My American Journey

by Colin L. Powell

  I can easily put that man’s occasional excesses into perspective. In the end, results are what matter. While I served under General Emerson, AWOLs in the division dropped by over 50 percent. Reenlistments jumped by nearly 200 percent. And while impetuous youths might occasionally punch each other out, racially related brawling practically disappeared. Gunfighter went on to make three stars and to command XVIII Airborne Corps before he retired. Many of his initiatives, hatched in the isolation of Korea, would probably not have withstood the scrutiny of the new Army, the Judge Advocate General’s Office, the press, or the Medical Service Corps back in the States. Yet, I found this man inspiring. He had an instinct for knowing what gave soldiers pride, especially the rank and file who had rarely tasted any in their lives.

  Gunfighter remained true to himself in every circumstance. After he got the big job with the big house as commander of XVIII Airborne Corps, he decided that such an elevated post required a wife. He recalled the name of a fine woman from a prominent family whom he had once met. He found her, romanced her, and proposed, in rapid succession. Alma and I were among the wedding guests at Fort McNair. Chaplain Gianastasias was brought in to conduct the ceremony. Father G gave a lovely homily drawn from the wedding at Cana, weaving into his remarks his service with Gunfighter in Korea. As soon as the priest started down from the pulpit, the general, to the astonishment of the guests, started up the steps. “Did you hear that?” he exclaimed from the pulpit. Everyone in the church sat stunned. The groom went on. “Did you hear what that fine man of God just said about Korea? Yes, he was with me, a key part of our Pro-Life program.” With eyes blazing and veins throbbing, Gunfighter proceeded to give as rousing a Pro-Life speech as if he were addressing the 2d Division instead of his wedding guests, with only the profanities omitted. His refined, artistic bride had not realized that she was marrying an Army corps, not just a man.

  Had it not been for a Tom Miller and Red Barrett in Germany, a Bill Abernathy and Cider Joe Stilwell at Fort Devens, a Charles Gettys in Vietnam, a Gunfighter Emerson in Korea, I would have left the Army long ago. These men gave our lives a flavor, a spice, a texture, a mood, an atmosphere, an unforgettableness. I realize, looking back on that period over twenty years ago, that my service in Korea marked the end of an age. We were moving from the old Army to the new, from draftees and enlistees to an all-volunteer force of unprecedented standards, from an Army with few women to an Army with many. It was the end of the hard-drinking, hell-raising, all-male culture in which I had grown up. No longer would hundreds of men march through the post, throaty voices raised in profane Jody chants (I don’t know, but I’ve been told, Eskimo [anatomy] are mighty cold…. Give me your left, your right, your left …). As one of my pals put it, it was “our last chance to be old-fashioned infantrymen before the lace-curtain Army took over.”

  Was the old Army better than the new? It was not. Today’s force is superior, as proved in operations like Just Cause in Panama and Desert Storm in the Persian Gulf. And I do not forget the bad, which I have inventoried in some detail. In fact, I vowed to myself that I would never say in my retirement, “That’s not the way we did it in the old days.” Yet, late at night, when my thoughts drift, I fondly recall those days. I savor the intense camaraderie, the irrepressible characters, the coltish high spirits. And I recognize that thirty years from now, today’s lieutenants and captains will have gone gray and will mistily recall their “old Army.” I am proud to be part of the leadership that created the new Army just as I am proud to have been part of the old one that had to change. I came home from Korea having served the happiest year of my military career, in many ways because of what was and can never be again.

  … … …

  Just before I left Korea, I had bundled up all the letters Alma sent me. One of them I had read at the time with no particular reaction. But I have reread it since with a sense of wonder. On August 13, 1974, Alma wrote: “I feel we are on the verge of something exciting. I somehow don’t feel that we will settle into a comfortable rut living out our lives in Dale City with you coming and going to the Pentagon…. I don’t know what is in store for us, but something big and exciting will happen.”

  Nine

  The Graduate School of War

  WHILE I WAS IN KOREA, FIVE GENERALS HAD MET IN WASHINGTON TO select Army officers to attend the service war colleges. I was lucky enough to be selected. The Army, Navy, and Air Force all have prestigious institutions, but the likelihood was that I would go to the Army War College. The president of the selection board was one of my mentors, Lieutenant General Julius Becton. Becton decided instead that I should go to the National War College at Fort McNair, in Washington, D.C. The NWC, the Harvard of military education, was open to about 140 students yearly, with equal attendance from all the armed forces as well as civilians from the State Department, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the U.S. Information Agency. Becton was an NWC graduate.

  When you are in Korea on twelve-mile marches and bellowing Jody chants, the National War College seems as remote as the stars. I had been crouching in the mud on a Gunfighter Shootout when I got word that I had been chosen for NWC. I returned to the States in September 1974 at a strange interlude in our national life. The month before, President Nixon had resigned in the wake of the Watergate scandal, and just as I got home, Nixon’s successor, President Gerald Ford, pardoned Nixon. I remembered Fred Malek’s words on Watergate when I had decided not to stay on with the administration and had gone instead to Korea: this will all blow over.

  NWC classes would not start until August 1975, and so I was temporarily assigned to the Pentagon, where I expected to mark time for nine months. William Brehm, assistant secretary of defense for manpower, reserve affairs, and logistics, had other ideas. “Colonel Powell,” Brehm said, almost as I came through the door, “we’re in hot water with Congress. We’re supposed to produce an annual projection of the military’s manpower needs. And we’ve been late for the last few years. I don’t care how you do it, but your job is to get the report in on time.”

  For the first time, I began working with career Pentagon civilians, under Irving Greenberg, a thoroughgoing professional. A new challenge for me, but old to these hands, was to try to get the four services pulling together, since our report to Congress had to cover the manpower each service thought it deserved. As I began my task, I found that the Air Force had the fastest reaction time, not surprising from the youngest service and from people used to supersonic speed. The Marines Corps, the smallest service, fought as if its every manpower position was a battleground. The Navy was the most cautious about revealing its intentions. And the Army performance? Solid, dependable, but not all that imaginative.

  Experiencing interservice rivalries firsthand turned out to be an important education for me. A time would come when juggling these competing interests would become almost my full-time job. This initial exposure introduced me to an eternal paradox: the rivalry among the services produces both the friction that lowers performance and the distinctiveness that lifts performance. The challenge then, now, and forever is to strike the right balance.

  I worked like a dog those months, as John Brinkerhof, my immediate boss, and I went through endless drafts. It was a happy day for me when we submitted the report to Congress—ahead of time—and I could head for the National War College.

  What pleased me about attending NWC, as much as the career significance, was that I did not have to uproot my family. We could go on living in Dale City as I commuted to NWC at the historic Washington Arsenal at Fort McNair. There is a majesty about the 1907 building where the college is located. From the grand entrance, you step into a marble three-story rotunda, encircled by balustraded galleries and crowned by a Spanish-tiled dome eighty feet high. The place has a hushed aura, something like the Lincoln Memorial. It was near this site that the Lincoln assassination conspirators were hanged, and the ghost of one of them, Mary Surratt, is said to haunt a nearby building.

  At the college we were
subjected to nothing so mechanical as multiple-choice questions. In fact, we took no examinations. The courses in history, politics, diplomacy, and military theory were designed for intellectual stimulation and growth rather than the mastery of technical material. Mornings we attended lectures in an auditorium resembling the medical school amphitheaters you see in nineteenth-century paintings. Our teachers were diplomats, academics, chiefs of the military services, writers, top people in every field. We were introduced to the great military thinkers and their ideas—Mahan on sea power, Douhet on airpower, and Clausewitz on war in general. In the afternoon, we had a choice of electives in subjects such as Futuristics, Media Impact on National Security, and Radical Ideologies.

  It was a good time to be at the NWC. In the wake of Vietnam the soul searching—the what-went-wrong syndrome—created a lively ferment. A teacher who raised my vision several levels was Harlan Ullman, a Navy lieutenant commander who taught military strategy. So far, I had known men of action, but few who were also authentic intellectuals. Ullman was that rarity, a scholar in uniform, a line officer qualified for command at sea, also possessed of one of the best, most provocative minds I have ever encountered. Ullman and his fellow faculty members enabled me to connect my worm’s-eye experiences to an overview of the interrelated history, culture, and politics of warfare.

  That wise Prussian Karl von Clausewitz was an awakening for me. His On War, written 106 years before I was born, was like a beam of light from the past, still illuminating present-day military quandaries. “No one starts a war, or rather no one in his senses should do so,” Clausewitz wrote, “without first being clear in his mind what he intends to achieve by that war and how he intends to achieve it.” Mistake number one in Vietnam. Which led to Clausewitz’s rule number two. Political leaders must set a war’s objectives, while armies achieve them. In Vietnam, one seemed to be looking to the other for the answers that never came. Finally, the people must support a war. Since they supply the treasure and the sons, and today the daughters too, they must be convinced that the sacrifice is justified. That essential pillar had crumbled as the Vietnam War ground on. Clausewitz’s greatest lesson for my profession was that the soldier, for all his patriotism, valor, and skill, forms just one leg in a triad. Without all three legs engaged, the military, the government, and the people, the enterprise cannot stand.

  In my world, thus far, social life had centered on contemporaries in rank, maybe a notch above or a notch below, plus neighbors and relatives. Harlan Ullman knew no such boundaries. On one occasion, Harlan and his British-born wife, Julian, invited Alma and me to meet some of their friends at a dinner in their Georgetown townhouse. The guest of honor was to be Vice Admiral Marmaduke G. Bayne, president of the National Defense University, which included both the National War College and the Industrial College of the Armed Forces. In my circle, lieutenant commanders did not ordinarily hobnob with admirals, yet Harlan Ullman did. The admiral was friendly enough, but a flicker of puzzlement crossed his face when we were introduced. He had come expecting to meet Lewis Powell, associate justice of the Supreme Court, not a student from his own school.

  At the NWC, wives were permitted to audit the elective courses, and Julian Ullman often came to hear Harlan lecture. She and I usually sat together. On drowsy Washington afternoons, it was not always easy to stay awake listening to “lessons for us today from the Punic Wars.” Years later, after I had become deputy national security advisor, the Ullmans came to my fiftieth birthday party, and when it came time for me to make a little speech, I called Julian, with whom I shared the same birthday, to my side. I put my arm around her, and confided to the guests that while I was a student at the war college, she and I had slept together, adding, after an agonizing pause, “during her husband’s lectures.”

  In February 1976, midway through the NWC, I received an accelerated promotion to full colonel. Many thoroughly respectable military careers top out at that grade, and I wondered how much further mine would go. The military then operated on a rigid career principle—up or out. The system was hard, competitive, and more ruthless than civilians probably realized. Those who did not make the next grade did not simply mark time in place. If passed over more than once for promotion, an officer had to retire to make way for the next generation. The competition got stiffer at every level. Of one hundred career lieutenants starting out, perhaps only one would make brigadier general.

  I always tempered my career expectations with caution. Yet, soon after that accelerated promotion to colonel, I received more good news. After the war college, I was to take command of the 2d Brigade of the 101st Airborne Division at Fort Campbell, Kentucky. I was the youngest in my war college class to make colonel and one of only two Army officers in the class chosen for brigade command. In Korea, I had led a battalion of 700 men. Next, I would be commanding three battalions, totaling over 2,500 men. With all the caution in the world, I could not add up this evidence—National War College, accelerated promotion, upcoming command—without concluding that I might have a future at the senior level. I might make general. Still, there was a long way to go.

  I was excited that after the war college I would be joining the 101st Airborne Division, “the Screaming Eagles,” a storybook outfit. The 101st had been formed in mid-1942, along with the 82d Airborne Division, from the merger of five parachute regiments of the deactivated 82d Motorized Division. In the famous photograph of General Eisenhower saying farewell to paratroopers with blackened faces just before D-Day, he is talking to the men of the 101st. The 101st jumped into Holland in Operation Market Garden, immortalized in the book and movie A Bridge Too Far. When Bastogne was surrounded during the Battle of the Bulge, it was the 101st’s commander, Brigadier General Anthony McAuliffe, who issued the legendary reply when the Germans demanded surrender: “Nuts.” The 101st added to its fighting reputation in Vietnam.

  And then I hit a mine. I was supposed to replace Colonel Fred Mahaffey, the fastest of fast burners, another DePuy protégé, the officer most of us expected to become Army Chief of Staff someday (until his untimely death). Major General John Wickham, commanding the 101st, called to inform me that Mahaffey was being promoted to brigadier general and would be leaving the 2d Brigade right away. Mahaffey’s early departure meant that Wickham would have to fill my slot with someone else, since he could not wait another two months until I graduated from the war college. I was distressed. I was also not ready to give up.

  The National Defense University had a policy that you could not leave the course early. Air Force Major General James Murphy was president of the National War College, under the university’s president, Admiral Bayne. I went to Murphy and explained that if I could not leave early, I was going to lose this command and have to get back in the queue. Murphy was sympathetic, but reiterated the policy. I would have to finish my classes, go on an out-of-country field trip, and come back for graduation.

  I saw a crack of daylight. Since I had made field trips abroad to Russia and China as a White House Fellow, maybe I could make a field trip more profitably elsewhere. How about Fort Campbell—home of the 101st? “Hmm,” Murphy said. “You just might do that, then come back to present your final report and graduate with your class.”

  I contacted General Wickham and asked him to hold my command open. I hurried to Infantry Branch to pull a little sleight of hand, but hit another roadblock. They could not let me assume command on temporary duty while I was on permanent duty with the war college. Okay, I said, then assign me to Campbell permanently and make my return to the war college temporary. Velma Baldwin of OMB would have been proud of me, and Fred Malek too.

  I brought my solution back to General Murphy. “Just one thing,” he said. “Would you mind leaving your jump boots and 101st patch at Campbell when you come back? We don’t have to flaunt our arrangement.” I went out to Campbell without the family, took command, came back six weeks later, and graduated from the NWC.

  In those days, the rule for Washington-area real estate was, wh
at goes up just keeps on going up. We sold the house in Dale City, after living there for seven years, for about twice what we’d paid for it. Alma was ready for a change, and now that her husband was a bird colonel with a brigade, we should rate Army housing approaching elegance.

  As usual, we drove—kids and all—from Washington to Fort Campbell, this time in a monster Chrysler, which I’d bought from a war college classmate, Bill Bramlett, for $50 and which averaged seven miles per gallon. Fort Campbell is in rural country astride the Kentucky-Tennessee border, about an hour north of Nashville. We followed directions to Cole Park, where the residences of the commanding general and brigade and battalion commanders were located. On the way in, we passed a rustic masterpiece, a log cabin mansion, General Wickham’s home. Alma’s eyes lit up. We passed a small Capehart home, named for the U.S. senator who sponsored military housing legislation. We passed another Capehart, and another and another, all the same. Alma’s eyes narrowed. These, it turned out, were the brigade and battalion commanders’ houses. We stopped before 1560 Cole Park, the house assigned to us. The three kids sprang from the car like tigers released from a cage and started exploring the outdoors while Alma and I went indoors.

  “Nice,” Alma said. “Same house we had at Benning with the hardwood floors, dishwasher, and air conditioning when you were a captain, except here we’ve got linoleum floors, no dishwasher, and no air conditioning, and now you’re a colonel. Colin,” she asked, “when are we going to get one of those fancy houses you promised?”

  “Soon,” I said.

  John Wickham was the kind of officer whom gruffer types like to denigrate as a “political general” because he had served in the Pentagon as military assistant to two Secretaries of Defense, James Schlesinger and Donald Rumsfeld. Wickham faced another prejudice—he had gotten a command that ordinarily went to an aviator. I met him at division headquarters, a short, wiry man with steel-gray hair and a quiet, confident demeanor. I was surprised at how agilely Wickham moved. In Vietnam, the Viet Cong had thrown a satchel charge into his bunker; he was torn up so badly that he spent over a year in Army hospitals. John Wickham had paid his dues and was every inch a soldier.