I remember George Aiken, this senator from Vermont, got up in the Senate- and this was long before we made that huge commitment of forces in Vietnam,… - Jack H. Jacobs
" "I remember George Aiken, this senator from Vermont, got up in the Senate- and this was long before we made that huge commitment of forces in Vietnam, still relatively early in the conflict- and Aiken was a Republican who was pretty much to the right, he said, 'I've got a great idea: Why don't we just say we won, and go home?'
And of course, ten years later, that's exactly what we did. Fifty-eight thousand lives later. And now we know from the tapes that came out from Johnson, he said, 'This sucks. This is a big mistake. I'm going to live to regret this. I know we're doing the wrong thing, but what can you do?' He was very badly advised. He had rotten advice from his civilian assistants, and even worse advice from the military. McNamara was probably the wrong guy in that job, and Westmoreland was a complete numbskull. I mean, he's a great guy and I'm sure he's a patriot, but one should never confuse respect for people's motives with respect for their intellectual acuity, and he had lots of the former and none of the latter, none whatsoever. He was absolutely the wrong guy for the job.
And it may very well be that you couldn't have picked the right guy for that job. There may not have been a right guy for that job.
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About Jack H. Jacobs
Colonel Jack Howard Jacobs (born August 2, 1945) is a retired colonel in the United States Army and a Medal of Honor recipient for his actions during the Vietnam War. He serves as a military analyst for NBC News and MSNBC and previously worked as an investment manager.
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Jack Howard Jacobs
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Additional quotes by Jack H. Jacobs
It happens, stuff like that happens, and you do what you have to do and you don't think about it. People who do these sorts of things are not tactical geniuses. You follow your heart, you follow your training, and you do what you can do, and often guys don't make it. And there are lots of guys who did similar things and never got cited. There's lots of actions that have taken place where guys have done extraordinary things, where ordinary people have done extraordinary things that never got to the level of being published.
That's the way combat is. That's ordinary people doing extraordinary things. There are lots of instances in which people have done really quite extraordinary things, and I don't know if they got anything or not.
Today, the oldest living recipient of the Medal of Honor is John Finn, who was decorated for action on Pearl Harbor Day. Born in 1909, John joined the Navy in 1926, and, loquacious as we all tend to be when we findally grasp that we have too many stories and not enough time, he will transfix anyone who cares to listen with tales of what it was like to grow up before the First World War and to ply the Yangtze River as a young sailor aboard an American gunboat.
In 1941, he was stationed in Kaneohe Bay, with a squadron of Navy patrol planes. Rudely rousted from bed by the cacaphony of the Japanese bombs destroying the fleet anchored at Pearl Harbor, John raced from his quarters, sped to the hangars that housed his aircraft, and manned a .50-caliber machine gun mounted on an exposed section of a parking ramp. For the next two hours, Finn, in the open and suffering from more than twenty shrapnel wounds in his back and stomach, blasted at the attacking enemy planes, hitting many of them and not relinquishing his post until the attack was over. Even when we were young, those of us who were raised on stirring John Wayne war movies assumed there was more than a little hyperbole and cinematic license in them. But for forty years I have known a man whose real-life exploits render the movies limp, pallid, and ineffectual in contrast. Art can often approximate life, but it has a hard time doing it justice.
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