One day, Zinni felt strong enough to try to find the troops from his company who’d been medevaced when he was; but after a search of the wards he only found one still confined to the hospital—Lance Corporal Maui, a big strapping Hawaiian kid from the point team. He’d been hit in the ankle and had a badly screwed-up leg. He and Zinni had a good talk, but it was clear he was depressed; he didn’t know if he would fully recover.

But that wasn’t the only thing bothering him. Something larger was on his mind; and after the two men had talked for a while, he blurted it out. “Sir, why are we here?” he asked.

Zinni gave him an answer, but it was the “party line” response; and by then he realized that was “piss-poor,” as he thinks of it now: “I knew we were fighting a war that neither the South Vietnamese nor the American people were backing, and we were doing it with a lousy strategy, the wrong policies, and terrible tactics. After I walked away from Corporal Maui, I swore that from then on no troops of mine would ever again get such a shitty answer from me. They’d know from me why we were fighting. And if I felt something was wrong that put the lives of our troops in needless risk, I swore I would speak out, never hesitating to put my own career on the line for doing what was right by my men.”

AFTER A WEEK, Zinni’s time in Vietnam came to an end. His stretcher was loaded on another medevac plane headed for Guam.

Several hours later, lying on his bed in the ward of the Guam hospital, he began thinking about the dressing on his back. It had been there for two days. Removing it was going to be agonizing.

Later, a corpsman came in to discuss his injury. “You’re lucky,” he said. “The finest surgeon in the Navy will be handling your case.”

At that moment, a doctor appeared at the side of Zinni’s bed. “Let’s take a look at this guy’s wound,” he said gruffly.

Zinni began his ritual of rolling slowly over on his stomach and putting a death grip on the bed rails.

“What the hell are you doing?” the doctor said.

Zinni explained the procedure back at the hospital in Vietnam.

“You’re shittin’ me,” he said. And then he said to the corpsman, “Make him happy.”

Zinni got a shot in each shoulder that made him very happy. Then the corpsman soaked the dressing in a solution that loosened the adhesive. A few minutes later, he simply lifted off the bandage.

“I wanted to kill the other medics who’d ripped it off twice a day,” Zinni says now.