FORT CAMPBELL, Ky. (Sept. 3, 2009) - When a Fort Campbell 3rd Brigade Combat Team Soldier went to Nashville to audition for the game show, "Who Wants to be a Millionaire" he never expected to make it all the way to the hot seat in New York.
Now 1st Lt. Jacob Shaha, 1st Battalion, 187th Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division, is $25,000 richer and it's all thanks to his wife.
"[She] was watching the show one afternoon and at the end there was a small... announcement saying there were going to be auditions in Nashville. She said 'Honey, you're smart, you'll win.' So, we went to Nashville," Shaha said.
Out of hundreds of applicants, Shaha was one of nearly 10 percent who passed the first test - a 10-minute written quiz with 30 trivia questions. Shaha returned that afternoon along with the other contestants who passed to film a short interview with a member of the production staff.
He passed that test as well, and got to shoot a longer video interview with an actual producer. A few weeks later he got a postcard saying he was in the contestant pool. The call to go to New York didn't come until the end of July, seven days before the studio wanted him to film.
Even after he got to New York, though, Shaha said he still didn't expect to make it to the main chair.
He said it wasn't until the contestants were lined up to take their places that the reality of the situation finally hit him.
"I wasn't scared and I wasn't nervous like dread," Shaha said. "I was thinking through my head what a peculiar sensation it was, and I realized the only other time I could remember feeling like that was right before the first time I went into the tear gas chamber."
All 10 contestants were lead to their places on the stage and taught how to use the equipment well before the show started.
"You do a bunch of the fastest finger questions as practice and I dismally lost all of the practice ones - it is not encouraging at all," he said. "When I won, I was so totally stunned that the entire time I was in the chair I was trying to figure out how that had happened. I mean, it was just so improbable."
Shaha said everyone from the producers to Regis Philbin to the crowd was pulling for him to win.
"I was a huge hit and it's not 'cause I'm some stud, it's because everybody wants to give the Soldier money," he said. "I think it was, they sort of saw it as this all-American story, where really my story's not any different than every Soldier in this division."
Shaha made it all the way up to the $50,000 question before he answered incorrectly and went home with $25,000.
"For 15 minutes of work, I've had worse," he said.
Since returning to Fort Campbell, Shaha said things haven't changed much.
"I took a lot of good-natured ribbing," he said. "My buddies on the staff would often advise me to phone a friend when I didn't know the answer."
Shaha used phone-a-friend for the $8,000 question on the show, as well as double-dip and ask an expert - a special addition for the 10th anniversary of the show. He used ask-the-audience on an earlier question.
Despite the teasing and not winning the million, Shaha said he was happy he'd tried.
"I'm glad I listened to my wife," he said. "I TiVoed it, I'm going to put it on a DVD. It'll be a great story for my kids some day."
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