My American Journey

by Colin L. Powell

  Readiness and training reports in the Vietnam era were routinely inflated to please and conceal rather than to evaluate and correct. Like the children of Lake Wobegon, everybody came out “above average.” The powers that be seemed to believe that by manipulating words, we could change the truth. We had lost touch with reality. We were also deluded by technology. The enemy was primitive, and we were the most technologically advanced nation on earth. It therefore should be no contest. Thus, out of the McNamara shop came miracles like the “people sniffer,” a device that could detect concentrations of urine on the ground from an airplane (brought to you by the same people who later came up with Agent Orange). If the urine was detected in likely enemy territory, we now had an artillery target. But woe to any innocent peasants or water buffalos that happened to relieve themselves in the wrong place. The people sniffer was of a piece with McNamara’s Line, a series of electronic sensors strung across the country that were going to alert us whenever an enemy force began moving down the Ho Chi Minh Trail, an idea stillborn.

  The Legion of Merit I received? It might have meant more to me in a war where medals were not distributed so indiscriminately. I remember once, as division G-3, attending a battalion change-of-command ceremony at one firebase where the departing CO was awarded three Silver Stars, the nation’s third-highest medal for valor, plus a clutch of other medals, after a tour lasting six months. He had performed ably, at times heroically. He was popular with his men. Yet, the troops had to stand there and listen to an overheated description of a fairly typical performance. Awards were piled on to a point where writing the justifying citations became a minor art form. The departing battalion commander’s “package,” a Silver Star, a Legion of Merit, and Air Medals just for logging helicopter time, became almost standard-issue. You accepted the package because everyone else did. These wholesale awards diminished the achievements of real heros—privates or colonels—who had performed extraordinary acts of valor. I remember looking at the faces of the troops the day of the three Silver Stars and thinking, this is insane, and we have brought these young soldiers here to witness the insanity. What lessons are we passing on to them? That bull works? A corrosive careerism had infected the Army; and I was part of it.

  Dark episodes like My Lai resulted, in part, because of the military’s obsession with another semifiction, the “body count,” that grisly yardstick produced by the Vietnam War. The 11th Infantry Brigade had actually been awarded a Special Commendation for 128 “enemy” killed at My Lai, before the truth came out. The Army, under Pentagon pressure to justify the country’s investment in lives and billions, desperately needed something to measure. What military objectives could we claim in this week’s situation report? A hill? A valley? A hamlet? Rarely. Consequently, bodies became the measure. But body counts were tricky. The press knew precisely the casualties on our side. They simply counted the caskets going out. Twenty caskets, twenty KHAs in the latest firefight. What do we have to show for it? How many of the enemy fell? Finding out was not easy. The VC and NVA did not use caskets. They were also skilled at breaking off contact and taking their dead with them. We might have used weapons captured as a measure. But you have to produce the weapons, and reporters can count. Enemy bodies did not have to be brought back. Every night, the company would make a tally. “How many did your platoon get?” “I don’t know. We saw two for sure.” “Well, if you saw two, there were probably eight. So let’s say ten.” Counting bodies became a macabre statistical competition. Companies were measured against companies, battalions against battalions, brigades against brigades. Good commanders scored high body counts. And good commanders got promoted. If your competition was inflating the counts, could you afford not to?

  The enemy actually was taking horrendous casualties. But it made little difference. As one military analyst put it, divide each side’s casualties by the economic cost of producing them. Then multiply by the political cost of sustaining them. As long as your enemy was willing to pay that price, body counts meant nothing. This enemy was obviously prepared to pay, and unsportingly refused to play the game by our scorekeeping. We were forever trying to engage the NVA in a knockout battle—a Vietnamese Waterloo, an Iwo Jima, an Inchon—but the NVA refused to cooperate. No matter how hard we struck, NVA troops would melt into their sanctuaries in the highlands or into Laos, refit, regroup, and come out to fight again. We had our sanctuaries too, stretching from the South China Sea all the way back to the U.S.A. The two forces joined to kill each other between the mountains and coastal plains of Vietnam. Every Friday night, our side toted up the body count for the week, then we went to bed and started all over again the next day.

  At the end of my first tour, I had guessed that finishing the job would take half a million men. Six years later, during my second tour, we reached the peak, 543,400, and it was still not enough. Given the terrain, the kind of war the NVA and VC were fighting, and the casualties they were willing to take, no defensible level of U.S. involvement would have been enough.

  I remember a soldier, while I was still battalion exec, who had stepped on a mine. One leg hung by a shred, and his chest had been punctured. We loaded him onto a slick and headed for the nearest evac hospital at Due Pho, about fifteen minutes away. He was just a kid, and I can never forget the expression on his face, a mixture of astonishment, fear, curiosity, and, most of all, incomprehension. He kept trying to speak, but the words would not come out. His eyes seemed to be saying, why? I did not have an answer, then or now. He died in my arms before we could reach Due Pho.

  I recently reread Bernard Fall’s book on Vietnam, Street Without Joy. Fall makes painfully clear that we had almost no understanding of what we had gotten ourselves into. I cannot help thinking that if President Kennedy or President Johnson had spent a quiet weekend at Camp David reading that perceptive book, they would have returned to the White House Monday morning and immediately started to figure out a way to extricate us from the quicksand of Vietnam. In the years between my first and second tours, the logic of Captain Hieu’s explanation—the base is here to protect the airstrip, which is here to supply the base—had not changed, only widened. We’re here because we’re here because …

  War should be the politics of last resort. And when we go to war, we should have a purpose that our people understand and support; we should mobilize the country’s resources to fulfill that mission and then go in to win. In Vietnam, we had entered into a halfhearted half-war, with much of the nation opposed or indifferent, while a small fraction carried the burden.

  I witnessed as much bravery in Vietnam as I expect to see in any war. I am proud of my service in the Americal Division. We had our bright moments and outstanding soldiers. Another officer who served in that division was a lieutenant colonel named H. Norman Schwarzkopf. Norm Schwarzkopf, I, and so many others who went on to major military responsibility must have carried away something useful from the experience. I am proud of the way American soldiers answered the call in a war so poorly conceived, conducted, and explained by their country’s leaders. Dozens of my friends died in that war. As small a circle as the CCNY Pershing Rifles lost its third member in Vietnam in 1968, John Young. All this heroism and sacrifice are precisely the point: you do not squander courage and lives without clear purpose, without the country’s backing, and without full commitment.

  I particularly condemn the way our political leaders supplied the manpower for that war. The policies—determining who would be drafted and who would be deferred, who would serve and who would escape, who would die and who would live—were an antidemocratic disgrace. I can never forgive a leadership that said, in effect: These young men—poorer, less educated, less privileged—are expendable (someone described them as “economic cannon fodder”), but the rest are too good to risk. I am angry that so many of the sons of the powerful and well placed and so many professional athletes (who were probably healthier than any of us) managed to wangle slots in Reserve and National Guard units. Of the many tragedies of Vietnam,
this raw class discrimination strikes me as the most damaging to the ideal that all Americans are created equal and owe equal allegiance to their country.

  In time, just as I came to reexamine my feelings about the war, the Army, as an institution, would do the same thing. We accepted that we had been sent to pursue a policy that had become bankrupt. Our political leaders had led us into a war for the one-size-fits-all rationale of anticommunism, which was only a partial fit in Vietnam, where the war had its own historical roots in nationalism, anticolonialism, and civil strife beyond the East-West conflict. Our senior officers knew the war was going badly. Yet they bowed to groupthink pressure and kept up pretenses, the phony measure of body counts, the comforting illusion of secure hamlets, the inflated progress reports. As a corporate entity, the military failed to talk straight to its political superiors or to itself. The top leadership never went to the Secretary of Defense or the President and said, “This war is unwinnable the way we are fighting it.” Many of my generation, the career captains, majors, and lieutenant colonels seasoned in that war, vowed that when our turn came to call the shots, we would not quietly acquiesce in halfhearted warfare for half-baked reasons that the American people could not understand or support. If we could make good on that promise to ourselves, to the civilian leadership, and to the country, then the sacrifices of Vietnam would not have been in vain.

  On June 15, 1969, with a few weeks left in my tour, I received a letter from The George Washington University. I had been accepted for the fall class in the School of Government and Business Administration. Earlier in the day, I had been out at one of the LZs, watching a rifle company return from patrol. The troops wearily climbed the hill, leaning into the weight of the rucksacks on their backs, M-16s slung in front of them, another day crossed off. That was another irony of the war in Vietnam. When the calendar hit a certain date, you just walked away from it.

  On my return to the States, Alma and I had planned to spend a few days by ourselves before joining the kids and my in-laws in Birmingham. We arranged to stay in Atlanta, where Alma was to pick me up at the airport. I had written ahead telling her what hairdo, what kind of dress, and what colors I hoped she would wear, orange and yellow. I had nourished a fantasy in my imagination, and I wanted it fulfilled when I stepped off that plane. Alma did not fail me. We drove into town and checked into our hotel. That night, I fell asleep unfashionably early. Try as she might, Alma could not keep me awake. She kept tugging at me, saying I had to watch television because the astronauts were walking on the moon! It was July 20, 1969. I was exhausted, not just from jet lag, but deep in my bones, sleeping off the emotional and physical fatigue of a year in Vietnam. We managed to spend a day and a half by ourselves, and by then Alma knew what I wanted more than anything else, to get home to see my children.

  Seven

  White House Fellow

  WHEN I HUNG UP MY UNIFORM AND STARTED CLASSES AT THE GEORGE Washington University in Washington, I was reentering a world I had been out of for eleven years. I had lived in the cocoon of the military, wearing its uniform, guided by its rules, and associating almost exclusively with its members, since leaving college. Now I was, for all practical purposes, living as a civilian.

  Alma and I immediately started house hunting. We had never owned our own home. So far, we had lived in transient military quarters, camped on the doorsteps of friends and relatives, or rented apartments on the fringes of Army posts. We had no fear over what we were about to do; it was just a question of which mansion we chose. During my tours overseas, we had managed to put away nearly $8,000. Back in Birmingham, the finest homes went for $30,000 to $35,000, well within our range. We found a real estate agent and started hunting through the northern Virginia suburbs where military families tend to gravitate. After about the tenth cramped three-bedroom look-alike, I asked the agent, “Is this what thirty-five thousand dollars buys around here?” Welcome, he told us, to the world of Washington real estate. A friend tipped us off to a new bedroom community, called Dale City, going up in Woodbridge, Virginia. Not particularly prestigious. Not much distinction between the houses. And every last tree had been bulldozed. But the developer was offering space, blessed space—five bedrooms, three baths—all for $31,520. We bought in Dale City, at 14605 DeSoto Court, on a VA mortgage for $20 down and $259 a month.

  Soon the word was out on the New York telegraph: “You hear? Colin’s bought himself a big new house—in Washington, D.C.” “So soon?” “Can he carry it?” We had barely moved in before the relatives descended to see the house, to check on Colin’s judgment, and, as long as they had a place to stay, to tour the nation’s capital.

  I underwent a crisis of confidence during my first semester at GWU. The Army had allotted eighteen months for me to complete an M.B.A. in data processing. I checked in with my department chairman before starting classes, a fine gentleman, Dr. Jack McCarthy. As Professor McCarthy leafed through my college record, I heard him mutter, “Hmm, no math, hmm, no statistics, hmm, no economics.” He picked up a phone and got in touch with the Infantry Branch. I heard McCarthy say that he saw nothing in my academic past that would suggest success in pursuing an M.B.A. My heart sank, until he added, “At least not in eighteen months.” He went on, “Yes, I know. Fine record at the Infantry School, Command and General Staff College, but they’re not graduate school.” Give Major Powell two years and two summer schools and there was hope for him, McCarthy recommended. Fortunately for me, the Army approved.

  It was true; I was rusty at academic scholarship. I found the work daunting, and was not relieved by the fact that, at age thirty-two, I was the oldest student in most classes. Even the half-dozen other officers going through with me had an edge; they were administrative and finance types to whom economics and computers were already familiar terrain. As the professors plunged us into courses such as statistical analysis and calculus—I had already flunked the latter at CCNY—they might as well have been speaking Swahili to me. I began to experience the Impostor Syndrome. What am I doing here? I don’t belong here. They made a mistake in admitting me.

  Between classes, students hung out at the student union cafeteria, where we drank coffee and played cards. And there I made a discovery. In the class of the blind, the one-eyed student is king. Not only my fellow officers but most of the business majors were as bewildered as I was. My proctor, Dr. Marvin Wofsey, Professor of Management, took me aside and lifted my spirits. He had complete faith in me, he said. And, to my astonishment, my first-semester grades were straight A’s.

  That was how it went, until I struck a reef, a course called Computer Logic. For the final exam, we were to draw a flow chart of a software program showing how the computer made decisions. I was back again trying to visualize a cone intersecting a plane in space. I pulled a D in the midterm examination but managed to salvage a B in the course, probably through divine intervention.

  I was eagerly scanning the Army Times those days to see who was going to be promoted to lieutenant colonel. I was on the promotion list, but my sequence number had yet to come up. I was anxious to make the jump not only professionally but financially. It meant a boost from $12,999 to $16,179 per annum at a time when I was taking home about $900 a month and sweating out that $259 mortgage payment. Early in July, I opened the Army Times and there were the numbers of those who would be promoted to lieutenant colonel next month, and my number appeared. It was not an early promotion this time; still, I was doing fine, a couple of years ahead of the pack. I managed to track down a captain at the Military District of Washington and asked him how I went about getting formally promoted. “Damned if I know, sir,” he said.

  I thought there ought to be some ceremonial fuss. I solved the problem by assembling the troops in the family room at 14605 DeSoto Court. Alma was out, and I was baby-sitting. I sat on the floor amid a jumble of toys while Michael Powell, now age seven, pinned a silver leaf on my sport shirt. The witnesses were Linda, five, and our most recent arrival, Annemarie Powell, watching with mi
nimal interest from her infant seat.

  Annemarie had been born two months before, on May 20. I remember vividly the day Alma came home from the hospital with that tiny bundle. I used a movie camera I had picked up at a PX in Vietnam for $10 to record the moment for posterity. As Alma got out of the car, Mike rushed up, excited and curious. Linda took a perfunctory peek at the newest princess, spun on her heels, and left, a fairly common sisterly relationship that would last for the next twenty years.

  I thought Annemarie was absolutely beautiful. And since graduate school gave me plenty of free time, I liked carrying her in my arms up and down DeSoto Court, waiting for our neighbors to come out and admire her. We now had three healthy, handsome children and decided not to strain the world’s population further.

  That fall, I was back at GWU, a professional soldier in college at the height of the antiwar movement. It was an odd sensation, passing by fraternity houses where sheets painted with the peace symbol and antiwar slogans fluttered from windows and soapbox orators condemned the war I had fought in. As I walked around in my chino slacks and sport shirt, I felt like a disguised plant in the enemy camp. My brushes with the protesters were peripheral, however, since there were few flag burners among M.B.A. candidates taking courses such as Marketing Management and Business Accounting. Like me, my classmates were less concerned with politics than with boning up for the next exam and finishing their master’s theses. They were the yuppies of tomorrow, though the term had yet to be coined.