When you have nearly completed the ROTC program and are approaching graduation and commissioning, you request… — Colonel Jack Jacobs
When you have nearly completed the ROTC program and are approaching graduation and commissioning, you request a specific branch assignment. There are many occupational specialties whose smooth integration into the whole of the Army produces the well-oiled military machine we know well. Soldiers and contractors have to get paid, so there is a Finance Corps. The Army is a large bureaucracy, and there is plenty of paperwork to do, and so some officers join the Adjutant General's Corps. The Army can't fight without supplies, and so the Quartermaster Corps is critical to combat success. Indeed, among many of my brethren in ROTC, the large majority of them selected noncombat branches, almost certainly because for some of them these administrative specialties afforded far less chance of becoming a casualty. Let's face it: some people talk a convincing game, but they shrink at the point of decision, when, in the harsh glare of sunlight, the consequences of their selected course of action appear overloaded with personal danger. This does not make them bad people, but it is instructive of the axiom that you should believe half of what you read and none of what you hear.
p. 53Source: Wikiquote · CC BY-SA 4.0
More from this book
Today, the oldest living recipient of the Medal of Honor is John Finn, who was decorated for action on Pearl Harbor Day. Born in 1909, John joined the Navy in 1926, and, loquacious as we all tend to be when we findally grasp that we have too many stories and not enough time, he will transfix anyone who cares to listen with tales of what it was like to grow up before the First World War and to ply the Yangtze River as a young sailor aboard an American gunboat.
In 1941, he was stationed in Kaneohe Bay, with a squadron of Navy patrol planes. Rudely rousted from bed by the cacaphony of the Japanese bombs destroying the fleet anchored at Pearl Harbor, John raced from his quarters, sped to the hangars that housed his aircraft, and manned a .50-caliber machine gun mounted on an exposed section of a parking ramp. For the next two hours, Finn, in the open and suffering from more than twenty shrapnel wounds in his back and stomach, blasted at the attacking enemy planes, hitting many of them and not relinquishing his post until the attack was over. Even when we were young, those of us who were raised on stirring John Wayne war movies assumed there was more than a little hyperbole and cinematic license in them. But for forty years I have known a man whose real-life exploits render the movies limp, pallid, and ineffectual in contrast. Art can often approximate life, but it has a hard time doing it justice.
p. 272
Recipients of the Medal of Honor really have little in common. They have been from every state, economic station, and ethnic group. But they have shared a strong sense of duty and of purpose and the motivating burden of personal responsibility at the perilous moment of decision. They feared death, but their biggest fear was failing themselves, their friends, and their nation, and thus they have been no different from the tens of millions of the other men and women who have served in uniform.
When the Japanese attacked on December 7, 1941, most Americans did not know where Hawaii was, let alone Pearl Harbor. And yet on the very next day, thousands of Americans rallied to the nation by offering their services in its defense. During World War II, almost every household made some contribution to the effort, and nearly half a million Americans sacrificed their lives so that hundreds of millions of others could live.
p. 273
Not long ago, I asked John what he was doing at the precise moment when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. "Truth be told, my boy," John said, "I was in bed with a good-looking gal." I asked if he ever saw her again. "See her again?" said John. "She was my wife for sixty years!" Then he slapped his knee and bellowed with laughter.
p. 272
