To Matt Ridgway, the military was not just a career, it was a calling. His sense of duty had a touch of the mystical to it. “He was,” noted a West Point contemporary, Russell Reeder, “a twelfth-century knight with a twentieth-century brain.” Even in the peacetime Army he seemed different—not merely better read and more serious, but more committed than other men. George Catlett Marshall, whose protégé he became, had to warn him repeatedly about pushing himself too hard.
