A Medal of Honor recipient looks back at his own service in the Vietnam War—and ahead to America’s future. Jack Jacobs was acting as an advisor to the South Vietnamese when he and his men came under devastating attack. Wounded, 1st Lt. Jacobs took command and withdrew the unit, returning again and again, saving fourteen lives—for which he received the Medal of Honor. Here, Col. Jacobs tells his stirring story of heroism, honor, and the personal code by which he has lived his life, and expounds with blunt honesty and insight his views on our contemporary world, and the nature and necessity of sacrifice. If Not Now, When? is a compelling account of a unique life at both war and peace, and the all-too-often unexamined role of the citizenry in the service and defense of the Republic.

Long dismissed by critics as a novel of merely historical interest, Colonel Jack is one of Daniel Defoe’s most entertaining, revealing, and complex works. It is the supposed autobiography of an English gentleman who begins life as a child of the London streets. He and his brothers are brought up as pickpockets and highwaymen, but Jack seeks to improve himself. Kidnapped and taken to America, he becomes first a slave, then an overseer on plantations in Maryland. Jack’s story is one of dramatic turns of fortune that ultimately lead to a life of law-abiding prosperity as a plantation owner. Historical appendices relate to eighteenth-century Virginia and Maryland and to contemporary crime, punishment, and imprisonment.

John Coffee Hays was a soldier, surveyor, Ranger, officer in the Mexican War, and explorer, Tennessee and Mississppi were already part of him. He was one of the keymen who maintained the Republic of Texas and then helped make it into a state. Yet he left San Antopnio for the Gila River country to head an Indian agency, and went on to California, where he was a sheriff, Federal surveyor general, and town developer before he entered his long period as gentleman ranchman and capitalist, to say nothing of his influence in politics and his exemplary life.

Colonel Jack follows an orphaned boy from a life of poverty and crime to colonial prosperity, military and marital imbroglios, and religious conversion, driven by a problematic notion of becoming a "gentleman." Colonel Jack prominently tackles the subjects of money and crime. The novel begins with Jack as an abandoned illegitimate child, whose attending nurse is instructed by his father to inform Jack when he grows up that he is a "Gentleman". Jack goes through many adventures, initially turning to crime from desperation, wandering around the country and beyond, finding love several times… Daniel Defoe (1660-1731) was an English trader, writer, journalist, pamphleteer, and spy, most famous for his novel Robinson Crusoe. Defoe is noted for being one of the earliest proponents of the novel, as he helped to popularize the form in Britain with others such as Samuel Richardson, and is among the founders of the English novel. He was a prolific and versatile writer, producing more than five hundred books, pamphlets, and journals on various topics, including politics, crime, religion, marriage, psychology, and the supernatural.

This edition is limited to 775 copies.