We had to move quickly if Alma was to come with me to Fort Bragg for my training. We decided on a wedding just two weeks off, Saturday, August 25, 1962, in Birmingham, to be performed at the Congregational Church, with a reception at the Johnson home.
I alerted Ronnie Brooks, who was in Providence, Rhode Island, completing doctoral work in chemistry at Brown University. Ronnie, my role model, the perfect soldier, had served the minimum six months of obligated service on active duty and then had chosen civilian life. “Whoa,” Ronnie said, when I told him about my imminent marriage. “Hold everything.” I was to wait until he came up to Boston to see what kind of jam I had gotten into. When Ronnie arrived a few nights later, Alma had a delicious Southern dinner waiting for him. That settled it for Ronnie Brooks. He got up, walked around the table, kissed Alma, and nominated himself best man.
And then we hit a snag. “I’m not going to the wedding,” Pop informed me. “You wouldn’t catch me dead in Birmingham.” Luther Powell was not about to go anywhere where he would have to assume second-class citizenship. “I’ll send you a telegram with my best wishes,” he said. Mom, bless her, said that she did not care what Luther did; she was going to see her son get married. Marilyn and Norm reported in from Buffalo that they were coming to the wedding. Pop had to rethink his position. As an interracial couple in the South, his daughter and son-in-law were bound to get into trouble. “If they’re gonna lynch Norm,” Pop said, “we might as well all be there. I may have to buy off the lynchers.”
I went to see my boss, Lieutenant Colonel Abernathy, and asked for a weekend pass to get married. I promised that I would be back on the job Monday morning. Abernathy shook my hand warmly and said, “I think the battalion might survive three days without you, Lieutenant.”
The next ten days were a blur as Alma and her mother went about the preparations with the zeal of the Allies planning D-Day. Mildred found spare rooms in her friends’ homes where my family could stay. She produced a relative who volunteered to host the wedding-eve dinner. Alma’s sister, Barbara, was to be the maid of honor. Ronnie and I were instructed to wear our summer tan dress uniforms, assuming Ronnie still fit in his, after a couple of years on civilian rations. In Boston, Alma and I bought simple gold wedding bands to exchange, and then she went on ahead to Birmingham. I arrived in time for the dinner and reception the night before.
R. C. Johnson turned out to be a big, deadly serious man and not one to mince words. In later years, I would occasionally run into black soldiers from Birmingham who had gone to Parker High, R.C.’s school. When I mentioned that their old principal was my father-in-law, I got a fairly standard reaction: “You married R.C.’s daughter? You’re one brave dude.” Actually, R.C. was glad that Alma was getting married, though he was not crazy about my occupation or the fact that I was about to go off for a year. And he definitely was not overjoyed at having a West Indian son-in-law. After we had phoned to tell the Johnsons that we were getting married, R.C. had muttered to his wife, “All my life I’ve tried to stay away from those damn West Indians and now my daughter’s going to marry one!” Between Luther, who resisted the South, and R.C., who resisted Luther’s kind, this should be some weekend!
My folks arrived in Birmingham, and Pop, having survived so far unlynched, began having a grand old time. He loved parties, baptisms, weddings, wakes, and funerals, anything that brought people together. The Johnsons and their circle were now his lifelong friends, even if he had never laid eyes on them until a few hours before.
August is Alabama at its hottest. On the wedding day, in the packed church, you could hear the rustling as women tried to cool themselves with fans provided by a local funeral home. As the Reverend J. Clyde Perry began the ceremony, Ronnie and I marched in smartly from a side entrance, came to a halt as we hit our mark, did a right-face, clicked our heels, and stood at attention as if we were in drill competition. The funeral-home fans created a veritable wind as the congregation oohed and aahed. Alma, attended by her sister Barbara, came down the aisle on the arm of a solemn-faced R.C. I was struck by how radiant she looked and by her serene self-possession. In a few minutes, this beautiful woman was going to be my wife.
Afterward, we retired to the Johnsons’ home for the reception. Here my folks discovered that they do it differently down South. No booze. No music. Few refreshments. You entered the front door, dropped off your gift, signed the guest book, went through the receiving line in the parlor, continued on to the dining room, where you were handed a glass of punch and a piece of cake, and kept moving toward the kitchen, where you deposited your empty glass and plate before being ushered out the back door. The reception lasted a little over an hour. On the spot, Luther and Arie started planning a different kind of wedding party for New York.
We spent our honeymoon night at the A. G. Gaston Motel, the only decent place in town for a black couple. A. G. Gaston was a millionaire black entrepreneur who had made a fortune selling life insurance to blacks, business white insurance companies ignored. The next day, Alma and I flew back to Boston. Jackie had conveniently moved out of the apartment on Marlborough Street, and I moved in. After its having played a fateful part in our lives, nothing more came of the budding romance of Jackie Fields and Mike Heningburg. Monday morning, as promised, I reported in to Lieutenant Colonel Abernathy, and Alma returned to work at the Boston Guild for the Hard of Hearing.
A few days later, I answered the phone in our apartment. The caller was obviously puzzled to hear a male voice on the line. “Who are you?” he asked.
“Colin Powell,” I answered. “And who are you?”
“I’m Alma’s fiancé,” he informed me.
“How do you do,” I said. “I’m her husband.”
The conversation stumbled to an awkward close. We evidently had not had enough time to put my earlier rivals on notice that Alma was now spoken for.
A week later, on a Saturday morning, I answered a knock at the door barefooted, wearing only a T-shirt and chino pants. There stood a nice-looking guy with a box of candy under his arm and a smile on his face, which vanished at the sight of me. “What are you doing here?” he asked indignantly.
I explained my status in the household. Alma came into the room, and I thought it politic for me to fade. From the bedroom, I could hear parts of a brief, tense conversation. And then our visitor was gone. When I came back, I noticed that he had taken his candy with him. He was just an old friend, Alma told me, with an exaggerated notion of the degree of their friendship. She has stuck to this story for over thirty years.
The Powell wedding reception took place not long afterward at Elmira Avenue. Our guests showed up early in the afternoon, jamming the basement family room, carrying on until the last drop of rum gave out, which was at 4:00 A.M. Alma survived this second test of Jamaican hospitality, charming everybody in sight. What delighted me most was to see Luther and Arie beaming over their new daughter-in-law. After the staid, clockwork Johnson reception, the Powell party was a cultural one-eighty.
My cousin Vernon Lewis, whose interests included cake-baking, poker, the track, and his job as a cop, in that order, had been commissioned by Mom to bake a cake for this event. As the cake and Vernon failed to materialize, Arie became increasingly distraught, fearing that Vernon’s number two and three interests had overtaken number one, not an unheard-of development. At long last, Cousin Vernon appeared with the Versailles of wedding cakes and disarmed my mother with his usual charm: “Auntie Arie, how, even for a minute, could you have ever doubted that I would come through with a glorious creation?” And when, Alma wondered, would this parade of in-law characters ever end?
I enjoyed being married. I liked shopping with Alma on weekends. I liked having my wife meet my friends. I would race from Devens to our little nest in my car, a blue 1959 Volkswagen I had bought in Germany for $1,312. On one of these mad dashes, I was zipping along Route 2 when I noticed a convertible coming up fast behind me. Obviously, some New England Yankee intended to show me his dust. I push
ed the Beetle to the limit. Then, to my astonishment, a siren sounded. I pulled over. The driver got out, identified himself as a state trooper, and informed me that I was doing ninety in a fifty-five-mile-an-hour zone. “Officer,” I said, “you know and I know this car can’t go that fast.” My defense fell on unsympathetic ears. In those days, and occasionally today, I tend to want to see what my automobiles can do.
The carefree life that Alma and I were living was about to end. On September 24, a month after the wedding, the battalion threw a farewell party for us. Bill Abernathy read from a beautifully hand-lettered scroll emblazoned with the insignia of the 1st Battalion, 2d Infantry. “Hear ye, hear ye,” Abernathy began. “The chief paper shuffler of the battalion, being sent to the exotic land of poisoned darts and sharp bamboo sticks …” He went on to cite some of the memorable features of my service at Devens: “Battalion headquarters will miss the slam of the telephone, the bang of the clenched fist on the desk, the violent movements of your swivel chair.” Bill Louisell would have nodded.
Soon afterward, Alma and I packed everything we owned (which one Volkswagen could accommodate), made a brief visit to Elmira Avenue, and headed for Fort Bragg, North Carolina, where I was to take the Military Assistance Training Advisor course. Driving through Dixie with a new wife was more unnerving for me than the trip a few years before with a couple of Army buddies. I remember passing Woodbridge, Virginia, and not finding even a gas station bathroom that we were allowed to use. I had to pull off the road so that we could relieve ourselves in the woods.
At Fort Bragg, we tracked down a black rental agent and started looking for a furnished place in nearby Fayetteville where we could stay while I completed the MATA course. The kind of black middle-class neighborhood we hoped to find scarcely existed. I remember our first stop, a dilapidated house on a lot overgrown with weeds and strewn with rusty tin cans, plastic bags, and other rubbish. Inside the house, the floors were covered with cracked linoleum and the furniture looked as if it belonged outside with the trash. We shook our heads and went on to the next. Nothing else was much better. Finally, the agent told us that he had a solution. He was going to put us up in his own home. Our hopes rose. He stopped in front of a grim-looking place. The inside was even grimmer, with old people sitting around a dark room staring ahead vacantly. The agent showed us a bedroom in the back. We would have to provide our own bedding, and we would share the kitchen and bathroom with the rest of his boarders. We said thanks anyway and left.
We faced the bitter truth. I would have to send Alma back to Birmingham to stay with her parents while I spent my time at Bragg alone. The prospect was all the gloomier because this separation would be on top of the year I would be away. And Alma by now was pregnant.
On my first day at Bragg, I ran into an old Gelnhausen buddy, Joe Schwar, who was assigned there with the Special Forces, the Green Berets. Joe and his wife, Pat, invited us to dinner on what looked like the Powells’ last night together for a while. I was eager to have the Schwars meet Alma, though I wished we were in better spirits.
The Schwar household was a happy bedlam. Joe and Pat were living in a small government-issue three-bedroom duplex on the post with their three boys, Joey, Kevin, and Steve, all under age four. During dinner, I enjoyed swapping stories with Joe about Tom Miller, Red Man Barrett, and other characters we had known in Germany and watching Alma and Pat get acquainted. In the meantime, Joey and Kevin used the living room for the Indianapolis Speedway while baby Steve squealed enviously from his high chair.
Inevitably, the conversation got around to our housing plans. I explained that Alma would have to go back to Birmingham. Oh no, Pat said. She wouldn’t let that happen. We could stay with them. Joe chimed in, saying, “Sure you can.” The house was barely big enough for the five Schwars, and Alma said, “That’s nice of you, but we can’t impose.” Pat insisted. She had it all figured out. The two older boys could leave the bunk beds in their room and sleep on cots in baby Steve’s room. Alma and I would take over the boys’ room and sleep in their kid-size bunks. Not exactly the honeymoon suite; but their offer was so genuine and Alma and I hated so much to part that we said yes, and moved in the next day.
The Schwars’ kindness was not cost-free for them. Pat took heat from some of her neighbors, who were repelled by the idea of blacks moving in with a white family, even sharing the same bathroom. Pat Schwar is from South Philadelphia and as tough as she is kind. She told these people what they could do with their prejudices. What the Schwars did for two desperate newlyweds long years ago is one of the greatest kindnesses that Alma and I have ever experienced.
For five weeks at Fort Bragg’s Unconventional Warfare Center, I sat in classes studying French colonial history, learning the methods of communist takeovers, and trying to master a few Vietnamese phrases. We reviewed the history of U.S. involvement—how President Eisenhower had refused to intervene in the fifties when France was losing its eight-year war against Vietnamese nationalists and communists under Ho Chi Minh; how the country had then been divided between Ho in the North and a Western-oriented government in the South pending elections in 1956; how Ngo Dinh Diem, president of South Vietnam, had canceled the election in his half of the country and, facing communist attacks, had appealed to President Kennedy to save Vietnam from “the forces of international communism.” Kennedy had committed the United States to support the Diem regime by sending in more counterinsurgency advisors, all the rage then. By the end of 1961, 3,205 advisors were in Vietnam. The group I was part of would bring the total to well over 11,000. We felt we were in the thick of things, especially in October 1962 when the Cuban missile crisis erupted. Rumors swept the school that we were to be pulled out of class to fight the communists much closer than in Vietnam. I came home one night to find that Joe Schwar was gone and that his Special Forces detachment had been alerted for movement to a staging area in Florida. After days of heart-stopping tension, the superpowers backed away from the brink, and we completed our advisor course on schedule.
We had cause for celebration in the Schwar-Powell household that fall. Both Joe and I were promoted to captain several months early.
I was still excited over the Vietnam assignment as the course wrapped up in early December and I prepared to leave my wife of four months and the child she was carrying. By God, a worldwide communist conspiracy was out there, and we had to stop it wherever it raised its ugly head. I had helped man the frontiers of freedom in West Germany. Now it was time for me to man another frontier in the same fight on the other side of the world. It all had a compelling neatness and simplicity in 1962.
Shortly before Christmas, we said goodbye to Joe, Pat, and the little Schwars and headed for Birmingham, where Alma would stay while I was gone. The city lay in the heart of the Old South, incorporating all the menace that phrase conjured up for blacks. Alabama Governor George C. Wallace’s policy of “segregation forever” had become the white rallying cry. Birmingham was turning into a racial war zone, the rising civil rights movement, with its sit-ins and demonstrations, pitted against Eugene T. “Bull” Connor, the city’s brutal police chief, determined to hold Negroes down and keep agitators out, white or black. Not a happy time; not a happy place. Still, I felt reasonably relaxed about leaving Alma there. Her folks and her aunt and uncle had just built a new home for the four of them just outside Birmingham in what was regarded as a safe neighborhood. The house had a spare room for Alma and the baby, and nearby was the Holy Family Catholic Hospital for Alma’s confinement. Should the racial time bomb in Birmingham go off, Alma’s dad, tough old R.C., had a house full of guns that he had taken away from students over the years at Parker High.
I remember the mixed emotions of those last days at the Johnsons’. Alma and her mom went out and cut a Christmas tree, and we decorated it. We celebrated early, since my orders called for me to leave by December 23. If the Army sent me to Vietnam after Christmas, I cannot imagine it would have upset the Cold War balance; but mine was not to reason why. We
exchanged presents early, and I felt harsh reality intrude when we opened my mother-in-law’s gift to us, a pair of tape recorders so that Alma and I could communicate while I was gone. We said our goodbyes that morning, two days before Christmas, and I went to the airport by myself, since I am not comfortable with public displays of emotion.
I had learned something about Alma in those final weeks. Here was a young woman, soon to become a mother, whose husband was leaving for a long time for a far-off, dangerous place. She accepted our separation with stoic calm. Before meeting me, Alma had never imagined herself as an Army wife. But I knew that she was going to make the perfect life partner for this soldier.
I left Birmingham for Travis Air Force Base in California and arrived in Saigon on Christmas morning, 1962.
Part Two
SOLDIERING
Four
“It’ll Take Half a Million Men to Succeed”
MY IMAGES OF GOING TO WAR WERE FORMED BY FORTIES NEWSREELS, fifties movies, and early-sixties TV documentaries, and war was always in black and white. My arrival in Vietnam shattered all the preconceptions. I did not cross the Pacific in a crowded troop transport; I came on World Airways, a chartered commercial flight. I did not storm down the ramp of an LCI and hit the beach in waist-high water. I checked into the Rex, a hotel in Saigon turned into bachelor officers’ quarters. And I entered a world, not black and white, but painted in the colorful palette of a semitropical capital.
They say Irving Berlin was inspired to write “White Christmas” after spending the holidays amid palm trees during a Los Angeles heat wave. I had the same out-of-sync sensation checking into the Rex that muggy Christmas. That night, after a dinner in the hotel’s rooftop restaurant with other lonely new arrivals, I looked down on Tu Do Street, a handsome boulevard with a touch of Paris. White-uniformed traffic cops directed a flow of cars and “cyclos,” Vietnamese pedicabs, while fashionable women in silk ao dais moved in and out of elegant shops. The night air was soft, and, in the background, a jukebox played “Moon River,” a song whose lyrics did not ease my loneliness.
My American Journey Page 10