My American Journey

by Colin L. Powell

  That brief lapse was not fatal to John Pardo. Nearly thirty years later, soldiers at Fort Myer were treated to a rare sight: the deputy national security advisor to the President and a prominent New York graphics designer (Powell and Pardo, respectively) and other paunchy, middle-aged men carrying out a rusty version of their old trick drill fireworks in front of my residence at a reunion of the Pershing Rifles.

  We all still remain in touch—Tony DePace, Mark Gatanas, Rich Goldfarb, Bill Scott, John Theologos, and others who made Army careers, retiring as full colonels, and Sam Ebbesen, a black, who rose to lieutenant general. Some who stayed in were killed in Vietnam. Most of those who did not remain in the military have been successful, like Pardo, in civilian careers. Vietnam also killed the ROTC program and the Pershing Rifles at CCNY in the early seventies, which I deeply regret. Not only did our citizen Army lose a special kind of officer, one coming out of the inner city, but we have denied to these young people an opportunity to maintain structure in their lives and to make a useful contribution to their country. Too bad.

  On June 9, 1958, at 8:00 P.M., I entered CCNY’s Aronowitz Auditorium. A few weeks before, my father had come into my room, sat on the edge of the bed, and, with a twinkling eye, handed me an envelope. He had cleaned out a savings account that he and my mother had been keeping for me since I was a child. Six hundred dollars. I was rich! The first thing I did was to head downtown to Morry Luxenberg’s, regarded as the best military haberdasher in New York, to be outfitted.

  The First Army band was playing and I was wearing Morry’s uniform when I strode past my parents onto the Aronowitz Auditorium stage. “I, Colin Luther Powell, do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies foreign and domestic,” I repeated with my classmates, “and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office upon which I am about to enter, so help me God.” We live in a more cynical age today. We are embarrassed by expressions of patriotism. But when I said those words almost four decades ago, they sent a shiver down my spine. They still do.

  Because I was a “Distinguished Military Graduate,” I was offered a regular rather than a reserve commission, which meant that I would have to serve three rather than two years on active duty. I eagerly accepted.

  For me, graduation from college the next day was anticlimactic. The night before, after our commissioning, I had gone out celebrating with the boys. We had resumed the revelry the following noon at a college hangout called the Emerald Bar. My mother, knowing where to find me, had to send a cousin to haul me over to my graduation, which in her mind had been the whole point of the previous four and a half years. I tended to look on my B.S. in geology as an incidental dividend.

  For much of our growing up, Marilyn and I had been “latchkey kids,” left by ourselves or with neighbors and relatives after school. This situation is supposed to be a prescription for trouble. But that day, Luther and Arie Powell, Jamaican immigrants, garment-district workers, were the parents of two college graduates, with their son now an Army officer as well. Small achievements as the world measures success, but mountaintops in their lives. Thirty-five years later, I was asked by Parade magazine to talk about those two people. “My parents,” I said, “did not recognize their own strengths.” It was nothing they ever said that taught us, I recalled. “It was the way they lived their lives,” I said. “If the values seem correct or relevant, the children will follow the values.” I had been shaped not by preaching, but by example, by moral osmosis. Banana Kelly, the embracing warmth of an extended family, St. Margaret’s Church, and let’s weave in the Jamaican roots and a little calypso—all provided an enviable send-off on life’s journey.

  I also owe an unpayable debt to the New York City public education system. I typified the students that CCNY was created to serve, the sons and daughters of the inner city, the poor, the immigrant. Many of my college classmates had the brainpower to attend Harvard, Yale, or Princeton. What they lacked was money and influential connections. Yet they have gone on to compete with and often surpass alumni of the most prestigious private campuses in this country.

  I have made clear that I was no great shakes as a scholar. I have joked over the years that the CCNY faculty handed me a diploma, uttering a sigh of relief, and were happy to pass me along to the military. Yet, even this C-average student emerged from CCNY prepared to write, think, and communicate effectively and equipped to compete against students from colleges that I could never have dreamed of attending. If the Statue of Liberty opened the gateway to this country, public education opened the door to attainment here. Schools like my sister’s Buffalo State Teachers College and CCNY have served as the Harvards and Princetons of the poor. And they served us well. I am, consequently, a champion of public secondary and higher education. I will speak out for them and support them for as long as I have the good sense to remember where I came from.

  Shortly before the commissioning ceremony in Aronowitz Auditorium, Colonel Brookhart called me into his office in the drill hall. “Sit down, Mr. Powell,” he said. I did, sitting at attention. “You’ve done well here. You’ll do well in the Army. You’re going to Fort Benning soon.”

  He warned me that I needed to be careful. Georgia was not New York. The South was another world. I had to learn to compromise, to accept a world I had not made and that was beyond my changing. He mentioned the black general Benjamin O. Davis, who had been with him at West Point, where Davis was shunned the whole four years by his classmates, including, I assumed, Brookhart. Davis had gotten himself into trouble in the South, Brookhart said, because he had tried to buck the system. The colonel was telling me, in effect, not to rock the boat, to be a “good Negro.”

  I do not remember being upset by what he said. He meant well. Like all of us, Brookhart was a product of his times and his environment. Beneath the West Point armor, he was a caring human being. I thanked him and left.

  I took my girl out to Coney Island for a final fling, and a few days after graduation, I headed for Georgia. My parents expected that I would serve the three years, and after that, come back to New York and begin to make something of my life.

  Two

  A Soldier’s Life for Me

  I CAN REMEMBER THE MOMENT I HAD MY FIRST DOUBT ABOUT THE CAREER I had chosen. It happened in the mountains of northern Georgia as I hurtled along a cable at a height of one hundred feet, seconds from being smashed against a large tree. This exercise was called the Slide for Life, and the Army was making me perform it to see if I was scared. I was.

  The slide also tested our willingness to obey what seemed like suicidal orders. The cable had been strung across a river, attached to trees at either end, starting high, then sloping steeply. At my turn, I climbed the tree and looked down at the troops on the other side, who from this height looked small. I grabbed a hook attached to a pulley that ran along the cable. The challenge was to ride the cable and not let go until the instructor on the other bank yelled, “Drop!” Before I had time to think, another instructor pushed me off. Suddenly I was careening down the wire at terrifying speed, the tree on the other side, looking bigger and bigger, rushing up to meet me. Would that bastard ever say the word? At what seemed the last possible second, he yelled, and I plunged into the water a dozen feet from the tree. It was one of the most frightening experiences of my life.

  The Slide for Life was one of the joys cooked up for us during the two months at Ranger school that followed eight weeks of basic infantry training at Fort Benning, Georgia. The first two weeks of Ranger school had involved physical challenges, designed to make the basic course seem like a stroll down Westchester Avenue. The idea was to weed out the weak before we moved on to Ranger training in the Florida swamplands. A couple of weeks of wading in swamp water and living off alligator and rattlesnake cured me forever of any desire to invest in Florida real estate.

  We then went to northern Georgia for mountain training. Our Ranger instructors led us to wild terrain near Dahlo
nega, where the nights were cold and the mornings damp. We were supposed to bunk in wooden cabins, though we rarely saw the inside of them. We lived outdoors, scaling cliffs, crossing gorges on three-rope bridges, patrolling in the dark of night in hip-deep water, and sleeping on the ground, never for very long. We learned the Australian rappel. With a rope slung behind, you stepped off the edge of a cliff so that you were facedown, horizontal to Mother Earth. You then proceeded to “run” down the cliff by letting out slack on the rope, a little like Fred Astaire tap-dancing on a wall. It was quite thrilling, once you accepted that you were not going to land face first on the rocks 150 feet below.

  My Army career had begun a few months before on a gloriously sunny morning in June 1958. That day, I found myself standing in front of the bachelor officers’ quarters at Fort Benning, Georgia, which would be my home, on and off, for the next five months. Across the road from the BOQ was the airborne training ground, and rising above it, like a thrill ride at an amusement park, stood three 250-foot practice jump towers. I studied them with considerable personal interest. If you were regular Army, if you were infantry, then you wanted to be the best, and that meant becoming a Ranger and a paratrooper. Those jump towers, however, looked terribly high.

  Newly commissioned lieutenants from ROTC killed time waiting for the latest class of West Pointers to finish their graduation leaves and join us for the basic course. This marked the first time any of us would be competing head to head with academy graduates, and the ROTC guys seemed to think West Pointers had a median height of ten feet. When they arrived, they turned out to be like colts happily out of the corral after four years of regimentation, and we all got along fine.

  That first day, we mustered in front of the Infantry School by the legendary Follow Me statue, a bronze infantryman, rifle held high, leading men into battle. It was only forged metal to me at the time, but in the weeks to follow I was to learn that this statue captured perfectly the infantry officer’s code. We were about to be taught a deadly serious calling, and its creed was “Follow Me.”

  I found the class work and weapons training easy enough. But the field course turned out to be tough. One feat especially tested a lad from the gridlike streets of the South Bronx—a five-mile, nighttime compass hike to locate a stake planted somewhere in the Georgia wilds.

  By the time the basic course ended, the meaning of “Follow Me” had been hammered home. The infantry’s mission was “to close with and destroy the enemy.” No questions asked. No ambiguity. No gray areas. The infantry officer was to go into battle up front, demonstrating courage, determination, strength, proficiency, and selfless sacrifice. We were to march into hell, if necessary, to accomplish the mission. At the same time, we were taught to fulfill this responsibility while trying to keep ourselves and our men from being killed. For years, I have told young officers that most of what I know about military life I learned in my first eight weeks at Fort Benning. I can sum up those lessons in a few maxims:

  —“Take charge of this post and all government property in view”—the Army’s first general order.

  —The mission is primary, followed by taking care of your soldiers.

  —Don’t stand there. Do something!

  —Lead by example.

  —“No excuse, sir.”

  —Officers always eat last.

  —Never forget, you are an American infantryman, the best.

  —And never be without a watch, a pencil, and a notepad.

  The soul of the Army, particularly the infantryman’s Army, was captured for me in an old poem by Colonel C. T. Lanham that I first read at Fort Benning. It tells the plight of the lowly foot soldier, going all the way back to the Roman legions, and describes the fear, the death he has to face with blind obedience. It ends:

  I see these things.

  Yet am I slave,

  When banners flaunt and bugles blow,

  Content to fill a soldier’s grave,

  For reasons I will never know.

  We were taught at Fort Benning, however, that American soldiers must know the reason for their sacrifices. Our GIs are not vassals or mercenaries. They are the nation’s sons and daughters. We put their lives at risk only for worthy objectives. If the duty of the soldier is to risk his life, the responsibility of his leaders is not to spend that life in vain. In the post-Vietnam era, when I rose to a position where I had to recommend where to risk American lives, I never forgot that principle.

  I finished the basic course in the top ten of the class, validating my ROTC and Pershing Rifles preparation. I was now a certified professional. The Ranger school that followed, with its tests like the Slide for Life and the Australian rappel, occupied us for the next two months. One of our most memorable Ranger instructors was a black first lieutenant, Vernon Coffey, who seemed to be made of flexible steel. Coffey drove us mercilessly, push-ups, sit-ups, and running until we were ready to drop. Lack of motion offended Ranger Coffey. We stood in awe of the man. I could not imagine myself ever matching his strength and endurance. Coffey was the first black officer I knew who was at the top of his game, the first so good that respect for him transcended race.

  The Army was becoming more democratic, but I was plunged back into the Old South every time I left the post. I could go into Wool-worth’s in Columbus, Georgia, and buy anything I wanted, as long as I did not try to eat there. I could go into a department store and they would take my money, as long as I did not try to use the men’s room. I could walk along the street, as long as I did not look at a white woman.

  While we were training in the north Georgia mountains, the only black church was some distance away in Gainesville. I wanted to go to services on Sundays, and the Army thoughtfully provided me with a half-ton truck and a driver, a white corporal, to take me to Gainesville. There I sang and swayed with the rest of the Baptist congregation. The next Sunday, the corporal pointed out that because he had to drive me to church, he could not attend services himself. Would it be all right, he wanted to know, if he joined me? The minister was a kindly man and said it would ordinarily give him great pleasure to have the corporal among his flock. But his presence in a black church might not sit well with the local white folks. It might be wiser if the corporal waited in the truck.

  What my father had feared, what Colonel Brookhart had warned me of, the reality I wanted to ignore, was forcing its way into my life, the lunatic code that made it wrong for two men to sit together in a house of God, or share a meal in a restaurant, or use the same bathroom.

  Racism was still relatively new to me, and I had to find a way to cope psychologically. I began by identifying my priorities. I wanted, above all, to succeed at my Army career. I did not intend to give way to self-destructive rage, no matter how provoked. If people in the South insisted on living by crazy rules, then I would play the hand dealt me for now. If I was to be confined to one end of the playing field, then I was going to be a star on that part of the field. Nothing that happened off-post, none of the indignities, none of the injustices, was going to inhibit my performance. I was not going to let myself become emotionally crippled because I could not play on the whole field. I did not feel inferior, and I was not going to let anybody make me believe I was. I was not going to allow someone else’s feelings about me to become my feelings about myself. Racism was not just a black problem. It was America’s problem. And until the country solved it, I was not going to let bigotry make me a victim instead of a full human being. I occasionally felt hurt; I felt anger; but most of all I felt challenged. I’ll show you!

  After Ranger school, I reported for airborne training, physically exhausted, underweight, and fighting a leg infection that I had picked up sliding down a mountain. I said nothing about the leg and just kept slathering the wound with antibiotic ointment. I was determined not to fall behind. First week: dropped from parachute trainers a few feet off the ground. Second week: dropped from the top of those 250-foot towers, astonished that the parachute actually saved me from being pulped. Third wee
k: into the air aboard a twin-engine C-123 transport. I felt a cold anxiety as I stood in the door of the plane, battered by the wind, waiting for the jumpmaster’s signal. Jumping into nothingness goes against our deepest human instincts. Nevertheless, I made five jumps in two days.

  Rappelling off cliffs, sliding for life, and jumping out of airplanes answered a question that I think everyone secretly asks: Do I have physical courage? I dreaded doing these things. If I never have to parachute again, that will be fine with me, yet there was never any doubt in my mind that I would do what had to be done. I usually volunteered to go first to get the chore out of the way, which may reveal more practicality than courage. These experiences are rites of passage. Physical danger that people face and master together bonds them in some mystical way. And conquering one’s deepest fears is exhilarating.

  The day came when we mustered on the parade ground under the jump towers, standing stiff as pikes in our Corcoran commercial jump boots (paid for out of pocket, since no self-respecting paratrooper would be caught dead wearing Army-issue boots), and received paratrooper wings to complement our black-and-gold Ranger tabs. We were not just infantrymen, we were airborne Rangers; and the way we said it was “airborneranger,” all one word. In all the American infantry, there is no cockier soldier.

  I went home on leave like someone returning from another planet, from the Deep South to Queens, from rigid military discipline to casual civilian life, from the rugged companionship of young men to mothers, fathers, aunts, and uncles. One of my first stops was at CCNY to visit the Pershing Rifles and let them see this extraordinary five-month transformation in one of the brothers. “Colin! Airborneranger.” I could see the wonder in their eyes, and I reveled in it. I was twenty-one and on the launchpad of life. I had a girlfriend. My parents were proud of me, though horrified when I told them I had jumped out of a plane. And I was about to see the world. My first orders sent me to the 3d Armored Division in West Germany. In that Cold War era, when the globe seemed divided between white and red, I was excited to be going to the front line, with our godless communist adversary deployed just across the Iron Curtain.