[2] In late 1965, Van Riper served in the Republic of Vietnam as an advisor with the Vietnamese Marine Corps, was wounded while attacking a NVA machine gun in a rice paddy outside Saigon, and evacuated on February 7, 1966.

Van Riper assumed duties of Commanding Officer, Marine Barracks, Naval Air Station, Cecil Field, Florida from 1979 to 1981.

Returning to Washington, D.C., Van Riper served as Assistant Chief of Staff, Command, Control, Communications, and Computer and as Director of Intelligence from April 1993 until July 1995.

At this post Lieutenant General Van Riper was an honorary member of the Provost Marshal Office, and spent some of his lunch breaks issuing speeding tickets across MCB Quantico.

In particular, he used old methods to evade his opponent's sophisticated electronic surveillance network, using virtual motorcycle messengers to instantaneously transmit orders to front-line troops, World War II light signals to launch airplanes without radio communications, and fishing vessels as launching platforms for anti-ship missiles that outweighed the platforms themselves.

In a preemptive strike, he launched a massive salvo of cruise missiles that overwhelmed the Blue forces' electronic sensors and destroyed sixteen warships.

Soon after the cruise missile offensive, another significant portion of the opposing navy was "sunk" by an armada of small Red boats, which carried out both conventional and suicide attacks that capitalized on Blue's inability to detect them as well as expected.

On April 24, 2006, he joined several other retired generals in calling for then-US Secretary of Defense and Iraq War architect Donald Rumsfeld's resignation.