He’s right, there aren’t many at all. On the Panthers alone, Jackson is one of only two players who wear the Heritage Helmet sticker as a military kid. The other is Patrick Jones II, but the linebacker continued to live in Japan until he was a teenager.
Jackson moved to the States as a toddler; his ability to speak German quickly petered out, and his connection to his first home came primarily through stories from his mom.
“She loved it over there,” Jackson admits. “She always talked about wanting to move back, but once we left there, we went to Seattle, and then after that, we moved back to Alabama, so she was just kind of— like she loves it over there, she came to the game when we were out there.”
The game was Jackson’s next significant connection to his birthplace. When the Panthers played in Munich, Germany, last season as part of the NFL’s international slate, Jackson was able to return, for the first time in over two decades, to the country that helped raise him for the first couple of years of his life.
“I went to a big church in downtown Munich,” he recalls. “So, I did that, did some shopping, so it was just kind of cool to be in the city, to kind of just—a big what if.”