KSV News: Short Round 039

Who Knew?

Every once in a while, information about the Khe Sanh battle heroics of Marines and Corpsmen surfaces. The attached letter from David Jacobsen caught me unprepared to properly respond. He is the son of HM3 Russell Jacobsen Jr and wrote us to share the sad news of his Dad’s passing.

His Dad’s heroic actions on Hill 861 in March 1967 staggered me. Those who have been in battles where so few survive to bear witness will understand. There are just no eyewitnesses left who can go through the award writing process. This is one reason why so many, like Doc Jacobsen, who deserve our highest awards are not given the recognition they have earned. In fact it took five years for his Purple Heart citation to reach the Doc, and that only after much prodding. Dismal.

The story is told below by his son David in a letter to our Jack Haigwood for including his Dad in our Passages Bunker. Below, I have made a few editorial additions and annotations to tell this hero’s story more fully.

Dear Mr. Haigwood,

My name is David Jacobson. I’m writing to submit my father, Russell Harold Jacobson Jr.’s passing, for inclusion in the Khe Sanh Veterans Passages section.

My father served in Vietnam as a Navy Hospital Corpsman, HM3, attached to Echo Company, 2nd Battalion, 9th Marines. On the night of March 16–17, 1967, he was on Hill 861 during the Hill Fight there. The battle was intense, and felled many Marines. The NVA had professionally prepared their bunkers and ambush in depth, with fields of fire and camouflage beyond anything the Marines had ever experienced. It became a blood bath for the trapped Marines who continued the assault as assigned. But now with the additional mission of retrieving their wounded and dead.

When the battlefield at last became quiet, the senior Marine in the area, Sergeant Olsen, focused his efforts on getting the wounded out. He called for his two corpsmen. Then, someone told him that both Docs had been hit. In fact, Doc Jacobson lay among the collection of seriously wounded. He had been hit more than a dozen times while moving up and down the fire-swept Hill 861 trail treating and pulling casualties to safety. The damage to his body was devastating — severe wounds to his hip and kidney area, his legs and feet. The “Doc” was finally felled when yet another bullet ripped into his right hip, destroying it and immobilizing him.

As a pain-wracked Jacobson lay in the elephant grass, an NVA machine gun team set up their weapon by his head and operated there for forty-five minutes. Basically using his body as a shield Marines would hesitate to destroy. Published accounts of the battle describe my father and another wounded Marine lying exposed for an extended period while enemy forces remained dangerously close, as the fighting continued around them.

Other Marines eventually risked their own lives under fire to recover my Dad and other wounded to move them toward evacuation helicopters. Two of those men were Earl Chittenden and Herbert Thompson, who helped get my father to the evacuation helicopter during the chaos of the battle. In a 1967 letter, Thompson later credited my father with helping save the lives of Marines who otherwise likely would not have made it out alive.

When the NVA pulled out, one of them tucked a grenade between Dad’s pack and his flak jacket. This to kill or maim the Marines who they knew would come to recover and treat their wounded. The grenade blast took one of his kidneys. The flak jacket saved his life! When the Marines found Dad, there was no pulse. He was loaded onto the Medevac as a casualty, believed to be KIA.

He was alive.

Dad’s actions that night are documented by name in Edward F. Murphy’s The Hill Fights (Presidio Press, 2003), pages 44–45. The other corpsman, Doc Francis Arthur Benoit, had taken shrapnel in both arms and legs in the opening moments of the attack, but had ignored his considerable pain to continue treating the others. He was posthumously awarded the Navy Cross for actions on the same hill, the same night, under the same conditions as Dad.

My father came home. He raised a family. Like many Vietnam veterans, he rarely spoke about the war. Growing up, we knew he had been badly wounded and carried lifelong injuries from Vietnam, but he never centered his identity around it. He never bragged. In fact, he would often say he was one of the lucky ones.

The war physically followed my father home for the rest of his life. The wounds he sustained on Hill 861 led to surgery after surgery over many years — a constant physical reminder of what that day had cost him. He spent roughly a year recovering at Chelsea Naval Hospital in Massachusetts.

Only later in life did we begin to understand how extraordinary, and how traumatic Dad’s experience truly was. Chelsea Naval Hospital and the VA documented every wound in clinical detail — fractured tibia, fractured fibula, destroyed kidney, peroneal nerve transection, hip fusion, multiple fragmentation wounds. He lost 60 pounds. He walked with a cane and a leg brace for the rest of his life.

Yet despite the pain, the disability, and the long years of recovery, he remained remarkably active, compassionate, and engaged in life. He eventually built a career in medicine as a physician assistant and pathologist.

None of that would have been possible without my mother, Peggy. She was a nurse, and in many ways his care became a lifelong extension of that calling. She stood by him through decades of recovery, surgeries, and the invisible wounds that never fully healed — nursing him through long stretches of recovery right there in our home. My father, never one to miss an opportunity, would tease her from his hospital bed by calling her “Nurse Ratched”. She took it in stride every time.

That was who he was. Even after everything his body had been through, he never lost his humor. When people would see his scars and injuries and struggle to find words, he would wave them off with a grin and quote Monty Python — “tis but a flesh wound” — like the Black Knight who kept fighting after losing every limb. It always got a laugh. And somehow it said everything about him that words couldn’t.

Along the trail, he was struck by an Agent Orange-related illness — the war’s final wound on him. Vietnam: The Gift That Keeps On Giving

Looking back now, I realize how much we learned simply by watching how he carried himself. He taught us that while people cannot control the terrible things that happen in life, they can control how they carry life forward. He treated people with kindness, humility, patience, and compassion. One message written after his passing described him perfectly — “He was slow to anger and quick to forgive”. He had a favorite quote he lived by. Ralph Waldo Emerson’s definition of success: to laugh often and love much, to appreciate beauty, to find the best in others, and to know that even one life has breathed easier because you have lived — that was to have succeeded.

That was my father.

He never used his suffering as an excuse and never wanted attention for what he had endured. Like many veterans, he carried much of the war internally and rarely discussed it in detail. When my father passed away about eleven years ago from an Agent Orange related cancer, it was another painful reminder that for many Vietnam veterans, the war never truly ended.

Right now, our family is simply trying to preserve his story and the memory of the Marines and corpsmen who fought and died alongside him during those terrible days on Hill 861. I should mention that everything in this letter is drawn from actual military records, eyewitness accounts, published historical material, veteran interviews, and family documentation. I intentionally left citations out because I wanted this to read as a human story rather than a research paper, but I do have supporting material for everything described here and would be happy to share it if useful for KSV purposes.

I am actively researching his service and working toward formal recognition of his actions. I would be grateful to have him included in the KSV Passages records, and I would welcome any connection to veterans who served with E/2/9 during the Hill Fights. Someone in your network may have been there that night. Thank you for all you do for these men and their families.

David Jacobson

Son of HM3 Russell Harold Jacobson Jr.

David- Your family’s mission is the reason the Khe Sanh Veterans organization exists. To remember and document those who fought there for a future America that knows so little about that battle. We welcome you and your family to our family.

Bob Koury: Website & Digital Manager