McMaster, who retains his rank, will want a fourth star and, if he keeps his head about him when all around are losing theirs, he'll deserve it.
McMaster earned his gold spurs (complete with a hat like that of Robert Duvall in Apocalypse Now) as a captain and tank commander in the first Gulf War, where his eight-tank troop took out 80 Iraqi army tanks without loss. Partly that was due to superior equipment -- the Abrams tank -- but he deserved his Silver Star.
After his battlefield exploits, McMaster turned academic with a PhD in military history, and published his thesis, Dereliction of Duty, in which he took to task those general officers who, during Vietnam, failed to correct the over-optimism of their bosses, Lyndon Johnson and McNamara, compounding the losses.
In 2004, just as the Iraq invasion was beginning to turn to custard, McMaster, now a colonel, was assigned to Tal Afar in Ambar Province. The town was a stronghold for the insurgency, costing American lives.
Instead of following the policies then prevalent of quartering his 2000 troops in a fortified compound and striking out from there on raids, McMaster stationed his men among the Iraqis. He cultivated relationships with local leaders and gradually won their trust.
He shifted the focus to protection of the civilians and, with that as a base, he was able to pacify the area. His adroit handling of the incipient conflicts between local Sunni and Shia forestalled the sectarian violence that was to come later, after he left Tal Afar.
Several contemporaneous observers -- George Packer of the New Yorker, Thomas Ricks in his book The Gamble -- credit McMaster as the model that then Major General David Petraeus developed as a general plan for counter-insurgency, boosting his own career to stratospheric political heights.
What's not sufficiently emphasised is that such successful efforts as McMaster's were dissipated by rotating him to a new assignment, leaving the field ripe for the return of the insurgency which soon metastasised to sectarian civil war and hence to ISIS.
McMaster assisted Petraeus in writing the Counter Insurgency Manual -- thus finding his rabbi, as the saying goes.
McMaster was twice passed over for his brigadier's star, but got it when a grateful Petraeus intervened.
One thing this episode demonstrates: McMaster was not afraid to speak truth to power, but he also knew when to keep his own light under a bushel (and keep his mouth shut).
In this White House, the equivalent of Tal Afar is the war between the Bannon and Priebus factions, with orchestration by Vice President Mike Pence. McMaster will need all he learned in Iraq to avoid being caught in the crossfire, to keep his head and to somehow steady the President.
It may be whistling in the dark, but McMaster's appointment is reason for restrained optimism. In a place of tumult, where the boss is the consummate empty suit, with access to nuclear weapons, preoccupied with his own grandiosity, and susceptible to advisers who want to burn the house down with apocalyptic designs, it's nice to know there's at least one adult in the room who knows how to use a fire extinguisher.
�Jay Kuten is an American-trained forensic psychiatrist who emigrated to New Zealand for the fly fishing. He spent 40 years comforting the afflicted and intends to spend the rest afflicting the comfortable.
