Truckload Authority - Fall 2015

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machine gun fire and in seconds dozens of soldiers were thrown to the
ground by the enormous energy of high-powered fire.
All around him, Jacobs heard the sickening thumps of bullets as they
hit the flesh and bones of his comrades.
“We lost about 75 guys who were killed and wounded in the first 10
seconds,” he recalled recently.
As the firefight raged on, Jacobs suddenly found himself in a lake of
blood.
An 82-millimeter mortar round had smashed into the ground a
couple of meters away from him, killing two soldiers nearby, wounding
Jacobs, how holding the rank of captain, and his NCO Ray Ramirez, and
killing two or three more soldiers behind him.
Shrapnel had torn through Jacobs’ face and into his skull.
He could only see out of one eye, his field of vision reduced to the
width of a knife and he was functioning as a blind man.
He made an effort to thwart the Viet Cong’s advance with limited
success.
Finally, his focus changed.
“My mission is simple: get as many of the wounded out of the open
as I can and prevent the enemy from swarming our little position,” he
would later write in his book.
In his initial efforts to do that, he lost three more men to enemy fire.
Now he felt alone with his wounded and the enemy soldiers trying to
kill them.
Convinced that he wouldn’t survive, he was relaxed and ready to accept
the end and would later say that it was the inevitability of mortality
that helped him overcome his fear.
Suddenly, he recalled a famous anecdote that he was taught years
before, a saying of the first-century Jewish sage Hillel the Elder.
A rich man had come to consult Hillel, telling the Rabbi that despite
all he gives to the poor, they ask for more. What should he do, he asks
the Rabbi.
Rabbi Hillel answers the man with a series of his own questions:
“If I am not for myself, who will be for me?”
“And if I am only for myself, then what am I?”
“And if not now, when?”
With continuous fire coming from a large number of Viet Cong, he
was scared, but refused to focus on the danger. Instead, he was thinking
only of the voice of Hillel reaching across two thousand years: “Jacobs,
if not you, then who? And if not now, then when?”
So he swung into action.
His Medal of Honor citation tells the rest.
“Despite profuse bleeding from head wounds which impaired his
vision, Capt. Jacobs, with complete disregard for his safety, returned
under intense fire to evacuate a seriously wounded advisor (Ramirez) to
the safety of a wooded area where he administered lifesaving first aid.
“He then returned through heavy automatic weapons fire to evacuate
the wounded company commander. Capt. Jacobs made repeated
trips across the fire-swept open rice paddies evacuating wounded and
their weapons. On three separate occasions, Capt. Jacobs contacted
and drove off Viet Cong squads who were searching for allied wounded
and weapons, single-handedly killing three and wounding several others.
His gallant actions and extraordinary heroism saved the lives of
one U.S. advisor and 13 allied soldiers. Through his effort the allied
company was restored to an effective fighting unit and prevented defeat
of the friendly forces by a strong and determined enemy.”
“In the end we prevailed, although I got medivacked before it ended,”
Jacobs said in a recent interview. “But I tried real hard to save the
good guys and kill the bad guys.”
After he returned to the United States, the Army gave Jacobs permission
to return to Rutgers to earn his master’s degree.
In 1972 as he was preparing to graduate, he was offered a teaching
position at West Point, but he wouldn’t be needed there until 1973, so
the Army decided to send him to Korea for a year.
By now you can probably figure out how that assignment settled
with Jacobs.
He finally talked his way into another assignment in Vietnam, but
was told no combat.
So back to Vietnam he went, and sure enough, it wasn’t long before
he’d figured out a way to get back on the front lines.
He found Vietnam vastly different in 1972.
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