 Richard (Dick) Jaehne
Champaign, Illinois
Director, Illinois Fire Service Institute - He went to Vietnam in 1969 as 22-year-old Marine rifle platoon commander and spent 30 years as a career Marine officer
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 "I think everyone who goes to war and faces battle is both positively and negatively affected by that experience. I think part of the positive is who you are with and how you sustain each other. … The negative is that there is always a cost for that heroism. … I don’t think there’s a man who comes back from facing an enemy that doesn’t ask the question, ‘Why did I come back and the man next to me not?’ And there’s a sense of shame and a sense of sorrow that there might have been something that you did that didn’t allow that man to come back. … You can’t place a finger on why that feeling exists. But it’s a true feeling."
"I don’t honestly think combat makes you the person you are. I think it’s a furnace in which you’re like a piece of raw steel. The steel is what it is, but it is tempered by your experience. It may be made brittle. It may be made stronger. It’s not clear to me why one person is strengthened as one is weakened by that, but several things come to me. One is that the experience was a shared experience. To the extent that you face it alone, I think you’re weakened. I think that those of us who fought, if we fought alone, if we had no faith in God or support of a family, were weakened before we ever left. And it was infinitely more difficult when you came back."
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