I just heard from a friend of mine, Scott, who lives in Texas. He passed along a note that his 22-year-old cousin was killed in Iraq. It was a shock to say the least.

I met his cousin, a baby at the time, when I was a senior in high school. Scott was headed to spend spring break at his cousin’s house near Akron, Ohio. For some reason, a spur of the moment thing, I packed a bag and tagged along. I had never met his cousins, but that didn’t matter to him or them. I was along for the ride.

It was an enjoyable, relaxing week for sure as the family was very kind to me and made me feel very welcome. Besides how strange it was to feel so welcome in the home of complete strangers, the thing I remember the most is the amount of basketball my friend and I played. We played for hours and hours at night. The family had a basketball court with an overhead light that we could play on into the wee hours of the morning. We played some baseball, too, which is where the cousins who lived there (Nick, Stevie and Ben) came in. They were young (all under 10 I think) but loved baseball.

As for the basketball, we watched on TV as Danny Manning had one of the greatest NCAA tournament games of all-time and led Kansas to the NCAA championship over Oklahoma. Manning was my favorite player so that made it even better. After the game ended — probably about 11:30 p.m. — my friend and I went outside and began playing hoops. With the light shining on the court, we must have played for two hours. It was probably the funnest pick up basketball game I had ever played. It was a couple hours of intense, yet fun, basketball, and I remember it to this day. It’s one of my best basketball memories.

Anyway, I just found out that the youngest of the children who lived in that home (Ben) was killed in Iraq. Army Corporal Benjamin C. Dillon was an Army Ranger. Scott says he had enlisted right out of high school and had served several tours. I searched on the Internet and found some pictures and stories from other newspapers about it once I heard. It mentioned that Ben played baseball and basketball in high school. For some reason, that makes me pretty happy. May he rest in peace.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 15th, 2008 at 1:53 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.