Posted by Julie Baldridge on October 23, 2010:

I was the hometown girl Jack left in Arkansas when he matriculated at USMA. We were seniors in trig class when he got news of the appointment, and I burst into tears. Four years, a million letters and a few too-short visits later, I was in graduate school when I got the call that he had been killed in a car crash in a New York park, about a month before he would have graduated. I figure he picked me out because my Dad was 30 years Navy, and both of them were serious military. I see when I look at the list of the 72 members of his West Point class who also have died that many were lost soon after graduation, likely in Vietnam. That's where he couldn't wait to go. The pain of losing him never went away, but I realized at some point that I didn't mind carrying it with me. He's buried in our hometown of Heber Springs, and I still visit his grave when I'm up that way from Little Rock, where I've lived for 40 years, successful and confused at the same time. He was the one I could count on.

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