Wrestling Hillary Clinton: Part III

“We can report that Edward G. Partin has been under investigation by the New Orleans District Attorney’s Office in connection with the Kennedy Assassination investigation… based on an exclusive interview with an Assistant District Attorney in Jim Garrison’s office. We can report that Partin’s activities have been under scrutiny. In his words: “We know that Jack Ruby and Lee Harvey Oswald were here in New Orleans several times… there was a third man driving them and we are checking the possibility it was Partin.”

WJBO radio, New Orleans, 23 June1964

On 03 August 1990, Saddam Hussein ordered his army of 400,000 soldiers and all of their tanks, the world’s largest fleet at that time – larger than even America’s or combined force of Europe – to overtake the small country of Kuwait. They rolled across the border and succeeded as quickly as America had overtaken Panama only six months before, then turned their turrets towards Saudi Arabia and rolled in SCUD missiles armed with chemical weapons Saddam had already used on innocent people in Iraq’s civil war; if there were a tournament of terrifying ways to die, serin nerve gas would win at least a silver medal.

President Bush Senior called the 82nd Airborne, America’s Quick Reaction Force, able to respond quickly without congressional approval. Two hours later, Defense Ready Force 1, the first of nine 82nd Airborne battalions and the one on two-hour recall that month, boarded a few C-141’s en route to Saudi Arabia. A handful of young paratroopers still weary from a month in the jungles of Panama landed in 117 degree desert heat of Saudi Arabia

They faced Saddam’s armada of tanks with puny M-16, M-60, and M243 machine guns, a handful of M-203 grenade launchers (the MK-19 grenade-launching machine gun with armor-melting rounds wouldn’t be delivered for another few months), about ten .50 cal machine guns with generously named armor-piercing rounds capable of piercing through up to two inches of steel typical of personnel carriers, five TOW anti-tank missile systems capable of punching through 38 inches of armored steel, and a handful of the newly issued and contentious 9mm Berretta sidearms that had replaced the trusty .45’s that had “won two world wars,” but were viewed cautiously after 1988’s fiasco in Miami where two bank robbers with off-the-shelf body armor held off a small army of police and FBI agents carrying 9mm sidearms; the 82nd had baggy pants filled with extra bullets and Walkman cassette players, but they did not have body armor yet. Despite those odds, they stood their ground against thousands of tanks and unknown numbers of SCUD missiles and chemical weapons. President Bush went on international television and said the 82nd drew a line in the sand that no one dared cross.

Every two hours, one to two more battalions arrived, slightly increasing the odds in my future team’s favor. Within a few days, the full might of the 82nd Airborne was on the ground, including thin-skinned Sheridan tanks light enough to be dropped by parachute but weak against Soviet ground armor. The outgunned 82nd held the line in what media dubbed Desert Shield; soon, an international coalition of 560,000 soldiers coalesced behind them, and that’s when I showed up, ready for my first duty assignment with the 504th Parachute Infantry Regiment at the very thin front line between Saudi Arabia and Iraq, a hundred barren miles east of the relatively cushy allied headquarters showcased on television that were out of SCUD range.

All allied forces were led by American General “Stormin'” Norman Scwartzcoff, who set clear goals and wanted a fast and effective victory once the ground war began, to not repeat mistakes from Vietnam that he and his generation had experienced. I was of 13 anti-tank paratroopers destined for the front line; rather than an intimidating nickname like “The Dirty Dozen” or even a nice one like “The Baker’s Dozen,” we were given the poorly chosen moniker “body replacements,” probably because real-time news coverage of a war was so new that the military had yet to pass nicknames through a public relations team. I still had not shaved. We still did not have body armor.

A few months later I had peach fuzz and began shaving before dawn, when we’d mask up and wait for an chemical attack, to ensure my gas mask sealed and hoping it slow down death from serin so that I could wrestle against the onslaught a few minutes longer.

To help, military scientists gave us pyridostigmine bromide pills that they said would proactively shield our bodies a bit longer, though we would have preferred actual shields atop our open Humvees or in front of our .50 cal machine guns. I never heard someone complain, and every morning before dawn, we donned chemical gear and leaned down in trenches behind our guns and waited, because chemical weapons are often used in the dawn, when desert winds are calm and the gas can linger longer. Sweating inside that suit, I thought of running up and down the state capital steps in a rubber suit to sweat off a few pounds before weigh-in; I, like everyone on the front line, waited patiently each morning for an onslaught, though out of all 12,000 soldiers in the 82nd I was probably the only one who thought the feeling was remarkably similar to warming up before getting on the mat to face Hillary Clinton.

But no onslaught crossed across the line in our direction. On 17 January 1991, the world’s largest armada of bombers crossed into Iraq and began Desert Storm, decimating dozens of thousands of tired and practically starving soldiers who had conscripted into service by their dictator. On 24 February 1991, French paratroopers crossed the border and led the allies into the ground war.

My company, Delta Company, 1st Battallion, 504th Parachute Infantry Regiment, led American forces. Our nickname was the Delta Dawgs; I was one of twenty paratroopers in Anti-Tank Platoon #4, simply called AT4, one of five AT platoons leading the charge. The Delta Dawgs were, literally, the best of the best; the 504 had been on Defense Ready Force 2 during Panama, but when the DRF1 team’s anti-tank units failed readiness inspection, the 504th Delta Company was, thanks to their leaders, ready to take their place; that’s why I had seen them on news only a few months before, and how I grew to realize how lucky I was to randomly be assigned as one of their body replacements; I never kept track of the other 12, which were distributed among the other eight Delta companies of the 82nd Airborne Division’s three regiments, the 504, 505, and 325, all having three battalions, each with one Delta company and all of them nicknamed the Delta Dawgs.

Our pack of 100 Delta Dawgs crept through mine fields and fought Iraqis who survived the air raids by hunkering deep in bunkers, and soon AT4 and The Dawgs passed the French, mostly due to a company of Vulcan mine-field clearing teams, and we spearheaded ground battles deep inside Iraq. AT4 had two squads, one Humvee with three soldiers and one with four, because I was assigned to it as a body replacement. We crept forward catching brief bits of sleep with 50% of soldiers awake and geared up at all time. Four days later, my right eye was caked with dried blood from dropping a MK-19 ammo can on my face as I heaved it up to reload our gunner as our outgunned Humvee was accelerating to leave a company of T-54’s firing upon us, and my uniform was stained maroon with other people’s blood and black from crawling across patches of melted asphalt on the single highway leading from the border of Saudi Arabia to the capital of Iraq, Baghdad. I was the most fatigued I had ever been in my life.

Communication was challenging – this was before the first GPS satellite or even the ground-based LANS were spread in Arab countries – and the coalition of countries tried to coordinate in different languages using a mix of radio technologies that had a mere 3 to 5 kilometer range. In one battle, my platoon sergeant, a squat tough old geezer seasoned from battles in Panama and the Dominican Republic, handed me the mic and said, in a voice muffled by a gas mask: “Hey, Dolly, speak some of that Cajun shit to these guys.” Though I mumbled through my gas mask and barely knew French, I was the best option because I was the only option. I had finally become first in something, and I was proud of that; I would try my best to – as much as I resist quoting the cheesy army recruitment line – be the best I could be. I began riding at the front of AT4, speaking Cajun shit and learning from the best of the best.

On 03 March 1991 we spearheaded the battle for Khamisiya airport, and the allies eventually captured it with considerable help from above. There were fleets of A-10 anti-armor flying warthogs with 30mm Avenger cannons in their nose and enough plating to withstand heavy and close-up anti-aircraft fire for close-up tank kills; modified C-130 Hercules turned into AC-130H Specter gunships, each with an arsenal of two 20mm machine cannons, a 40mm cannon, a 105mm Howitzer, and – like a BB gun augmenting a bazooka – a single M60 machine gun.

For deep bunkers with tenacious soldiers from Saddam’s Republican Guard, their equivalent of our elite forces, there were heavily-funded new missiles called “bunker busters” that either punched through 20 yards of rock and concrete, or exploded so much fire and brimestone that all oxygen was burned up and anyone nearby suffocated. The t-shirts and hats I had seen as a kid advertising “Death from above” turned out to be less about the 82nd and more about new technology, and thousands of people defending Khamisiya died inside of those tanks and bunkers, or fleeing across the desert as Specter gunships circled and plowed them down. Only a few survived; AT4 captured 14 in the bunker closest to Khamisiya, including a thin and weary captain of the Republican Guard who was not unlike the German officer who gave The Devil’s in Baggy Pants our nickname; they were more fatigued than I was, and our fight inside their bunker lasted less than one two-minute round of wrestling. They seemed more hungry than wrestlers cutting weight, and my squad leader shared our MRE’s with them, the chicken-and-rice no one liked and we saved to the end, and I quipped that was punishment enough for any enemy.

AT4 turned over our prisoners to military intelligence and approached the airport with 3-inch square infra-red reflective pieces of tape on each corner of our Humvees and one atop our helmets to keep the auto-fire system of Specter gunship 20mm rounds at least 5 meters away from us and to keep the airport runway intact. General Swartzcoff planned to use the airport to parachute into Baghdad, but the war ended the next morning; thanks to the command of Stormin’ Norman, who had set clear goals that we met, allied forces won the well-planned and concise war of American history.

We were ordered to destroy the airport and all Soviet MiG aircraft and helicopters on it to prevent surviving Iraqi’s from launching a counter attack. We surrounded the airport to prevent Allies ignorant of the plan from inadvertently approaching, and 82nd engineers and several supporting units I don’t recall planted explosives on the ground. They coordinated the detonation with two 15,000 pound bombs, each the size of a Voltswagon and nicknamed “The Daisy Cutter” in Vietnam, dropped by parachute from two C-130’s. The combined explosions rocked our Humvees like Hillary Clinton landing a bear-hug throw, and the mushroom cloud seemed to block out the midday sun. Desert winds, already carrying smoke from burning oil fields, scattered the cloud surprisingly fast; that’s when I finally understood, not just knew, why someone would attack with chemicals in the relatively windless dawn and dusk, and why we spent every pre-dawn day in chemical protective suits and why shaving was so important to everyone but me.

When the dust settled, we learned why the defense forces protected Khamisiha so fiercely; they were guarding Saddam Hussein’s serin nerve agent stockpile. He had told them to defend it with their lives, or else. That’s probably why they seemed grateful to be captured: anything must have been better than conscripted service under a dictator who used chemical weapons on his own citizens. But we didn’t have time to ponder what happened to the gas cloud. Without rest for the weary, the 82nd remained to ensure others got home safely, spending another two months in Iraq and learning that not everyone heard the same news.

The thick air from burning oil fields blocked our views and watered our eyes, and we escorted National Guard and Reserve units to safety and, because of orders, sat by and watched Iraqi soldiers take revenge on Kurdish villages they thought had supported the Americans. Every day, at least one of my teammates quoted the Pathfinder maxim: “First in, last out.” Not a single soldier I knew complained, not even once.

I landed back in Fort Bragg a few months later and was given a few awards and was called an All American hero, including a small mention in an award for my squad capturing 14 of Saddam Hussein’s personal guard in what a few gruff old times quipped was hand-to-hand combat, though it was so dark inside that bunker no one was really sure what happened. I was so tired that I don’t recall details, and anything I had to say I said to what everyone quipped was the oxymoronic military intelligence team who interviewed us when they took away the prisoners. No one at Fort Bragg had ever heard of Big Daddy, and I never told them I came from a family of “all-American heroes.” I was starting anew, and I could begin being whatever I wanted to become.

I finally needed to shave every morning: real stubble, not just fuzz. I was 18 years old, a legal adult in every state and not just in Louisiana, like I had been only a year and a half before. During the war, I had grown to be 5’11” and weighed around 185 pounds. I still thought Hillary Clinton could have beaten me; he was that fierce, and not even the captain of Saddam Hussein’s personal guard would stand a chance against him.

In karmic retribution for all the jokes about Hillary and a Boy Named Sue, my team called me Dolly for the next two years, inevitable because everyone knew Dolly Parton by then. I stopped mumbling as much, and in my spare time practice languages and learn the new technologies that sprouted from defense companies funded during Desert Storm.

Among new technologies was the science-fiction sounding GPS, Global Positioning Satellites, that reached down from space and could guide us rather than relying on outdated maps and compasses (though we still used them), and the SINCGARS, Single Chanel Ground and Airborne Radio System, that would become standard across allied forces and replace the 3 to 5 kilometer radios virtually unchanged since the Vietnam military action. We were trying to make the next allied mission flow more smoothly.

In 1992, when Bill Clinton was the democratic presidential nominee, I finally saw the joke about Hillary Clinton. The 1992 Oliver Stone film JFK prompted American voters to demand that if Clinton won, he’d release the John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Junior Assassination Report, which had been classified since it’s first release to President Carter in 1979. The summer JFK was released and when President Bush Senior was still in office, I was unofficially training with Delta Force, which was headquartered in Fort Bragg a few miles from the 82nd.

I began training with diverse teams from around the world. One two-week course that sticks in my mind was 268 of us began, and after two weeks of food and sleep deprivation and extreme physical effort and strict silence, only nine of us crossed the finish line. It wasn’t a contest and no medals were given. When we finally talked, we learned that of the nine, six of us had wrestled in high school.

Almost half of the 268 who began failed the first day. We were blindfolded and in full uniform with backpacks and combat gear, and we blindly walked along a high-diving board until we plummeted into the pool; the only people who continued the course were able to ditch their backpacks and swim to the surface with waterlogged combat boots and a belt full of ammunition and their M-16 in hand. We were simulating an accidental water landing in a combat zone and the ability to keep calm in tense situations when you couldn’t breathe, ready to defend your team from whatever had grounded your plane or helicopter, epitomized in 1992’s ground battle of Mogodishu and the film based on it, Black Hawk Down, where the 10th Mountain Division suffered heavy losses, the world watched a Ranger’s carcass drug through the streets, and two Delta Force soldiers would perish after running out of ammunition and doing the best they could with bayonets. I had seen a couple of the other soldiers who crossed the finish line a month before, at the Fort Bragg swimming pool, when we were doing laps with waterlogged clothes to prepare. We didn’t know each other then and we didn’t chat. When we finally talked, we swapped war stories about high school wrestling, and that was the first time I showed my finger and said that Hillary Clinton broke it. Their chuckle reminded me so much of me laughing at Pat’s wiggly eyes that I began to use that joke whenever we thought we were too fatigued to continue. I was on a new team.

My nickname was, briefly, upgraded to Special Agent Dolly.

By 1993, I was on President Clinton’s quick reaction force and specialized in parachuting into the midst of coups and war zones to extract American diplomats, a reconaisse scout attached to HQ of the 504th. I was 5’11” and a lean 195 pounds. I wore size 14 boots (my body never grew to match my feet). My dress uniform had spit-shined jump boots, and I sported a maroon beret adorned with the bright blue and gold shield and sword of the 504th. Our logo since WWII was still “Strike Hold!” to represent our fast attack and ability to hold a line, something no one could argue.

My hair, buzzed short, showed my finger-width scar; soldiers behind me said it looked like a rat-tail dangling from the back of my beret, as if I hid a rodent under my maroon beret. My shoulders were draped in a ribbons, and my right shoulder proudly displayed a red, white, and blue 82nd Airborne combat patch that I could wear forever, no matter which team I temporarily joined. Each side of my chest was an impressive display of badges, patches, and shiny silver icons with wings (Airborne loves to put wings on everything). Above my heart was a stack of multi-colored ribbons and a gold medal with scimitars crossing a palm tree, a gift from the prince of Kuwait for their liberation, something they had literally prayed for, and the royal family singled out the 82nd as answering their prayers.

Though I was certified expert in every weapon NATO had to offer, probably due to Big Daddy being a skilled hunter and effective teacher who kept a few foreign weapons around, I only wore my expert rifleman marksmanship badge. I was part of an unarmed and ambiguous peacekeeping force called “communication liaisons” that were unconcerned with badges. (We often quoted the Humphrey Bogart movie where a Mexican guy told him: “We don’t need no skinkin’ badges!”) I had outgrown the bling of youth, and I only wore my uniform at award ceremonies, including when I wore it in front of generals for soldier of the year; I lost, receiving runner-up in a pattern reminiscent of facing the equivalent of Hillary Clinton wherever I went.

During the final review board I spoke eloquently to the senior commanders of the 82nd about Coach Ketelsen and small teams, saying that keeping a physical stance led to a calm mind: people make mistakes when they react in anger or haste, and so do teams. I mentioned Coach’s service on the 1960 Olympic team, held a year before we almost went to nuclear war and Kennedy’s failed Bay of Pigs invasion, and how he learned to work with Russians for the shared love of wrestling despite the differences in governments. I also spoke of General Swartzcoff’s Norman’s clear tactics saving lives, his focus on being Good Samaritans even in the midst of battle, and lessons he learned from Vietnam, clearly outlined in his 1993 autobiography, “It Doesn’t Take a Hero,” which none of the board had read yet.

(I did not mention that Stormin’ Norman was, coincidentally, also a magician in the International Brotherhood of Magicians and the local Ring #341, the “All American Magicians,” in Fayetteville, North Carolina, who performed for his niece and nephew’s birthday party; or that though he was an successful war commander, he was an average magician but with the tenacity to keep trying no matter how hard it is to master the French Drop.)

Even though I lost soldier of the year, the generals gave me a diplomatic passport and asked me to serve as one of four communications liaisons with a Middle East peacekeeping team called the Multinational Force and Observers, a coalition of 17 nations spearheaded by President Jimmy Carter after he brokered a treaty in the Camp David accords of 1979. The joke was that some high-ranking generals were trying to be better than the Neil Young song that spoke of soldiers with a kinder, gentler machine gun hand; some leaders wanted peaceful resolution to the growing threat of Islamic fundamentalist that would, perhaps because we didn’t try our best, sprout into Al-Queda and the 9/11 World Trade Center bombing and the second Gulf War; but I wouldn’t know that then. I was focused on the coincidence that the 504th companies A, B, and C were being assigned to the base two hours southeast of Mount Sinai, where Moses had been banished thousands of years ago (the Delta Dawgs were heavy machine guns, which had no place according to the MFO rules agreed upon in 1979).

I was told that if I agreed, I would spend half of my time with Hebrew and Islamic forces without guidance or oversight, unarmed and able to cross borders freely. When I saw that the MFO wore an orange beret the color of my Belaire letterman jacket, I chuckled and didn’t explain to the board why; they hadn’t laughed when I called Moses the original communication’s liaison, so I didn’t push my luck by telling them about Hillary Clinton breaking my finger. I said yes.

Though not on the review board, 82nd’s senior chaplain, a colonel whom I knew as a captain in the first Gulf War who sported the tabs of Special Forces and Rangers above his Airborne tab, and who had two tiny bronze oak leafs on his master-blaster Airborne wings called mustard seeds, one for jumping into Panama and one for jumping into the Dominican Republic, gave me a copy of the Koran. Like all chaplains, he was an unarmed peacekeeper trained to represent all humans regardless of personal biases, like the Good Samaritan. If he was armed, it was with the Vadra of knowledge. He knew I was not religious, just loquacious and proud of my newly discovered appreciation for academics.

I respected and trusted him. After the battle for Khamisiyah, he knelt beside me and silently and motionlessly helped me wash blood from my hands; I was barely conscious, collapsing outside of a bunker with a bayonet in one hand and a half-empty Berretta in the other, too tired to move any more and mumbling something about thou shall not kill, staring in shock at thousands of charred and mutilated bodies spread along the asphalt road and littered across the desert in the name of God or Allah or a war or a jihad. I stared so long that my mind’s radio played all of Lunatic Fringe, and towards then end I saw the words on the Baton Rouge All City wresting team’s shirts and I muttered them and I stood up. I glanced at the chaplain and wondered whose team he was on. I took a deep breath and exhaled and stepped back onto the mat; Freestyle’s Rockin’ in the house tonight began playing in my mind’s ear, and I knew everything was all right.

When he handed me the Koran after I lost soldier of the year, the then Colonel said knowing it like I did the Christian bible could help me empathize with the opposing team, to find common ground and go from there; I said I would try my best.

My security clearance passed and I had access to key parts of the JFK Assassination report, but it wasn’t because of my clearance. President Clinton made it public in 1993, overriding Presidents Carter, Reagan, and Bush Senior’s decisions to keep it classified. In the days before the internet, anyone willing to drive to Washington DC could see it. A copy was made available to me at Fort Bragg, though I never learned who sent it.

The 1979 report, officially called the House Select Committee on Assassinations Report on John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Junior, reversed the Warren Report and said there was likely a conspiracy to kill President John F. Kennedy, and that the three people most likely to have orchestrated Kennedy’s murder were New Orleans mafia boss Carlos Marcello, Miami mafia boss and Cuban exile Santos Traficante Junior, and International Brotherhood of Teamsters President Jimmy Hoffa.

By then, everyone knew President Kennedy was shot by at least one sniper as he rode through Dallas in his open convertible on 22 November 1963, and that Lee Harvey Oswald’s 6.5mm Italian army surplus rifle was found nearby. Oswald was never tried by a court, because 48 hours after Kennedy died, he was shot and killed on live television while in police custody by Jack Ruby, who was found guilting of first degree murder by a court of law. That much had been known, just like it had been known that Big Daddy and Hoffa plotted to kill Bobby Kennedy with military C4 plastic explosives, and that Big Daddy refused and was therefore an “all-American hero.”

The newly unclassified report, among a mountain of other information, included a 1962 memo from FBI director J. Edgar Hoover that said Big Daddy and Hoffa plotted to kill the president’s little brother, U.S. Attorney General Bobby Kennedy, by recruiting a lone sniper with a high-powered scope and having him shoot Bobby as he rode through a southern town in his convertible. If they did that, Hoffa told Big Daddy in the report said, they’d have to ensure the sniper couldn’t be traced back to the Teamsters.

Lee Harvey Olswald was a New Orleans native who trained in the Baton Rouge civil air force a few miles from my grandmother’s house under the alias Harvey Lee, and Jack Ruby was a low-level mafia runner who knew my grandfather and called Jimmy Hoffa several times just before Kennedy was killed. At least one of the 6.5 mm bullets that killed Kennedy was verified to have come from Oswald’s carbine, which had recently been outfitted with a scope and was found in the 6th floor of a Dallas book repository in downtown Dallas, where Oswald had inexplicably been given a job and relocated from New Orleans only a few months before.

Many people believed that Oswald, a notoriously bad marksman according to his marine service records, could not have made such a remarkable shot from the 6th floor. But I could have made it, even without a scope, and almost anyone can be trained to shoot like that. Italian army surplus rifles like the one Oswald owned were abundant back then, and it seemed that everyone in the mafia had a few lying around. As for so-called experts saying tree leaves blocked the shot, anyone who had spent time hunting deer in Arkansas or Elk near Flagstaff knew that a scope’s focus could be adjusted for long distance and turn the leaves into irrelevant green blurs that wouldn’t affect a bullet’s path: a lens allows you to focus on what you want, not what’s in your way.

Some conspiracy theories said that even if Oswald made the shot, there were multiple shooters gathered to ensure success, and that the “bouncing bullet” theory was bullshit and that multiple shots were coordinated to hit simultaneously. Pundits countered that no one could coordinate such a feet, but any one of my teams could have pulled it off and disappeared, just like the gaggle of physically fit homeless men who were seen shuffling away from the scene.

The coincidences about Kennedy’s assassination and Big Daddy were poignant and theories abounded, but I kept any opinions to myself. I had learned from Mamma Jean, a southern belle who discretely practiced her Miranda Rights and, by her silence, implied the world would be a better place if more people practiced their right to remain silent. My gruff platoon sergeant put it more bluntly when he said: “Opinions are like assholes: everyone has one, but no one wants to hear it.”

After the United States granted my diplomatic passport in 1993, I was scheduled to leave for the Middle East again, this time without a gun but with a copy of the Koran. I took a two week leave and visited Belaire and told Coach what I’d be doing. He shook my hand and said, “Good job, Magik.”

He reached up and took my tricep with a grasp that would make the strongest of special operations soldiers pause and pay attention. “You remember Little Paige?”

I said of course.

He looked up at me and grinned and said, “Well, he’s captain now. 121 pounds.”

He chuckled and said, “Goes by the name Paige The Rage.”

Coach turned and waddled towards his desk among the other assistant football coaches that doubled as his driver’s education desk, a cluttered mess of paperwork and photos of legendary wrestlers from his era, and I followed.

“He’s doing fine,” Coach said. “He’ll probably win state this year.” He rummaged around his desk, looking for his glasses.

“But we have a new guy,” he said when he found the thin brown nose-hugging glasses. He held them in a hand near a photo of Doug Blubaugh wrestling a Russian, and a few other black and white photos of famous wrestlers, including the 412 pound Chris Taylor, the heaviest heavyweight of all time, being thrown in a perfect bear hug by the lightest heavyweight, the 226 pound Kyle Snyder, a match that led to capping heavyweights at 275. I realized I had been mistaken: those weren’t Russians that Coach was friends with, it was his team against the Russians; I had assumed they were friends because he spoke so highly of them, and it sounded like something he would have done, anyway. I didn’t have time to ask, because said: “Big guy. 275 pounds.”

Coach paused and looked up at me with glasses in one hand and his other hand pointing a short stubby forefinger to make a point: “But fast. We don’t have anyone to challenge him at practice.”

He lowered his finger and said, “If you’d like to come by, he could use someone to give him a workout.”

Coach chuckled and said, “Calls himself The Hulk.”

His face became serious and he said, “Stay alert! He may surprise you.”

I said I would return the next day, and I left so he could catch up on paperwork and prepare to lead his drivers-ed class later that afternoon. He didn’t have a size 14 wrestling shoe for me to borrow, so for the next two weeks I wore out three pairs of socks while being, to my great honor, Coach Ketelsen’s assistant.

Coach was was right: Big Rodney was a 275 pound gentle giant with remarkable speed who could slide me around the mat if I didn’t stay alert. I blamed it on the slick socks. At the end of those two weeks, those three pairs of threadbare socks meant more to me than my faded desert fatigues or anything the army ever pinned to my chest. I was happier than a pig in slop. I even attended church with Coach, a methodist congregation near LSU where Coach had been a deacon since before I was born. I watched him shake every attendees hand and get eye contact with each and every person. If I were to ever claim belief in a religion, I’d have a tough act to follow.

I bought a pair of size 13 wrestling shoes, the biggest available back then, and I slit the toes with a sharp knife to fit my big feet. Whenever I was back in country, I visited Belaire and helped Coach until he retired and assisted Craig at St. Paul’s. After Coach passed in 2014. Louisiana renamed the Robert E. Lee Invitational the Coach Dale Ketelsen Memorial Tournament for obvious reasons. Everyone said it was about time, and only Lea and my wife and a few aging wrestlers knew why I cried when I heard the news.

I never got around to telling Coach about my military service and how he influenced me – we always seemed to have more important jobs to do, and I didn’t know he had been in the marines until I read his obituary.¹ When I read that, it made sense: I had always felt Coach was in my corner during the war; he was the epitome a man who followed his words, and every word he uttered came from a good place. I saw him like I saw the chaplain that day: on everybody’s team.

Thirty years passed.

My cousin Jennifer spoke at Big Daddy’s funeral, she was right when she said: “Time is flying by very fast.” By 2018, I was a middle aged man who wore bland clothing and had a nondescript job title. I was as an engineering instructor for the University of San Diego, the only Catholic university in America not under the diocese and a perfect place for someone who quoted religious texts in engineering classes.

I had never gotten around to writing a memoir about the first Gulf War, but I read all of the ones by M-1 Abrams tank companies and M2 Bradly fighting vehicles who saved AT4’s butts during the first few days of the war, and they had said enough. No one cared about ancient history anymore, anyway, especially with 20 years of the second Gulf war dominating news. At the very least, I was glad Humvees now had shields and soldiers had body armor, and I heard MRE’s tasted better.

A bald spot had begun to poke its way through my receding hairline, making the backwards C on my scalp look like a semicolon, and I usually wore one of several LSU baseball caps to shield it from the sun. My right leg was held together by bone screws and tenacity. I limped at then end of long days, and I rarely shared why; it, like how Hillary Clinton broke my finger, is a long story.

Hillary won state after beating me in city, but none of us heard from him since. Jeremy, Belaire’s other co-captain, was in the northeast helping his son’s wrestling team. Both twins had passed from drug abuse the summer of 1993, when I was deployed in the Middle East the second time. Big Rodney had wrestled for LSU’s revived program, which even eventually disbanded for reasons similar to the downtown camp, but he continued helping Baton Rouge and became head coach of Catholic High; he has a lovely wife and an adorable Little Rodney. Pat was still at Baton Rouge High, where his sons graduated and lingered like the smell of fungicide on a mat and helped him coach; to this day, Pat still wiggles his eyeballs when he jokes about how tightly someone was pinned. Paige lifted weights six days a week and wrestled in college at around 145 pounds, then went into the air force and won Korera’s national banter weight mixed martial arts title, just like Chuck Norris had won karate tournaments when he was stationed there; Paige returned to Baton Rouge and opened Rage Fitness, and in his spare time helps as many teams as he can, just like the downtown camp volunteers had done. Lea was a new grandmother who designed film props for her livelihood; her kids call me Uncle Magik, and any day now her grandson will, too. She still says the 1977 Star Wars was the best of the litter, and I would not argue with that.

Billy Cannon died in his Saint Francisville home the summer of 2018. He saw LSU win their second national championship in 2004, but would miss their third national title in 2019, when practically every commentator in America called them the greatest lineup in college football history; though that news would be overshadowed by the Covid-19 pandemic a few months later. By then, Uncle Keith was elected president of Teamsters Local #5, like his uncle and father had been, and James R. Hoffa Junior had – for reasons that may seem obvious – obtained his law degree and was elected president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters (Keith and Hoffa Jr. were as professional and cordial with each other as possible given their fathers’s history together). My cousin Jason’s smiling face and big blue eyes had replaced Billy Cannon’s smiling face on billboards along I-110: that Jason Partin was a respected physical therapist with a booming business. My great-uncle Joe had retired as the Bronco’s head football coach and school principal, and passed away peacefully and with a large turnout of mostly fellow teachers and former students.

Shaqueel O’Neal returned to LSU in 1994 as a student who didn’t compete in basketball, fulfilling a promise he made to his mother when he left for the Orlando Magic that he would complete his degree, which he did. Shaq went on to play for the Los Angeles Lakers and was one of the most celebrated athletes of the century. One of his endorsements was for a famous shoe brand, and they finally confirmed that he did, in fact, wear a size 22 shoe.

At the same time Shaq was back at LSU, Big Rodney was one of the first wrestlers on the newly revitalized wrestling club. The downtown wrestling club had faltered from lack of funding and volunteers, many of whom were former LSU wrestlers disgruntled at the 1979 Title IX that disbanded their sport in around 100 colleges to ensure equal numbers of women as men in sports. Though contested back then, the LSU Lady Tigers would grow and eventually dominate basketball and gymnastics, and spark a new era of fans who had no idea what Title IX was; no one remembered history from as far back as 1979.

Fans of Brian Dennehy were shocked to learn that his claims of military service were stolen valor; he lied to improve his tough-guy image and reap stronger roles. I would have been interested in discussing stolen valor with him, but he would pass away during the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 as one of the most celebrated actors of his era.

Uncle Doug, an air force veteran from the WWII era, would also pass away in 2020 in a Mississippi veterans convalescent home. Doug was proud of his two years of service in the air force, especially because his famous brother was dishonorably discharged after only two weeks in the marines. We all knew the story: on his first day of mandated service, Big Daddy punched the commanding officer and removed the captain’s watch from his unconscious body, returning to Woodville a free man and set his sites on organizing the Woodville sawmill labor union with a zeal that impressed both Mamma Jean an ill-fated Jimmy Hoffa. Doug would write stories like that in his 2013 autobiography: “From My Brother’s Shadow, Teamster Douglas Westley Partin Finally Tells His Side of The Story,” a title that sums up everyone’s view of Big Daddy back then. His book was self-published and unedited and full of typos and chronological errors – it was a glorified blog post – but it contained stories I remembered and talked about family members I loved who are no longer with us, and I smiled as I read it and heard Doug’s southern drawl in mind’s ear.

I am not on social media and I rarely discussed my family history, but my name is sprinkled in a few government databases. I’m listed as a co-inventor on a handful of patents for implants that healed small bones in the fingers and feet, and I’m co-author on a few standards of the American Society for Testing and Materials for testing orthopedic implant strength, and one for wrestling mats to test their ability to dampen forces and resist fungus and microbes. My passport is filled with stamps from visiting international medical device companies wanting to enter the United States but were more used to the European Napoleonic code than the system for every state other than Louisiana, and U.S. customs records me as having visited, officially and coincidentally, 82 countries.

I had been a part of three congressional inquiries and a 30-year Veterans Administration research study about the Khamisiyah explosion. After several studies comparing Desert Storm veterans versus other veterans versus civilians, the VA concluded that a range of symptoms dubbed “Desert Storm Syndrome” included things like fibromalaysia, rashes, irritible bowel syndrome, inability to sleep, etc., was linked to the explosion. The three factors that led to a 40-times likelihood of symptoms being related to the Desert Storm were: being within 100 miles of the Khamisiya explosion in the week that followed 03 March 1991, having taken the pyridostigmine bromide prophylactic pills against serin (ironically), and having an intrinsic protein that’s in around 40% of the general population but was discovered long after Desert Storm.

The VA treats veterans with Desert Storm syndrome in the same offices that hold Vietnam’s Agent Orange treatments, and that office is shared with a few survivors of WWII radiation testing. I used to laugh with some of the old veterans there, but over time I became one of the old veterans and laughed with the young ones coming in from the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. To me they look like kids, and I’m surprised they are old enough to shave. When I noticed their birth dates being after 2000, I began joking that I was born in the mid 19th century, which usually gets a chuckle. Most still listen to Van Halen, and they introduce me to new music that I stream on my smartphone when cooking dinner; it’s surprisingly good. Every day, fewer know who Jimmy Hoffa or Bobby Kennedy were, much less their Blood Feud that had been the talk of a generation before mine.

My had feet flattened and spread out from years of humping heavy rucksacks and hitting the earth like a rock dropped out of a C-141, and I wore a size 14-wide street shoes and a size 15 hiking boot with thick socks. I wear custom dress shoes made wide at the right spots to create an illusion that my feet are proportionate to my height.

I wore those shoes with a tailored suit when I performed magic on Thursday evenings at The Gathering, a restaurant and lounge in the mellow San Diego neighborhood of Mission Hills that hosted strolling magicians three nights a week; it’s owner was a lifetime member of the International Brotherhood of Magicians, but had Parkinsons and couldn’t perform any longer, though his mind was still sharp and he offered lots of input on my routines, but not even he can detect where I hide the things I produce from under a handkerchief.

The suit was adorned with two small pieces of bling: a dime-sized gold membership pin from The IBM, and a similarly sized gold owl from The Academy of Magical Arts in Hollywood’s Magic Castle. I had hand-sewn hidden pockets and filled them with coins, decks of cards, and gadgets that would have impressed the British secret agent James Bond. On some weekends, I drove two hours north and performed in small theaters deep inside the Magic Castle. It was at The Gathering and The Magic Castle that people asked about my finger, and where I learned to use puns as part of my act to distract from the longer story.

In 2004, WWII infantry veteran with many confirmed kills, Teamster leader, mafia hitman, and ex-con Frank “The Irishman” Sheenan was co-author of his memoir about allegedly killing Jimmy Hoffa, “I Heard You Paint Houses.” The title was a reference to hitman lingo, to paint a house red with splattered blood, and Frank says he painted a Detroit suburb’s walls on 30 July 1975. Frank knew Big Daddy well, and the book peppers Big Daddy and his ties with President Nixon and WWII veteran Audie Murphy, and Hoffa mistakenly thinking Big Daddy painted houses for other people, though the film focused on Frank. Martin Scorcese scooped up the film rights and raised $257 Million to hire the best actors. Scorcese said his job was to sell tickets and recoup a hefty investment, not to make a documentary, and that he would call his opus “The Irishman.” Soon after, Edward Grady Partin’s Wikipedia page was edited to fit Scorcese’s script; it was, in my mind, a continuation of the influence of national media Jimmy Hoffa had railed against like a Don Quixote that no one believed.

In the summer of 2019, the burly actor and veteran of Scorcese mobster films, Craig Vincent, portrayed a simplified role of Big Daddy as “Big Eddie” Partin in “The Irishman,” also starring Al Pacino, Robert DeNiro, Joe Pesci, and all the other high-grossing goodfellas from decades of gangster films. When Craig chatted with us researching his role, he asked how Big Daddy could fool so many people for so long and somehow stay alive after sending Hoffa to prison. I couldn’t answer concisely. Neither could Scorcese, but he may have solved the characterization artistically; in The Irishman, there’s a brief scene with Craig, portraying Big Daddy, stands behind all the big name actors and the camera director uses low camera angle and zoom lense that exaggerated Craig’s formidable bulk, making the character “Big Eddie” Partin loom large in the background, head and shoulders above all the big name actors people paid to see. In his book, Frank “The Irishman” Sheenan briefly mentions the bags of Italian army surplus carbines he saw fellow assassins carrying, just like the ones I remembered lying around when I was growing up. Frank died in 2003 without seeing the big picture, though I’m sure he would have been pleased to know he portrayed by an actor of Robert DeNiro’s caliper.

In March of 2020, shuttered theaters worldwide, and “The Irishman” set streaming records on Netflix, easily recouping the $257 Million invested.

During Covid, I looked at my history with 20/20 hindsight. The lens of time blurred many memories and made others sharper; when in doubt, I glanced at Wikipedia, but ultimately I trusted my memories.

Bobby Kennedy was shot and killed by the redundantly named Sirhan Sirhan in 1968, the same year Martin Luther King Junior was assassinated in a way similar to JFK, sparking riots across America because of many things, including believe that it was a conspiracy and that the FBI was involved. Hoover had died in 1972, coincidentally the year I was born, after 37 years heading the FBI and surviving two presidential assassinations and several attempts.

Walter had died in 1996 and Mamma Jean followed a year later; both took secrets to their graves.

Tiffany took her own life soon after Mamma Jean died during her second bout with breast cancer, and over the years I’ve lost many teammates to suicide and will probably lose more. Suicide takes twice as many lives as murder in America, around 38,000 in 2015 compared to 19,500 murders, and veterans have four times the rate of suicide as civilians. I don’t have a joke for that; I sprinkle semicolons throughout my memoir to remind people that it’s possible to continue any sentence with a new thought, not ending it with a period. An irony of President Kennedy’s death was that three weeks before he was murdered, the final bill President John F, Kennedy signed into law was The 1963 Community Mental Health Care Act, meant to address mental illness and PTSD and other treatable diseases that plague Americans, especially after war; the irony of being probably shot by a veteran diagnosed with PTSD after his service and mental illness as a youth, Lee Harvey Oswald; and the additional irony that Lee Harvey Oswald was shot and killed by Jack Ruby, a veteran also diagnosed with mental illness in youth and PTSD after service. There is a disease in America I call war, regardless of what we’re at war with. As a veteran, whenever I’m asked what I did in the army or what happened to my teammates, I just say it’s a long story and hope they don’t pry; if pressed I’ll stress the importance of breast exams and hope they get the joke.

Chief Justice Earl Warren was right, and accepting Big Daddy’s testimony weakened the 4th Amendment’s right to privacy. After 9/11, President George W. Bush Junior used Hoffa versus The United States as a president and cornerstone of PATRIOT act, a brilliant acronym officially known as “The Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act of 2001,” and around 160 Million Americans had their cell phones monitored without a warrant or probable cause or anything specific searched. As a soldier, I swore to defend the U.S. constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic, but I’ve never been sure whose team our leaders are on.

I did read that President Bush Junior wrote in his 2010 memoir, “Decision Points,” that he assigned a team under U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft to ensure the constitutionality of his plan and he knew the PATRIOT act was based on “an unscrupulous witness,” but he chose to proceed anyway and that he believed that decision helped America fight the war on terror. I wouldn’t argue with that; I knew Big Daddy well, and he was unquestionably an unscrupulous witness.

Edward Partin’s name is peppered throughout every book about Hoffa and many about the Kennedys, but only a few people are left alive who remember him and could answer Craig’s question about how he could fool so many people for so long. It’s likely Big Daddy was right when he spoke his final words, and no one will ever know his part in history. He continues to be a footnote to bigger characters, an unscrupulous witness in a 1966 court case, simplified on Wikipedia down to “the surprise witness whose testimony sent Jimmy Hoffa to prison.” But, now that you know his story, you may get a pun I’ve savored since 1990, one that I could have used to begin this tale but may make more sense now:

My grandfather was Edward Partin, a big part in history; I’m Jason Partin, a small part in his story.

If you saw me say that, you’d see my eyes crinkle and I would break into that same sly smile Big Daddy wore all the time, as if he knew the funniest joke in the world that he’d never tell anyone.

Though no one but me probably knows this, but Big Daddy’s smile looked just like the smile Coach Dale Ketelsen wore when I first met him. He was barely half the height of Big Daddy, but he left me with big shoes to fill. At the weakest point in his life Coach was stronger than Big Daddy ever was, but both made me who I am, a combination of nature and nurture.

May they both rest in peace.

Go to the Table of Contents

1. When I began writing this, Coach’s oldest son, Craig, was head coach at St. Paul’s and on the board of the Louisiana High School Sports Association. When I asked him if I could use Coach’s name in a memoir I was writing, he asked Mrs. K and Penny; they gave me their blessing. What they wrote in his obituary was like Coach: concise, humble, and remarkably short for such an accomplished person.
   
   Dale “Coach” Glenn Ketelson Obituary: 2014
   
   Dale Glenn Ketelsen, 78, Retired Teacher and Coach, passed away March 22, 2014 at Ollie Steele Burden Manor with his wife by his side. A Memorial service will be held Saturday, March 29 at University United Methodist Church, 3350 Dalrymple Drive. Visitation will begin at 10 am with a service to follow at 12 pm conducted by Rev. Larry Miller. Dale is survived by his wife of 52 years, Pat Ballard Ketelsen, 2 sons: Craig (Emily) Ketelsen of Covington, La; Erik (Bonnie) Ketelsen, Atlanta, Ga and one daughter, Penny (Lee) Kelly, Nashville, TN; 5 grandchildren: Katie, Abby, Brian and Michael Ketelsen and Graham Kelly; a Sister-in-Law, Karen Ketelsen of Osage, Iowa, and numerous neices and nephews. He was preceded in death by his parents, 2 sisters and a brother. Dale was born in Osage, Iowa where he attended High School, lettering in 4 sports. Upon graduation, he attended Iowa State University as a member of the wrestling team where he was a 2 time All American and won 2nd and 3rd in the NCAA finals in Wrestling. He was a finalist in the Olympic Trials for the 1960 Olympics. After graduation, he joined the US Marine Reserves and returned to ISU as an Asst. Wrestling Coach. In 1961, he took a job as Teacher/Coach at Riverside-Brookfield High School in Suburban Chicago, Ill. While there, he also earned a Masters Degree from Northern Illinois University. In 1968, he was hired to start a Wrestling program at LSU in Baton Rouge, La. He was on the Executive Board of the National Wrestling Coaches Association and a founding member of USA Wrestling. He was the wrestling host for the National Sports Festival in 1985, He was instrumental in promoting wrestling in the High Schools in Louisiana. He was head Wrestling Coach at Belaire High School for 20 years and Assistant Wrestling coach at The St. Paul’s School in Covington, La. He was devoted to Faith, Family, Farm and the sport of Wrestling. Among his many honors were induction into the National Wrestling Hall of Fame and being named Master of Wrestling (Man of the Year) for Wrestling USA magazine. He was a long time member and Usher of University United Methodist Church. In lieu of flowers, the family asks that donations be made to Alzheimer’s Services, 3772 North Blvd., Baton Rouge, La. 70806.
   
   Published by The Advocate from Mar. 26 to Mar. 29, 2014.
   
   According to online reports, but not included in his obituary, after the olympics Coach revived a high school team in Iowa that went on to win a conference championship, produce 30 all-conference wrestlers, 20 district champions, eight regional champions and two state titlist; in the twelve years as head coach of the new LSU program, his teams won two SEC Intercollegiate Wrestling tournaments, produced 15 individual conference champs, and rose LSU to be ranked 4th in the nation. I’d like to add that he spent a summer driving a pimply-faced legal adult from Baton Rouge to and from New Orleans to wrestle, and he never once talked about himself unless asked. ↩︎