My American Journey

by Colin L. Powell

  One evening not long afterward I told Alma that we had to talk. “I’ll be leaving here soon,” I said. We had been lucky so far. We had stayed at Benning almost three years, during a war. The Army was obviously clocking me for another Vietnam tour. “You’ve got to be ready for it,” I said. “It’s inevitable.” Alma’s face assumed that impassive expression that cloaks what she feels inside. There was another interim possibility, I told her. I was eligible for the Army Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. The college marked a critical turning point in the lives of career officers. If the advanced course was our bachelor’s degree, Leavenworth was a master’s (and the National War College represented a Ph.D.). Not every major would be selected for Leavenworth. Army officers not chosen, and the odds were about 50–50, could still have a fulfilling career, but would level off probably as lieutenant colonels, or in unusual circumstances, as full colonels. But to make general officer, Leavenworth was an all but inescapable prerequisite. If not selected now, I would almost certainly be going back to Vietnam. Alma understood; there was nothing more to say, and so we went to bed.

  On a spring afternoon in 1967, I had just finished teaching a class and saw the long-awaited Leavenworth list posted on a bulletin board. I called Alma immediately. I could hear the relief in her voice. Vietnam was off for the time being. I was going to the Command and General Staff College.

  You can roughly judge where the American male is at any point in his life by what he is driving. In my day, swinging bachelor: Ford Mustang or Chevy Corvette; new husband: Volkswagen; young father: station wagon. As we packed up at Benning and prepared to drive to Leavenworth, I was about to make my next model change. I had watched sadly, six months before, as a Mr. Wayne Guest drove off with my beloved blue Beetle, sold for $400. Alma insisted that a family with two kids needed more space. Brand- and color-loyal, I showed up soon afterward not with a station wagon, but with a reasonable facsimile, a blue Volkswagen van that the kids loved. Alma drove it twice to the PX and declared, “That heap has to go.” She was not about to pull up to the officers’ club at Fort Leavenworth in a used miniature bus. Thereafter, the Powells made the automotive equivalent of moving from company to field grade. We bought our first new American car, a 1967 Chevy Bel Air, and, with Michael, four, and Linda, two, headed west, via our customary detour, Elmira Avenue in Queens.

  We eventually reached the Missouri River at the Penny Bridge in Missouri, so called because, even in 1967, it cost a penny to use. We crossed over into Kansas and entered Fort Leavenworth. Instead of going straight to the garden apartment my old Gelnhausen mentor Red Barrett had found for us in the adjacent town of Leavenworth, I parked next to the post’s Memorial Chapel. I found what I was looking for, a grassy sunken lane that ran down to the river we had just crossed. The pioneers had come up the Missouri on flatboats and then headed overland in ox-drawn Conestoga wagons to link up with the Santa Fe and Oregon trails. The rut in the earth that we were standing in had been worn by these wagons on their westward trek. A sense of the past has always moved me, and I wished my children were old enough to feel the pulse of history in this spot. Fort Leavenworth was founded in 1827, and every morning on the way to play war games and read military history, I felt thrilled to be walking along roads that had known the footsteps of George Armstrong Custer, Philip Sheridan, Dwight Eisenhower, George Patton, and other storybook soldiers.

  Until now, the infantry battalion of a few hundred men had been my universe. Leavenworth’s mission was to raise our vision above the horizon of a battalion-level infantry officer and give us an understanding of the larger canvas of warfare. For the first time, in concentrated form, I began dealing with artillerymen, tankers, engineers, signal corpsmen, quartermasters—the whole panoply of an Army in which people with jobs and outlooks as different as those of accountants and cowboys have to learn to mesh. By the time the course ended, thirty-eight weeks later, we were expected to know how to move a division of twelve to fifteen thousand men by train or road, how to feed it, supply it, and, above all, fight it.

  My CCNY record notwithstanding, I had done well so far in my military education. But Leavenworth was in another league academically. Officers who had finished in the top third of the Infantry Officers Advanced Course might well find themselves in the bottom third here. I studied hard and did my homework. And by now I had learned how to outwit multiple-choice tests, which the Army favored because they were easy to grade and supposedly more objective than essay tests. I could spot the throwaway and trick choices, which usually left two plausible answers, giving you even odds of being right with an intelligent guess. We were graded on a i-to-4 scale, and I started racking up 1’s, the equivalent of A’s, in all my courses. And I still had time for extracurricular interests, particularly gin rummy, which I learned to play from a hell-raising cavalry officer named Jim Amlong, and to which I became addicted. Every time we had a ten-minute break in class, and every lunch hour, out came the cards. Any free time not devoted to gin rummy I spent on the softball diamond, where, after my dismal performance as a kid player, I was developing a reputation as a long-ball hitter.

  The morning of February 1, 1968, I came out of the bedroom, put on the coffeepot, and turned on the TV news. I was stunned. There on the screen were American GIs fighting on the grounds of the U.S. embassy and ARVN forces battling before the Presidential Palace in the heart of Saigon. The Viet Cong, supported by North Vietnamese Army units, had launched a coordinated strike against 108 of South Vietnam’s provincial and district capitals. When I went to class that day, the atmosphere was one of disbelief, as if we had taken a punch in the gut. Fighting over the next few days continued to be fierce, and twenty-six days passed before Hue was liberated. By then, the lovely former capital where I had served lay in ruins, with at least 2,800 of its people executed by the enemy. The campaign had been launched on the eve of Tet, the Vietnamese lunar New Year, and thus found its name in history.

  Judged in cold military terms, the Tet offensive was a massive defeat for the Viet Cong and North Vietnam. Their troops were driven out of every town they had attacked, and with horrific losses, estimated at 45,000 of the 84,000 men committed. But, 137 years before, Clausewitz had said something still relevant: “If you want to overcome your enemy, you must match your effort against his power of resistance, which can be expressed as the product of two inseparable factors … the total means at his disposal and the strength of his will.” It did not matter how many of the enemy we killed. The Viet Cong and North Vietnam had all the bodies needed to fling into this conflict and the will to do so. The North simply started sending in its regular army units to counter the losses.

  The images beamed into American living rooms of a once faceless enemy suddenly popping up in the middle of South Vietnam’s capital had a profound effect on public opinion. Tet marked a turning point, raising doubts in the minds of moderate Americans, not just hippies and campus radicals, about the worth of this conflict, and the antiwar movement intensified.

  I disliked watching Americans demonstrating against Americans in wartime. Those of us who knew we were going back to Vietnam would do our duty undeterred by demonstrations, flag burning, or draft dodging. Politicians start wars; soldiers fight and die in them. We do not have the luxury of waiting for a better war. On March 31, 1968, while I was at Leavenworth, President Johnson told the country that he would not seek reelection. It was a statesmanlike gesture—as well as a pragmatic reading of the writing on the wall. Johnson saw a dangerously divided country that he could not hold together. Still, packing it in and going home to the ranch was not an option available to career officers, or to American draftees, for that matter.

  Leavenworth was my first assignment where there were enough other blacks to form a critical mass. In class and in formal social situations, the college was completely integrated. Informally, however, black officers hung out together. We had our own parties, put on soul food nights, and played Aretha Franklin records. Nevertheless, we had
made it this far up the ladder precisely because we had the ability to shift back into the white-dominated world on Monday morning. Leavenworth represented integration in the best sense of the word. Blacks could hang around with the brothers in their free time, and no one gave it any more thought than the fact that West Pointers, tankers, or engineers went off by themselves. That was exactly the kind of integration we had been fighting for, to be permitted our blackness and also to be able to make it in a mostly white world.

  Five days after President Johnson dropped out of the 1968 presidential race, the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., was murdered. For me and my fellow black officers at Leavenworth, Dr. King’s death was an abrupt reminder that across the Penny Bridge, racism still bedeviled America. Each of us had experienced enough racial indignities to understand the riots unleashed in black ghettos in the wake of the King assassination. We understood the bitterness of black GIs who, if they were lucky enough to get home from Vietnam in one piece, still faced poor job prospects and fresh indignities. However, we saw ourselves as professionals first, with our duty to our oath and our country. And because of the relative freedom in the military, the American dream was working for us. We had overcome humble origins, worked our tails off, achieved field grade, proved ourselves anyone’s equal, and were building better futures for our children. We heard the radical black voices—Stokely Carmichael, Eldridge Cleaver, and H. Rap Brown with his “Burn, baby, burn!”—with uneasiness. We were not eager to see the country burned down. We were doing well in it. In later years, however, I came to understand that a movement requires many different voices, and the tirades of the agitators were like a fire bell ringing in the night, waking up defenders of the status quo with the message that change had better be on the way.

  At Leavenworth I met a lot of officers with graduate degrees earned on Army time. It dawned on me that an advanced degree, along with my efficiency reports, citations, and decorations, would make me more competitive. When I discussed my post-Leavenworth future with my assignment officer at Infantry Branch, I mentioned my interest in the Army’s Graduate Civil Schooling Program. This gruff soldier, a fellow major, pointed out that there was a war on. I was aware of that, I said, but it did not prevent others from applying to graduate school.

  He looked over my college grades. “You don’t seem like graduate school material to me,” he said.

  I felt a surge of anger, but managed to suppress it. “You’re going to have to turn me down in writing,” I said, “because I intend to try anyway.”

  I applied for the Army-financed graduate program, and, fortunately, my superiors took into account my record at Bragg, Benning, Gelnhausen, Devens, and Vietnam and my good grades so far at Leavenworth. I was approved. The next step was to take the Graduate Record Examination, and if I passed, to apply to grad school.

  Late one winter evening, after Alma and the kids had gone to bed, I was in the kitchen studying for an upcoming exam on Tactical Infiltration. It was a dark, cold night and I could hear the wind beating against the window. Suddenly, a voice sent a shiver through me. The television was on in the living room, and I got up and went to it. There was my friend Tony Mavroudis, dead these many months, on the screen. I called Alma. She came out in her pajamas, and we watched the rest of the program in heavy silence. It was an NBC documentary narrated by Frank McGee entitled Same Mud, Same Blood, dealing with blacks in the military in Vietnam. And there was Tony, in jungle fatigues, with his street-smart logic, driving home the program’s message. Race did not matter out here, Tony said. “It doesn’t exist…. We’re all soldiers. The only color we know is khaki and green. The color of the mud and the color of the blood is all the same.” At the end of the program, McGee said, “Five days after we left him, Captain Mavroudis … was killed by an exploding land mine.” Scholars could take pages to express the wisdom Tony had captured in a few blunt words. The loss of this friend hit me harder on this night than on the day I first heard the news.

  I was coming out of a class in Intelligence Estimates when I ran into my faculty advisor. “Do you know how well you’re doing?” he asked me.

  “All 1’S so far,” I said.

  “Well, you’re damn near at the top of the class.” I could well be the honor graduate, he pointed out, if I aced the final exam.

  About a week later, I entered a classroom with a huge map of Europe covering the front wall. The final examination of the course was not multiple-choice. It required essay answers to hypothetical tactical problems. There was no right or wrong answer, just the instructors’ evaluation of the appropriateness of our decisions. In the last question, we had to respond to an armored attack on our division’s flank. My dilemma was whether I should try to out-psyche the test writers and give the answer I thought they wanted or should answer with what I really believed. I chose the latter. I kept my division on tactical defense, not counterattacking until I had better intelligence on the enemy’s strength, deployment, and intentions. Good decisions, I reasoned, are based on solid information. Check the pool for water before you take a header off the high board.

  I should have known better. On the last exam of the last day, Leavenworth’s gung ho faculty would obviously want you to attack! attack! attack! I scored my only 2, still a respectable grade. At graduation, I ranked first among infantrymen in my class. But I came in behind an artilleryman, a talented major, Donald Whalen (who went on to become a brigadier general).

  It would have been satisfying to be number one, but I still think my answer was as good as what the instructor wanted. It revealed a natural inclination to be prudent until I have enough information. Then I am ready to move boldly, even intuitively. That day at Leavenworth, I was only a student answering a hypothetical problem, and any casualties were only on paper. A time would come when my advice and decisions would be paid for in real lives. And when that day came, I would not change my approach. For me, it comes down simply to Stop, Look, Listen—then strike hard and fast with all the power you need.

  Leavenworth was my introduction to a more cosmopolitan world. Other nations sent the cream of their officer corps to the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College. We studied together, ate together, and played together. Here was the first opportunity to get to know men with whom we might (and later did) plan combined military operations. One of my Leavenworth buddies was a Belgian army major, Joseph Charlier. The next time I saw him, he was chief of staff of the Belgian armed forces, and I worked with him in NATO. Thus are old-boy networks born.

  The townsfolk adopted these foreign officers, so far from home, some separated from their families. They were invited by Kansans of every station to picnics, Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners, birthdays, and baptisms. Years later, when I was serving as National Security Advisor to President Reagan, we faced a minicrisis during the visit of the president of Pakistan, Mohammad Zia ul-Haq. When asked for the list of guests he would like invited to the White House state dinner honoring him, Zia said he wanted Ed and Dollie included. Ed and Dollie? It turned out that when Zia was a major studying at Leavenworth, Ed, a mailman, and his wife, Dollie, had just about adopted him. Zia was still filled with warm memories of his friends, and, consequently, a somewhat astonished Ed and Dollie were flown to Washington for dinner at the White House.

  While we were at Leavenworth, Alma, baptized a Congregationalism became an Episcopalian. She did so because we wanted to grow together spiritually as a family. Alma’s confirmation, like everything in Leavenworth, occurred against a backdrop of history. The small Memorial Chapel commemorated the loss of 7th Cavalry troopers at the Little Bighorn on June 25, 1876. During Alma’s confirmation, I studied the plaques on the chapel walls. One next to the front door contained the names of Lieutenant Colonel George A. Custer, his younger brother Captain Thomas W. Custer, and other officers who perished that fateful day. Other plaques were less historic but no less touching: “John Anthony Rucker, 2d Lieutenant… 6th Cavalry … drowned … attempting to save the life of a brother officer.” They t
ell a joke at Leavenworth about a little boy at the chapel with his parents. He wants to know about the names on the plaques. “They died in service,” his mother explains. “The eight-thirty or the eleven?” the boy asks.

  The pleasant life we were living was about to end. My orders had come through for Vietnam. That day, when I came home from class, I caught sight of Mike, now five, careening around a corner on two wheels of his tricycle and Linda playing with the Carter twins, children of close friends. I called to my kids and swept them up in my arms. This parting was going to be far harder than the last one. And war was no longer the adventure I had eagerly set out on in 1962. I was a husband and father now.

  I pushed such thoughts aside. Tony Mavroudis had been right. We were soldiers by profession, and Vietnam was where we were supposed to be.

  I drove the family from Leavenworth to Birmingham, where Alma and the kids were to stay while I was gone. Alma’s sister, Barbara, had been divorced, and the two sisters and their children, four cousins in all, would be living together in a rented house about a mile and a half from Alma’s folks in Tarrant City. I liked the location; it seemed secure. And I liked the economy of the sisters’ splitting the rent.

  A few days before my departure, Alma had an idea. We were living in the New South. For the past four years, public accommodations had been open to all. Parliament House, the fanciest hotel in Birmingham, boasted a fine restaurant. “That’s where I want us to go for our farewell dinner,” Alma said. That night, I, in my best tailored Hong Kong suit from my first Vietnam tour, and Alma, stylish as always, walked into a dining room without another black patron in sight. Our entrance into once forbidden territory was slightly daunting. But what was the point of it all, the sit-ins, the marches, the battles in court and Congress, the martyrdom, the eviction of Jim Crow, if not to enjoy the fruits of everyday life so long denied us? We followed the maître d’ to a table, and we were treated graciously.