Later, the surgeon explained why. “As we removed the rounds from your back,” he said, “we couldn’t just clean the wound and put you back together. The injury had wrecked too much. What we had to do, in order to prevent infection, was to debride the wound. That is, cut away about a third of the muscle tissue on your back and side. You’ve got a pretty big crater back there,” he added sympathetically.

“What’s going to happen,” the surgeon went on, “is we’ll keep you here for about a week, then we’ll send you to Guam for extensive physical therapy. There they’ll also take skin grafts taken from your legs and butt to cover the hole in your back.

“I have to be honest with you,” he concluded. “I doubt if you’ll regain full use of your arms and back.”

This was a shock. “What will this mean for my family and my future?” Zinni asked himself.

On his way out, the surgeon gave Zinni one of the rounds he’d dug out of his back.

The next week was tough. Twice a day the medics literally ripped the bandages off the wound, with the most excruciating pain he’d ever known. Before this ritual, any troops on the ward who could move left the area. It was too painful to witness.

“Sir, you’re really fucked up,” a wounded lance corporal told him. “You should see your back.”

“No, thanks,” Zinni thought.

AFTER A few days, he was able to get up and walk a little. It wasn’t easy, but he was able to get himself upright and to shuffle around the ward. The troops on the ward did everything to help.

One day, a nurse came in with disturbing news. Zinni’s Kit Carson Scout (wounded in the same engagement and now in another ward of the hospital) was in bad shape.

“He has a shoulder wound,” she said. “It’s not serious. So there’s no reason he should be doing so badly. But we don’t think he’s going to make it. It’s as if he’s lost his will to live.”

This did not surprise Zinni. He’d experienced the fatalism of the Vietnamese many times before when he was an adviser. But that experience also gave him an idea how he might help his scout. “Can you move him into the bed next to me?” he asked.

“We really shouldn’t,” she said. “Our policy is to keep the Vietnamese patients separate. But,” she added, “in this case we can make an exception.”

Zinni spent the next several days keeping his scout going. His family on their visits also helped.

After days of touch and go, he came out of his funk.