Now he headed a Combined Arms Battalion, consisting mostly of recent trainees who had never seen combat. Because they were training in mountainous terrain in West Virginia, he assumed that they were preparing for possible future operations in Taiwan. He found this encouraging—this administration, at least, was not going to let China get away with gobbling up its neighbors. And Buck Harward would be in the thick of it with men he had trained himself. If he screwed up there would be no one to blame but himself—but he was fine with bearing responsibility. Because if he succeeded—brilliantly, he hoped—then the credit would all be his. That would help a soldier who hoped to end his career as Army Chief of Staff—or higher.

But one of the problems with commanding a training battalion within a hundred miles of the Beltway and five miles from Interstate 81 was drop-ins—VIPs who wanted to get a sense of what the Army was doing or vent their opinions or have a photo op with guys in tanks. And Buck Harward knew better than to complain about this—not to his superiors and not even to his underlings. Politics was an essential part of soldiering, today and in every other era. If Hannibal had understood that better, he might not have had to end his days in exile from Carthage.

Buck was teased sometimes because he spent so much time reading about the great strategists of history—not just Hannibal, but Alexander, Pyrrhus, Scipio, and Caesar. Learning from their successes and their failures, Buck struggled to find the balance between caution and boldness, but had recently come to realize that there was no perfect balance. Victory went to bold, cautious generals—if they were also lucky, or faced incompetent enemies. And the longer their careers, the more their enemies learned to use their own strategies and tactics against them.

Alexander had the right idea—conquer and move on, and when your men will no longer follow you on wars of conquest, die young and live forever in legend. If Alexander had died as a fat old man, he would certainly not have such a glorious reputation. Likewise, if Hannibal had been good at politics and stayed in Carthage, Scipio probably would have beaten him and had no choice but to bring him back to Rome to be strangled after Scipio’s triumph. Even setbacks could be viewed as lucky, depending on what you hoped for.

I hope for everything, Buck admitted to himself in moments of candor. I want the name of Buck Harward to stand among names like Omar Bradley, George Marshall, Dwight Eisenhower, Ulysses S Grant. Or, if he was lucky enough, George Patton, Stonewall Jackson, George Washington, or Robert E. Lee.

Or Hannibal. Hannibal would be nice. And if he could perform brilliantly in Taiwan, against the high-tech hordes of China …