Russell Harold Jacobson Jr.

Russell's story

He taught his kids to give more than you take. He came home from a war that nearly killed him, to a country that didn't want to hear about it, and he built a life and a family anyway.

Russell Harold Jacobson Jr. was born November 7, 1946, in New London, Connecticut, and grew up in Norwich. He graduated from Norwich Free Academy in 1964, and in October 1965 he joined the Navy and trained as a hospital corpsman. After Field Medical Service School at Camp Pendleton, he went to Vietnam in November 1966 as a corpsman with Echo Company, 2nd Battalion, 9th Marines. The Marines called him Doc, or Doc Jake.

Early in 1967 his company was on Hill 180, near Phu Bai. He wrote home to Peg from there, and around that time a class of schoolgirls in Huế sent him Christmas and New Year cards.

In March 1967, near Khe Sanh, Echo Company was ambushed on Hill 861 in the fighting that became known as the Hill Fights. Edward F. Murphy's history, The Hill Fights, describes him racing up and down the "fire-swept trail" to pull wounded Marines to safety until he was badly wounded himself. Friends of his from the company were killed that day.

He was treated aboard the hospital ship USS Repose off Da Nang, then brought home to Chelsea Naval Hospital near Boston, where he spent many months recovering, much of it in a body cast. While he was there, a fourth grade class at St. Ann School in Gloucester wrote him letters. He kept all 26 of them for the rest of his life, in a red TWA bag.

The wounds cost him a kidney and much of the use of his hip. The Navy medically retired him in February 1968. He went on to study at the University of Connecticut, Quinnipiac and Yale, where, according to his VVMF biography, he earned a Physician Assistant degree. He spent most of his career in pathology and medical education, at the University of Connecticut and later at Cape Cod Hospital. Over the years he had more than 90 surgeries, most of them for the injuries he brought home from Vietnam.

He married Margaret "Peg" Johnson, and they were married for 46 years. They raised three sons, Andrew, Matthew and David, and had six grandchildren. He loved woodworking, archaeology, boating and fishing. He was an avid reader and a history buff, and the people who knew him remember his great sense of humor and quick wit.

He rarely talked about Vietnam. His obituary never mentioned it. Later in life he reconnected with Marines from 2/9, including at a reunion in 2007.

His family remembers what he told them about the water. In the jungle, the Marines filled their canteens from rivers and streams. Moving upstream, they would come across stretches where all the vegetation was dead. He believed that was where Agent Orange got into him. The VA presumes that anyone who served on the ground in Vietnam during the war was exposed to Agent Orange.

He died on January 9, 2015, of non-Hodgkin lymphoma, one of the cancers the VA links to Agent Orange. He is buried at the Massachusetts National Cemetery in Bourne. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund honored him in its In Memory program in 2017.

His family has asked the Navy to review his actions on Hill 861. No decision has been made.