‘A hell of a soul’: Combat medic’s actions in Vietnam lead his son on a mission to honor him

[rangerrebew]

‘A hell of a soul’: Combat medic’s actions in Vietnam lead his son on a mission to honor him

By LINDA F. HERSEY STARS AND STRIPES •
August 4, 2026

WASHINGTON — A Vietnam veteran’s son is on a mission to gather the evidence needed for his late father — a combat medic — to be considered for a Navy Cross for his actions to save wounded comrades in battle near Khe Sanh base, a remote military outpost near Laos that is now a memorial site. The Navy Cross is the service’s second-highest decoration for extraordinary heroism in combat awarded to a member of the Navy or Marines. David Jacobson, of Massachusetts, has been collecting eyewitness accounts, old letters, newspaper stories, military reports and sworn affidavits about an enemy ambush on Hill 861 on March 16, 1967, and the actions of his father, Russell H. Jacobson Jr., to treat the wounded as he himself came under fire. Russell Jacobson was shot multiple times as he moved the injured from the battlefield, and then returned to help others, according to the documentation. The North Vietnamese Army then used Jacobson’s broken body as a decoy to fire at Marines who tried to reach him.

Read more at: https://www.stripes.com/history/2026-08-04/vietnam-veteran-son-navy-cross-22448580.html
Source - Stars and Stripes

[IsailedawayfromFR]

This seems eerily similar to a movie I had just watched The Last Full Measure

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0783640/

It entailed the drive to award posthumously(34 years) the Congressional Medal of Honor to a Air Force medic who dropped into the Vietnam jungle when a group of Army soldiers came under fire and had lost their own medic.

A good movie with Samuel Jackson, Ed Harris and William Hurt.