He had come to be a Marine by way of Villanova University in Philadelphia, where as an undergraduate he’d joined a Marine equivalent of ROTC, called the PLC—“Platoon Leaders Class.” He had received additional basic and officers training at Quantico, and graduated from Villanova as a Marine second lieutenant.

After additional training at Quantico, he had been sent to the 2nd Marine Division based at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, where he spent a little over a year as a rifle platoon commander, infantry company commander, and commander of an infantry training company.

After his stint at the Infantry Training Regiment, he returned to his parent unit, the 1st Battalion, 6th Marines, where he expected to be a platoon commander. But because they were short of officers, he became a company commander . . . incredibly good luck, since it was a captain’s job, and he was still only a second lieutenant.

Meanwhile, the lieutenants in his battalion were getting orders to Vietnam. Soon, two-thirds of the Marine Corps were in that country fighting the first big battles. They were short of officers.

But there remained one lieutenant without orders to Nam—Tony Zinni. All of his contemporaries—his buddies—were going to be combat vets and he was going to remain a virgin. He wanted to go to Nam.

He got his wish after his wedding and brief honeymoon in Williams-burg, Virginia. When he returned to his battalion, his orders to Vietnam were waiting for him. They were strange orders. His buddies had all gone to U.S. Marine units, mostly to one of the two Marine divisions then in Vietnam. Zinni was to report to the Marine Advisory Unit, of the Naval Advisory Group, of the Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV). He had no clue what this meant. He would only find that out in Vietnam.

But first, he was sent to attend the Army Special Warfare School at Fort Bragg and go through the school’s Military Assistance, Training, and Advisory (MATA) course at Fort Bragg, where, among other things, he would learn to speak and write basic Vietnamese.

AFTER A WEEK of orientation in Saigon, Zinni was taken to the headquarters of the Vietnamese Marine Corps on Le Thanh Ton Street, a collection of old colonial buildings that had once been the headquarters of the legendary French Foreign Legion.

After the inevitable processing and issuing of uniforms (he thought the Vietnamese Marine tiger-striped camouflage uniforms and green berets8 were very macho), he was taken to an assigned hotel room. Advisers were provided with rooms either in Saigon or in Cholon, the Chinese section of Saigon. Zinni’s, in the Five Oceans Hotel in Cholon, became his “home” when he was in town from the field, and was a welcome oasis where he could clean up and get a decent night’s sleep.

The first days at Le Thanh Ton were devoted to briefings on the unit and its mission.