The Warrior (continued)

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His first major test as a leader came just before the summer monsoon season. It was cloudy and cooler than usual, and very, very dark. They got to the Vietnamese graveyard at midnight, exactly as planned. The graveyard overlooked a road that the Vietcong used when getting rice from a nearby village. It was a perfect spot for an ambush, and as Cirie positioned the twenty-four men he had brought on the mission so that they were in a line parallel to the road, he said to himself that everything was going like clockwork; nothing could go wrong.

Now his men were sitting or squatting, their weapons trained on the killing zone along the road. Cirie started working his way from one end of the line to the other, moving as quietly as he could in the pitch darkness, putting his hand on each Marine's shoulder in turn, making sure that weapons were pointed in the right direction, whispering words of encouragement. He was just three feet from the last man in the line, a machine gunner, just making out the man's dark outline, just reaching out to touch his shoulder, when the inexplicable happened. The machine gunner jumped to his feet in terror, and, almost at the same instant, Cirie found himself looking straight into the bright-orange muzzle flashes of AK-47 automatic rifles, less than six feet away.

They figured it all out later and realized the odds for its happening that way were about a million to one. A group of Vietcong had picked the same spot for an ambush, and had moved in only minutes after the Marines. The first VC, in fact, had probably bumped into the machine gunner in the darkness, then had raised his gun and fired. At that instant, without thought, Cirie dropped to the ground and started firing his pistol in the direction of the muzzle flashes. His men also began firing, but most of them, not knowing what had happened, were aiming at the road, not the Vietcong. The machine gunner lay dying a few feet away. Bullets were flying everywhere.

For Cirie, it was a moment outside of time. Lying there on the ground firing at the VC in a void of darkness lit only by muzzle flashes, he was briefly tempted to do nothing more, to indulge in the luxury of incomprehension. But he rose to his feet, amazed at how calm he felt. His overriding sensation was one of relief; at last he was getting a chance to do what he as a leader was supposed to do. He began moving among his men, telling them to stop firing, to watch the flanks, to stay calm. He ordered flares shot up to light the scene. And all the time he was doing this, he was strangely, marvelously detached, almost as if he were out of his body. The Marines stayed there until it started getting light, then returned to their base camp. The Vietcong had withdrawn, leaving a trail of blood, but none of their dead or wounded.

The episode in the graveyard - one more variation in an age-old story - sealed Cirie's unspoken compact with his men. What they had learned to expect from a leader was fulfilled.

Four years later, Cirie returned to Vietnam as a captain, a U.S. advisor to a South Vietnamese battalion. And there were more of those moments outside ordinary time, more days of tedium and hours of terror, more than enough opportunities to look inside yourself in the presence of death. And, for what it was worth, there was a validation that comes with decorations and words about valor above and beyond the call of duty.