March 16, 1967
Russell Harold Jacobson Jr. was a Navy corpsman attached to a Marine rifle company. On one day in 1967, he ran repeatedly into open fire to treat wounded Marines. He was shot more than a dozen times doing it. Nearby, on the same hill, another corpsman did nearly the same thing and was awarded the Navy Cross. Russell was awarded nothing. Here is what happened, and why.
Part of Echo Company was detached from 2/9 to support 1st Battalion, 9th Marines in the heavy fighting near Khe Sanh. Russell went with them.
Near Hill 861, Russell ran up and down a fire-swept trail to reach and treat wounded Marines. He was hit more than a dozen times, shot repeatedly in the legs and body, then finally knocked down when a round destroyed his right hip.
He lay wounded on the trail for roughly 45 minutes with an NVA machine gun team positioned beside him. During that time an enemy soldier placed a grenade between his medical pack and flak jacket. The blast destroyed one of his kidneys. His flak jacket kept the blast from killing him outright. He was paralyzed in one leg, processed as killed in action, and discovered alive only en route to Da Nang.
He was found with no pulse, up in a bamboo thicket, by a fellow serviceman known as "Chit" Chittenden, who would go on to mentor him for years afterward.
He survived. He came home, raised a family, and lived for another 48 years. He died in January 2015 from a service connected illness. He was awarded a Purple Heart for his wounds. No valor award was ever issued for what he did to earn them.
Same Hill, Same Day, Different Outcome
On March 16, 1967, on the same hill, another Navy corpsman, HM3 Francis Arthur Benoit, performed nearly identical actions under fire: moving through open ground, under fire, to reach and treat wounded Marines. Benoit was awarded the Navy Cross, the second-highest decoration the Navy can give for combat valor. Russell, for actions that matched his, received nothing.
The difference was not what either man did under fire. Both were HM3s. Both were attached to Echo Company. Both moved through enemy fire, unarmed, to save Marines who weren't their own chain of command. Both were wounded doing it. The difference was administrative: whose actions got written up, and whose didn't.
Echo Company was operating under 1/9 that day, but remained administratively part of 2/9. Russell was a Navy corpsman attached to a Marine unit that wasn't his own on paper. In the chaos of the evacuation, responsibility for documenting his actions fell into the gap between two chains of command. The Navy assumed the Marines would write it up. The Marines assumed the Navy would. Neither did. Fifty-nine years later, that gap is what this case exists to close.
He didn't talk about Hill 861 often. He built a life instead: a marriage, a career, a family. That life is its own kind of evidence, of who he was after the war as much as during it.
