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he fired his first shot at my buddy’s head, I attacked the senior man with my bare hands. I managed to disarm him as he fired all the rounds in his pistol’s magazine at the wall and ceiling. As he struggled to regain control of the pistol, two other new sergeants and I beat him savagely. Later, I could never explain how any of us survived.
    In March of 1969, at the end of my self-extended tour of duty, I was the non-commissioned officer in charge of a detail in Saigon. It was supposed to be a boondoggle—an R&R disguised as an official mission.
    On the last night of our sojourn, the NVA sent a barrage of 122 mm rockets into Saigon. One rocket hit our hotel in Cholon, destroying the fourth floor and setting the building on fire. My men and I remained on the 11th floor for several hours, trapped by the conflagration.
    By all rights and every law of physics, the whole place should have burned to the ground. No fire department ever arrived to fight the flames. Miraculously, the fire burned out before it reached our floor. Americans died in the attack. Once again, I made it through unscathed.
    I wasn’t blind. I could see how lucky I’d been. I wondered why I was the recipient of such good fortune. It wasn’t the guilt of the survivor. Something more profound was at work.
    Becoming a Paratrooper and serving in Vietnam fulfilled a dream that I had since sixth grade, when I read a book about the Airborne that Sister Mary Assumption had purchased for our class library. The experience proved to be all that I’d hoped and feared it would be—and much, much more. The Army finished the job that the Jesuits started.

Chapter Three
    May 3, 1999, 11:45 A.M
    Major Crimes Section
    Office of the United States Attorney
    Tampa Division, Middle District of Florida
    I wouldn’t trade my experiences as an enlisted man and non-commissioned officer for anything. Only my wife, sons, daughters, and grandchildren have more value.
    In the three decades after the war, I had many successes and some dismal failures. After Vietnam, I married an Army nurse. We had two daughters. We put each other through college: grad school for her and law school for me.
    In 1974, I returned to active duty in the Army as a Captain in the Judge Advocate General’s Corps. I’d found a way to reconcile my two treasured goals. My first assignment as an officer was with the 82nd Airborne Division. For the next few years, I jumped out of airplanes and tried criminal cases in courts-martial.
    My extraordinary good fortune continued during my first tour at Bragg. In 1976, I survived a helicopter crash in an OH-58 Kiowa that had lost all power during takeoff.
    As he was lifting from the Division Headquarters’ pad at the edge of the ridgeline overlooking Gruber Avenue, the pilot tried to auto-rotate the 100 feet to the ground. He had limited success. The helicopter crashed into a space between several stout pine trees, destroying the main rotor, fracturing the airframe, and catching on fire. Although the crew and I limped away, the pilot had compressed several vertebrae. He never flew again. Once again, my overworked guardian angel had kept me safe.
    My first marriage did not survive Fort Bragg. After we broke up, I remained single for eight years. In the interim, I earned an advanced legal degree at George Washington University, served at the Army War College, did a second tour at Bragg, and taught Constitutional and Criminal Law at the Judge Advocate General’s School at the University of Virginia.
    In 1984, I married a female officer in the JAG Corps. It took.
    The Army assigned us to posts near Washington, D.C. In 1986, during the Iran-Contra Scandal, the Army posted me as the General Counsel of the White House Office of Emergency Operations. Almost everything about that job was classified. I can tell you that I had to travel a lot.
    On a very snowy morning in January of 1987, I tried to drive from the District to a site in Western Virginia. I got as far as