My American Journey

by Colin L. Powell

  Wickham’s assistant division commander, Brigadier General Weldon C. Honeycutt, my immediate boss, had been a classmate of mine at Fort Leavenworth. “Tiger” Honeycutt was a born warrior who had come out of Vietnam a hero and who may have been the most profane man in the Army, where the competition is fierce. “Powell,” he greeted me when I first reported in, “besides Leavenworth, I don’t know shit about you, but welcome to the 101st anyway. Best son-of-a-bitching division on God’s green earth.” He sat down and left me standing as he reviewed the division. “We’ve got three infantry brigades,” he said. “Yours is dead-ass last. You got Kinzel”—Lieutenant Colonel Arthur Kinzel—“the best battalion commander out here, running your 501st Infantry. But your 502d and the 506th are at the bottom of the heap. So fix ’em. Now get your ass outta here.”

  Thank you, sir. If this had been my first exposure to the Tiger Honeycutts of this world, I might have been upset. The Army, however, was full of them. They provided the pepper that stings, but spices as well. Colonel Ted “Wild Turkey” Crozier, General Wickham’s chief of staff, was another memorable figure. His nickname derived from a spiritous product that he favored and from his explosive enthusiasms. He had been sent by the Pentagon to Fort Campbell presumably to ride out his time to retirement in serenity. Instead, he had gotten the key chief of staff job and continued to live up to his reputation. At Campbell, John Wickham provided the vision. Honeycutt and Crozier applied the lash to get the crew to comply. Fortunately, we had two officers fulfilling the chaplain role, Brigadier General Chuck Bagnal, the assistant division commander for support, and Colonel Arthur Lombardi, an old-timer who ran day-to-day post operations. While the enforcers ranted and raved, Bagnal and Lombardi spoke with calmness and reason. While the others raised hackles, these two smoothed feathers. With vision only, you get no follow-through. With enforcers only, the vision is realized but leaves a lot of wreckage. Good chaplains pick up the pieces and put everything together again. At Campbell, fortunately, we had all three roles filled.

  The 101st had a unique mission, helicopter-borne assault, and General Wickham was its apostle. The division was the only air assault unit in the world combining light infantry battalions and helicopter battalions to move them swiftly around the battlefield. We were airborne, but not paratroopers. And we certainly were not heavy armor. Consequently, we took flak from both sides. Any airborne troops who did not jump were “legs,” the paratroopers’ term, not intended as a compliment. Any soldiers who flitted around in anything as flimsy as a helicopter would not last five minutes on a battlefield, said the heavy armor people. Our mission, John Wickham believed, was to prove both sides wrong.

  “Reforger” was the upcoming show that fall of 1976. It stood for “Return of Forces to Germany,” an annual exercise through which the United States assured our NATO allies that we could rapidly reinforce the Continent. This year, the 101st was to carry out Reforger, and I was hoping to go back as a colonel and brigade commander to the haunts where I had served as a lowly lieutenant eighteen years before.

  Two of the 101st’s three brigades were to go on Reforger and one would be left behind for stateside duties. To my bitter disappointment, my brigade, the 2d, had already been designated to stay home. I moped for half a day and then decided that we were not going to listen to the other two brigades’ war stories when they got back. We were going to have our own little surprise.

  Air assault school is to the helicopter forces what jump school is to paratroopers. I decided to qualify as many of my soldiers as possible at the school, starting with me. So far, none of my fellow infantry brigade commanders had been able to pass the physical training test to get into air assault school. I presented myself to the noncoms who ran the test, did my push-ups, squats, pull-ups, ran the obstacle course—and flunked the last by a tenth of a second. I went back a week later sufficiently primed to pass the test. At age thirty-nine, I felt like an old man trying out for college football, rappelling out of helicopters and making twelve-mile forced marches as the senior officer among about one hundred enlisted soldiers.

  After I had earned my air assault badge, I gathered my battalion commanders, company commanders, and staff and made an announcement. “Some of you are not air-assault-qualified,” I said, pointing to my new badge. “On October 30, we are going to be photographed together, and anybody in that picture without the badge will be out of the picture in this brigade as far as I am concerned.”

  I went to my three chaplains and told them to enroll in the air assault course too. To make it easier for them, I locked up the chapel, except on weekends. Chaplains belonged with the troops, I suggested, and the troops did not always frequent the chapel. The Baptist chaplain objected. He had not entered the Army to play commando, he advised me. If he expected to comfort my troops, I said, he was going to complete air assault school along with every other officer. He grudgingly complied and broke his leg during the first week. After an appropriate interval, I asked him when his cast was coming off. “Why?” he asked. “So you can finish the course,” I answered. He got himself transferred to another brigade.

  Six weeks later, the rest of the division returned from Germany, having had a successful exercise. General Wickham was impressed by our accomplishments in his absence—particularly the 100 percent air assault qualification among my officers. Since he did not want my brigade to feel like Cinderella, he had Ted Crozier lean on me to put my men in for awards for outstanding achievements. I submitted a few names. But I was of the Gunfighter Emerson school. Inflation debases currencies and medals. I had my own reward in the lesson learned. If you get the dirty end of the stick, sharpen it and turn it into a useful tool.

  My folks came to Fort Campbell to celebrate Thanksgiving in 1976. Mom enjoyed catching up on her grandchildren and helping Alma in the kitchen. But Pop had come to Fort Campbell to see and be seen. I bundled him up in a black coat with his ever-present fedora and had my driver take us all around the post in a jeep. Since Luther had never heard a gun fired in his life, I took him to an M-16 rifle range so that he could see what his son did for a living. We had drinks at the officers’ club. We went to the division boxing matches with General Wickham. Luther sat in the front row as if he had never sat anywhere else, and he chatted with Wickham as if he had known generals all his life.

  I wanted to give Mom and Pop another taste of the world I lived in. My brigade still used the old-fashioned company mess halls, and that was where the Powell family went for Thanksgiving dinner. We took our places at the CO’s table and the cooks served us turkey with all the trimmings. I looked around at one point, and Pop was gone. I spotted him in the kitchen talking to the cooks, shaking hands, telling them what a fine meal they had put on. Then he started table-hopping through the mess hall, like Omar Bradley mixing with the troops before an invasion. What impressed me was my father’s toted aplomb. He was never daunted by rank, place, or ceremony. Luther Powell belonged wherever Luther Powell happened to be. On his last night with us, Pop sidled up to Alma in the kitchen and whispered, “Colin’s going to be a general.” Alma asked how he knew. He had been talking, Pop said, to General Wickham.

  The next day, I drove my folks to the Nashville Airport. As we headed for the terminal, Pop, for once, made no fuss about my carrying his bags. His step was slower, his face a little drawn. My father was growing old. And it shocked me.

  The admirable General Wickham had a few passions, one of which was thermostats. These were the days of the energy crisis and rocketing oil prices. The general had promulgated one inviolable rule: thermostats in every building on post were to be set at sixty-eight degrees. It is a civilized temperature if you are in a modern, well-insulated, evenly heated structure. The men of the 2d Brigade, however, were in World War II, two-story, uninsulated barracks heated by one oil furnace in a corner of the first floor. If your bunk was near the furnace, then you received the promised sixty-eight degrees. But the farther away you were, the less correlation there was between the thermostat setti
ng and the temperature. And it gets cold in Kentucky in the winter.

  Every night, the division duty officer spot-checked, and if anybody had touched the thermostat, the brigade commander had to report personally to General Wickham to explain why he could not enforce a simple order. I have never felt quite so foolish as I did standing before the commanding general of the 101st Airborne Division explaining why the thermostat in one of my barracks was discovered at a tropical seventy-three degrees.

  The men and officers now became engaged in a battle of wits. These soldiers were ready to die for their country in wartime, but they were not prepared to freeze to death for it in peacetime. They continued to raise the setting. We had steel ammo boxes nailed over the thermostats and put locks on the boxes. First the men began jimmying them open. When the perpetrators of this crude gambit were caught and punished, the more cunning types managed to have keys made.

  Most officers were college graduates, some with advanced degrees, the products of the Command and General Staff College, even the National War College, the heirs of Washington, Grant, Lee, Pershing, Eisenhower, and Patton. Were we to be outmaneuvered by privates and corporals? Apparently yes, because as the winter wore on, something peculiar occurred. The thermostats remained at sixty-eight degrees, yet the men stopped complaining. Those even in the remotest reaches of the barracks were warm as toast. Spring approached before we solved the mystery. Some electrical genius had figured out that by sticking a straight pin into the wiring at an undetectable place, you could short out the system and, in effect, free the furnace from control by the thermostat. Even if the duty officer found the barracks hot as the equator, the thermostat still showed sixty-eight degrees. When the heat became uncomfortable, out came the straight pin, until the temperature dropped. Everybody was happy, from General Wickham to the thinnest-blooded private in the farthest, draftiest corner of the barracks.

  Officers have been trying for hundreds of years to outsmart soldiers and have still not learned that it cannot be done. We can always count on the native ingenuity of the American GI to save us from ourselves, and to win wars.

  Every afternoon, I walked a fixed route, at the same time, through the streets of my three battalions, deliberately letting myself be ambushed. I had lifted a leaf out of Father Gianastasias’s book. Go where your flock is. It did not take long for the soldier with a gripe, the noncom with a problem, to figure out where he could waylay the brigade commander for a private minute or two. Good NCOs and junior officers understood what I was doing. I was not breaking the chain of command. They knew that I would never agree to anything in these curbside sessions that would undermine their authority. If anything, my outdoor office hours gave them a chance to blow off steam too.

  Mike and I were playing pitch and catch behind the house in Cole Park one day when he volunteered that he liked it at Fort Campbell. “All the kids are like us,” he said. “Everybody’s mom and dad do the same thing.” His words were a relief to me. I grew up in the same neighborhood with the same kids well into my college years. One attraction of Dale City had been that even though I was gone part of the time, my family stayed in the same home and the children stayed in the same school system. Service parents worry about the effect on their children of constant uprooting. And here was my son telling me that the move was fine, that the common experience of the fathers made for a comfortable common ground for the kids.

  Life was good at Fort Campbell, although we had to do a little restructuring. We found only a tiny Episcopal congregation, without an organist for the hymn-singing or a cross for the processions. Alma and I worked with the Episcopal chaplain to find other communicants on the post, many of whom had slipped into the inactive reserve. We sat down over several nights and wrote notes, inviting them to get active again. We located a pianist and a processional cross and conscripted our kids once more as acolytes. The congregation began to grow, and we found our faith anchored once again. But we were never able to recapture entirely the spirit of St. Margaret’s after we left Dale City.

  My kids attended on-post schools operated under the authority of the federal Department of Health, Education and Welfare. We had a school board, and I was appointed board president by General Wickham, which put the Powell children on the spot. Not only was their old man the brigade commander, he was also the guy who hired, fired, and paid their teachers.

  My kids were turning out to be good students, including Annemarie, who began first grade at Fort Campbell. Mike became the star catcher on the junior high baseball team, which allowed me to bask a bit. Linda showed an aptitude for music. At first we rented a flute for her from the school. She progressed quickly, and the teacher recommended that Linda have a flute of her own. Ever the dutiful father, I scanned the “For Sale” section of the Post Daily Bulletin and parted with $25 for a used flute. Linda was appalled. Alma was appalled. So was the flute teacher. This instrument leaked more air than a ’72 Vega with 100,000 miles. We bought her a better flute. She continued to excel, and the flutes improved. She topped out, fortunately, before we reached the $25,000 gold top-of-the-line model.

  More important than flute lessons, Linda received the greatest educational gift at Campbell, a teacher who made a difference. Betty Quirrin taught sixth grade and possessed the rare capacity to communicate with budding teenagers. The middle child often occupies an anomalous position between the firstborn and the baby, and Linda found that with Betty she could share her innermost feelings. This teacher awakened my daughter intellectually, and to this day they remain close. Every child deserves at least one Betty Quirrin.

  We rarely know what our children think of us, what, from the flood of childhood impressions and memories, stands out and what fades. Recently, the photographer Mariana Cook did a book on fathers and daughters and asked Linda and Annemarie to provide an observation to accompany our photograph. Linda wrote: “My father is a gentle man, but, as a child, I remember being a little afraid of him—he was so big. He rarely raised his voice, but when he did, my heart would drop through my stomach. But I also remember once weaving a pink-and-white net around my bicycle as decoration so that as I picked up speed it would trail color behind me. The net got caught in the spokes and I went flying over the front of the handlebars. I sat stunned and crying on the asphalt. My father appeared from nowhere, scooped me up, held me close, and carried me home.” I did not remember the incident, but she never forgot.

  Annemarie wrote in the same book: “Dad is the smartest person I have ever known. He always wins at Trivial Pursuit. He’s always been frank with me when it was necessary. He looks great in a tux or his dress blues. His successes never surprise me; they just make me proud. He’s the best mechanic in town. I have always had the secure feeling that he could and would take care of us, no matter what.”

  Who am I to quarrel with my daughters’ judgments, especially regarding mechanics?

  Where the children are concerned, I never believed that possessions could buy love, popularity, respect, or accomplishment. Consequently, I have always been careful about giving them money. They received an allowance of $2 a week when they reached age twelve. They wanted for nothing; but they were taught not to want too much. And on the big holidays, Christmas and birthdays, they got the big presents.

  When Mike reached his teens, I thought it was time to give him some grounding in the facts of life. The way I handled the matter was direct, but I am not sure how courageous. I stopped by his room one night and handed him a paper bag with a book in it entitled Boys and Sex. “What’s this?” he asked. “Read it,” I answered, “and let me know if you have any questions.”

  As each of my children reached age sixteen, I wrote him or her a letter trying to pass along what I hoped was wisdom, or at least the benefit of my right choices and mistakes. Mike was first, and I wrote, among other things, “You now begin to leave childhood behind and start on the road to manhood…. you will establish definitively the type person you will be the remaining fifty years of your lifetime. Temptations wil
l come your way, drugs, alcohol, opportunities for misbehaving. You know what is right and wrong, and I have confidence in your judgment…. Don’t be afraid of failure. Be more afraid of not trying….

  Take chances and risks—not foolhardy actions but actions which could result in failure, yet promise success and great reward. And always remember that no matter how bad something may seem, it will not be that bad tomorrow.”

  I watched with fascination what each side of the family contributed to the character of our children. Alma’s folks and mine could not have been more different. Mike and Linda, when they were small, lived with the Johnsons while I was in Vietnam. We managed to visit my parents “on the way” no matter in which direction of the compass we were traveling. The Johnsons were not much for emotion. They lived disciplined, austere lives. They were voracious readers. They read to the children, and reading tends to be contagious. From them, my kids absorbed a sense of discipline and a respect for learning. From the Powell side, the children absorbed a love of life. They met funny, irreverent characters, people who laughed, deep from the belly, without restraint, people who played as hard as they worked. Let’s have a party. Let’s have a song. Let’s dance. I enjoyed watching both strains blossom in my children.

  From the day Pop pulled up to 952 Kelly Street with a 1946 Pontiac, I began a love affair with cars. I loved to drive them, but what went on under the hood might as well have been magic. In Dale City, I lived next door to a fellow who would listen to me gripe about my car problems and say, “Check the voltage regulator,” which would have been fine if I’d known what it was. I bought a Chevy manual, and little by little I began demystifying the gizmos under the hood. Pretty soon I was changing my own oil!