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 planning for a war game that they were calling
Millennium Challenge ’02. It was the largest and most
expensive war game thus far in history. By the time the exercise
was finally staged — in July and early August of 2002, two and
a half years later — it would end up costing a quarter of a
billion dollars, which is more than some countries spend on
their entire defense budget. According to the Millennium