patrol area were happening once or even twice a week. In the
three months he was in the bush, there was only one.
“I remember when I first met him like it was yesterday,”
says Richard Gregory, who was Van Riper’s gunnery sergeant in
Mike Company. “It was between Hill Fifty-five and Hill Ten,
just southeast of Danang. We shook hands. He had that crisp
voice, low to middle tones. Very direct. Concise. Confident,
without a lot of icing on the cake. That’s how he was, and he
maintained that every day of the war. He had an office in our
combat area — a hooch — but I never saw him in there. He was
always out in the field or out near his bunker, figuring out what
to do next. If he had an idea and he had a scrap of paper in his
pocket, he would write that idea on the scrap, and then, when
we had a meeting, he would pull out seven or eight little pieces
of paper. Once he and I were in the jungle a few yards away
from a river, and he wanted to reconnoiter over certain areas,
but he couldn’t get the view he wanted. The bush was in the
way. Damned if he didn’t take off his shoes, dive into the river,
swim out to the middle, and tread water so he could see
downstream.”
In the first week of November of 1968, Mike Company was
engaged in heavy fighting with a much larger North Vietnamese