My American Journey

by Colin L. Powell

  The next morning, Major General Charles M. Timmes gathered us in a conference room at the U.S. Military Assistance Advisory Group headquarters and delivered a rousing pep talk. Why had we left our loved ones behind? Why had we come here to fight halfway around the world? To stop the spread of Marxism; to help the South Vietnamese save their country from a communist takeover. That was the finest thing we could do for our families, our country, and freedom-loving people everywhere. I was fired up all over again. That afternoon we were driven out to the American military side of Tan Son Nhut Airport to be issued field gear, jungle fatigues, jungle boots, helmets—reminders of where we were headed.

  After a few more days of indoctrination in Saigon I was to head north to join up with the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN). I was to serve as advisor to the four-hundred-man 2d Battalion, 3d Infantry Regiment, of the 1st Division, posted in the tropical forest along the Laotian border at a place called A Shau. I had arrived in Vietnam in the rainy season, and getting to A Shau was not easy. You could either fly there in thirty hair-raising minutes or take weeks to walk in. The bad weather grounded flights for days, while I grew increasingly itchy to get moving. Finally, on January 17, at Quang Tri, I boarded a Marine H-34 helicopter loaded with ARVN replacements, bags of rice, and live chickens and pigs. We darted and bounced through thunderheads and showers over dense jungle terrain and plopped down onto a crude perforated-metal airstrip stamped out of the jungle. The pilot shouted for soldiers to unload the helo before the Viet Cong started taking potshots at us.

  I jumped to the ground, looked around, and felt as if I had been propelled backward in time. Shimmering in the heat of the sun was an earth-and-wood fortress ringed by pillboxes. But for the greenness, A Shau had a French Foreign Legion quality, Beau Geste without the sand. I stood there asking myself the question I am sure Roman legionnaires must have asked in Gaul—what the hell am I doing here? The A Shau Valley ran down the narrow northern neck of South Vietnam near the Laotian border and contained a crucial stretch of the Ho Chi Minh Trail, the main supply artery of our enemy, the Viet Cong. A Shau was one of four fortified bases running up to Laos, from which we were to interdict the flow of goods and men to the south. Rugged mountains rose up on the western side of the valley, and a wooded jungle bordered the east. Somewhere under that triple canopy of growth was the enemy.

  ARVN troops trotted out to the helicopter and began unloading. An American soldier came up, saluted, and introduced himself as Sergeant First Class Willard Sink. Sink led me through a barbed-wire gate into the compound, where a Vietnamese officer saluted and put out his hand. “Captain Vo Cong Hieu, commanding 2d Battalion,” he said in passable English. Hieu was my ARVN counterpart, the man I would be advising. He was short, in his early thirties, with a broad face and an engaging smile. But for the uniform, I would have taken him for a genial schoolteacher, not a professional soldier.

  The three of us headed toward a thatched hut of bamboo and grass, my new quarters. Inside was a frame cot, also of bamboo, set on a dirt floor, and not much else. A huge rat scampered from under the bed. “The A Shau Hilton,” Sink said. I threw my pack onto the cot and told Hieu I would like to go outside and have a look around the compound.

  Directly behind A Shau, a mountain loomed over us. I pointed toward it, and Hieu said with a grin, “Laos.” From that mountainside, the enemy could almost roll rocks down onto us. I wondered why the base had been established in such a vulnerable spot.

  “Very important outpost,” Hieu assured me.

  “What’s its mission?” I asked.

  “Very important outpost,” Hieu repeated.

  “But why is it here?”

  “Outpost is here to protect airfield,” he said, pointing in the direction of our departing Marine helo.

  “What’s the airfield here for?” I asked.

  “Airfield here to resupply outpost.”

  From my training at Fort Bragg, I knew our formal role here. We were to establish a “presence,” a word with a nice sophisticated ring. More specifically, we were supposed to engage the Viet Cong to keep them from moving through the A Shau Valley and fomenting their insurgency in the populated coastal provinces. But Hieu’s words were the immediate reality. The base camp at A Shau was there to protect an airstrip that was there to supply the outpost.

  I would spend nearly twenty years, one way or another, grappling with our experience in this country. And over all that time, Vietnam rarely made much more sense than Captain Hieu’s circular reasoning on that January day in 1963. We’re here because we’re here, because we’re …

  My first sensation at being among Vietnamese troops was one of towering over them and presenting a choice target. They were short and slight, and with their smooth faces they looked like kids, though most were in their twenties. They seemed barely trained but willing and obedient. What went on in their heads I had no idea, since they were mostly conscripts who hid their feelings behind a mask of polite submission.

  At our A Shau base camp, I was surprised to find families of Montagnards, nomadic people who populated this part of the country. Almost no Vietnamese lived here, only these mountain tribesmen and a few other indigenous minorities. I had expected to find the reputedly independent Montagnards living in the hills rather than on a military post, and I wondered what they were doing here. I would find out soon enough.

  After a couple of weeks, Captain Hieu came to my hut with the news I had been waiting for. We had our orders—we were going out on Operation Grasshopper, an extended patrol down the A Shau Valley. I had become restless at the base camp, working with Sergeant Sink, training the Vietnamese in marksmanship on the rifle range, teaching patrol tactics, helping with disciplinary problems, trying to be useful without taking over. The high point of my day, much of it spent in my hooch devouring paperback novels and smoking too much, was anticipating dinner, as the livestock that had flown in with me began appearing on the menu. The Americans ate what the Vietnamese ate. Breakfast: rice stuck together with some glutinous substance and shaped into what looked like an edible softball. Lunch: rice with vegetables. Dinner: more rice, with chunks of pork or goat and, as an occasional treat, a two-inch-square omelet, actually quite tasty. I was introduced to the ubiquitous Vietnamese fish-based sauce, nuoc mam. Nuoc mam was used so commonly that it entered the GI vocabulary as a good-natured gibe at anything Vietnamese. The national airline became “Air Nuoc Mam.” An older Vietnamese woman was a “nuoc mam mama.”

  At 3:00 A.M. on February 7, I threw my pack over my back, slung my M-2 carbine over my shoulder, and joined Hieu for a last inspection of the battalion before we moved out. Soon the long green line of troops was swallowed up by the dark jungle. I felt a tingling anticipation. A force of armed men moving into the unknown has a certain power, even a touch of majesty, although the squealing pigs and cackling chickens accompanying us in wicker baskets detracted somewhat from the martial aura.

  On this march, I discovered the reality of a triple-canopy tropical forest. The lowest stratum consisted of saw grass, bushes, vines, and small trees struggling for air. Adolescent trees formed the second canopy, densely packed, rising thirty or forty feet. The third canopy consisted of mature hardwoods, some over one hundred feet high. Unless we broke out into a clearing, we could go all day long without seeing the sun. Even in the shade, sweat bathed our faces and our uniforms turned soggy. The salt from our perspiration formed gray-white semicircles under our armpits and blotches on the backs of our fatigues. We constantly popped tablets to replenish our bodies’ salt supply. A distinctive smell clung to us, a pungent mixture of mud, dirty bodies, and rotting vegetation. Every day was an endless obstacle course, as we tried to make contact with the Viet Cong. We were constantly going “cross compartment,” following trails down one steep side of a valley and up the other, clambering over craggy rocks and fording streams. The physical demands validated every test the Army had put me through in Florida swamps and Georgia mountains.

  We moved in
clouds of insects. Worse were the leeches. I never understood how they managed to get through our clothing, under our web belts and onto our chests, through our bloused pants and onto our legs, biting the flesh and bloating themselves on our blood. We stopped as often as ten times a day to get rid of them. It did no good to pull the leeches off. Their bodies simply broke and the head remained biting into the skin. We had to stun them with bursts of insect repellent or the lit end of a cigarette, which made a hissing sound on contact.

  The trails we followed had been sown by the VC with snares and punji spikes, bamboo stakes concealed in a hole, the tip poisoned with buffalo dung. The first casualty I witnessed was a soldier who stepped onto a punji spike. For all the hardship, I was still excited to be on the trail, testing my endurance, feeling especially alive as strength and fatigue flowed alternately through my limbs.

  Our column stretched for nearly a mile, four hundred men trying to be quiet, the noncoms constantly shushing the troops, everyone taking care not to rustle a dry twig or step on a branch, eyes darting left and right, grinding out our meager advance in eerie silence, except for the calls of exotic birds and the chatter of monkeys. Then, at nightfall, when we made camp, all hell broke loose. The Vietnamese lit campfires, the flames rising and smoke billowing high into the air. The animals screeched as they were slaughtered for our evening meal. The men sat around the fires, mess kits clattering, talking freely as they ate. It was futile to try to keep them quiet. The noise, fire, and smoke must have announced our presence for miles. In the morning, after making tea, dousing the fires, cleaning out the rice pots, and dumping the hot water down the hillside, we would resume the trails, shushing each other again and making our silent way.

  It happened on the sixth day out as we were coming down a steep hillside. I was a quarter of the way back in the column, the customary place for advisors. It had been raining earlier, and the men ahead of me had churned the trail into a quagmire. As usual, we were moving in single file, which meant that the VC could halt the entire column by picking off the first man. I had repeatedly urged Hieu to break the battalion into three or four parallel columns, but the forest was so dense and the passes so narrow in places that Hieu let this bit of American wisdom go politely unheeded.

  I had just arrived at the bottom of a narrow creek bed when I heard several sharp cracks. Incoming fire, the first I had ever experienced, rifles and submachine guns, I guessed. I heard a scream up ahead. The men began shouting and running around in utter confusion. I repressed my own terror and started to make my way forward to find out what had happened. When I got to the head of the column, I saw a knot of Vietnamese huddled around a groaning soldier, a medic kneeling at his side. An ARVN noncom gestured toward the creek. Another small figure lay there in a fetal crouch. His head was turned sideways, and the creek flowed across his face. This man was dead. We had been ambushed. We had taken casualties from attackers who had vanished before we had ever seen them. The whole cycle—silence, shots, confusion, death, and silence again—was over in a couple of minutes.

  I wondered what you did with a dead man in the middle of the jungle. The Vietnamese rolled the body into a poncho and trussed it to a bamboo pole. The terrain, Hieu told me, was too wild and rocky to bury the soldier. Besides, it was Vietnamese custom to try to return a dead man to his native village. The troops put the wounded soldier in a litter, and we resumed the march. The Vietnamese took turns lugging our twin burdens through the entangling underbrush until we reached high ground, where our radioman used a hand-cranked AN/GRC-9 portable radio to call a helicopter to evacuate the casualties. The radio was primitive; the operator had to tap out the message in Morse code, the same way news was telegraphed a hundred years before, during the Civil War.

  Within a surprisingly short time, I heard the throb of an H-34’s rotors and watched the aircraft approach a clearing. The Vietnamese pilot skillfully corkscrewed the helo earthward in a tight circle to minimize flying over the jungle at low altitude. The Vietnamese loaded the wounded man and the body aboard. The helo quickly disappeared, and we were alone again.

  As night fell, we camped on high ground where we would be less vulnerable to attack than down in the valley. The usual tumult of rattling pots, squealing animals, shouting men, and billowing fires began. I threw down my pack, my carbine, my helmet damp with cold sweat, and slumped to the ground. I felt drained. The lark was over. The exhilaration of a cocky twenty-five-year-old American had evaporated in a single burst of gunfire. Somebody got killed today. Somebody was liable to get killed tomorrow, and the day after. This was not war movies on a Saturday afternoon; it was real, and it was ugly.

  It turned cold at night in the mountains, sometimes dropping to forty degrees. I inflated my air mattress, set it on the ground, stretched my down sleeping bag over it, and crawled in, shivering. I needed to steel myself to get through tomorrow and all the other tomorrows until they added up to a year. I was gripped by a terrible loneliness made all the more acute because I could not share my fears. I was the senior American advisor, the one the others looked to for strength and guidance. Those lines from Fort Benning came back to me: “Content to fill a soldier’s grave, for reasons I will never know.” Yet, I wanted to know why. And then I fell into a fitful sleep.

  I woke up with the sun splashing across my face, feeling oddly invigorated. Someone else was dead, but not me, a sense of elation, I was to learn, common to men in the wake of battle, even as they mourn dead comrades. Somehow, the world did not look so frightening in the light of day. This awareness—that things will look better in the morning—was to get me through many a dark night. We packed up and started making our way along the valley, and within an hour, we were ambushed again, but, this time, suffered no casualties.

  I tried to blend in with the ARVN. I wore the same uniform and carried the same pack. I pinned my captain’s bars onto the front of my blouse, concealed by my gear. And, for once, my color provided an advantage. I was color-coordinated with the Vietnamese and by slouching became virtually indistinguishable from Hieu’s men. I kidded Sink. What the VC really were after, I told him, was a white hide.

  As they had taught us at Fort Benning, I always carried a pencil and notebook, the latter green, government-issue, stamped “Memorandum” across the front. It fit neatly into my shirt pocket. By now it was discolored by sweat and coffee stains. Typical entries read:

  10 Feb.: Rain. Located evacuated village; destroyed houses and 100 K [kilos] rice, 20 K corn. Harassing fire on 3rd Co.

  11 Feb.: Rain. Killed 3 buffalo, pigs, chickens. Harassing fire from VC.

  13 Feb.: 2nd Co. made contact with VC. Bloodstains indicate cas [a possible casualty, since we still had not seen the enemy]. Crossbows, quiver of possible poison located vicinity of river.

  18 Feb.: Sprayed 2 hec [hectares] sweet potatoes, manioc destroyed.

  21 Feb.: 0910. Ambushed. 1 KIA [killed in action]. 1 WIA [wounded in action]. 1610, 1 KIA. 1 unconfirmed VC cas. 2 houses destroyed.

  On February 18, we came upon a deserted Montagnard village. The people had fled at our approach, except for an old woman too feeble to move. We burned down the thatched huts, starting the blaze with Ronson and Zippo cigarette lighters. The ARVN troops slashed away with their bayonets at fields of corn, onions, and manioc, a Montagnard starch staple. Part of the crop we kept for ourselves. On later occasions, the destruction became more sophisticated. Helicopters delivered fifty-five-gallon drums of a chemical herbicide to us, a forerunner of Agent Orange. From the drums, we filled two-and-a-half-gallon hand-pumped Hudson sprayers, which looked like fire extinguishers. Within minutes after we sprayed, the plants began to turn brown and wither.

  Why were we torching houses and destroying crops? Ho Chi Minh had said the people were like the sea in which his guerrillas swam. Our problem was to distinguish friendly or at least neutral fish from the VC swimming alongside. We tried to solve the problem by making the whole sea uninhabitable. In the hard logic of war, what difference did it make if
you shot your enemy or starved him to death? As for the poor Montagnards, caught in the middle, with their crops and huts ruined, they were forced to rely on the South Vietnamese for food. That explained why these nomadic people were living on the dole at base camps like A Shau. The strategy was to win their hearts and minds by making them dependent on the government. I am sure these mountain people wished they had never heard of the ARVN, the Viet Cong, or the Americans.

  However chilling this destruction of homes and crops reads in cold print today, as a young officer, I had been conditioned to believe in the wisdom of my superiors, and to obey. I had no qualms about what we were doing. This was counterinsurgency at the cutting edge. Hack down the peasants’ crops, thus denying food to the Viet Cong, who were supported by the North Vietnamese, who, in turn, were backed by Moscow and Beijing, who were our mortal enemies in the global struggle between freedom and communism. It all made sense in those days.

  My notebook for Saturday, February 23, read: “Rain/Fair. Marine H-34 evac. 2 KIA; 1 WIA; about 1235 VC delivered harassing fire.” This terse entry covered a bad patch. The day before, we had taken casualties, and the following day, we radioed the base camp to evacuate our dead and wounded. We climbed up to high, level ground to give the helicopter a quick approach in and out and to set up a perimeter to protect the aircraft while it was on the ground. Two U.S. Marine helos appeared, one circling while the other descended into the perimeter. We loaded the casualties aboard and signaled the pilot to take off. A young Marine wearing an armored vest, no shirt, his bare arms covered with tattoos, crouched in the doorway behind an M-60 machine gun.