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