wonder’s effect.

Sarge took a drag and said, calmly and as if it were a fact: “You’re gonna do well in the 82nd, Magic Man.”

I told him I’d be leaving my motorcycle there a lot over the holidays, and he said he’d keep an eye on it. He said he would, then launched into a story about the ill-fated attempt to make parachute-dropped motorcycles for the 82nd, and how that idea came from the Motor Machine Gun Corps in WWII. He was a many of many words and long goodbyes. When he finally left to do his rounds around campus, I tossed the filterless Camel into a trash can by the outdoor basketball court.

He smoked both, and I never knew which he would choose. But at least I was getting better at discerning the smells from afar, so that I could prepare beforehand. Sarge had mentioned the usefulness of that. Apparently, even smokers had to refrain before going to sit in darkness all night long, the way a deer hunter doesn’t smoke and keeps his clothes outside to nullify his smell before a hunt. In the pitch black of night, it was useful to know if a shadow smelled of American or Vietnamese cigarettes. One of Wolverine’s super powers, in addition to super healing and aging slowly, was his super sense of smell; he had used his nose more than his guns as a soldier in both WWII and Vietnam, too, so I figured I might as well practice now.

I used the keys I had copied in Little Saigon to enter the door without an outside padlock. I shut the door and locked it back. From the outside, even if Sarge tested the door, no one would know I was there. It wasn’t like anyone was crazy enough to sneak into school during the holidays. I made my way to the basketball gym, where our mats were stored and probably still warm from the day’s tournament, and thought about Sarge and his stories from Vietnam.

I had heard of the 82nd and seen their AA patch long before I met Sarge. Their patch stands for their nickname, “The All Americans,” given to them when they were formed as the 82nd Infantry to fight in World War I. Someone noticed that the 82nd was the first time in history that soldiers from every state in the United States were represented; before that, units were regional and held regional alliances, like in the civil war, so the idea to nickname the 82nd All Americans was intended to unite a divided country against a common, foreign threat.

In WWII, when airplanes were still relatively new and the Germans were devastating European forces with their paratrooper units, the 82nd Infantry became America’s first paratroopers, the 82nd Airborne All Americans. The apocryphal story Sarge told me is that when Generals asked leg infantry soldiers, men who averaged around 26 years old back then and remembered their dad’s fighting the Germans, who wanted to volunteer to jump out of an airplane. About half of the men stepped forward, obviously nervous at the prospect of jumping out of a perfectly good airplane.

The generals told them to go get their parachutes, and the men who stayed back said, “You mean we get parachutes?” The first group looked relieved, and the second group stepped forward to join them, and they all went on to get their parachutes.

No one had taken a physics course to see that it was, theoretically, relatively safe on paper to jump from a perfectly good airplane. It was the landing that hurt, and the falling that was dangerous. They fell to the ground while Germans shot them like ducks in the air, and many hit the ground dead while survivors stood up and charged forward with machine guns blaring and and fought like hell. Most died. Sometimes entire companies of men didn’t see the morning light after a jump. Their sacrifices paved the way for follow up soldiers, and combined they all turned the tides of war towards allied forces.

Like most people, I learned of the 82nd Airborne when the legendary actor John Wayne portrayed the 82nd’s commanding officer in 1962’s The Longest Day, a film about D-Day, the decisive allied victory that practically ended the war in Europe so we could focus on Japan. It was shown on at least one of the three television stations once a year, usually during a weekend afternoon, and though John Wayne died in 1979 he was still America’s most well known actor in the 80’s. The Longest Day stared dozens of other celebrities still famous, like Henry Fonda and Sean Connery, but only someone as larger than life as John Wayne could give viewers a hint at the type of American who once stood, battle weary and covered in snow and said, “I’m, the 82nd Airborne, and this is as far as the bastards are going.”

That photo and the line it captured was on my recruiter’s desk, and would hang on the wall of every 82nd general I met thereafter. It was from an unknown soldier before a different battle, The Battle of the Bulge, where a reporter caught a battle weary man with a week’s worth of stubble dusted with snow, digging a hole in the icy ground and with a bazooka strapped across his back, preparing to stop Germany’s largest and most advanced Panzer tank fleet from breaking through the bulge. No actor, no matter how deeply they believed what they were saying, could provide more than a pale facsimile of what it must have been like to be a paratrooper back then. The Longest Day was still realistic, though, perhaps because the legendary WWII 82nd Airborne general James “Jumpin’ Jim” Gavin advised producers and writers. Jumpin’ Jim kept that unknown soldier’s photo on his wall, too.

I watched The Longest Day with a different perspective, because I felt a kinship with The Duke. Photos of him in civil war garb were placed here and there in Mamma Jean’s house from when he filmed The Horse Soldiers in 1959. Producers chose filming locations in Saint Francisville and Natchez, Mississippi, and, like a lot of Hollywood films, Teamsters hauled filming equipment and housed actors and workers in Teamster trailers.

In the 1950’s and 60’s, Jimmy Hoffa invested the Teamster pension fund in Hollywood films. Instead of being credited as a producer, he simply asked that they pay hefty dividends back into the fund and hired only Teamsters to drive all equipment and house all actors in wheeled trailers. For a while, Hoffa had said anything with a wheel was Teamster territory, even the camera men whose film spun on two big wheels. If you sat through the credits at the end of every movie we saw on weekend afternoons, and some at the end of some in the theaters, the final screen was one massive and slow moving shot of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters logo, the heads of two horses named Thunder and Lightening, from when Teamsters drove horse wagons instead of trucks, framed around a ships steering wheel to imply who was driving the economy. When Big Daddy took Teamsters Local #5 under Hoffa and, in the FBI’s words, helped Hoffa by forcibly installing some of Hoffa’s men in New Orleans, he also took over organizing and overseeing Hollywood films being shot in Louisiana.

The world premier of The Longest Day was in Shreveport, the largest town in northern Louisiana and next to Spring Hill, where Mamma Jean was born and had family. She became such a home-town celebrity for knowing John Wayne, and it was her friends and relatives who brought it up more than she ever did. But she kept the photo of her and John Wayne on her desk with photos of her children and grandchildren, and to a kid who didn’t know better, he might have thought that John Wayne was Big Daddy. When The Longest Day showed up on television, I naively viewed it as a documentary. I learned names and logos that would become a permanent part of my mind, though later I’d sort through fact and fiction. But the 82nd All Americans was a phrase permanently etched in my brain.

I spoke with recruiters from every branch. The marines had that slogan focused on their dress uniform that said: “The few. The proud. The marines.” It sold the uniform more than the service. The army paid almost twice as much for college, an attempt to differentiate and market themselves in the few years since the draft was disbanded after Vietnam. The army was five times bigger than the marines and therefore didn’t focus on a single uniform. The navy and air force emphasized more job training and high-tech careers, like radar operators and medics and pilots; perhaps because of their training, their college fund was around $10,000 less than the army’s. And the army had Special forces and Airborne under their umbrella, and after Rambo every kid I knew said Special Forces was where you learned to do what he did, which is why not even the sheriff department and national guard could stop him.

But you had to try out for Special Forces after already serving, like trying out for a first-string wrestling team after joining the second string. I learned that I could join the 82nd and would only have to pass Airborne school to get there. Given all the facts, it was inevitable I’d chose to be a real All American, unlike my grandfather who was an all-American to people only because Life magazine said he was, or like John Wayne, an Iowa-born actor who never served in the military, yet who spoke in favor of the Vietnam conflict with the conviction that spoke to voters at a time when President Kennedy’s 50,000 or so special forces were being ramped up by President Johnson to a staggering 550,000 soldiers, mostly drafted to fight in battles that people like John Wayne said was a good thing.

Like Big Daddy, despite being almost 6’6″, I didn’t think John Wayne was someone to look up to. Mamma Jean was Big Daddy’s third wife and he had a another when I knew him; like Big Daddy, John Wayne went through a handful of wives. It was Uncle Bob who stood beside Auntie Lo for thirty years, and Coach who had stood beside Mrs. K for just as long, that I admired.

John Wayne was only okay at college football, and he never completed his degree from USC. Yet he was one of the world’s wealthiest and most influential men because of acting, which enforced in me that you don’t need a degree to be all you can be. And because John Wayne reminded me so much of Big Daddy, I felt more than thought that he was acting and fooling people more than a magician ever could.

John Wayne didn’t earn as much as David Copperfield, and he never bought his own island or married a supermodel like David did, but he influenced America more than practically anyone of his generation. He was often drunk by midday while filming movies, and he a lifelong smoker who was diagnosed with lung cancer in 1964, two years after The Longest Day; coincidentally, the month he was diagnosis for what he dubbed “The Big C” was when Big Daddy was first splattered across media as an all-American hero, despite being a dishonorably discharged marine who betrayed his teammate, a tidbit of history mentioned by anyone who knew about how both men behaved off camera.

John Wayne died in 1979 at age 72. His tombstone reads:

Tomorrow is the most important thing in life. Comes into us at midnight very clean. It’s perfect when it arrives and it puts itself in our hands. It hopes we’ve learned something from yesterday.

As poetic as that sounds, there’s not a word about the present moment, unless, like Sarge watching my hands make a cigarette disappear, you look for it. John Wayne smoked until the day he died, as if he learned nothing. If it hand’t been for Mamma Jean’s photo with him and her repeating stories in celebrity-focused magazines she kept laying around her hair salon for lady fans to read, I wouldn’t have known as much as I did about The Duke when I was making plans for my future.

I thought about that when Mrs. Abrams once mentioned that we never know someone’s purpose, which is why she assumes there’s a higher power behind the scenes, directing things that may one day make more sense. Now, as I began to rotate my arms and warm up for a practice session, I thought about her and Sarge and Coach and my teammates, and wondered what it was all leading to.

Maybe – just maybe – I could make it to state this year. I unrolled one of the mat segments about 2/3 flat, and went to work.

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