My American Journey

by Colin L. Powell

  Toward the end of dinner, I handed Alma an envelope.

  “What’s that?” she wanted to know.

  “Just put it away in case,” I said.

  “In case of what?”

  “In case something happens.”

  In the envelope were my instructions in the event I did not return from Vietnam. Alma was not one to flinch from reality. I had friends, Pershing Rifles brothers, pals from Gelnhausen and Devens, and infantry course classmates, who had already died in the war. We knew many Army widows at Fort Benning. We talked briefly about my wishes—for example, my wanting to be buried in Arlington National Cemetery. Then we went back to more pleasant conversation.

  Part of the difficulty in contemplating my return to Vietnam was the mood of America. Losses in the war were perceived as if they were happening only to the military and their families, people unlucky enough to get caught up in a messy conflict; they were not seen as sacrifices shared by the country for a common purpose, as in other wars. As a career officer, I was willing to do my duty. But as far as the rest of the country was concerned, we were doing it alone. We were in a war against an enemy who believed in his cause and was willing to pay the price, however high. Our country was not; yet it took our government five more years to get us out.

  We had to get up while it was dark and the kids still sleeping in order for me to catch an 8:30 A.M. flight out of Birmingham. This time, I let Alma drive me to the airport parking lot, although I did not want her to come any farther. We said our goodbyes in the car, and on July 21, 1968, I was on my way again to Vietnam.

  Six

  Back to Vietnam

  THE SAIGON I HAD KNOWN IN 1962 NOW LOOKED AS IF IT HAD BEEN trampled by a giant. Where before the streets had been full of pedicabs, now they were jammed with jeeps, staff cars, and Army trucks. Where previously the U.S. presence had been muted, GIs now swarmed all over the place. Quiet bistros had been displaced by noisy bars populated by B-girls catering to our troops. The charming colonial capital was encircled by American barracks, headquarters, storage depots, airfields, hospitals, even military jails. Saigon now resembled an American garrison town more than the Paris of the Orient. I could not wait to go up-country.

  I arrived at Due Pho on July 27, 1968, assigned to the resurrected World War II 23d Infantry Division, known as the Americal. I was to serve as executive officer of the 3d Battalion, 1st Infantry, 11th Infantry Brigade. The Americal’s headquarters was in Chu Lai on the northern coastal plain. Due Pho was about a half-hour helicopter ride farther inland and to the south.

  Most armies are a combination of fighting machine and bureaucratic beast, and our beast had a long tail. My job as exec was to make sure the battalion had all the support it required to remain in fighting trim, and my duties included everything from ordering up ammo, to making sure the helos had fuel, to getting mail out to the troops. As soon as I arrived, my new boss, the battalion commander, Lieutenant Colonel Hank Lowder, a compact, feisty scrapper, handed me another assignment. I was to prepare for the Annual General Inspection, a task better suited to peacetime at Fort Devens than Vietnam in the middle of a war. Still, the Army took its inspections seriously. Hank Lowder wanted me to handle the administrative headaches in preparing for the inspection so that he would be free to concentrate on fighting the war. Consequently, while he led the troops in the field, I was at Due Pho making sure that the fumigation schedule, troop inoculation records, and other endless reels of red tape were inspection-ready.

  My situation reminded me a little of the Duke of Wellington during the Peninsular Campaign. Wellington is purported to have written to the British Foreign Office in London: “We have enumerated our saddles, bridles, tents and tent poles, and all manner of sundry items for which his Majesty’s Government holds me accountable…. Unfortunately, the sum of one shilling and ninepence remains unaccounted for in one infantry battalion’s petty cash and there has been a hideous confusion as to the number of jars of raspberry jam issued to one cavalry regiment, … This brings me to my present purpose, which is to request elucidation of my instructions…. 1) to train an army of uniformed British clerks in Spain for the benefit of the accountant and copy boys in London, or, perchance 2) to see to it that the forces of Napoleon are driven out of Spain?” In preparing for the annual inspection in Vietnam and in all my future service, I would think of Wellington’s jam jars whenever the purpose of the mission seemed to get lost in bureaucracy.

  Though Due Pho was away from the main VC units, it was hardly a garden spot. The first thing I noticed, parked on the edge of the camp, was a “conex” container, the kind used to ship heavy equipment or household effects. This huge crate, I learned, was our backyard mortuary, used to hold Viet Cong dead until we figured out what to do with the bodies. The next thing I noticed was the odor, which almost knocked me out. Excrement was burned all day long in fifty-five-gallon drums, and the whole post smelled like a privy. The burning, like laundry, KP, and other menial tasks, was done by Vietnamese whom we hired. The workers’ loyalty was supposedly checked out by the local village chiefs, though Lord knows how many people running around inside Due Pho were moonlighting for the VC, including the chiefs.

  We were ambushed regularly and took occasional rounds of mortar and rocket fire. Every morning the roads out of Due Pho had to be swept for mines that the VC might have planted during the night. While high-tech warriors back at the Pentagon were dreaming up supersophisticated equipment for this task, our troops used a down-home remedy. The men filled a five-ton dump truck with dirt; the driver put it in reverse and backed down the road. If he hit a mine, it would blow off the tires and probably damage the rear end. But the truck could usually be salvaged, and the roads were cleared. We lost an occasional vehicle, but seldom a driver.

  Besides getting Due Pho in shape, I had to go out and make sure that field units were also ready for the annual inspection. We had several FSBs (fire support bases) and LZs (landing zones)—Dragon, Liz, Chevy—located throughout our area. Early in August, I got a helicopter and flew out to check out LZ Dragon. I had heard that its messing facilities were substandard. Bad chow proved to be the least of Dragon’s problems. I had not expected to find stateside spit and polish. Still, what I discovered jolted me. As I stepped out of the helo, I practically stumbled over rusted ammo left lying around the landing site. Sanitation was nil, weapons dirty, equipment neglected, and the troops sloppy in appearance, bearing, and behavior. Seven years had passed since American advisors had first gone to Vietnam in force, and it was four years since the big buildup after the Tonkin Gulf Resolution. Still, the end was nowhere in sight, and deterioration of discipline and morale was obvious. I issued orders to get Dragon back into shape, told the officers I would be back to check on their compliance, and moved on to the next site.

  These were good men, the same kind of young Americans who had fought, bled, and died winning victory after victory throughout our country’s history. They were no less brave or skilled, but by this time in the war, they lacked inspiration and a sense of purpose. Back home, the administration was trying to conduct the war with as little inconvenience to the country as possible. The reserves had not been called up. Taxes to finance the war had not been raised. Better-off kids beat the draft with college deferments. The commander in chief, LBJ himself, was packing it in at the end of his term. Troops of the ally we had come to aid were deserting at a rate of over 100,000 a year. That flying statesman Nguyen Cao Ky had gone beyond air marshal to become South Vietnam’s premier by age thirty-four, though by my second tour he had been reduced to vice president. Ky had married a young airline hostess who wore the same silk flying suit and trailing scarf as he did as they hopscotched around the country in his plane. Ky had said, “I have only one [hero]—Hitler…. But the situation here is so desperate now that one man would not be enough. We need four or five Hitlers in Vietnam.” This was the man for whose regime three, four, even five hundred Americans were dying every week in 1968. They were dying with the sam
e finality as at Valley Forge or Normandy, but with little of the nobility of purpose.

  Our men in the field, trudging through elephant grass under hostile fire, did not have time to be hostile toward each other. But bases like Due Pho were increasingly divided by the same racial polarization that had begun to plague America during the sixties. The base contained dozens of new men waiting to be sent out to the field and short-timers waiting to go home. For both groups, the unifying force of a shared mission and shared danger did not exist. Racial friction took its place. Young blacks, particularly draftees, saw the war, not surprisingly, as even less their fight than the whites did. They had less to go home to. This generation was more likely to be reached by the fireworks of an H. Rap Brown than the reasonableness of the late Martin Luther King, Jr. Both blacks and whites were increasingly resentful of the authority that kept them here for a dangerous and unclear purpose. The number one goal was to do your time and get home alive. I was living in a large tent and I moved my cot every night, partly to thwart Viet Cong informants who might be tracking me, but also because I did not rule out attacks on authority from within the battalion itself.

  Life at Due Pho took crazy pendulum swings from the trite to the heartbreaking. One afternoon I was getting Coke and beer helicoptered out to the firebases—a daily priority the exec dared not miss—when Colonel Lowder sent word that he had run into a stiff fight at Firebase Liz and needed help. I ordered up a “slick,” a bare-bones UH-1 helicopter, no seats, just space and a couple of door guns, had it loaded with 5.56mm rifle and 7.62mm machine-gun ammo, and headed out over the treetops. We landed at Liz near dusk and quickly unloaded. A grim-faced Lowder told me to take back nine of our casualties. The vulnerability of a helicopter on the ground left little time for niceties. The nine KHAs (killed by hostile action, the Army’s replacement term for KIA, killed in action) were rolled into ponchos and loaded onto the slick. As we took off in the half-light, I slumped to the floor, facing nine recently healthy young American boys, now stacked like cordwood. We landed in darkness at an evac hospital, a MASH unit. The tents were a hive of activity, with wounded being flown in from all directions.

  People in combat develop a protective numbness that allows them to go on. That night I saw this shield crack. Eventually, the bodies were taken from the slick into the field hospital to be confirmed as dead. Medical staffers unrolled each poncho and examined the bodies with brisk efficiency, until the last one. I heard a nurse gasp, “Oh my God, it’s …” The final casualty was a young medic from their unit who had volunteered to go out to the firebase the day before. Nurses and medics started crying. I turned and left them to their duty.

  Then it was back to bean counting for the annual inspection. When it finally took place, we were examined by a scrupulous but fair officer, Lieutenant Colonel Carrol Swain, inspector general of the Americal Division. The battalion scored highest in the division, an achievement that meant more back at headquarters, I am sure, than to grunts counting the days until their tour was over.

  On October 31, 1968, President Johnson called a halt to the bombing of North Vietnam. To those of us on the ground, these geopolitical stratagems were as remote as sunspots. While back at home the country seethed with controversy over the war, I do not recall a single discussion on its merits among my fellow officers all the while I was in Vietnam. Questioning the war would not have made fighting it any easier. If a bombing halt meant anything to us, it meant less pressure on the enemy and more grief for our men.

  I got my picture in the newspaper, and it changed my life in Vietnam. The paper was the Army Times, and the photo had appeared in a story on my graduating class from the Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth. Up in Chu Lai, Major General Charles M. Gettys, commanding the Americal Division, was reading a two-month-old issue of the paper and recognized me as an officer he had met briefly at Landing Zone Liz. On finishing the piece, Gettys told his staff, “I’ve got the number two Leavenworth graduate in my division and he’s stuck out in the boonies as a battalion exec? Bring him up here. I want him as my plans officer.”

  A division commander has five major staff officers, the G-1 for personnel, the G-2 for intelligence, the G-3 for operations and planning, the G-4 for logistics, and the G-5 for civil affairs, involving relations with civilians. Of the five jobs, the G-3 is the most coveted, since operations are the reason why armies exist. The job usually goes to the fastest burner among lieutenant colonels in a division.

  Gettys had already earmarked a hot property, Lieutenant Colonel Richard D. Lawrence, for his recently vacated G-3 spot. But it turned out that Lawrence still had three months to complete as an armored squadron commander, and Gettys found himself in need of a G-3 at once. And so, instead of starting off as plans officer, a G-3 deputy, I was picked by General Gettys over several lieutenant colonels for the G-3 job itself, making me the only major filling that role in Vietnam. Another officer had been considered as interim G-3 before me. But General Gettys’s aide, Captain Ron Tumelson, had stuck his neck out with Gettys, telling the general the failings of his initial choice, a bold act that could have destroyed Tumelson’s career. Gettys, to his credit, was persuaded by facts, and he took a chance on me, a major he barely knew. I never knew any of this until twenty-five years later when Tumelson wrote to me. The general’s decision enormously influenced my career. Overnight, I went from looking after eight hundred men to planning warfare for nearly eighteen thousand troops, artillery units, aviation battalions, and a fleet of 450 helicopters.

  The Americal was not a division in the usual organizational sense. Its lineage was honorable enough. It had originally been formed as the 23d Infantry Division in New Caledonia during World War II and christened the Americal—America plus Caledonia. The division distinguished itself in Guadalcanal, Bougainville, and the Philippines campaigns. Except for a brief resurrection in the mid-1950s, the Americal had been deactivated as of December 1945. The name was revived in Vietnam to stitch together three unrelated brigades from different U.S. locations, brigades that had not trained together or even arrived in Vietnam together. Once there, battalions within the brigades were arbitrarily shifted around the country like so many pieces on a checkerboard. The revived Americal lacked tradition, cohesion, and even any future. Once the war ended, the division would be dissolved. Even with these handicaps, it was a good division; but its reputation would be forever tarnished by one of the darker chapters in American military history at a place called My Lai.

  Briefing is a performing art. You stand, pointer in hand, before maps and charts, and have a splendid chance to show your stuff, often to your seniors. Not long after taking over as G-3, I headed for the Chu Lai briefing room, located in a Quonset hut, with other map-toting, chart-laden staffers. Inside this functional structure were surprising touches—six plush general officer chairs and a backlit Lucite map board. This day, the Americal was to brief General Creighton Abrams, commander of all U.S. forces in Vietnam.

  Abrams was a living legend, revered throughout the Army, the tank commander who punched his way through the German lines to relieve the surrounded 101st Airborne Division at Bastogne during the Battle of the Bulge. His boss at the time, General George Patton, told war correspondents that if they wanted to write about this officer they had better hurry—“He’s so good, he isn’t going to live long.” Abrams was still with us, still all soldier, a man without a duplicitous bone in his body, and blunt as a punch in the nose. His aides had devised a system for decoding their laconic boss. A deep grunt? Abrams was satisfied. An abrupt groan? He was dissatisfied. And if Abe took the cigar out of his mouth, stand by for the blast of a blowtorch. One overworked briefer who had tried to peddle warmed-over intelligence to Abrams had been fired on the spot.

  We could practically hear the tension crackling in the hut as we took our seats and waited. Within minutes, General Abrams strode in, and we flew to attention. A nervous General Gettys followed him. The two were longtime buddies, which did not seem to allevia
te Gettys’s anxiety.

  All the briefers who preceded me were lieutenant colonels. Finally, Gettys stood up and said, “Major Powell will now brief.” To prepare, I had called on my instructor training from Fort Benning, and my cramming techniques from Fort Leavenworth. I went through the Americal, battalion by battalion, explaining where every outfit was, its state of readiness, and what operations the troops were presently engaged in, and gave an extended forecast over the next several weeks. I used no notes. I had committed the information to memory.

  When I finished, I turned to General Abrams and asked, “Sir, are there any questions?” He gave a grunt that I could not decipher as long or short, positive or negative, approving or rejecting. With the briefing over, he simply got up and walked out, with Gettys trailing after him.

  A few minutes later, Gettys, having seen Abrams off, returned to the hut where we were milling outside, expectantly. He was grinning. “Abe’s happy,” Gettys said.

  “He is, sir?” I asked. “How could you tell?”

  “For one thing, he wanted to know, who’s that young major?” Gettys said, putting an arm around my shoulder.