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 carrying out comparable duties was killed and posthumously 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.
Three Navy corpsmen were with Echo Company on Hill 861 that day. Two were already dead, one of them HM3 Francis Arthur Benoit. Russell was the third, and by the sequence of the battle, would have been the last.
He was already taking rounds while running the fire swept trail, treating wounded Marines in the open. When he finally went down, an NVA machine gun team set up beside him and used his body as cover. He took additional rounds while lying there, roughly a dozen total recorded across the action.
At some point during those roughly 45 minutes, an NVA soldier tucked a hand grenade between his medical pack and flak jacket, a booby trap meant to kill anyone who tried to rescue him. It detonated. The blast destroyed his right kidney, compounded the hip damage from the gunfire, and spread shrapnel through his body. His flak jacket absorbed the rest and preserved his other organs.
He was found afterward high up in a bamboo thicket by a fellow serviceman, "Chit" Chittenden, who preserved his body and got him loaded onto the medevac helicopter with the dead. His pulse returned en route to Da Nang.
A fuller account of his injuries and recovery is documented in family interviews elsewhere in this archive. See Coverage & Recognition below.
He survived, left with permanent nerve damage and partial paralysis in one leg that required a brace and cane for the rest of his life. 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, was killed moving through open ground under fire to reach and treat wounded Marines. He was posthumously awarded the Navy Cross, the second-highest decoration the Navy can give for combat valor. Russell, doing the same job in the same fight, received nothing.
HM3 Francis Arthur Benoit, killed in the same action, was posthumously awarded the Navy Cross for comparable actions under fire. The circumstances of his death differ meaningfully from Russell's survival, and this comparison is not intended to equate the two men's experiences. It is offered as evidence that this specific type of corpsman heroism, in this company, on this day, was recognized by command at the Navy Cross level when the paperwork existed.
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, facing comparable exposure to that fire. 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.
