Zinni stood, then started his radio call for fire procedure. Though he had never before called in a fire mission, even in training, he knew basically how it was done, and he’d been tested on it. He carefully went through the remembered procedure. A few minutes later, artillery rounds smacked into the VC positions a few hundred meters away. While trees exploded all around from flying shrapnel, he stood, observing and adjusting the fire . . . without noticing that the VC were also adjusting their fire, bringing it down. VC rounds were starting to hit all around him; but this did not faze Zinni, focused as he was on the artillery.

After a time, the VC fire slacked off and he could tell they were breaking contact.

But when he turned toward the XO to get his take on that, he noticed that everybody was on the ground covering their heads. “Get down!” the XO was yelling. “Now they’re shooting low!”

Moments later, the Marines began moving across the paddies and pursuing the enemy. As they went by, they smiled and gave him a thumbs-up.

Later, the XO told him how impressed they’d been that he’d stood up under the enemy fire and called in the artillery rounds “danger close” on his first mission. Zinni didn’t know what he was talking about (the term was new to him), but since he seemed pleased, Zinni didn’t ask questions.

He realized later what had happened: In his unfamiliarity with the whole process of targeting artillery, he had called the fire mission directly onto the enemy positions rather than creeping it in from behind, the usual procedure when the target was within six hundred meters—“danger close.”

Meanwhile, the Marines treated him like a fearless hero. God protects the innocent and the ignorant.

The rest of the sweep was a continuing series of hit-and-run gun battles:

At one point, VC burst up from camouflaged holes just as the headquarters element came by, but they were taken out by the security platoon almost before Zinni realized what was happening. The platoon leader, a big guy and half French, carried a Thompson submachine gun without a stock and was deadly with it.

After another firefight, they found several VC bodies, including—to Zinni’s amazement—two young women, obviously twins and beautiful. “This isn’t unusual,” a lieutenant told him. “The VC have a number of women in their ranks.”

“Strange war,” Zinni thought.

TONY ZINNI had arrived in Vietnam a month earlier, on March 26, 1967, leaving behind a large and loving blue-collar Italian family in Philadelphia and a bride of only a few weeks, who stayed with her own family in Atlanta in Tony’s absence.