Always Faithful

The blacktop road in this picturesque neighborhood of Colonial Williamsburg is lined with Southern Magnolias, red maples, and flowering dogwoods, their leaves turned deep shades of red. Near the end of the road sits a red brick, colonial-style house, yellow and purple pansies bordering a path to the front door.

“Planting flowers is my exercise,” says Lieutenant General Paul K. Van Riper, USMC (Ret.), 87.

For 23 years, Van Riper shared the house with Lillie Catherine, whom he called LC, his beloved wife of 53 years who passed away in 2021. He designed the house at the end of a decades-long career, which began with his enlistment in the Marine Corps Reserve in the fall of 1956, continued with his commissioning as a second lieutenant in the fall of 1963, and culminated in his retirement as a three-star general after 41 years of service.

Van Riper, who earned two Silver Star medals for heroic action in the Vietnam War, is known as an independent thinker unafraid to challenge conventional wisdom. In the 2005 bestseller Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, journalist Malcolm Gladwell wrote about Van Riper and his performance in a military wargame called Millennium Challenge 2002 to illustrate how brilliant decision makers use intuition to break down complex situations.

“Can I show you the library?” Van Riper asks, motioning me to a comfortable room holding a few thousand volumes on religion, philosophy, and, of course, military history. The library is both a kind of sanctuary and a place where old and new ideas come together in the lap of a quiet, sunlit room.

Though he no longer drives, Van Riper remains busy. He’s auditing a course online about the first volume of The Second World War, Winston Churchill’s history of world events from World War I through 1940. He talks on the phone with his twin brother, James, also a retired Marine officer, and with former colleagues. He mentors officers serving on active duty and participates in military wargames. And every other week, his best friend and neighbor, General Anthony Zinni, USMC (Ret.), 81, takes Van Riper to meetings and to appointments.

Van Riper Insignia and Awards

Van Riper keeps up with current events, too. He agrees with the substance of Secretary Hegseth’s September 30 speech to general officers and admirals, and especially approves of the secretary’s emphasis on warfighting. “You can get back equipment and weapons,” Van Riper says. “You can redesign organizations. But if you lose the warfighting ethos of the organization … I don’t know how you get that back.”

Ordinarily, when Van Riper needs a break from the action, he settles into the overstuffed recliner in the corner of his library and takes a nap. But today there is too much work. He points to a shelf holding plaques, coffee mugs, and challenge coins, the words “A Company Called Mike” emblazoned across each one. Mike Company comprised the 215 Marines that Van Riper led in Vietnam in 1968 and 1969.

“If I could live my life over again, and wasn’t separated from my family, and didn’t have to endure the casualties, that would be my life. I would love to command Mike Company my whole life. Just the excitement of it. The thrill of it, every day. You’re living right at the edge of life. You’ve got people around you who are just like family.”

That family is getting together for one final reunion. This Veterans Day, the surviving men of Mike Company who served in Vietnam will meet in Philadelphia to celebrate the 250th birthday of the Marine Corps, and to celebrate each other. Van Riper will deliver keynote remarks. Though some of the Marines use walkers and wheelchairs, they’re determined to keep up with the skipper.

“I tell Rip, ‘I’ll still follow you anywhere — I’m just a lot slower,’” says Jim Meyer, 77, of Minneapolis.

Van Riper Library

Meyer enlisted in the Marine Corps in February 1968. His older sister had dated a Marine, whose Dress Blue uniform left a strong impression. “I saw that uniform and that was it! I knew I wanted to be a Marine.” In June 1968, he joined Mike Company and found himself walking foot patrols through an area called “Dodge City” in Quang Nam Province, some 10 miles southwest of Da Nang. The area was a stronghold for Viet Cong insurgents and the People’s Army of Vietnam, who used a complex network of tunnels to stage attacks. There were daily gunfights and ambushes, and Meyer saw many friends wounded or killed.

Almost one year into his enlistment, on February 23, 1969, Meyer was shot in the leg during a battle with a regiment-sized force of North Vietnamese Army troops. “I had seen plenty of Viet Cong, but never so many NVA,” Meyer recalls. “They wore uniforms. They had patches. It was a professional force.” He was medically evacuated from Vietnam and discharged that spring.

Years later, a job with 3M Company in Minneapolis would find Meyer traveling across the country as a sales representative. At each stop, Meyer looked through the phone book for names of men with whom he served in Mike Company. After a few years reconnecting with his fellow Marines, Meyer held a get-together in Nashville, Tennessee.

Van Riper Library

The idea of holding a formal reunion didn’t occur to him until a business trip to Marine Corps Base Quantico, Virginia. “I was talking to a Marine Colonel about a product I was selling, and said that I had served under Captain Van Riper in Vietnam. The Colonel told me that General Van Riper had his office in the building next door, so I walked over and spoke with his secretary.”

Meyer, who promoted to corporal before being evacuated from Vietnam, watched as Marine colonels and generals poured out of the conference room. “I had never seen that many senior officers!” Meyer recalls. “But when I re-introduced myself to the skipper – we’d only met once or twice in country – he apologized for making me wait.”

They compiled a roster of Mike Company Marines who had served together in Quang Nam, and Meyer began making calls. “I wanted to be with the Marines again, the guys who were there with us.” The first formal reunion was held in the mid-1980s, and reunions have continued every two years, without fail, for 40 years.

Tommy Harrell, 81, of Natchitoches, Louisiana, agrees with Meyer about the importance of keeping up their bond. Harrell, a junior officer in Mike Company, suffered wounds to the head and neck on June 16, 1969, when a satchel charge detonated inside his patrol base during an attack by Viet Cong insurgents. Harrell lost his right eye and was medically discharged. He was the first of three lieutenants wounded in action that day.

Harrell started attending Mike Company reunions sometime in the late 1980s. He discovered the young men he’d fought alongside had gone on to careers in law, banking, and business. They got married and had children. Though Harrell is legally blind, he remains proud of his service in combat and feels fortunate to have served under Van Riper.

Volumes by Carl von Clausewitz

“He was a real leader, and an example to us and the younger generation. Integrity. Responsibility. Call to duty. If you saw him in action, you knew. I love him for it.”

John Mason, a retired lawyer from Asheville, North Carolina, was wounded just a few hours after Harrell, when a radioman tripped a booby trap, sending shrapnel into Mason’s body from ankle to ear. He remembers the company’s courage in the face of uncertainty, its ferocity in achieving the mission and in protecting each other.

“I showed up in Vietnam a boot second lieutenant, didn’t know a thing,” Mason recalls. “There was an ambush on one of my first patrols, and we lost two Marines. I wondered how I was going to make it in Vietnam. Rip just had a calm way about him under pressure. “Just a month later and I had been through a few tough fights. I came back to the command post and rather than ‘Lieutenant Mason,’ Rip called me ‘John’ for the first time. The Marines held different ranks, but we became the same in combat.”

Which made it difficult to come home. The anti-war movement peaked in 1969, when millions of Americans participated in the Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam on October 15. Colleges and universities suspended classes. Small businesses closed. Religious leaders organized peace services and prayer vigils. Parks, plazas, campuses, state capitals and, especially, Washington, D.C. transformed into venues of protest against the war in general and President Nixon in particular. Though the demonstrations were meant to move public opinion on the war itself, many veterans perceived the protesters as overtly political and unpatriotic, if not insulting to the sacrifices made by their generational peers serving in Vietnam.

Gunshot through Belt

“What the f—,” Mason says he remembers wondering as he lay in the hospital still recovering from his wounds. He was angry at the protesters, at his country, at the war. “I tried calling Rip but LC, his wife, answered the phone. She was from South Carolina and had gone to Winthrop (University in Rock Hill, S.C.). We knew some of the same people. Rip is special, but so was LC. She could sense what I was feeling, and so we just hung on the line and talked about home. By the time I hung up, I felt like I’d gotten back some of my soul.”

In the beginning, Mike Company reunions were intense in the feelings they reignited. The veterans arrived as middle-aged civilians many years removed from their tour of duty overseas. They brought their wives and children. But as the night wore on, and the men huddled around the bar, memories rushed back with a power and clarity that surprised them.

“I wouldn’t want to relive those early reunions, actually,” says Terry Williamson, a platoon commander from Philadelphia who went on to a career in journalism and communications. “I brought my teenage son with me thinking we’d take in the reunion together — he spent the whole time in the car or hotel room.”

The men tried to fill gaps in their memories, piecing together the real story of a war that was misrepresented by media figures and politicians too afraid to witness the raw action with their own eyes. Fortunately, time healed some wounds—several of the men returned to Vietnam in 1998. They toured the cities and walked the ground, visiting with villagers who remembered the U.S. Marines who shed blood in South Vietnam between 1965 and 1971. Today’s reunions look and feel less like a cathartic moment than a gathering of old friends.

The reality of the Vietnam War still eludes the American public. Consider this: The average infantryman saw roughly 40 days of combat in World War II; for the soldier or Marine in Vietnam, it was 240 days. Between 1968 and 1969, Mike Company saw a casualty rate of nearly 100 percent. And yet Van Riper’s Marines and their brothers-in-arms demonstrated extraordinary resilience and fighting spirit, which makes them as much a “greatest generation” as their fathers.

Mike Company, 3/7

The best way to repay these veterans and the 58,220 Americans who never came home is to follow their example. Love your family, your friends, your neighbors. Keep faith with your country. Strive to live with the same strength and conviction they demonstrated on the battlefields of southeast Asia.

Van Riper continues to live a life worthy of the Marines’ high standard. He is determined to remain engaged and optimistic. Longtime friend and neighbor Gen. Zinni says it best: “There are a few ways to look at what you do in life. You can see it as a job. You can see it as a profession. For Rip, being a Marine was a calling.”

Semper Fidelis.

John J. Waters is the author of the postwar novel River City One (Simon and Schuster, 2023). He lives in Nebraska, where he was born.