This is an article that was written by Lee Benson, a columnist for the Deseret News. Lee and his twin brother Dee were in my BYU ward when I came back from my mission in 1970. When we moved to Utah in 2001 I noticed his column in the paper. So when I saw him in front of us in the security line at the airport when Dad and I were going to Alaska, I just had to say hi to him and renew our acquaintance. I emailed him a couple of weeks ago and mentioned Dad's death and I was surprised when he emailed back and remembered our conversation in the airport. Here is his column.
'Ordinary hero' led a life of service
By
Lee BensonDeseret News
Published: Friday, Feb. 26, 2010 12:05 a.m. MST
I met him a year ago, when he was 96. It was one of those modern introductions. We were waiting in a security line at the airport.
Actually, it was his son I met first, Harold Jackson, who jogged my memory that we were once classmates in college.
But even before Harold spoke up, I'd been studying him and the older man next to him.
My guesses are often wrong, but this one was right: a son taking his dad on a trip. And not because he had to. Because he wanted to.
Because the dad had done so much for him and this was a way to say thanks.
"Dad always wanted to see Alaska," Harold said that day. "So I called him and said, 'Pack your bag; we're going.' "
Then he slung V. Rex Jackson's bag onto the security belt.
I forgot about that encounter until I opened an e-mail this week. It was from Harold Jackson.
"I thought you'd like to know that Dad passed away," he wrote. "Alaska was his last vacation trip."
"He was an ordinary hero," he added, and then, for enlightenment, he included a few details of two heroic occasions in his father's life.
One was in June 1944, D-Day, when he stormed the beach at Normandy.
It happened to be Utah Beach — an appropriate destination for a young man who had been born in Randolph, Utah.He was with a U.S. Army engineer regiment whose job was to lay down matting so the trucks, tractors and tanks waiting to come ashore could have traction in making it to higher ground.
Pvt. Jackson was among the first Allied troops to set foot on French soil. He almost drowned getting there. Then he had to help haul in bodies of soldiers who did drown.
Several weeks later, he marched into Paris. Several months after that, still unhurt, he was in Germany when the war he helped win ended. He had survived four invasions and came home with seven battle stars.
The other hero moment for V. Rex Jackson came nearly 50 years later, in February 1993, when he stormed the stage at the Marriott Center.
OK, storming it is overstating it. He was 80 at the time and had come to the Marriott Center to listen to Howard W. Hunter, then an LDS apostle and soon to be LDS Church president, give a speech to 17,000 BYU students and faculty.
The peaceful nature of the occasion was shattered when a 27-year-old man named Cody Judy jumped onto the stage, said he had a bomb and demanded that Hunter read a three-page statement.
Security rushed to the edge of the stage but was held at bay by the alleged bomb (which later proved to be bogus).
A tense standoff ensued until Jackson, who had arrived late and was sitting in back of the stage, walked up behind Judy and said in an even voice, "What's going on?"The would-be terrorist turned and knocked Jackson down, allowing security to swoop in. Judy went to jail. Jackson, unhurt, went home.
"He told us he'd been in the Army and through foreign invasions, and he didn't think that guy had a bomb," Harold said, remembering his father's explanation to the family. "He said he wasn't afraid."
Rex Jackson didn't get any publicity for what he did — due possibly to the fact that it wasn't exactly by the book.
"That's just speculation on our part," Harold said. "But it's part of our family lore that our dad was the hero who helped save President Hunter."
It was in between and around those two flashes of headline heroism, however, that V. Rex Jackson did his real heroics — the years he spent as a builder: at work as a carpenter and at home as a husband and father who raised six adoring children.
I saw that adoration firsthand. It was a year ago, when Rex was 96, and his son took him to Alaska, and the only reason was because he'd always wanted to go.
Lee Benson's column runs Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Please send e-mail to
benson@desnews.com
