Veteran Jesse, 93, earns ‘Quilt of Valor’
“It’s really nice you all did this,” said Jesse’s daughter, Sue Stuhl, a former Town of Farragut Parks & Recreation director.
Attending college at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh during the Korean War, Jesse said a lot of his high school friends were drafted after high school and served in that war. “They were in the worst part of the war,” he said. “That’s where I would have been if I hadn’t gone to college.”
However, after graduating college with a degree in chemistry in 1955, “the draft board decided it was time to serve,” Jesse recalled.
Already married at the time with a baby at home, his wife was not pleased with the draft notice.
Jesse was sent to Fort Jackson, South Carolina, for basic training, and then trained at the Center for Intelligence School, where he studied for four months.
“I ended up serving the rest of my (military) time in the field office in Pittsburgh,” his hometown, he recalled.
At the field office, Jesse was assigned to investigate personnel for security clearances.
“We did investigations like security agencies … and wrote up reports,” he said. “Nobody ever read them.”
Jesse also was in charge of classified areas at the field office for a while.
“A number of years ago, we lived in Mount Juliet near Nashville, and one of my neighbors was in the CIC agency,” he recalled. “He went all over the country. He had a really interesting background, but he couldn’t talk about it.”
