John F. Forrest
U.S. Army officer and combat commander during the Korean War and Vietnam War era.
John Franklin "Jack" Forrest (June 20, 1927 – May 27, 1997) was a career officer in the United States Army and a combat commander during the Korean War and Vietnam War.
Early life
Forrest was born in Mexia, Texas, on June 20, 1927, the second son of Robert E. and Gertrude Klug Forrest. One of his ancestors was Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest. His father was severely injured as a United States Army Air Service pilot in World War I, and his brother Robert fought in the Battle of the Bulge in World War II and survived capture by the Germans.
Forrest left Mexia when he was a young boy. The oil business led his father to move the family to Houston, Texas; Saginaw, Michigan; and Olney, Illinois. At Olney High School, he was a scholar and an athlete, joining the National Honor Society and playing varsity basketball and football. A swimmer, he worked summers as a lifeguard. Forrest was president of his senior class and the debate club, and voted "most popular."
Military career
Early career and Korea
Forrest entered the United States Military Academy in 1945 during the closing days of World War II. As a West Point cadet, he played B-Squad football and fought on the A-1 boxing team. His roommates were Samuel S. Coursen, Joe Toomey, Murray Williams, Collier Ross, and Jim Scholtz.
“John F. Forrest” enters the record as u.S. Army officer and combat commander during the Korean War and Vietnam War era. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what John, Forrest and Army can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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This entry incorporates text from “John F. Forrest” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.