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“I remember when I first met him like it was yesterday,” says Richard Gregory, who was Van Riper’s gu
In the first week of November of 1968, Mike Company was engaged in heavy fighting with a much larger North Vietnamese regiment. “At one point we called in a medevac to take out some wounded. The helicopter was landing, and the North Vietnamese army was shooting rockets and killing everybody in the command post,” remembers John Mason, who was one of the company’s platoon commanders. “We suddenly had twelve dead marines. It was bad. We got out of there three or four days later, and we took a number of casualties, maybe forty-five total. But we reached our objective. We got back to Hill Fifty-five, and the very next day, we were working on squad tactics and inspection and, believe it or not, physical training. It had never dawned on me as a young lieutenant that we would do PT in the bush. But we did. It did not dawn on me that we would practice platoon and squad tactics or bayonet training in the bush, but we did. And we did it on a routine basis. After a battle, there would be a brief respite, then we would be back to training. That’s how Rip ran his company.”
Van Riper was strict. He was fair. He was a student of war, with clear ideas about how his men ought to conduct themselves in combat. “He was a gunslinger,” another of his soldiers from Mike Company remembers, “somebody who doesn’t sit behind a desk but leads the troops from the front. He was always very aggressive but in such a way that you didn’t mind doing what he was asking you to do. I remember one time I was out with a squad on a night ambush. I got a call from the skipper [what marines call the company commander] on the radio. He told me that there were one hundred twenty-one little people, meaning Vietnamese, heading toward my position, and my job was to resist them. I said, ‘Skipper, I have nine men.’ He said he would bring out a reactionary force if I needed one. That’s the way he was. The enemy was out there and there may have been nine of us and one hundred twenty-one of them, but there was no doubt in his mind that we had to engage them. Wherever the skipper operated, the enemy was put off by his tactics. He was not ‘live and let live.’”
In the spring of 2000, Van Riper was approached by a group of senior Pentagon officials. He was retired at that point, after a long and distinguished career. The Pentagon was in the earliest stages of pla
The group that runs war games for the U.S. military is called the Joint Forces Command, or, as it is better known, JFCOM. JFCOM occupies two rather nondescript low-slung concrete buildings at the end of a curving driveway in Suffolk, Virginia, a few hours’ drive south and east of Washington, D.C. Just before the entrance to the parking lot, hidden from the street, is a small guard hut. A chain-link fence rings the perimeter. There is a Wal-Mart across the street. Inside, JFCOM looks like a very ordinary office building, with conference rooms and rows of cubicles and long, brightly lit carpetless corridors. The business of JFCOM, however, is anything but ordinary. JFCOM is where the Pentagon tests new ideas about military organization and experiments with new military strategies.
Pla
In late July, both sides came to Suffolk and set up shop in the huge, windowless rooms known as test bays on the first floor of the main JFCOM building. Marine Corps, air force, army, and navy units at various military bases around the country stood by to enact the commands of Red and Blue Team brass. Sometimes when Blue Team fired a missile or launched a plane, a missile actually fired or a plane actually took off, and whenever it didn’t, one of forty-two separate computer models simulated each of those actions so precisely that the people in the war room often couldn’t tell it wasn’t real. The game lasted for two and a half weeks. For future analysis, a team of JFCOM specialists monitored and recorded every conversation, and a computer kept track of every bullet fired and missile launched and tank deployed. This was more than an experiment. As became clear less than a year later—when the United States invaded a Middle Eastern state with a rogue commander who had a strong ethnic power base and was thought to be harboring terrorists—this was a full dress rehearsal for war.
The stated purpose of Mille