My American Journey

by Colin L. Powell

  I wound up slated for Korea, not through preference or pull, but because command of the ist Battalion, 32d Infantry, 2d Infantry Division, Eighth Army, Korea, was one of the few blanks I found in Column B. The battalion was known as the Queen’s Own Buccaneers, shortened to “the Bucs.” The name reflected the battalion’s roots in Hawaii, when ruled by Queen Liliuokalani in the 1890s.

  The hard part was telling Alma where I was going. Korea was an “unaccompanied tour,” which meant leaving her alone in Dale City for a year with three children, ages ten, eight, and three. My wife, a sensible woman, was not thrilled. “I’m asking you to make a sacrifice,” I admitted.

  Alma did not disagree. “But if this is what you want,” she said, “if this is what you think is best for you, then do it.”

  Her support made it easier, but not easy. This marked the third time I would be absent from the life of my son, the second time I would be leaving Linda, and the first time I would be parted from Annemarie, at her most enchanting age. Having to leave my wife and children to go off to Korea was, at that point, the most painful thing I had ever faced.

  The White House Fellowship ended, and I put on the uniform again. The people I had met during that year were going to shape my future in ways unimaginable to me then. But first, I was off to Korea, where an old soldier would teach me a unique brand of military leadership.

  Eight

  “Go, Gunfighter, Go!”

  MY NEW COMMANDING OFFICER, MAJOR GENERAL HENRY E. “THE GUNfighter” Emerson, had taken over the 2d Division at Camp Casey just a few months before I arrived in Korea. I got an early hint of what he might be like from my change-of-command ceremony. I was replacing Lieutenant Colonel Zeb Bradford, another officer also out of the DePuy staff, and a battalion commander who had done a first-rate job with the Bucs. Changes of command tend to be somewhat uncomfortable. There is only so much you want to hear about how the other guy ran his ship. I prefer the overlap to be brief, and in this case it was.

  The morning of the ceremony, Bradford and I arrived at a nearly deserted parade ground. I had become accustomed in Germany and Vietnam to overblown hoopla at these events, a big turnout, and the shower of medals. But here, only a lonely-looking four-man color guard stood in the middle of the field. Five company commanders and their guidon bearers, representing the battalion’s five companies, were spread out like solitary pickets. A handful of onlookers watched from the stands. “Gunfighter doesn’t care to have the troops stand in the hot sun while a couple of colonels tell each other how wonderful they are,” Bradford said to me. The sergeant major presented the battalion colors to Bradford, who handed them to me, and I returned them to the sergeant major. That was it. The whole business took less than thirty seconds. I started thinking I might like Gunfighter Emerson.

  Soon afterward, I went to division headquarters to report to the general. He came bursting out of his office and seized my hand, which he pumped like a well handle. The man was about fifty, tall, rangy, with a great eagle’s beak of a nose, craggy features, a hot-eyed gaze, and a booming voice. He never stopped pacing as he welcomed me. He had earned his nickname in Vietnam by carrying a cowboy-style six-shooter rather than a regulation .45 caliber pistol, and I noticed that he had a revolver engraved on his belt buckle. I was also aware that he had won a reputation there as a fierce fighter.

  General Emerson scheduled a commanders call for this morning, and I stayed on to attend. As my fellow officers came in, the general introduced me, and we seated ourselves around the conference room. Emerson continued to pace. “Today’s subject,” he announced, “is marksmanship.” He started off in a reasonable tone. As he went on, however, he warmed to his subject. Marksmanship was important! The pacing quickened. If marksmanship was neglected, soldiers would be unprepared! The eyes began to blaze. And if soldiers were unprepared, they would not win. And what the hell kind of leadership was that? Fists now pounding. The pattern was never to change all the while I served under the Gunfighter. A modest premise, mounting fervor, and an apoplectic windup. I observed his accelerating excitement on every subject from deploying helicopters along the DMZ to soldier correspondence courses. And his punch line was always the same, a vein-popping “If we don’t do our jobs right, soldiers won’t win!”

  His performance before the troops was no different. The first time I witnessed it, we had assembled the entire division oh the Camp Casey parade field. Gunfighter started off calmly. “Our mission in Korea is to maintain the armistice agreed to on July 27, 1953, between the United Nations and North Korea. Further, our mission is to come to the aid of our South Korean allies should that armistice be violated.” As he spoke, Emerson’s voice took on velocity. I heard one of the sergeants whisper, “Here he goes.” Pretty soon, Gunfighter was shouting, “And if those North Korean sons of bitches ever cross that DMZ, we’re gonna kick their asses!” By now, the eyes were flashing and the veins throbbed on his neck. “And if the Chinese throw a million troops across the border, we’re gonna kick their asses too!” The troops caught the spirit and began shouting, “Go, Gunfighter, go!”

  Emerson had inherited a tough command. Morale in the 2d Division when he took over was not high, and discipline was slack. I found it heartening to hear a leader sound off with spirit and show a will to change. This division could stand a little gung ho.

  On just my second night in camp, I had gotten a taste of the division’s condition. I was in my quarters, a metal half-Quonset with a shower, bed, desk, and smelly diesel heater, getting ready to hit the sack when I got a call asking me to come immediately to the provost marshal’s office. The night was chilly with just a hint of the impending Korean winter in the air as I hurried down the hillside still buttoning my jacket.

  I entered a small building just inside the camp gate, containing a desk for the MP sergeant and a couple of detention cells. I seemed to have walked in on a fight with a wildcat. An MP was trying to handcuff about 150 pounds of unadulterated fury while a half-dozen others warily circled this blur of arms and legs. A major, cool as ice, stood outside the ring. “Remember your training,” he was saying. “If I told you once, I told you ten times, not one on one. Everybody on him!” With that, the other MPs piled on and subdued the culprit. At the bottom of the pileup, I glimpsed a small private, who, I was informed, was from my battalion.

  As the MPs took him outside and wrestled him into the back of a van for transfer to the stockade in Seoul, the major explained the situation. The private was part of a gang that allegedly intended to murder the camp provost marshal. He and his pals had created a deliberate ruckus in order to get arrested and tossed into the cells. While there, they planned to start another fight, and when the provost marshal came to break it up, the scrapper I had just observed was supposed to stab him with a long needle he had managed to sneak through the body search. The last I saw of the prisoner, he was shackled hand and foot, kicking out the back window as the van pulled away. This was my introduction to the drugs, racial tension, and indiscipline plaguing the Army in Korea, without even the distraction of a war as in Vietnam.

  Today’s all-volunteer Army has high standards. It was not the case then. We were in transition from the draft to the all-volunteer force. As we dragged ourselves home from Vietnam, the nation turned its back on the military. Many of our troops, in Army shorthand, were “Cat Four,” Category IV, soldiers possessing meager skills in reading, writing, and math. They were life’s dropouts, one step above Category V, those who were considered unfit for Army service. Today, about 4 percent of the Army is Cat Four, while in those days the figure was closer to 50 percent.

  General Emerson was determined to turn around this slack, demoralized operation. He gave the job his total attention, since Gunfighter was a bachelor to whom the Army was wife and mistress. He had begun a program for remaking the 2d Infantry Division which he called “Pro-Life,” not to be confused with the antiabortion movement. Emerson’s Pro-Life program, as he put it, “was to provide the soldier opportunities to be
come a winner rather than a loser in life.” Given Army conditions in Korea, I favored “pro” anything, within reason, though reasonableness was not always Gunfighter’s long suit.

  He was not a lone voice in his reforming zeal. In this transitional period, the Army was trying to make military life more appealing and to get rid of aspects that made people disinclined to stay in. Hated KP was eliminated. The Army went to a five-day week with weekends off wherever practical. Barracks were redesigned to end the hospital-ward look and to provide a private room and bath for every three soldiers. Almost none of these innovations, however, had yet reached Korea. Gunfighter, nevertheless, was determined to lift morale.

  We were in this country because of a war that had ended twenty years before. The Korean War stands almost hidden in the shadows of the two wars that flank it, the drama of World War II and the agony of Vietnam. Yet, 54,000 Americans died in this conflict, heavier casualties proportionately for its three years than suffered during the nearly ten years of major U.S. involvement in Vietnam. And Korea was the war I pretty much grew up on. I was eight when World War II ended, and my memories are the sketchy recollections of a child. But I was in the impressionable ages of thirteen through sixteen when, the older boys from Kelly Street went off to Korea. The GIs who fought there returned talking about combat in a primitive place where things moved by oxcart and the stench of dung was everywhere. Today, South Korea is another Asian economic miracle producing everything from cars to VCRs to microchips. And when I arrived, the impending economic miracle was already beginning in a Seoul bristling with office towers and humming with entrepreneurial energy. A few miles beyond, however, the capital’s sophistication yielded to thatch-roofed villages, small vegetable farms, rice paddies, and the ever-present oxen.

  Camp Casey, where I was to spend the next year, was about an hour’s drive from Seoul, a straggly succession of World War II Quonset huts stretching up a valley and climbing the surrounding hillsides. The atmosphere was pure war zone, with none of the softening amenities of a post where families live. We were about twenty-five miles from the DMZ, the demilitarized zone forming the buffer between North and South Korea. And the 2d Infantry Division was there, to put it bluntly, to provide a buffer of American flesh and blood.

  We were there to obstruct a North Korean attack. If and when that danger ever lifted, the Army would pull out. Therefore, there was no need for building costly frills. The Quonset huts were hot as ovens in the summer and cold as charity during the bitter Korean winter, which we were about to enter. The Quonsets were heated by inefficient diesel-fuel units that required a little carburetor valve to function. I found that many barracks were unheated for lack of this small part, a situation reflecting the prevailing sloppiness on the post. When my supply clerk ordered the valves, the maintenance battalion brushed him off—“Out of stock.” I went to the warehouse myself and raised hell until I found the valves—near a stash of World War I gas mask canisters. The supply people, who could not find valves to heat barracks, said that they were keeping the nearly sixty-year-old canisters because they were afraid to throw them away. This was the environment Emerson was trying to change, and I was all for it.

  On checking the battalion records, I was struck by the number of short-term AWOLs, men usually gone only a few hours. “Yobos,” my executive officer explained. Yobos? Any eighteen-year-old who had had trouble getting a date in high school could have an apartment and a girl, a yobo of his own, in Tong Du Chon, the town next to Camp Casey, and for only $180 a month. The girls were provided by a combination madam-yenta serving the American garrison. Given the grim accommodations on post, the appeal of these menages was not hard to understand. And from a health standpoint, the arrangement was probably preferable to the widespread patronage of $10 prostitutes, who had driven the VD rate in Camp Casey to lofty heights, with repeat performers in some units propelling the rate to over 100 percent.

  Tong Du Chon was a one-industry town, and the U.S. Army was the industry. Back home this was the era of Afros and black exploitation movies like Shaft and Superfly. Black soldiers were not permitted extreme Afros in the Army, but off duty, they sported every other super-fly fashion—three-inch heels, wild suits and capes, outfits the tailors of Tong Du Chon could churn out almost overnight for $20. For the whites, cowboy hats, fancy-stitched boots, and denim shirts were the off-duty rage, and attempts to get away with longish hair.

  On my first visit to Tong Du Chon, I strolled along a block jammed with sidewalk artists who seemed to be grabbing at my wallet. Finally, I understood through their pidgin English that they wanted to see my family photographs. I took out a snapshot of little Annie, and in twenty minutes, for $10, a painter produced an oil painting of my daughter—my Korean daughter, since no matter who these artists depicted, the aspect was always Oriental. Elvis Presley was the big draw for white troops in Tong Du Chon, Elvis painted on velvet in every pose and size. I wonder how many American family rooms are decorated with these portraits of the King, with almond eyes, kept by paunchy men now in their fifties.

  Whole streets of Tong Du Chon were filled with brassware sellers offering candlesticks, ashtrays, plates, plaques, utensils—any object or shape into which brass could be beaten. I soon learned the source of the metal. We were conducting a night firing exercise that fall, first pounding the side of a hill with artillery and then sending in infantry to pepper it with small-arms fire. A red-star cluster went off signaling “cease fire.” Immediately, the hillside twinkled with pinpoints of light. What was that? I asked. “Koreans,” my exec informed me. Shadowy shapes emerged out of shallow holes and trenches and headed straight for the firing range. They carried flashlights, even candles, and started scavenging spent bullets, shells, and brass cartridge cases while they were still hot. Some got a head start by hiding in caves inside the impact area. This was the source of brass found in the shops of Tong Du Chon.

  The second time my battalion went on one of these night exercises, I had to send the exec into a nearby village the next day to inform the chief that one of his people had been accidentally killed on the range. The chief’s reaction was a matter-of-fact nod. These were desperately poor people, and they were ready to take lethal risks as the cost of doing business.

  “You see, gentlemen, if you play football, you’ve only got twenty-two men on the field. Baseball, nine men plus the runners. Basketball, ten.” General Emerson had brought us together one fall morning, and I was not sure where this commanders call was headed. “But we’ve got eighteen thousand men in the division,” he continued. “And we want all of them to play. We want all of them to feel like winners. Pro-Life!” His solution was “combat sports.”

  Gunfighter went on to explain. We would start with combat football. Instead of conventional eleven-man teams, we would field whole units—first platoon against second platoon, maybe eighty men at once. We would play on the soccer field, and the objective was to get the football into the opponent’s net. How? Any way you can, the general explained. Run it, throw it, kick it, pass it. And, to liven up the action, we would use two footballs at once. The rules? None. You can tackle, block, clip, blindside, anything. Referees? No rules, so you don’t need any referees. And no penalties.

  As soon as we started combat football, the division doctors were in an uproar. They were being flooded with orthopedic cases, some serious. They threatened to blow the whistle on Gunfighter. We instituted minimal rules. We put in a referee to stop play at least when both balls went out of bounds. We replaced combat boots with sneakers. We banned kicking, clipping, and punching. The troops loved combat football, at least the spectators did, and Gunfighter Emerson adored it.

  In every successful military organization, and I suspect in all successful enterprises, different styles of leadership have to be present. If the man at the top does not exhibit all these qualities, then those around him have to supplement. If the top man has vision and vision only, he requires a whip hand to enforce his ideas. If the organization has a visionary and
a whip hand, it needs a “chaplain” to soften the relentless demands of the others. In the 2d Division, the chaplain role was performed by Brigadier General Harry Brooks, the assistant division commander and the first black general under whom I served directly. Where Gunfighter was theatrical, impetuous, demanding, and unbending, Harry Brooks provided stability, coolness, and common sense. Brooks could steer combat football from total to only partial mayhem. Without the flywheel of a Harry Brooks, the laudable energy of a Gunfighter would have torn the division apart. I loved, admired, and learned from both men.

  “Goooood morning, Camp Casey.” The determinedly cheery radio voice woke me every day at 5:30 A.M. Another of Gunfighter Emerson’s Pro-Life antidotes to brawling, drug abuse, boozing, lechery, and trying to stab provost marshals was physical exhaustion. Consequently, we began the day with a four-mile run, to be completed in thirty-two minutes or less. “Last week’s winner of the run was …” the announcer went on. “And today’s temperature is …” Oh God, let it be ten below zero. If it was that cold, we did not have to run. One degree higher, and we still had to pry ourselves from our warm bunks and start running in air that frosted our lungs—up a sloping hill, then up a steeper hill, to the halfway point at Camp Hovey, located on a mountaintop, then back down to Camp Casey, all before breakfast. We ran the last two minutes at a sprint, hundreds of men yelling their guts out. The curious thing to me was that the same men who griped constantly about the run were all over me the minute we crossed the finish line wanting to know, “What was the time, Colonel? How’d we do? Did we beat the 72d Armored?” Gunfighter was on to something.