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I have no reason to type this other than I was thinking about it. There's no end to the moral or end to the story. I was just thinking about old family and friends.

I don’t know why I’ve been thinking about Cousin Jackie lately, but I have. Maybe it’s because I always equate him with Viet Nam or the 1960’s and there have been a lot of commercials for Tom Brokaw’s 1968 on the History Channel lately. I don’t know. Jackie was a cousin in the distance. His mother and my father were cousins by way of their parents being brother and sister. His grandmother was my Great Aunt Susie, a woman I knew of but can hardly remember meeting. I knew of her through stories about her affliction; she couldn’t walk. Her legs were drawn up behind her back. Why? I don’t know, I just know that that was how things were. One story had it that she had crawled and pushed a baby carriage out of her burning house when her son set the house on fire by putting gas on a fire in the heating stove. The baby was a grandbaby of hers I believe. But, I have no memory of meeting Aunt Susie, although it is just not possible that I could have gone through life without meeting her. We met everyone in the family at least once every year.
Anyway, I don’t know why I’ve been thinking about Jackie, but I have. His mother and my mother were friends and after my mother and father no longer lived together, his mother would come to visit us with her kids. They lived in or around Peoria, IL and we lived in Northeast Arkansas. Jackie was what we called in Arkansas a mean Yankee. He’d take baby birds out of their nests and pull their legs apart just to be mean. And he would run around the house in just his underwear. Now, I have 6 brothers, but Jackie was the first boy that I’d ever seen in just underwear unless you count diapers, which we don’t. We stayed dressed in my house. And being the only girl, I was probably protected more than most.
Jackie and his sisters and Mother came about once a year and stayed with us in our tiny house for a weekend or so. My three older brothers spend most of that time protecting the birds nest in our cedar trees out front and protecting me from seeing a boy in underwear.
But his sisters and I always had fun. It was nice to have girls to play with every once in while.
Jackie grew up and was not a big kid, maybe 5’9” or 10”, and didn’t weigh much at all. But he was scrappy. He joined the Army when he was 17 to go fight. He liked to fight.
We all knew he’d make a good solider and shoot a lot of the Viet Cong. Well, while he was in Viet Nam we got word that he’d been hurt. The story was that he was inside a tank and it was hit by some kind of shell and caught on fire. He survived, but with about 75% of his body covered by burns. Of course, we all prayed for Jackie and told each other that he’d make it because he was so mean and scrappy. Jackie was in the hospital for almost a year it seems. We got an occasional letter, or someone in the family did and passed on all the pertinent information to everyone else.
One Sunday afternoon two of my older brothers and I were watching television when a strange vehicle pulled into our drive. It was a new, baby blue Mustang and it was driven by non other than Jackie! He was in uniform and looked great, thin but great. He came in and visited and told us all about what he was doing. He had recovered although he said there had been many days that he’d wished he could die because of the pain. And he was still in the Army, on leave. He’s saved his pay and bought himself a brand new Mustang to drive while he was on leave. He’d visit everyone in Arkansas, and then go to Illinois and visit then back to the Army to return to Viet Nam to try to kill some more ‘Cong’. He seemed happy and healthy. We visited the whole afternoon, talking about the Beatles, Stones, hippies, Elvis’s comeback, everything. Then he left with promises to stay in touch.
That was the last time I saw Jackie. He was killed in a vehicle accident on his way back to report to camp. His baby blue Mustang crashed and even though it had a full gas tank that did not catch fire, the car caught fire and Jackie burned to death.
I see Jackie’s mother and sisters at our family reunion every year, but it’s almost like we are strangers anymore. I guess if my Mom were alive she and Faye would visit and we’d have more to talk about. We go to the cemeteries separately and see each other’s group there cleaning headstones and placing flowers, but we never visit. Maybe Jackie was the connection that made us ‘family’?