Lyman White received his US Army commission from West Point, class of 1961. After airborne training, Ranger school, and the officer basic course at Fort Benning, he was assigned to the 82nd Airborne as a platoon leader at Fort Bragg. He went through the MATA (Military Assistance Training Advisor) course, and had language training at Monterey before he deployed for the first time to Vietnam in 1964 as an assistant battalion adviser with the ARVN 33rd Rangers. White returned to the U.S. as a captain and taught at West Point for four years before returning to Vietnam for a second tour, this time with the 1st Battalion, 52nd Infantry Regiment, 198th Light Infantry Brigade, Americal Division, “which did not have a very good reputation at the time.” By then a major, White remembers arriving to find “a lot of ragbag troops sitting around … that I didn't know we had in the Army.” But that was the rear. In the bush, he recalls, these were “good kids,” led by “some of the finest Soldiers in the Army.” White offers insights on leadership: “He could listen, and would listen, whether you were a lieutenant, a sergeant, or a lieutenant colonel, and … he would absorb what you said and he would factor that into his thinking process of what he wanted to do next. And that was an amazing trait. That's not battlefield valor and all that, but that's a mark, I think, of a good leader.” He discusses the ingenuity of the American GI (blowing up rats with Claymores), focusing on body count (“important up the chain of command,” but “not a very pleasant subject to talk about”), briefing a new division commander (“I'm running my mouth, telling him all about this brigade area and everything, and he'd spent a year there as a brigade commander”). He also discusses the difficulty of losing friends, and the two anchors in his life: West Point and his wife.