My American Journey

by Colin L. Powell

  Across the street, another Dale City neighbor rebuilt Volkswagens as a hobby. A Volks had been my first car. I still had a soft spot for them even after family expansion forced me to sedans and station wagons. I started hanging around, handing tools to this guy, learning more. By the time I reached Fort Campbell, I could adjust the timing on the distributor, solder a radiator, and trouble-shoot the electrical system. While I enjoyed sports, they never became obsessions, no doubt because of my modest athletic ability. But automobiles had a special appeal. In my professional life, whether in field commands or desk jobs, I was always dealing with unpredictable human beings, their foibles—and mine. The situation compounded as I rose in rank and responsibility. Cars, unlike people, lack temperament. When working on them, I was dealing not with the gods of the unknown, but the gods of the certain; not the gods of abstraction, but the gods of the concrete. If something malfunctioned in the engine, and I proceeded logically, I could identify the problem and fix it, the only area in life where I had that kind of control. I found these mechanical puzzles absorbing and relaxing. I had found my true hobby.

  Alma found her avocation at Fort Campbell. This was the first post where her husband was a commanding officer and where her relationship to the wives was somewhat analogous to my relationship to my officers. She became the mother figure to the younger women. She plunged into volunteer work at a time when the women’s liberation movement had taken off and some feminists disparaged unpaid hospital work, bake sales, and fund drives. That attitude, Alma believed, overlooked the singular nature of military life. Husbands of service wives might leave on a moment’s notice. When or if they were coming back was never certain. “If we don’t get to know each other now,” Alma would say, “how can we help each other through the tough, lonely times?” Beyond their immediate value, the traditional volunteer activities were providing just what the feminists championed, sisterly support.

  It had been only two years since I had bade farewell to the old Army in Korea. At Fort Campbell, we were almost, but not quite, into the new Army. The new jargon was coming into vogue. It was during this period that the old mess hall gave way to the “dining facility” and the old mess sergeant became the “dining facility manager.” The post laundry became the “Installation Fabricare Facility.” I almost gagged.

  The new all-volunteer force was to be evaluated by modern management measures—reenlistment rates, AWOL rates, drunk-driving rates, annual physical fitness rates, medical appointment show-up rates, and delinquency rates on supply store accounts. Every month, each brigade, battalion, and company got a printout reporting how well it was doing compared to other units. You needed these statistical measures to judge comparative performance in a huge organization like the Army. But numbers alone cannot measure factors like morale, leadership, and that feeling that a unit is combat-ready. Gunfighter Emerson could not have focused on a printout of these statistical indicators if you held a pistol to his head.

  I had long since learned to cope with Army management fashions. You pay the king his shilling, get him off your back, and then go about doing what you consider important. If, for example, you are going to judge me on AWOL rates, I’m going to send a sergeant out by 6:30 A.M. to bloodhound the kid who failed to show up for 6:00 A.M. reveille. The guy’s not considered AWOL until midnight. So drag him back before then and keep that AWOL rate down. I vigorously set out to better every indicator by which my brigade was statistically judged. And then went on to do the things that I thought counted.

  I detected a common thread running through the careers of officers who ran aground even though they were clearly able—a stubbornness about coughing up that shilling. They fought what they found foolish or irrelevant, and consequently did not survive to do what they considered vital.

  Once, however, I violated my own rule. The new Army, sensibly, had decided to curb excessive drinking. We had too many alcohol-fogged performances, too many families wrecked by drink, too many people killed in alcohol-related car crashes. Wickham rode this one hard. If a soldier was picked up for driving under the influence, he and his sergeant, company commander, battalion commander, and brigade commander were all to report to Wickham or Tiger Honeycutt and give an explanation. Then Wickham upped the stakes. Any officer caught driving under the influence was to receive an Article 15 proceeding, nonjudicial punishment that could mean a ruined career. MPs were posted outside the officers’ club to pounce on any officer suspected of having had one too many.

  I called in all my officers. I was going to save them from themselves by creating what amounted to a job action. “The club’s off-limits,” I announced. “No Happy Hour. No Italian-night dinner with wine. No O-club at all. Not for the 2d Brigade.” As I said this, you could have heard a cork drop.

  Receipts at the club took a nosedive. Chuck Bagnal, the assistant division commander who ran Fort Campbell’s clubs, asked if I had lost my mind. “We can’t have it both ways, sir,” I said. “You can’t have MPs parked outside waiting to nab my officers while another part of the Army is selling drinks for a quarter at Happy Hour.”

  Within a couple of weeks, I had Wild Turkey Crozier on my back. “Powell,” he said, “you can’t put the club off-limits to your brigade.”

  “I’m already doing it,” I said, and repeated my sermon on hypocrisy. The Army could not condemn behavior with one hand and promote it with the other.

  “Bullshit!” Crozier explained. “Back off.”

  I knew that I had played out this hand. I had fought the good fight, but did not want to make it my last fight. You cannot slay the dragon every day. Some days the dragon wins. I reopened the officers’ club to my brigade. But I also made sure that my officers understood the consequences of anything more than one social drink. The MPs stopped lurking outside; and in time Happy Hour became a thing of the past in the Army.

  I had an adjutant, Major James D. Hallums, whose duties included running the brigade sports competitions, which at Fort Campbell were red-hot. “Sir, we can take the division boxing championship,” Hallums told me one day. We had a sergeant in the brigade known as Hammering Hank, he said, a near pro with a lot of experience in coaching boxing teams. I told Hallums to go ahead. Never step on enthusiasm.

  Soon he was back with a conspiratorial smile. Not only was the 2d Brigade team looking strong, but Hammering Hank had scouted the competition, and not one outfit at Fort Campbell had a featherweight, the 120–125-pound class. All we had to do was field a fighter and we could win the division featherweight championship strictly with byes. That was true, I agreed. But I pointed out that we did not have a featherweight.

  “Colonel,” Jim went on, “do you remember that kid from the 506th who kicked in almost a thousand dollars for the United Way Drive, Pee Wee something?” I certainly did. Most of the troops contributed $1. This soldier’s donation had been so out of line that I had told Hallums to bring him to my office so that I could see if he was all right. His name was Rodney “Pee Wee” Preston and he turned out to be a shy little guy who might weigh 120 pounds soaking wet. He explained his philanthropy by telling us that the Army took care of all his wants, and therefore he should do all that he could to help others.

  “Let’s get Pee Wee for our featherweight,” Hallums said.

  “Has he ever boxed?” I asked.

  What difference did it make, Hallums replied. He wasn’t going to fight. He was just going to draw byes.

  Hallums managed to persuade Pee Wee to join the boxing team. His most persuasive argument was that Pee Wee would not have to go with his battalion on jungle training exercises in Panama—the soldier had an obsessive fear of snakes. Even though Pee Wee was not going to fight, Hammering Hank proved to be a coach of integrity and insisted that Pee Wee had to train along with everyone else.

  The boxing tournament began, and our strategy worked. Pee Wee drew byes at one level after another until he was headed for the 101st Airborne Division featherweight championship, without, so far, having had a glove laid on hi
m. In the championship matches, our fighters went up against the division’s Support Command. The commander of the Support Command, on to our little scam, had scoured his ranks and also discovered a featherweight. Consequently, when Pee Wee stepped into the ring that night, a Panamanian kid resembling a miniature Roberto Duran climbed into the opposite corner. This lad bounced around, snorting like a bull, pumping warm-up uppercuts like pistons. Pee Wee, in the meantime, stood in his corner looking like a lamb at the slaughterhouse. As Hallums and I watched from the first row, I turned to Jim and said, “The deal’s off. I am not going to be an accessory to murder.” I went to Pee Wee’s corner and told him that this was not in his contract. He did not have to fight.

  “Oh no, sir,” he said. “I have to. The whole 506th’s here.”

  Which was true. Pee Wee’s battalion was present in force and in combat fatigues, since they were going directly from the fight to maneuvers in Panama, which Pee Wee had escaped. I was not sure whether they had come to laugh or cry.

  The bell sounded for round one. The Panamanian bounded to the center of the ring and began hitting away as if Pee Wee were a punching bag. I winced. Pee Wee did what Hammering Hank had taught him. He kept his arms in close to his body while his gloves protected his face. He kept circling to his left, taking the pounding, until the bell sounded, ending round one. Pee Wee had not thrown a punch, but he was still standing and apparently unhurt. Some modest cheering went up from our side. “Attaboy, Pee Wee! Hang in there, kid!”

  Round two, a carbon copy of round one. The Panamanian pummeled Pee Wee. Pee Wee kept his guard up, circled, and never punched. But I noticed that his opponent had slowed down toward the end of the round, as though the sheer effort of beating on Pee Wee had tired him. End round two. By now the cheering for Pee Wee had become loud and enthusiastic. We could see his opponent in his corner shaking his head, grumbling about something to his trainers. Hammering Hank, in the meantime, kept begging Pee Wee, “Just throw a punch, kid. Just one. Any punch!”

  Round three, the final round. The two boxers came out of their corners, the Panamanian sluggishly. It was becoming clear that this guy knew how to box, but was out of shape. Out of nowhere, Pee Wee hit him with a right to the jaw. The Panamanian’s arms dropped and the guy quit! The place went crazy. The whole brigade was screaming, “Pee Wee! Pee Wee!” The referee declared a TKO. Pee Wee had become the legitimate featherweight champion of the 101st Airborne Division. His battalion descended on him, hugging him, kissing him, carrying him on their shoulders.

  Frank Capra could not have done better. Although Capra would have yelled, “Cut! Print it!” at this point. Pee Wee, however, as division champ, now had to go to Fort Bragg to fight the featherweight champion of the 82d Airborne Division for the XVIII Airborne Corps championship. There I had the pleasure of sitting with my old boss, the present commanding general of the corps, Gunfighter Emerson. I told Emerson the story of Pee Wee. His eyes shone and he kept saying, “Dammit! Dammit! Dammit! You hear what this man is saying? You hear what that boy’s accomplished?”

  This night, Pee Wee again managed to hang in gamely for all three rounds but was outpointed and lost on a decision. Gunfighter nevertheless had to meet Pee Wee. We found him in the locker room, where the general pumped his hand until I thought it was going to break off. “By God, son,” he gushed, “you’re what it’s all about! You’re the real champ!” Pee Wee was, in fact, the incarnation of everything Gunfighter believed, the little guy who, if given half a chance, could for one shining moment become a winner.

  Sixteen years later, as I was retiring as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Katie Couric of NBC interviewed me in the Pentagon for my last profile in uniform. I told her the Pee Wee story as an example of inspiration. She was intrigued and managed to have her crew track him down. (At first they found the wrong Pee Wee, Mike Caruthers, another boxer in the brigade with the same nickname.) She had Pee Wee Preston interviewed for the program. He was now a metalworker in Shelbyville, Illinois, married, and with two kids. If those kids ever asked, “What did you do in the war, Daddy?” Pee Wee had quite a story.

  One day I got a call from Gunfighter’s staff telling me that the old soldier was about to retire, and XVIII Airborne Corps was going to put on a big show. Emerson had personally requested me to command the troops for the parade. I begged off. Fort Bragg was the home of the 82nd Airborne. Even though the 101st was part of Emerson’s corps, the paratroopers of the 82d would not appreciate having someone from the 101st come over to lead their troops. Ten minutes later an aide was on the phone again. “The general said, ‘Tell Powell to get the hell down here.’” It sounded like the Gunfighter to me.

  I went to Fort Bragg and started whipping these brawny paratroopers into marching trim, much as I had done as a drill team leader at CCNY. On the appointed day, thousands of people were in attendance and Gunfighter stood on the reviewing stand, shaking every hand in sight and slapping every back. I was standing before the troops at parade rest when I saw him gesture for me to come over. He thanked me for taking charge of the parade and said he had something special he wanted me to do. When he gave the word, I was to order the officers to do an about-face, so that they would be facing the troops from about eight inches away. I started to question him about this novel command, but he told me not to worry. I went back and managed to get the word passed along to the other officers on parade.

  The ceremony began with speeches and awards honoring Emerson. When the time came for Gunfighter to speak, he could barely compose himself. He began weeping, repeating himself, and summoning the names of long-dead comrades. He paused at one point, looked straight at me, and shouted, “Now!”

  “Officers—and officers only—” I ordered, “about face!” There we stood almost nose-to-nose with the soldiers, wondering what was supposed to happen next.

  Then Gunfighter bellowed from the reviewing stand, “Officers, salute your soldiers!”

  It was a moving gesture, pure Gunfighter Emerson, and in its simple symbolism said everything that had to be said about armies and about who, in the end, most deserves to be saluted.

  After my experiences in Korea, I was highly sensitive to the Army’s racial environment. One of my early acts at Fort Campbell was to call in my executive officer, Lieutenant Colonel Henry B. “Sonny” Tucker, and tell him I wanted to meet the NCO handling equal opportunity and affirmative action. Sonny, a big, casually powerful Alabaman, eyed me strangely, but said he would produce the man.

  Tucker ordinarily had a wonderful way of handling soldiers and their problems, which I could overhear through our adjoining office wall: “Come here, son, you make my colonel unhappy, you make me unhappy. So let’s see how fast you can make us both happy again.” Somehow, problems disappeared overnight. But this time nothing happened. Two days later, I repeated that I wanted to see the EEOC non-com. “We’re looking, we’re looking,” Sonny assured me. If he could not find the man, how much importance could the brigade be giving to this subject? After my third demand, Tucker brought in a fat, listless sergeant wearing low-quarter shoes and white socks. He was on limited duty because of a leg injury, and coasting out his last months before retirement. I dismissed the man and then tore into Sonny Tucker. This guy was a dud. What kind of attention were we giving this mission?

  “Calm down, Colonel,” Sonny said. “We don’t have to waste a crackerjack sergeant on this problem. We haven’t had a racial complaint in the brigade in months.”

  I started poking around, asking questions, testing Tucker’s report. He turned out to be right. While we had not achieved perfect racial harmony, the present Army nowhere near resembled the one I had left in Korea. The reason was largely the all-volunteer system. By now, draftees were long gone. And the current recruits, white or black, were doing well in everything, including race relations, mostly because they were better educated and in the Army by choice. I nevertheless recruited a top-notch equal opportunity NCO to make sure things stayed that way.

 
I also pressured Sonny about attendance at high school equivalency courses. “Most of these soldiers are already high school graduates,” he informed me. What about our classes in English as a second language? “We don’t take recruits anymore who don’t speak English,” Sonny explained patiently. It was becoming a better Army, maybe not as much fun as the Army of my sentimental reveries. But then, fun was not its reason for being. The post-Vietnam reforms were taking hold. The Army was rebuilding itself with a restored sense of pride and purpose.

  I was happily immersed in commanding troops when in February 1977 I received a call to come to Washington. A new administration had been inaugurated on January 20, one for which I had voted. I had been impressed on meeting Jimmy Carter when I was a White House Fellow. But my vote was more influenced by a belief that, after the ordeal of Watergate, the country needed a fresh start. I was still voting absentee as a permanent resident of New York City and had not enrolled in a party, nor have I ever.

  I had been summoned to Washington to be interviewed for a National Security Council job by Carter’s National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski. Here we go again, I thought, off the career track, and I did not want it. I went to see John Wickham first, who was not only my superior officer but an operator skilled in the Washington labyrinth. “Go,” Wickham said. “At least you have to talk to him.”

  I was doing something that I loved to do and needed to do—validate myself once again as a true infantry officer. I had managed to make the transition from the old to the new Army without too much culture shock. I hated the idea of leaving again so soon. I had served with other divisions, but the 101st, so full of legend, had captured my heart. When I had taken over the brigade, I had been handed a special coin, another 101st tradition. Whenever a fellow member of the division challenges you to produce the coin, you do, or you buy the drinks. I have never been successfully challenged. From brigade command to chairman, that coin was always in my wallet.