My American Journey

by Colin L. Powell

  I had the only infantry battalion in a brigade of tankers. A couple of old Gelnhausen buddies, Clyde Sedgwick and Bill Wiehl, commanded the neighboring tank units. They made the run at a leisurely trot, while I went flat out, following the same cycle as my men—annoyance at getting up in the arctic cold, exhaustion halfway through the run, and exhilaration at the finish line. I was determined to have the 1st Battalion of the 32d Infantry win. I was not going to let a bunch of soldiers who rode around all day in mobile pillboxes beat infantrymen in a foot race.

  We had troops called Katusas (KATUSA stood for Korean Augmentation to the U.S. Army), who could run forever. Our units were always understrength. My battalion rated seven hundred men and I never had more than five hundred. We filled out the ranks with Koreans. They competed to join us, which got them out of their own units, and consequently we had the pick of the lot. The Katusas were among the finest troops I have ever commanded. They never showed up drunk or failed to show up at all. They were indefatigable, disciplined, and quick to learn. And they earned $3 a month, less than one of our men would blow on beer in a night in Tong Du Chon.

  On the rare occasion when a Katusa got out of line, I simply went to his Korean noncom. “Sergeant Major, how are you today?” “Ah, Colonel, Sergeant Major is very well, thank you.” “Sergeant Major, Private Kim seems to have a problem obeying orders.” The insubordinate private would be gone within the hour, on his way back to the Korean army. If Private Kim was worth salvaging, he and the sergeant major might disappear behind the barracks, where Kim was made to understand the error of his ways. In similar disciplinary cases, an American soldier might write to his lawyer or congressman. Different cultures were at work, presenting different trade-offs in the contest between freedom and order, between the rights of the individual and the needs of the group. On balance, though it can be far less tidy and inconvenient to those in authority, I’ll settle for our way.

  One winter day, Gunfighter summoned his commanders to tell us we were going into something called “reverse cycle training.” We were to turn night into day. “After all,” Gunfighter pointed out, “the North Koreans won’t be fighting us nine-to-five.” And so I took my battalion to the hills around the Imjin River, where we turned the clock upside down, breakfast at 8:00 P.M., compass course through the wilderness until a 1:00 A.M. lunch break, assembling and reassembling weapons and employing claymore mines and mortar fire in the “afternoon,” from 2:00 A.M. to 7:00 A.M., dinner at 8:00 A.M., and attempted sleep from 9:00 A.M. to 3:00 P.M. We did this for ten-day stretches, trying to turn the circadian clock around, which, for certain constitutions, never worked. The meals at these ungodly hours literally made some soldiers sick, and we had to go back to serving at the same time other people ate. But Gunfighter was right. Wars assume irregular hours.

  It was a crisp, clear winter day in December. The roar of artillery fire and crump of mortars were heavier than anything I had heard in two tours in Vietnam. I had the Bucs deployed on one side of the valley along the Rodriguez Range, ready to storm the hills on the opposite side. “Move out, Buccaneers,” a sergeant shouted, and the men on point began to push toward the valley floor.

  The North Koreans had not suddenly decided to break the twenty-year armistice. We were simply engaged in a “Gunfighter Shootout,” an exercise involving live ammunition, and plenty of it, to come as close to simulating actual combat conditions as possible without drawing blood. We fired off hundreds of 81mm and 107mm mortar rounds and 106mm recoilless rifle fire against targets arrayed as advancing troops.

  How had we come by all the firepower? one of my company commanders asked me. For a while the valley had echoed like D-Day. I said nothing. It would have been impolitic to explain. But Gunfighter did not want his division to mistake a few pops from our meager allowance of training ammo for actual combat conditions. We had fired off shells from our war reserve, a fact best not known to the North Koreans, or our superiors in Washington.

  “Colonel Powell, you got to come down to C Company, pronto.” The caller this Saturday afternoon was the company commander, a promising young officer who had not yet found that fine balance in handling his men between coercion and persuasion.

  I hurried from my hooch to discover a small crowd at an intersection near C Company’s rec room. The men parted to let me through. At the center stood a soldier, either drunk or doped up, brandishing a pool cue. His eyes were afire and his face contorted. “Somebody’s gonna die!” he was hollering. “Somebody’s gonna die! You put my buddy in jail. Nobody’s gonna put me in jail. Somebody’s gonna die first!”

  “I called the MPs, Colonel,” the lieutenant informed me. “They’re on the way.”

  I nodded and started toward the assailant, maintaining a distance of one pool cue. “What are you gonna do, son?” I said. “Hit me?”

  “Somebody’s gonna die,” he repeated.

  I spoke gently. “Son, put the cue down.”

  “No, sir.”

  “Do you know who I am?”

  “Yes, sir, Colonel Powell.”

  “I want you to put the cue down before you hurt somebody. I want you to put it down before somebody hurts you.” I came closer. “You see, if you don’t do what I tell you, all these men are going to whip hell out of you. Then, when they’re done, you’re going to the stockade for a year. What sense does that make? So put the cue down, and we’ll have a nice talk.”

  His arm dropped, the pool cue dropped. And he started to cry. “Nobody understands. Nobody cares.” Suddenly the homicidal maniac had become a confused, hurt kid.

  We put him on restriction for a couple of weeks. Soon afterward, I passed him on the post and he threw me a snappy salute. “Colonel, how you doin,’ sir.” He grinned to some of his pals. “That’s Bro P, Brother Powell, he’s all right.” And Bro P became my nickname, at least among the black troops, for the rest of the tour.

  Some of the race friction at Camp Casey could be traced along musical fault lines. The whites wanted rock and country-and-western. The blacks wanted soul, Aretha Franklin, and Dionne Warwick. The issue got so testy that we summoned the Tong Du Chon bar owners to division headquarters to see if we could work out a fair formula. They finally agreed that they would feature roughly seven “white” songs for every three “black” songs. As a result of this compromise, the whites were unhappy only 30 percent of the time and the blacks 70 percent.

  The soldiers had worked out their own solution. White troops gravitated toward bars in a certain part of town and blacks to another. The line of demarcation became known as the Crack. A white crossed the Crack at as much peril to himself as a black trying to enter a white Birmingham bar before the Civil Rights Act. To Gunfighter, the situation was anathema. The idea that one group “owned” part of Tong Du Chon was unacceptable. The thought that an American soldier had to fear for his safety at the hands of other American soldiers was intolerable. “Racism is bad,” Gunfighter told his assembled senior officers. “Race tension is not Pro-Life. I will not permit racism in my division.” We half expected him to say, “Racism will end by zero seven hundred tomorrow morning.”

  Gunfighter had a plan. He had already ordered a special detachment of MPs to Tong Du Chon, he informed us. “And you gentlemen are going to walk every damn street in the Crack. You’re going into dance halls, bars, any place of public accommodation. And if anyone is threatened or attacked, I’m sending in the Ready Brigade along with the MPs to clean out the place.” With that, he gave us a tight smile and said, “Now you go and have yourselves a good time.”

  In one joint we ran into Father Gianastasias, a Catholic chaplain, who was dancing with a bargirl. Some officers were taken aback. I was not. I knew Father G’s MO. He went where he would find his flock. The kid with a problem who felt uneasy about going to battalion HQ could locate Father at the Kit Kat Klub, where the priest would match him beer for beer until the soldier felt comfortable enough to bare his soul. We had other chaplains who spent their time in their hooches studyi
ng St. Paul’s Letters to the Corinthians. All very admirable, but it did not do much for troubled soldiers. And while his methods were unorthodox, we never heard a whisper that Father G ever violated his priestly vows.

  I cannot say that our march on the Crack produced integrated bliss. We had not achieved that at home, much less in a honky-tonk town halfway around the world. But General Emerson’s gutsy solution broke the color line. Thereafter, no group owned any part of Tong Du Chon. No vigilante code superseded the authority of the U.S. Army. We had shattered the mystique of the Crack.

  Seeking racial harmony was no fleeting whim with Gunfighter. He went at it full throttle, as at everything else. One day, I learned that an Emerson favorite, an unusually capable officer whom he had recently elevated to a top position on the 2d Division staff, had referred to black troops as “darkies.” I looked into it, and the charge turned out to be true. I thought it serious enough to bring to the attention of my superior, the brigade commander, who took the matter up to division. Gunfighter relieved the offending officer that afternoon, though I know the loss of an able subordinate was painful to him.

  White officers and noncoms could be tough on white troublemakers and shirkers, but many were reluctant to crack down on recalcitrant blacks for fear of being labeled racists. I had no such qualms, as in the case of a corporal whom I shall call Biggs. My command sergeant major, Albert Pettigrew, a soldier of the old school, came to me one day looking distressed. “Begging the colonel’s permission,” Pettigrew said, “I need to advise the colonel that we have a new man just transferred in from an artillery battalion up north, Corporal Biggs.”

  “So?”

  “Corporal Biggs looks like trouble,” Pettigrew said. “He’s from that battalion where the CO got relieved because he lost control of his men. Biggs was the ringleader. Now he’s got himself transferred here to Casey.”

  “Got himself transferred?” I asked. The resourceful Corporal Biggs, Pettigrew explained, had managed to have orders cut sending him wherever he wanted to go.

  “I’d like to see this soldier,” I told Pettigrew.

  Soon Biggs was before me, a small, cocky-looking guy. “I’m really glad to be down here,” he told me.

  “Why?” I asked him.

  Biggs informed me in a confidential tone that we had serious racial problems, but he thought he could handle them.

  “Really,” I said. “That’s nice. But let me tell you the rules we go by in the Bucs.” Biggs listened with bored courtesy as I explained how I ran my battalion.

  The next thing I knew, Biggs was holding meetings of black troops behind the barracks, and proving a skilled organizer. He gave dire warnings of what white officers would do if blacks did not stand up to them. He used drugs to manipulate himself into a position of control. After three weeks of this provocation, I had Pettigrew bring me Biggs’s file. After studying the file, I called the corporal to my office again. “How’re you doing, Biggs?” I asked.

  Biggs looked grave. “Sir, the battalion’s got more trouble than I thought. I got here just in time. We ought to get together every day to talk things over.”

  “That won’t be possible,” I said.

  “Why not?”

  “You see, Corporal, there’s a plane at Osan and you are going to be on it today. That plane is going to Travis Air Force Base in California, and when you get off, some people will be waiting with your discharge papers. And they’re going to put you out the gate.”

  “You can’t do that to me,” Biggs protested.

  “I’ve already done it. You’re out of my battalion. Out of this brigade. Out of this division. Out of this man’s Army. And you are unemployed.”

  I was on solid ground, since I had found enough misconduct in Biggs’s record to support an “administrative discharge,” a way to get rid of unfit soldiers for a miscellany of reasons. I called in Sergeant Major Pettigrew and two of my biggest, toughest NCOs to take the man away. Soon word went out to the battalion. “You hear what Bro P did? Whacked Biggs. That’s right. Biggs is gone, man, gone. You don’t mess with Bro P.”

  We had plenty of white problem soldiers. But proportionately we had more disciplinary problems with blacks. Less opportunity, less education, less money, fewer jobs for blacks equaled more antisocial behavior in the States, and these attitudes traveled. I also observed that black soldiers were less skillful at manipulating the system than white troublemakers. The blacks tended to be defiant, as if breaking the rules were a badge of black pride. Their attitude seemed to be “Take that,” whereas the white offender’s attitude was “Who? Little me, sir?”

  Among the blacks, I had some of the finest soldiers and NCOs I have ever known. They had found in the Army a freedom in which they could fulfill themselves. I did not like seeing their proud performance tarnished by nihilistic types, a minority within a minority. What problem soldiers needed, like the kid with the pool cue, was someone to care about them other than a Biggs, with his siren song of self-destruction. I wanted to care for them positively. And, with all his excesses, so did Gunfighter.

  One officer who had caught the Pro-Life religion was my immediate superior, the ist Brigade commander, Colonel Peter G. Grasser. Grasser was an outstanding troop trainer, demanding yet able to win respect and affection. As winter deepened, the temptation was great for the troops to hibernate in their hooches or spend all their free time with their yobos, rather than engage in healthy outdoor activities. What the brigade needed, Pete Grasser concluded, was a skating rink to be ready by Christmas. Gunfighter heartily endorsed the plan. We put the troops to work finding the flattest piece of earth in Camp Casey and ringed it with sandbags to a depth of about six inches, sealed with rubber from fuel bladders. We had benches installed and cut fifty-five-gallon drums to use as fireplaces in which the men could toast marshmallows and roast chestnuts. Grasser ordered ice skates shipped in from God knows where, and bugged us daily about our progress. I could just imagine the sugarplum visions dancing in his head—soldiers gliding along the ice as Johnny Mathis sang “Chestnuts roasting on an open fire …” and Bing Crosby crooned “White Christmas,” with booze, yobos, and B-girls in Tong Du Chon all but forgotten.

  Finally, late one afternoon, the rink was completed, and the men filled it with water. We retired to the officers’ club for drinks, waiting for the ice to form, which in Korea in December should not take long. At one point, I noticed a bunch of young lieutenants laughing slyly. My antennae always quiver when junior officers get a devilish gleam in their eyes. Soon they got up and left. I called to my exec at the other end of the bar. “Go and see what those guys are up to,” I said.

  He came back about a half hour later, red-faced either from the elements or from laughing himself silly. These lads had taken a fifty-five-gallon drum of antifreeze from the motor pool. The exec had caught them just as they were about to pour the stuff into Colonel Grasser’s rink, which then would not have frozen at fifty degrees below zero. It made no difference. The rink hardened, but the surface resembled concrete and was unusable.

  Gunfighter’s favorite tool for promoting racial tolerance was the 1970 film Brian’s Song, about the friendship between the black pro football player Gale Sayers and his white Chicago Bears teammate Brian Piccolo. We ran the movie in the post theater and followed it with a discussion. How far apart had these two men started? What divided them? What brought them together in genuine friendship? What lessons did their story have for the troops in Camp Casey? It was an effective tool. Gunfighter loved the movie and had it shown again and again. At one point, I counted that I had seen Brian’s Song six times.

  We got word one day that H. Minton Francis, head of the Pentagon’s equal opportunity program, was coming to Camp Casey. Gunfighter was ecstatic. He wanted Francis to witness the troops watching and then talking about Brian’s Song. My battalion drew the assignment. One problem! Most of my men were out in the field on training exercises, and most had seen the movie almost as often as I had. I came up with a plan to g
et us through the predicament. We would show the movie to about forty available troops in the battalion service club, where Gunfighter and Francis could observe the discussion in an intimate setting.

  I had my staff pull together a roomful of men still available in the battalion area. I had timed it so that Gunfighter and Francis would arrive for the last ten minutes of the movie and the discussion period. We had just started running the film when I got an urgent phone call. Emerson’s chief of staff, Colonel Paul Braim, was on the line. Gunfighter wanted my entire battalion watching the movie. I tried to explain why this was impossible. Maybe I did not understand, Braim said. Gunfighter wanted the movie and the discussion in a full theater, and he would be arriving in twenty minutes.

  I stopped the movie and told the projection crew to set up in the post theater—and to get an ax from the firehouse en route in case the place was locked up. Every warm body in the area was to be dragooned to attend—asleep, awake, drunk, sober. I posted a couple of sergeants on the main road and told them to divert everybody they saw to the theater, no matter what battalion they belonged to. They found one guy in handcuffs being escorted to the jail by two MPs. All three were redirected to the theater. We managed to fill the house with bewildered troops by the time Emerson and Francis showed up.

  I had just about enough time to place a few plants throughout the theater. When the film ended, one bright lieutenant spoke up on cue. “I think this film shows what people of different backgrounds can achieve when mutual respect, not race …” Gunfighter beamed. He and Francis stayed for about five minutes of this edifying talk and then left. I went onstage, thanked the men for coming, and told them they were now free to go about their business.