My American Journey

by Colin L. Powell

  “I’ll be frank,” I said. “From time to time, I’m going to make you mad as hell.” Making people mad was part of being a leader. As I had learned long ago, with John Pardo and the losing drill team, an individual’s hurt feelings run a distant second to the good of the service.

  Finally, I attempted to convey the deep love I had for the Army. “The Army is to be enjoyed, not endured. Have fun in your command. Don’t always run at a breakneck pace. Take leave when you’ve earned it. Spend time with your families. I don’t intend to work on weekends unless it’s absolutely necessary. And I don’t expect you to do it either. Anyone found logging Saturday or Sunday hours for himself or his troops had better have a good reason. Remember, this could be your last command, and it’s probably mine. So let’s enjoy it.”

  Just a couple of days after my arrival, like the pull of a magnet, I made a sentimental journey back to Gelnhausen. I took only my aide, Bruce Scott. On my arrival, we drove to the familiar Coleman Kaserne and parked in front of D Company’s barracks. The company commander met us and escorted me to the orderly room, all the while giving a running commentary on the company’s current doings. I barely heard a word. I was lost in reverie, a lieutenant, unaccountably wearing a general’s uniform, surrounded by old memories and faces from the past, Tom Miller, Red Barrett, Sergeant Edwards.

  … … …

  Once again, my family had to be resettled. Linda went back to William and Mary, and with Mike in the Army, that left three of us. We moved into the corps commander’s quarters and enrolled Annemarie in the American dependents’ Frankfurt High School. Our house resembled a checkpoint at a hostile border crossing. It was eight miles from my office in a suburb called Bad Vilbel and consisted of two cramped stories served by one orderly. One bathroom had been converted into an armor-plated sanctuary in which we were to lock ourselves until rescued in case of a terrorist attack. The house was encircled by barbed wire, and in front stood a guardhouse with one-way glass from which MPs scanned our residence twenty-four hours a day. Home sweet home.

  Watching the general’s house all day struck me as the height of boredom for teenage soldiers (other than catching an occasional glimpse of Annemarie sunbathing). To help break the monotony, I took one of the guards with me on a helicopter ride to Grafenwöhr. I asked him what the guys at the barracks had told him to ask me when they learned that he was going to travel with the corps commander. He gulped. “Go ahead, son,” I urged him. “Don’t be afraid.”

  “Well, sir,” he said, “it’s the jogging.” I frequently took a run across the countryside, and as soon as I started, an MP or two in jogging togs would pop out of the guardhouse and run discreetly behind me. “The guys,” the corporal went on, “wondered if you knew that on our weekends off, the provost marshal always picks guys to suit up and wait in the guardhouse in case you go for a jog.”

  I said nothing, but this was just the kind of overkill that I hated. Some poor soldier, on his supposed free time, had to sit all day in a cell on the off chance I might run for twenty minutes. Admittedly, security was a problem. Terrorists had bombed the Frankfurt PX the month before my arrival. But I always ran different routes at unexpected times, and terrorists depend on regularity. I waited a few days in order not to give away my source, and then I told the provost marshal to knock it off. I could take care of myself. If I got shot, it would not be his responsibility. He looked unconvinced.

  For security, I had an armor-plated white 380 SE Mercedes. Staff Sergeant Otis Pearson, a black soldier from rural Alabama, became my driver. Otis, tall, lean, handsome, and taciturn, had, like many young men, used the Army to overcome a rough upbringing. The Army was now his family, and he soon became part of the Powell family too. Otis had driven for my predecessor, Sam Wetzel, an avid sportsman, well connected to the German upper crust and an occasional guest at handsome hunting lodges. Consequently, Otis had spent a lot of time hauling dead animals out of the woods for Wetzel. Neither the crowd Wetzel traveled with nor his favorite pastime appealed to me. I preferred racquetball and auto repair, both of which were right up Otis’s alley. Soon after my arrival, I bought an almost new BMW 728, which we worked on together. My idea of fun was to come roaring out of the garage at Bad Vilbel like Batman and have the BMW up to 105 miles an hour on the autobahn before my guards could figure out what had happened.

  While the West Germans enjoyed the security of 75,000 V Corps troops stationed between them and the Soviets, they would have been just as happy if we had stayed in our barracks until war broke out. Tanks and personnel carriers chew up roads, and our armored columns barely left room for a Volkswagen. Our helicopters made a dreadful racket and were constantly interfering with air traffic at civilian airports. We were particularly unpopular with the “Greens,” the German environmentalists who were strong in the states of Hesse and Rhineland-Pfalz, where V Corps was stationed.

  One morning I got a call from the 3d Armored Division commander, Major General Tom Griffin. The Greens had planted a hundred young trees during the night right down the middle of our tank driving range. “General, I’m just gonna flatten ’em,” Griffin told me.

  “Hold on, Tom,” I said. One does not casually run over trees in Germany. Instead, we dug them up and replanted them in our housing area. Griffin then arranged an Earth Day-type celebration. We invited local politicians, the press, and the Greens, although the Greens ignored our invitation. We, nevertheless, thanked them for helping to improve our landscape. As I had learned in the Weinberger dog-rescue operation, with a little imagination you can turn a knock into a boost.

  I can still recall how proud I felt back in 1958 when Captain Tom Miller assigned me to guard that 280mm atomic cannon—until I lost my .45 pistol in the course of the mission. In those days, at my pay grade, I gave no thought to the wisdom of using nuclear weapons in the field. It was simply “Yes, sir!” Airborne Ranger! Twenty-eight years later, I was in the command center with my senior officers war-gaming an 8th Guards Army attack. My G-3, Colonel Jerry Rutherford, was at the map board with a pointer explaining that if the enemy crossed the Haune and the Fulda rivers heading toward the Vogelsberg mountains, they would then be into the valley of the Main River. From there the terrain was flat, giving them a clear shot all the way to Wiesbaden and the bridges over the Rhine River. NATO forces would be cut in half, and the enemy could swing north all the way to the English Channel. “So our last defensible position is the Vogelsberg range,” Rutherford explained, “and at that time it may be necessary to ask for release of nukes.”

  “Give me the plan,” I said.

  “We’ll hit ’em with Lances and AFAPs”—artillery-fired atomic projectiles. “The radius of effect will be just enough to close the roads without affecting our own troop movements.”

  “What about civilians?” I asked.

  “There won’t be any civilians.”

  “Where did they go?” I wanted to know.

  “The plan is for the Germans to stay put, in their villages, out of the way of our strikes. We’ll just hit wooded areas.”

  “Let’s think for a minute,” I said. “You’re a German civilian. You’ve just heard over the emergency broadcast system that the Russians are coming, and you should stay put so you don’t get in the Americans’ way. What do you really think is going to happen? You know damn well. Every BMW and Volks in Hesse and Rhineland-Pfalz is going to be stuffed with everything, including the family schnauzer, and headed west.”

  We were not talking simply about dropping a few artillery shells at a crossroad. No matter how small these nuclear payloads were, we would be crossing a threshold. Using nukes at this point would mark one of the most significant political and military decisions since Hiroshima. The Russians would certainly retaliate, maybe escalate. At that moment, the world’s heart was going to skip a beat. From that day on, I began rethinking the practicality of these small nuclear weapons. And a few years later, when I became Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, I would have some ideas about what to
do with tactical nukes.

  … … …

  I was settling in comfortably. My every need was anticipated by Bruce Scott, my aide, and Judi Reaume, my able secretary, who had served several V Corps commanders before me and who knew where all the land mines were buried. A ballroom just a few feet from my second-floor office had been converted to a racquetball court, and I kept in shape playing every day against other officers and Otis, my driver.

  I quickly grew fond of the Abrams Complex and was eager to undo the disfiguring we had perpetrated. I had the post engineers locate the original 1928 design and flew Joe Pisani over from the Pentagon to undertake a redesign similar to what he had done in the Eisenhower Corridor. The lobby started to look again as it had in the days of the Weimar Republic. I saved the glorious curved leaded-glass windows from being removed to make way for the hamburger grill vent. The restoration continued and was seen through to completion by my successor, Lieutenant General Jack Woodmansee.

  Nevertheless, it required two successors beyond Woodmansee before another of my intentions was realized, finding and returning a lovely statue of a nude woman that had once graced a courtyard behind the headquarters. The lady had been banished in 1947 at the insistence of the fuddy-duddy wife of an American colonel.

  I found it deeply satisfying to see how the budget victories won by the Pentagon were being translated into tangible improvements in Germany. Thanks to the Reagan-Weinberger buildup, modern equipment rolled into the corps, and the troops’ quarters became more livable. By now, the all-volunteer Army was fully in place, and we were getting the best-educated enlistees in history. I had to smile when my commanders complained that their strength levels had dropped below 98 percent. How soon they forgot the Cat Fours, the lowest-level acceptable recruits, so prevalent just a few years before, and the days when force levels often dropped below 70 percent. I was not eager to commit troops to battle. But if that day came, Comrade Achalov and his Red divisions would face a helluva foe.

  Marybel Batjer sent me week-old copies of the Washington Post, but somehow I could no longer get worked up about Beltway tempests. I loved what I was doing, and had not looked back at Washington once since leaving.

  My immediate boss was a distinguished officer, General Glenn Otis, commander of all U.S. Army forces in Europe and a NATO commander as well, heading the Central Army Group. Otis had two American corps under him, my V Corps and VII Corps, where my son, Mike, served. VII Corps was commanded by Lieutenant General Andy Chambers. My taking over V Corps meant that both corps were commanded by black three-star generals. The heartening thing is that no one took any notice, proof of how blind to race the Army had become and a nice corrective to European misperceptions about American race relations.

  Despite living in a semifortress, our family was happy in Frankfurt. Except during field exercises, the workday usually ended at five. I finished with a game of racquetball, went home, had dinner, did a little paperwork, and relaxed. The phone was not constantly ringing in the middle of the night with the DDO reporting the latest international firestorm. By comparative standards, I had jumped from the frying pan into the easy chair. I whiled away my happiest free time tinkering with my 1982 BMW with the help of Otis.

  Social demands were fairly heavy, however, and I was often on a dais with a Bürgermeister or snipping a ribbon at a German-American culture center. Alma belonged to at least four women’s organizations with names as unpronounceable as Steubenschurzgesellschaft. But it was pleasant to have others performing for me my old roles as gofer and horse holder. Whenever a fund drive began, I was expected to make the first symbolic contribution. Whenever the O-club held a charity auction, Alma and I were expected to make the first bid.

  And when the annual blood drive came along, the corps medical officer wanted me for the first drop. I went with him to the hospital, trailed by photographers from the corps newspaper. A young medic put the cuff around my arm to take my blood pressure. He looked puzzled, took it again, and then once more. He went to the medical officer, who came back and took the reading himself. The doctor canceled the photo op and my role in the blood donation drive. The years of middle-of-the-night phone calls and fourteen-hour days in Washington had evidently taken their toll. I had moderately high blood pressure. I was put on medication and have continued it ever since, with the pressure nicely under control.

  Though we were in the same country, we did not see much of Mike. Most of our contact was via letters, and Mike’s news took me back to my own days as a young officer. He wrote that one night, while on border outpost, his troop commander had gotten drunk and passed out. The phone rang, and since the officer was feeling and hearing nothing, Mike had to take the call. The squadron executive officer at the other end of the line, suspecting something, demanded to know why the commander could not come to the phone. Mike had to tell the truth. The next morning the commander was relieved of duty. It had been a tough call for Mike. He had done the right thing, though some of his contemporaries, out of misguided loyalty to their superior officer, criticized him.

  I felt particularly close to Mike when he told us about experiencing his first death in the field. My first experience had occurred when that stray shell at Grafenwöhr tore apart a tent full of young Americans. An M-113 armored personnel carrier had rolled over a soft shoulder and crushed one of Mike’s men to death during a late-night exercise. Mike shared his anguish in a long letter to me. As a father, I ached to jump in and help. But I knew that a soldier had to live through and learn from these experiences essentially alone. There is no profession in which life-and-death responsibility is placed on younger shoulders than in the military, and Mike was growing up fast. The accident also reminded Alma and me, as if we needed reminding, that even in peacetime, soldiering is dangerous work. And parents are never entirely free of anxiety.

  Reports coming to me through the grapevine indicated that Mike was doing exceptionally well and had a chance of becoming troop executive officer after making first lieutenant. He had made his choice. He too wanted to make the Army his life. It pleased me that he had reached this decision on his own.

  In the early fall of 1986, we were visited by a congressional delegation. I had a fairly standard pitch for such visiting firemen. This particular group included a forty-five-year-old four-term Republican congressman from Wyoming whom I had never met before, Richard B. Cheney, then a member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. I was aware that Cheney, when he was only thirty-four, had served as White House Chief of Staff under President Gerald Ford. Rather than put on the usual dog-and-pony show, I took the group into my private office. I picked up the photograph of General Achalov from my desk. “This man is the reason V Corps is here,” I began. Achalov, I explained, had started out as a paratrooper, smashed his legs in a jump a few years ago, and switched to heavy infantry. “He is younger than I am,” I went on. “He has had more training.” The man was a military thinker who had written a half-dozen articles on European land warfare. I had read them all. He commanded eighty thousand troops, more men than I had, and his soldiers were just as well trained and armed as mine. They were just sixty-six miles from where we were sitting. “The forces I command, nevertheless, can stop them,” I said. “We might not be able to hold back successive divisions, which are backed up practically to Moscow. But we can stop Achalov.”

  Congressman Cheney was reticent and asked few questions. What he did ask, however, knifed to the heart of the issue, and I recognized that I was in the presence of an exceptional mind. I could not have known then that in the years to come the two of us would be bound closely, facing not potential but real enemies.

  One of the spoils of World War II that the American Army inherited from Hitler’s Third Reich was a private railroad train embodying the magnificence of a bygone age. The train had a fully equipped kitchen, a staff of stewards, and a lounge area and slept six passengers. It was available to senior American commanders in Germany. Alma and I had become close friends of Ronald Laude
r and his wife, Jo Carol. Ron had served as a deputy assistant secretary of defense while I was in the Pentagon and was now American ambassador to Austria during a testy time when the Nazi-tainted Kurt Waldheim had been elected president. That fall, I decided to enjoy a touch of grandeur absent in the subway-riding days of my youth. I invited the Lauders and their two daughters, Jane and Aerin, to come to Frankfurt to join us on the train for a journey to Berlin. Ron, a man of considerable means, approved of this mode of travel, but I disappointed him in Berlin by my cheeseburger palate and acceptance of wine served in screw-cap bottles. In our subsequent friendship, we worked out a division of labor. Ron picks the restaurants and the wine, and I enjoy them.

  While I was immersed in running V Corps in Germany, those clandestine NSA messages I had brought to Weinberger’s attention in Washington finally uncoiled spectacularly in the Iran-contra affair. On November 1, the world learned, from Al Shiraa, a Beirut magazine, that the United States had been secretly selling arms to Khomeini’s regime, despite President Reagan’s pledge never to deal with terrorists. I had played a part in getting the Army’s TOW antitank missiles transferred to the CIA, which then shipped them to Iran. Then came the next shocker, revealed by Attorney General Edwin Meese on November 25. The Poindexter-North operation had jacked up the prices of weapons sold to Iran and siphoned off the profits into private bank accounts to fund help for the Nicaraguan contras. I had not known of this diversion, nor had the President, the cabinet, or Congress. Poindexter resigned and President Reagan dismissed Ollie North.