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Recipients of the Medal of Honor really have little in common. They have been from every state, economic station, and ethnic group. But they have sha… - Jack H. Jacobs
" "Recipients of the Medal of Honor really have little in common. They have been from every state, economic station, and ethnic group. But they have shared a strong sense of duty and of purpose and the motivating burden of personal responsibility at the perilous moment of decision. They feared death, but their biggest fear was failing themselves, their friends, and their nation, and thus they have been no different from the tens of millions of the other men and women who have served in uniform.
When the Japanese attacked on December 7, 1941, most Americans did not know where Hawaii was, let alone Pearl Harbor. And yet on the very next day, thousands of Americans rallied to the nation by offering their services in its defense. During World War II, almost every household made some contribution to the effort, and nearly half a million Americans sacrificed their lives so that hundreds of millions of others could live.
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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
Not long ago, I asked John what he was doing at the precise moment when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. "Truth be told, my boy," John said, "I was in bed with a good-looking gal." I asked if he ever saw her again. "See her again?" said John. "She was my wife for sixty years!" Then he slapped his knee and bellowed with laughter.
Young people don't have enough peripheral vision, they can't see very far into the future. Toward the end of my college career, the war was starting to heat up and a lot of people were against it already, but I figured they probably didn't know what they were talking about. There were no big protests at Rutgers, but the tenor of the intellectual discourse was decidedly against American participation in the war. Later on, I had a fairly grown-up view of what the war was really like and that the chances of getting your head blown off as an adviser were just as good as anywhere else: It's all a matter of luck, most times, anyway, all things being equal. So it's irrelevant whether you're standing in a bar that gets mortared or lying in the middle of a rice paddy getting shot at.
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.
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