Mike Jackson Quotes
Soldiering is a very important profession, is it not?
Jackson, Mike. Soldier: The Autobiography. Bantam Press, 2007.
Webb’s opponent had accused him of not being patriotic because he opposed many of President George W. Bush’s Iraq War policies. This technique of publicly intimating that an opponent was not patriotic because he opposed the hawkish proposals of the President, had worked very well for the Republicans before. Presidential Candidate John Kerry, a decorated war hero, was attacked and remarkably Senator Max Cleland who had lost three of his four limbs in battle was unseated by attacking his patriotism. When Senator George Allen, fighting for reelection, used the technique on Webb, Web responded much more aggressively than earlier Democrats had when faced with the accusation. Senator Allen, like most of the patriotism critics of heroic veterans, had never been in combat.
General Sir Michael David Jackson, GCB, CBE, DSO, DL is a retired British Army officer and one of its most high-profile generals since the Second World War. Originally commissioned into the Intelligence Corps in 1963, he transferred to the Parachute Regiment in 1970, with which he served two of his three tours of duty in Northern Ireland. On his first, he was present as an adjutant at the events of the Ballymurphy massacre (1971), where 11 unarmed civilians were shot dead by British troops, and then at Bloody Sunday (1972), when British soldiers opened fire on protesters, killing 14. On his second, he was a company commander in the aftermath of the Warrenpoint ambush (1979), the British Army's heaviest single loss of life during the Troubles. He was assigned to a staff post at the Ministry of Defence (MoD) in 1982 before assuming command of the 1st Battalion, Parachute Regiment, in 1984. Jackson was posted to Northern Ireland for the third time, as a brigade commander, in the early 1990s.
