In the summer of 1964, I went to the same drive-in on Victory Drive and ordered a hamburger without being told to go around to the back. Since my previous stop, President Lyndon Baines Johnson had signed the Civil Rights Act, outlawing discrimination in places of public accommodation. That fall, LBJ was running against the conservative Republican candidate, Senator Barry Goldwater. I was no political partisan, but Goldwater had disappointed me by casting the lone vote in the Senate against the civil rights bill. Goldwater was not a racist—he had opposed the bill on constitutional grounds—but his opposition nevertheless gave unintended encouragement to segregationists. I went out and slapped a red-white-and-blue sticker on the bumper of my Volkswagen reading “All the Way with LBJ,” probably violating post regulations on political activity in the process.
One evening that fall, while I was driving from Birmingham to Fort Benning, an Alabama state trooper flagged me down near the town of Sylacauga. Speeding? Not outside the realm of possibility. To my surprise, the trooper was not concerned about my driving. He was handing out bumper stickers for Goldwater! He looked over the Volks, an alien vehicle in sixties Alabama. Strike one. He checked my license plate—New York State. Strike two. He spotted the LBJ sticker. Strike three. And a black at the wheel. I had somehow managed to accumulate four strikes. He shook his head, “Boy,” he said, “you ain’t smart enough to be around here. You better get going.” Which I did, quickly.
Soldiers like Price, Mavroudis, DePace, and me had a future in the Army. Still, the officer corps had a dominant culture in those days, and it was white, Protestant, and heavily Southern with a dash of Midwest. Far more officers came out of Wake Forest, Clemson, the Citadel, Furman, and VMI than out of Princeton, or certainly CCNY.
Our career course classes often met in small, windowless rooms, and it was a relief to get out in the hallways to stretch a leg and have a smoke. I came out one day to find a cluster of white classmates discussing the presidential election, all praising Goldwater. “Hey, Colin,” one of them called out to me, “come on over.” I joined them, a little wary. “Are we prejudiced?” he asked. “Hell, if we were, would we all be sitting in the same classes together?” It was not a question of liking or disliking “colored people,” the guy continued. He and his friends just did not care for this pushy stuff, the government telling people how to live their lives. “It’s a question of property rights,” another classmate chimed in. “A man sets up a business, he ought to be able to do what he wants with it.”
I could have put my back up and lashed out, or I could have pulled away in hopeless resignation. Instead, I tried to open their eyes. “Let me tell you what property rights mean,” I said. “If you’re a soldier and you’re black, you’d better have a strong bladder, because you won’t be stopping much between Washington, D.C., and Fort Benning.” I told them how it was trying to find a decent place to eat on the road in the South, or a motel where you, your wife, and your kid could stay, as darkness began to fall. Medgar Evers of the NAACP had been murdered the year before in Mississippi. Sheriff Bull Connor had set police dogs against people. Murderers had blown up four children in a Birmingham church. And these people were arguing about “property rights”! “You can’t reduce this issue to whether or not a white hotel owner should have to rent a room to a black. You can’t put property in the same league with human beings,” I told them.
I don’t know that I made any converts. But it was good to get these feelings off my chest, and to let these men know that tolerance meant more than just sitting next to a black man in a classroom.
The soldiers whose stock shot up in my esteem during this period were black officers from the South. After a lifetime of second-class treatment, segregation, and isolation in black colleges, they had found themselves competing alongside whites whom they had not been allowed to live, study, or eat with, people before whom they had been expected to bow and scrape. During my growing-up years, I had never felt uncomfortable around whites; I never considered myself less valuable. Different, yes; inferior, never. These Southern blacks had never been told anything else. Through the years that followed, as I watched them rise in the Army, my admiration grew. Most of them simply refused to carry the baggage that racists tried to pile on their backs. The day they put on the same uniform as everybody else, they began to consider themselves as good as anyone else. And, fortunately, they had joined the most democratic institution in America, where they could rise or fall on merit. These Southern black soldiers stand tall in my hall of heroes.
Shortly before election day, November 3, 1964, I mailed in my absentee ballot to my New York voting address. LBJ, all the way. And I treated myself to another burger on Victory Drive.
This period was turning out to be one of the happiest in my life. For an infantryman, Fort Benning, home of the infantry, holds a sentimental place. The bachelor lieutenant sows his wild oats, gets married, makes captain, gets orders to the career course, and brings his wife to Fort Benning, often her first post. We bought our first furniture on credit from the same Columbus department stores, delivered in one load, living room, dining room, bedroom, and kitchen. We visited each other in our look-alike houses, small two- and three-bedroom ranches set on concrete slabs. Except for the rare couple with inherited wealth, there was scant room for snobbery, since most of us were bringing home the same paycheck and living the same standard.
On weekends, Alma and I often packed little Mike into the Volks for a visit to her folks in Birmingham. On the way out, we passed through the senior officers’ quarters, grand, gracious white stucco homes built by the WPA during the Depression. Most impressive of all was Riverside, an earlier antebellum mansion dripping with wisteria and ringed with magnolias, the residence of Fort Benning’s commanding general. Every year, the CG hosted a reception for career course students. The men wore dark civilian suits. The women went out and bought the best dress a captain’s pay allowed. And we walked up that clipped lawn toward Riverside as if we were bit players in a scene from Gone With the Wind.
After the reception for our class, Alma asked me if I could guess her dream. An upgrade from the Volkswagen to a station wagon? No, she said, to live at Riverside one day as the general’s lady. I kidded her over what her father liked to say about her mother, that Mildred Johnson still had a slave mentality; she wanted to live in the big white house with the columns. Alma’s dream seemed harmless enough and about as remote in 1964 as men going to the moon.
Benning is also where Linda Powell arrived on April 16, 1965. I had missed out on Mike’s earliest infancy. By the time I saw him, he was a little person. But that day, at Martin Army Hospital, as I studied that tiny, helpless creature, I was overcome with the feeling a father has for a little girl. I was going to catch up on what I had missed in my first round as a parent. The career course involved little heavy lifting, and I took advantage of the situation to spend as much time as I could with Linda, becoming an accomplished nanny. Alma was tied up in Red Cross volunteer work at the time of Linda’s six-week checkup, so I tucked the baby under one arm, held her diaper bag under the other, and took her to the hospital myself. I happily joined the young mothers in the waiting room, dispensing advice on treating croup and colic and other lore in which I was now parent-qualified.
Anybody entering my class that day would have found a U.S. Army major flinging a rubber chicken at a roomful of officer candidates. I had entered the teaching profession. And I was engaged in that sine qua non of all learning, motivation.
I had completed the Infantry Officers Advanced Course in May 1965, ranking first among infantrymen in my two-hundred-man class. But I came in third in the whole class, topped by a tanker and an artilleryman, which I found humbling.
As planned, I returned to the Infantry Board after the career course. My reasons were mostly personal—to keep the family in one place awhile longer. I spent several relatively uneventful months again evaluating new infantry equipment. Then one day, in the spring of 1966, I got word to report to Infantry Ha
ll. I was being assigned to the faculty of the school where I had recently been a student.
It was now about eighteen months since President Johnson had used an “unprovoked” attack by North Vietnamese gunboats in the Tonkin Gulf to push through a Senate resolution amounting to a virtual American declaration of war against the Viet Cong and North Vietnam. When I left Southeast Asia, it had still been a Vietnamese conflict involving some 16,000 American advisors. By the time I was asked to join the Infantry School faculty, the American involvement had begun to approach 300,000 troops, and the Army needed to produce more officers. Infantry Hall, a spanking-new building, had just been completed to accommodate the expansion. Duty as an instructor was a coveted assignment, much sought after and an impressive career credential. Instructors taught the officers who would be leading the troops in battle, not a mission the Army entrusted lightly.
Before I could go near a classroom, I had to complete an instructors course. For three intense weeks, we learned how to move before a class, use our hands, adopt an authoritative tone, hold center stage, project ourselves, and transmit what was inside our heads into someone else’s. We were peer-evaluated, merit-boarded, scored, graded, and critiqued to death. If I had to put my finger on the pivotal learning experience of my life, it could well be the instructors course, where I graduated first in the class. Years later, when I appeared before millions of Americans on television to describe our actions in the Gulf War, I was doing nothing more than using communicating techniques I had learned a quarter of a century before in the instructors course at Infantry Hall.
I entered my own classroom with something new, an oak leaf. I had received the accelerated promotion to major that the assignments officer had predicted back in Hue. I had been in the Army less than eight years, and I had attained a rank usually reached after ten or eleven years. And I had just entered another league. Army officers are divided into three broad categories: company grade, field grade, and general officers. I had just made field grade.
As an instructor, I taught students from officer candidates to reserve generals. I teamed up with a feisty Marine lieutenant colonel, P. X. Kelley, who later became the Marine Corps Commandant, to teach amphibious operations. But my most important classes involved officer candidates, young men in their early twenties who would be shipping out to Vietnam as new infantry second lieutenants, where they would suffer the highest casualties among officers. A fair percentage of those eager faces in my classes were not coming back, I knew, no matter what I taught them.
A healthy competition existed among the instructors. My chief rival was Major Steve Pawlik, a Polish-American live wire, a superb instructor, and my patient coach in handball. Steve and I were always trying to upstage each other, devising ways to grab and hold the students’ attention. One approach was humor. In those less correct days, with no woman within a mile of Infantry Hall, part of the macho culture was to open the class with a joke, usually of the raunchiest kind. These stories were not my forte. But I had one surefire joke I told to every new class. It involved a missionary about to be pounced on by a tiger. The missionary starts to pray. The tiger starts to pray. The missionary says, “What a Christian thing, to pray along with me.” “Pray with you?” the tiger says, “I’m saying grace.” It always got a laugh.
One day my story was greeted with thunderous silence. I tried a backup joke. Grim, stone faces. What was going on? Had I possibly exceeded even the Benning bounds of corny jokes? Afterward, a deadpan Pawlik asked me how the class had gone. “Awful,” I said, puzzled. Later I learned what had happened. Pawlik had gotten to my class ahead of me and persuaded the students to stiff me. He had then slipped behind the one-way glass on one wall of the classroom and thoroughly enjoyed my agony. Steve carried his fierce competitiveness to our off-duty games of hearts with another instructor and friend, Major Bill Duncan. To us hearts was a game, to Steve a vendetta.
Our ultimate challenge was teaching OCS candidates to prepare a Unit Readiness Report. The conditions were diabolical. The class was held at 4:00 P.M., at the last hour of the last day before graduation—and after a three-day field exercise of forced marches and mock battle, ending with a sleepless all-night operation. Nevertheless, the readiness report had to be mastered before a student was allowed to graduate.
This report would have been a crashing bore even for the most dedicated nerd. It involved a two-page form in which the officer recorded the percentage of equipment in state Green, ready to go, Yellow, not quite ready, and Red, out of commission. The officer had to report the unit’s training status, squad by squad, platoon by platoon: C-1, ready to go; C-2, got a few problems; C-3, serious problems; C-4, hopeless. The students would stagger back to Benning after that all-night operation, take a shower, have a hot meal, and then head for this final lecture, anticipating a much-needed snooze in an air-conditioned classroom.
My approach was to project the readiness form on a screen and go over it, block by block, computation by computation, on and on, trying to keep the students awake long enough to pound the importance of the report into their befogged skulls. When students began to doze off, they were to get up and stand against the wall. The instructor’s effectiveness was judged by how few catatonic officer candidates wound up at the wall. In teaching the readiness report, the competition between Pawlik and me reached fresh heights of ingenuity.
One day, I had an inspiration. I ordered a plucked rubber chicken from a gift catalog and hid the chicken under the lectern. The students came trooping in, enameled helmet liners tucked under their arms, desperately trying to look alert. I gave the order “Take seats, gentlemen!” Within minutes, I could hear snoring. As the first student rose and headed for the wall, I fired a question at him. He roused himself and answered. “That’s wrong,” I said, seizing the chicken and swinging it over my head. “And your punishment is …” I let the chicken fly. The class scattered in all directions as this realistic-looking hunk of fake poultry sailed through the room. When they realized what I had thrown, the students laughed and stayed awake for another ten minutes. The chicken became a fixed part of my curriculum. Education and entertainment, I realized, are not unrelated.
At Benning, we lived a life not all that different from that of Levittown suburbanites of that era. Dad came home from the office. Mom reported the kiddie violations of the day and the latest household catastrophe. One afternoon, Mike, age three, fell out of a tree and landed on his head. After a race to the emergency ward, the doctor told us to take him home and wake him every hour to make sure he could regain consciousness. At about 3:00 A.M., the kid asked if we would please leave him alone so that he could get some sleep. Linda, a serious, thoughtful, and independent little girl, was becoming the apple of her father’s eye. We lived in a neighborhood full of similar families, with similar numbers of kids, with similar joys—and similar fears, since a menacing cloud hung over this otherwise apple-pie landscape.
Since Columbus was the hometown of the infantry, thousands of officers and noncoms had left their families here while they went off to Vietnam. Casualties were now running well over one hundred a week. When a yellow cab pulled up to a house and the driver got out, you knew he was delivering a telegram from the Defense Department and Benning had another widow and a new family of fatherless children. The system was unintentionally brutal, and as casualties mounted, the services devised a more compassionate way to deliver the grim news. Casualty notification officers, usually local recruiters, drew the hardest job in the military, to go to the families of the fallen, to deliver the word, to comfort them, and to offer whatever help they could.
One day, walking through Infantry Hall, I heard a raucous voice from my CCNY days: “Hey, paisan!” I turned to see Tony Mavroudis, my Greek buddy from Queens. Tony was still following in my footsteps. He had also gone from ROTC into the regular Army. He had done a Vietnam tour, and he was just starting the career course while I was an instructor. Tony became a fixture around our house, and a great favorite of the kids. The gentee
l but perceptive Alma came to appreciate the diamond under the rough exterior.
One day, as Tony approached the end of his course, he told me that he had volunteered to go back to Vietnam.
“What’s the hurry?” I asked. “We’ll all be going again soon enough.”
“Don’t kid me,” Tony answered. “If it weren’t for Alma and the kids, you’d volunteer too.” He was right; as infantrymen, we thought that was where we belonged.
By now, the war had dragged on for so long that an infantry officer like myself could count on at least two tours, a helicopter pilot likely three. My return was just a matter of time. Tony went sooner rather than later.
I had just finished tucking in my children one night several months afterward when the phone rang. Alma answered and said it was for me. One of my Pershing Rifles buddies was calling, which one I do not remember. I was too stunned. Tony Mavroudis was dead. I did what people do in such situations. I started asking about details. We grasp at what we can handle in the face of what we cannot. Tony had been leading his company down a trail when a firefight had broken out. He was killed instantly. I told Alma what had happened. We sat on the edge of the bed, dry-eyed, wordless. The house suddenly seemed emptier. That boisterous, warmhearted spirit had been taken from us in an instant. It would take me time to absorb the loss.
My American Journey Page 15