more idea than he did about what the gunfire meant. It was just
gunfire. It was the beginning of something — but what that
something was was not yet clear. So Van Riper stopped asking.
On his second tour of Vietnam, whenever he heard gunfire, he
would wait. “I would look at my watch,” Van Riper says, “and
the reason I looked was that I wasn’t going to do a thing for
five minutes. If they needed help, they were going to holler.
And after five minutes, if things had settled down, I still
wouldn’t do anything. You’ve got to let people work out the
situation and work out what’s happening. The danger in calling
is that they’ll tell you anything to get you off their backs, and if
you act on that and take it at face value, you could make a
mistake. Plus you are diverting them. Now they are looking
upward instead of downward. You’re preventing them from
resolving the situation.”
Van Riper carried this lesson with him when he took over
the helm of Red Team. “The first thing I told our staff is that we
would be in command and out of control,” Van Riper says,
echoing the words of the management guru Kevin Kelly. “By
that, I mean that the overall guidance and the intent were
provided by me and the senior leadership, but the forces in the
field wouldn’t depend on intricate orders coming from the top.