FOUR
Paul Van Riper’s Big Victory: Creating Structure for
Spontaneity
Paul Van Riper is tall and lean with a gleaming bald dome and
wire-rimmed glasses. He walks with his shoulders square and
has a gruff, commanding voice. His friends call him Rip. Once
when he and his twin brother were twelve, they were sitting in
a car with their father as he read a newspaper story about the
Korean War. “Well, boys,” he said, “the war’s about to be over.
Truman’s sending in the marines.” That’s when Van Riper
decided that when he grew up, he would join the Marine Corps.
In his first tour in Vietnam, he was almost cut in half by gunfire
while taking out a North Vietnamese machine gun in a rice
paddy outside Saigon. In 1968, he returned to Vietnam, and this
time he was the commander of Mike Company (Third Battalion,
Seventh Marines, First Marine Division) in the rice-paddy-and-
hill country of South Vietnam between two treacherous regions
the marines called Dodge City and the Arizona Territory. There
his task was to stop the North Vietnamese from firing rockets
into Danang. Before he got there, the rocket attacks in his