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North commanded a patrol platoon. He was "tough but fair," says Herrod, and always a stickler for safety regulations. He insisted, for example, that his men buckle their helmet chin straps, when most soldiers let them dangle free. In combat, North's first instinct was to attack, not hit the dirt. Ernest Tuten, who served under North for five months, says, "He had a philosophy that the best way to survive was to minimize your exposure to hostile fire, and the best way to do that was to assault the enemy."
North's Silver Star owes as much to determination as to bravery. He was leading his platoon near the demilitarized zone when the lead platoon came under heavy fire. North maneuvered his men through the lines and led an assault against the North Vietnamese, "calmly braving the intense fire of the tenacious hostile soldiers," as his citation puts it. After regrouping his men and directing the evacuation of the wounded, he renewed the attack three more times before driving the enemy from the field.
When North's tour of duty was over, he returned to Quantico to teach tactics. As an instructor, North was something of a hot dog: he wore camouflage to class, and once surprised his students by jumping on a desk and opening fire with an M16 loaded with blanks. North justified his histrionics by saying that his men must be prepared for anything. "If you screw up, you die," he told them.
Even friends who admired North sometimes found his ambition hard to take. Rob Pfeiffer, who taught with North at Quantico, recalls basketball games in which North constantly fed the ball to the commanding officer. "Ollie passed to him because he was in to make rank," recalls Pfeiffer. "He was going to be a general, and being in Quantico wasn't quite close enough to Washington for him."
North briefly left Quantico in 1973 to supervise jungle training in Okinawa. Once again, he never let up, working long hours and seven-day weeks. His wife was not with him, and toward the end of his tour, the strain seemed to trigger a depression. He voluntarily checked himself into Bethesda Naval Hospital for mental exhaustion and stayed three weeks. North has never spoken of the experience, and it was subsequently expunged from his record. When he was released, he was pronounced "fit for duty." North was helped through this trying period in his marriage by the works of Dr. James Dobson, a Christian counselor whose films on marriage were required for all U.S. soldiers.
It was at a later posting, the Naval War College in Newport, R.I., that North caught the attention of Navy Secretary John Lehman, who was impressed by a paper the young major wrote about the uses of the modern battleship. Lehman recommended North to National Security Adviser Richard Allen, who hired him for the NSC's Defense Policy Staff.
North had arrived. Soon he was working on counterterrorism, then the contras. "Many NSC people took to their assignment passively," says one colleague. "North was aggressive from the start." The man of action turned into a fiend for paperwork and was often at his cluttered desk by 7 a.m. and still there after midnight. "I've seen a lot of workaholics in this town," said one associate, "and believe me, nobody outworked Ollie."