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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 th… - Jack H. Jacobs
" "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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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.
If you have been getting something for nothing for a long time, it's tough to convince you to pay for it. But pay Americans must. In the years since the end of World War II, we have experimented with a number of schemes for producing the force we have needed, but none has been based on the notion of shared sacrifice. It is arguable whether the current volunteer system or one in which we relied on a draft is worse, but suffice it to say that they are both bad. We don't need selective service. We need universal service. But there is great political danger in merely suggesting that all Americans contribute in a meaningful way to our collective defense, and so no politician who wants to keep his job will do it. Consequently none does, and we are the poorer for it.
A society coheres only when it shares beliefs and experiences, and humans rarely value things that are acquired at no cost. With a miniscule percentage of people making a contribution to our defense, we will not be successful in protecting a country of more than three hundred million people, worldwide obligations, and threats from a variety of malefactors who want to see us destroyed.
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When I was decorated in 1969, there were 450 living recipients of the Medal of Honor. Today, there are only about one hundred, and the average age is near eighty. Statistically, in five years there will only be fifty or sixty still alive, and in less than fifteen years there will be none of us left. There has not been a living Medal of Honor recipient from any conflict since the war in Vietnam.
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