Chapter 14: Little Man, Big Man 091825

    
    Yes, in three months, Dick had turned my unit into the best line unit in the division, and probably in all of Vietnam. That’s not just my opinion. Everyone whom I interviewed and who served with him said the same thing. His animated way of initiating and explaining the benefits behind routine commands always had an earthy and unmatched characteristic—unique to him alone. I never heard of him bullying or trying to intimidate anyone. When he spoke to the battalion, every man listened intently, and many remembered his words fifty years later. Why? One reason was that Dick never brought the conversation around to himself. Instead, he talked about his people and how proud he was of us, but not in a “mushy” way.
     There were always various contacts with enemy patrols and sappers, but Dick never micromanaged. He trusted us to do our job, and so we did. Yet, while Dick trusted us, he also enforced his own little bag of tricks by making them standard procedure. For example, he had our patrols zigzag instead of performing those dumb cloverleaf maneuvers. He also had patrols in force change directions and even return to base camp, and then go in a totally different direction. At the beginning of a march in force, Dick always had our single column count off. Even numbers knew to flank to one side, while odd numbers knew to flank to the other side when we made contact with the enemy. Dick never let his mind think that it was acceptable to trade our dead bodies for more enemy body counts. When we made contact, we would always withdraw at least fifty meters while calling in artillery on that vacated ground. Dick continually made time to think about the tactical aspects of his job and always had. This helped him nip things in the bud, becoming too wily to be baited into a trap. Like an old moss backed buck, he was continually honing his instincts for slipping the noose.............  Much later in Dick’s career, shortly after he was promoted to four-star general, Norman Schwarzkopf’s career had been sidelined in a dead-end job. However, Dick suggested to Norman’s boss that he choose Schwarzkopf to lead the Grenada Campaign. Norman then became a shoo-in to lead coalition forces against Iraq to free Kuwait. Leading troops into Kuwait was a life-changing event for Norman and a great victory for freedom across the world. It would never have happened if Dick had not been allowed to prove himself on the battlefields of Vietnam. Still, in June 1967, it seemed that Dick would never get that opportunity.
     To make matters worse, he was not predisposed to do anything about it. To do that, he would have had to become a self-promoting little man. Dick was just too big a man to fit in those little man shoes. It seemed destined for other battalion commanders to continue being chosen to lead operations instead of Dick. His career was weighted toward ending in a fizzle rather than a shooting star. He would have been left with a great retirement, but he would never have been given the chance to become a greater reflection of Henrietta’s eternal legacy. Of course, his career did not fizzle. Instead, just the opposite happened. However, I very much doubt that Dick realized the why or the how of that. Dick was utterly content with his life as it was. In a phone conversation, he once described his promotion to four-star general as “a moon shot.” I cringed when he made this remark. I wanted to say, “No, Dick, it was not a moon shot. Instead, you were made a part of God’s grander picture, which is too large for anyone to comprehend fully.” You see, mediocrity and chance are not words that have any place in describing God’s works, and Henrietta King’s legacy is an eternal work of God. During Operation Billings, the hand of God would turn the tables and create a much greater opportunity for Dick than he could ever have imagined. That was not done for Dick. Dick had not chosen to develop his own eternal legacy, but he had chosen to be a reflection of that ranch legacy. The grunts, whom Dick commanded and cherished, would greatly benefit from Dick’s reflected values. However, there is an even better way. A better way is to let the light of Jesus Christ burning within us, believers, guide us in charting our personal eternal legacy, even in the total darkness of this world, as Henrietta King and, more recently, Charlie Kirk have done.