I have never in my life been the 'guest of honor' before.   When all the presentations were done, I went to the back of the room to talk to a young Marine.  Someone came and tapped me on the shoulder and said, "Mrs. Jacks, would you mind filling your plate.  Everyone is waiting on you to eat first."  I turned around, and sure enough, the whole room was waiting.  I apologized profusely and told them that I had never trained to be a guest of honor and for them to go ahead and eat.  They wouldn't.  So I did my duty and filled my plate.

I was asked to give an impromptu speech--which was fine--my mind was filled with a million stories about Ken.  Which one?  I looked at the audience and they were for the most part enlisted men.  Men who had come under fire on the ground.  They knew that Ken was a Lt. Colonel.  A fighter pilot.  So I started by saying, "When Ken was eighteen, he enlisted in the Marine Corps, and went through boots at Camp Pendleton.  But by a stroke of good luck, he was chosen to go to flight school where he was commissioned a Second Lt."  There was an audible shift in the audience.  The word "Officer" is always a line of demarcation.  They hadn't known that he had been enlisted first and gone through boots just like they had.  They were naming their detachment after him, but didn't realize he was "one of them."  After that, it didn't matter what I said.  They were with me.

I shared a story about how, at the age of eighteen and totally ignorant of the Marine Corps, I was pouring coffee in a receiving line at the Officer's Club in Pensacola when a man came through the line with lots of "Pretty Stuff" pinned on his uniform.  I asked him what he did in the Marine Corps and he said that he did the things that nobody else wanted to do.  After he passed on by, the woman standing next to me said, "Janie, that was the Commandant!!!"  "What's a Commandant," I answered.

I think funny self depreciation always puts an audience on your side.  It was a good night.  I was proud to be Ken's wife.