X ^ Contents

1. White House Fellow 151 8. "Go, Gtinfighter, Go!" 179 9. The Graduate School of War 205

Fart Three: The Washingtofi Yearl

10. In the Carter Defense Department 233

11. The Reaganites—and a Close Call 255 12. The Phone Never Stops Ringing 282

13. "Frank, You're Gonna Ruin My Caieer" 316 14. National Security Advisor to the President 351

Fart Four: The Chairmanship

15. One Last Command 399 16. "Mr. Chairman, We've Got a Problem" 414 17. When You've Lost Your Best Enemy 435 18. A Line in the Sand 459

19. Every War Must End 507

20. Change of Command 543 21. Mustering Out 570

22. A Farewell to Arms 592

Colin Powell's Rules 613 Acknowledgments 615 Index 619

Part One

THE EARLY YEARS

O n e

Luther and Ams Son

I USUALLY TRUST MY INSTINCTS. THIS TIME I DID NOT, WHICH ALMOST

proved fatal. The day was pure Jamaica in February, the sun brilliant overhead, the air soft with only the hint of an afternoon thundershower. Perfect flying weather, as we boarded the UH-i helicopter. My wife. Alma, and I were visiting the island of my parents' birth at the invitation of Prime Minister Michael Manley. Manley had been after me for a year, ever since the Gulf War. "Get some rest, dear boy," he had said in that compelling lilt the last time he had called. "Come home, if only for a few days. Stay at our government guesthouse." This time I accepted with pleasure.

Even with Desert Storm behind us, the pressure on me as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff had been relentless over the past year. With the Cold War fast fading, we were trying to rethink and reshape America's defenses. The world had altered so radically that we were presently organizing a relief airlift to help feed the Russians. We had a

festering situation at our base at Guantanamo in Cuba, with Haitian migrants piling up under conditions starting to resemble a concentration camp. And a defeated but incorrigible Saddam Hussein was trying to thwart UN inspectors' efforts to put him out of the nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons business. I welcomed a chance to get out of cold, gray Washington and into the island sun for a fe\v days.'And, on the way down, I could stop and check out conditions at Guantanamo.

We arrived in Jamaica the afternoon of February 13, 1992, and were swept up in a whirlwind of West Indian hospitality. The next morning. Alma and I were whisked off to the Ward Theatre, where the mayor of Kingston, Marie Atkins, presented me with the keys to the city. 'I'm American-bom, Madame Mayor," I said in my response, "but you've handed me the keys to my second home." I recalled boyhood memories, listening to calypso melodies like "Fan Me, Saga Boy," hearing the pidgin-English poetry of Louise Bennett, and feasting on plantain, roast goat, and rice and peas. After my speech. Councillor Ezra Cole observed: "Only in Jamaica do we call it rice and peas. Everywhere else in the Caribbean, they have it backward, peas and rice. General Powell is a true Jamaican."

We next visited the Jamaica Defence Force headquarters at nearby Up Park Camp, where the chief of the JDF, Commodore Peter Brady, took me on a tour and had his troops go through their paces. The drill was carried off with great skill and flair. Much foot stomping, smart saluting, slapping of sides, and shouting of "Suh!" this and "Suh!" that. All very British and very professional.

After lunch, we boarded a Jamaica Defence Force helicopter for a quick hop across the bay to Manley International Airport. There we were to transfer to an American Blackhawk helo to visit U.S. units on temporary duty in Jamaica. The original plan had been for us to fly the Blackhawk all the way, but our hosts wanted us to use the U.S.-built Jamaican helo to leave their headquarters, and I could not easily reject their gesture of pride, though my antennae quivered. Kingston faded behind us as the helicopter rose, leveling off at about fifteen hundred feet. Alma smiled at me; it had been a lovely day. I was gazing out at the soothing aquamarine of the Caribbean when I heard a sudden sharp crrraack. Alma looked at me, puzzled.

I knew instantly that we were in trouble. The helicopter's transmission had seized. The aircraft began to sway wildly. We were dropping

Luther and Arie's Son if 5

into the bay. I had already experienced one helo crash in Vietnam. I knew that if the UH-i struck water, it would probably flip, and the blades would snap off and cut the air like shrapnel. And with the doors open, the aircraft would sink like a stone. What flashed through my brain was, we have three children and their mother and father were about to die.

"Hunch over! Grab your legs!" I shouted to Alma. "Why?" she asked.

"Dammit! Just do it!" I yelled, as we continued to plummet. I saw the two pilots snatching at the controls, racing through emergency procedures. They shut off the engines, and the only sound now was the whopping of the blades as we continued to drop toward the bay. At the last moment, the pilots managed to nurse the helo over the shoreline for a hard landing, scarcely twenty feet from the water's edge. I unhooked my seat belt, grabbed Alma, and dragged her away. This thing might still burst into flames.

"What happened?" she asked, when we were at a safe distance.

"We crashed," I told her. I went over to the Jamaican pilots and congratulated them on an impressive piece of emergency flying.

Later, Michael Manley phoned me. "My dear Colin, do you know what is causing the rustling of the trees you hear? It is my inmiense sigh of relief." Prose poetry, the language of my forebears. And the irony of the moment did not escape me. What had been the land of my folks' birth had nearly become the site of their son's death.

We boarded the Blackhawk and resumed the tour. We visited an Ohio National Guard unit that was helping the Jamaicans with a roadbuilding project and a U.S. Air Force drug-tracking radar site poised on a breathtaking bluff called Lover's Leap. With these stops completed, the official visit was over. Now the sentimental journey began.

We piled into jeeps provided by the Jamaican government and headed north into the interior. We turned onto a dirt road that cut through the red earth like a gash. Handsome homes gave way to humble cottages. The road dwindled to a path, and we finally had to get out and walk. We had been on foot for about fifteen minutes when, out of nowhere, the "custus"—the local government head—and the police chief and several other officials appeared and greeted our party. We walked behind them across gently rising fields to a crest, then started down a rutted trail into a small valley where something quite magical

6 * COLIN L. POWELL

happened. People seemed to emerge out of nowhere. Soon, about two hundred people surrounded us, young and old, some colorfully dressed, some in tatters, some with shoes, some barefoot. All at once, the air was filled with music. A band appeared, youngsters in black uniforms playing "The Star-Spangled Banner."

"The children are from the school your father attended," the custus informed me. The musicians then shifted to calypso tunes as familiar to me as our national anthem. The crowd began clapping, reaching out to Alma and me, taking our hands, smihng and greeting us. From a distance, a smaller group started toward us. The crowd parted to let them pass. I was choked with emotion. This was my family. No one needed to tell me. Some I had met before. As for the others, it was in their faces, in their resemblance to each other, in their resemblance to me. We had arrived at Top Hill, land of my father's birth. They embraced me and started introducing themselves. Aunt I vie Ritchie, Cousin Muriel, Uncle Claude, Cousin Pat, in a blur of faces and family connections.

Alma and I were led to folding chairs and asked to sit in the place of honor while Joan Bent, a schoolteacher and the wife of one of my cousins, delivered a speech of welcome full of colorful flourishes. We started walking again past several comfortable houses, with porches painted a rich red earth color, to a tiny cottage. Its walls were made of rough stucco, the roof of rusted sheet metal, the eaves of hand-hewn boards. Brown shutters flanked six-over-six windows, giving this tropical dwelling an unlikely New England touch.

The cottage contained four cubicles, no running water, no electricity, no kitchen, no indoor plumbing. The entire house was smaller than an average American living room. My relatives had shooed the chickens out of the place, scrubbed it, and swept it, but that was all. I was standing in the house where my father had been bom in 1898.

We went out back to the family burial plot, freshly weeded and tended. Once again the crowd surged around, waiting for me to say something. I thanked them for their welcome, and hoped to be left alone for a while. I wanted time to retrace my father's footsteps through the fields, to roam among trees he must have known. I wanted to imagine what it was like to live here, scratching out a subsistence living from these austere patches of earth. But people kept pressing in on us. Alma and I said a prayer over the graves of my grandmother and grandfather. We exchanged a few simple gifts with members of the family; the

Luther and Arie's Son lAr 7

women gave Alma lovely hand-embroidered linens. And then the visit was over.

We made our way back to the Blackhawk and flev/ over Westmoreland, the birthplace of Maud Ariel McKoy Powell, my mother. As we traveled along, I wondered what dreams or fears had prompted two young Jamaicans to cut the roots to their native soil, leave the people they loved, and emigrate to a land so foreign to what they knew. And I wondered if they could have imagined how much this act of courage and hope would shape the destiny of their son.

I was bom on April 5, 1937, at a time when my family was living on Morningside Avenue in Harlem. My parents' first child, my sister, Marilyn, had been bom five and a half years before. I have no recollection of the Harlem years. They say our earliest memories usually involve a trauma, and mine does. I was four, and we had moved to the South Bronx. Gram Alice McKoy, my matemal grandmother, was taking care of me, since both my parents worked. I was playing on the floor and stuck a hairpin into an electrical outlet. I remember the blinding flash and the shock almost lifting me off the floor. And I still remember Gram scolding and hugging me at the same fime. When my mother and father came home from work, much intense discussion occurred, followed by more scolding and fussing. My keenest memory of that day is not of the shock and pain, but of feeling important, being the center of attention, seeing how much they loved and cared about me.

The dominant figure of my youth was a small man, five feet two inches tall. In my mind's eye, I am leaning out the window of our apartment, and I spot him coming down the street from the Intervale Avenue subway station. He wears a coat and fie, and a small fedora is perched on his head. He has a newspaper tucked under his arm. His overcoat is unbuttoned, and it flaps at his sides as he approaches with a brisk, toes-out stride. He is whistling and stops to greet the dmggist, the baker, our building super, almost everybody he passes. To some kids on the block he is a faintly comical figure. Not to me. This jaunty, confident little man is Luther Powell, my father.

He emigrated from Jamaica in his early twenties, seventeen years before I was bom. He left his family and some sort of menial job in a store to emigrate. He never discussed his life in Jamaica, and I regret that I never asked him about those years. I do know that he was the sec-

ond of nine children born to poor folk in Top Hill. No doubt he came to this country for the reason that propelled millions before him, to become something more than he had been and to give his children a better start than he had known. He literally came to America on a banana boat, a United Fruit Company steamer that docked in Philadelphia.

Pop worked as a gardener on estates in Connecticut and then as a building superintendent in Manhattan. Finally, he found the job that was to provide the base of our family's security and make him the patriarch of our clan. He went to work for Ginsburg's (later elevated to the Gaines Company), manufacturers of women's suits and coats at 500 Seventh Avenue in Manhattan's garment district. He started out working in the stockroom, moved up to become a shipping clerk, and eventually became foreman of the shipping department.

My mother was the eldest of her generation—of nine children—and came from a slightly more elevated social station in Jamaica. She had a high school education, which my father lacked. ("Him who never finished high school," she would mutter, when Pop pulled rank on family matters.) Before emigrating. Mom had worked as a stenographer in a lawyer's office. Her mother, Gram McKoy, was a small, lovely woman whose English wedded African cadence to British inflection, the sound of which is still music to my soul. The McKoys and the Powells both had bloodlines common among Jamaicans, including African, English, Irish, Scotch, and probably Arawak Indian. My father's side even added a Jewish strain from a Broomfield ancestor.

Some of Gram's nine children were grown, but most were still dependent on her alone when she separated from Edwin McKoy, a sugar plantation overseer who lent the Scottish line to our ethnic mix. To support her family. Gram left Jamaica in search of work, first in Panama, then in Cuba, finally in the United States. She sent for her eldest child, my mother, to help her. She labored as a maid and as a garment-district pieceworker and sent back to the children still in Jamaica every penny she could spare. She eventually sent for her youngest child, my Aunt Laurice, whom she had not seen for twelve years. To those of us spared dire poverty, such sacrifices and family separations are all but unimaginable.

Gram had named my mother Maud Ariel, but she was known all her life as Arie. She was small, five feet one, plump, with a beautiful face, soft brown eyes, and brown hair done in the forties style, and she had a

Luther and Arie's Son ^ 9

melting smile. When I picture Mom, she is wearing an apron, bustling around our apartment, always in motion, cooking, washing, ironing, sewing, after working all day downtown in the garment district as a seamstress, sewing buttons and trim on clothing.

Mom was a staunch union supporter, a member of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union. My father, the shipping room foreman, considered himself part of management. Initially, they were both New Deal Democrats. We had that famous wartime photograph of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, with the Capitol and the flag in the background, hanging in the foyer of our apartment for as long as I can remember. My mother remained a diehard Democrat. But Pop, by 1952, was supporting Dwight Eisenhower.

He was the eternal optimist, my mother the perennial worrier. That never changed, no matter how much our fortunes did. After my father died, I would come home on leave to visit Mom and she would say, "Colin, take the book to the bank so they can show my interest."

And I would explain, ''Mom, you don't have to do that. The bank will post the interest on the statement they mail you. The interest isn't going anywhere."

"How do you know they won't 'tief me?" she would say, using an old Jamaican expression for stealing. She would go to her bedroom, fish out an old lace-covered pink candy box from under the bed, and hand me the bank book.

I would dutifully trot down to the bank, stand in line, and say, "Will you please post the interest on this account?"

"Of course. Colonel Powell. But we also show it on the statement. That can save you a trip down here."

"No," I would say. "My mother has to see those red numbers you print sideways to show her interest." And, I wanted to add, to prove you didn't "tief her.

According to my Aunt Beryl, Pop's sister, in her nineties as of this writing, my parents met at Gram McKoy's apartment in Harlem. Besides raising her own children. Gram took in relatives and Jamaican inmiigrants as boarders to earn a few extra dollars. One such boarder was Luther Powell. Thus, my parents courted while living under the same roof.

After early years in Harlem and at a couple of other addresses, I grew up largely at 952 Kelly Street in the Hunts Point section of the South

Bronx, where my family had moved in 1943, when I was six. The 1981 movie Fort Apache, The Bronx, starring Paul Newman, takes place in the police precinct where I lived. In the movie, the neighborhood is depicted as an urban sinkhole, block after block of burned-out tenements, garbage-strewn streets, and weed-choked lots, populated by gangs, junkies, pimps, hookers, maniacs, cop killers, a^d thirjd-generation welfare families—America's inner-city nightmare come true. That is not quite the Hunts Point I was raised in, although it was hardly elm trees and picket fences. We kept our doors and windows locked. I remember a steel rod running from the back of our front door to a brace on the floor, so that no one could push in the door. Burglaries were common. Drug use was on the rise. Street fights and knifings occurred. Gangs armed with clubs, bottles, bricks, and homemade .22 caliber zip guns waged turf wars. Yet, crime and violence in those days did not begin to suggest the social breakdown depicted in Fort Apache, The Bronx. That was yet to come. When I was growing up in Hunts Point, a certain rough-edged racial tolerance prevailed. And, critically, most families were intact and secure.

We lived in a four-bedroom apartment on the third floor of a four-story brick tenement, two families on each floor, eight families in all. When I stepped out the door onto Kelly Street, I saw my whole world. You went left three blocks to my grade school, one more block to my junior high school; between the two was a sliver of land where stood St. Margaret's Episcopal Church, our church. A few blocks in the opposite direction was the high school I would later attend. Across the street from us, at number 957, lived my Aunt Gytha and Uncle Alfred Coote. On my way to school, I passed 935 Kelly, where Aunt Laurice and Uncle Vic and their children lived. Farther down, at 932, my godmother, Mabel Evadne Brash, called Aunt Vads, and her family lived. And at 867 were Amy and Norman Brash, friends so close they were considered relatives. "Mammale and Pappale" we called them. Don't ask me why the Jewish diminutives, since they were also Jamaicans. Most of the black families I knew had their roots in Jamaica, Trinidad, or Barbados, or other islands of the West Indies.

The Brashes' nicknames may have reflected the fact that in those days Hunts Point was heavily Jewish, mixed with Irish, Polish, Italian, black, and Hispanic families. The block of Kelly Street next to ours was slightly curved, and the neighborhood had been known for years as

"Banana Kelly." We never used the word "ghetto." Ghettos were somewhere in Europe. We lived in the tenements. Outsiders often have a sense of New York as big, overwhelming, impersonal, anonymous. Actually, even now it*s a collection of neighborhoods where everybody knows everybody's business, the same as in a small town. Banana Kelly was like that.

There was a repeating pattern to the avenues that connected our streets. On almost every block you would find a candy store, usually owned by European Jews, selling the Daily News and the Post and the Mirror. No one in my neighborhood read the New York Times. These little stores also carried school supplies, penny candy, ice cream, and soft drinks. As every New Yorker knows, the specialty of the house was the egg cream, consisting of chocolate syrup, milk, and seltzer. If you did not have a dime for the egg cream, you could just get the seltzer—"two cents, plain." Every few blocks you found a Jewish bakery and a Puerto Rican grocery store. Italians ran the shoe repair shops. Every ten blocks were big chain stores, clothing and appliance merchants, and movie houses. I do not recall any black-owned businesses. An exciting event of my boyhood was the arrival of laundromats after World War II. My mother no longer had to scrub our clothes on a washboard and hang them out the window on a clothesline. Pop, however, insisted on having his shirts done at the Chinese laundry.

The South Bronx was an exciting place when I was growing up, and I have never longed for those elms and picket fences.

My father adored my sister, Marilyn. Thanks to his job in the garment district, she was always well dressed, and she led a sheltered life by Kelly Street standards. She ran with the good girls. The Teitelbaum sisters, whose father owned the pharmacy on the comer, were Marilyn's closest friends. I played the role of pesky little brother. Marilyn's first serious boyfriend was John Stevens, whose family was also active in St. Margaret's Church. John was an only child, and was being groomed to become a doctor (he made it). He and Marilyn were matched up by their parents. My idea of fun was to sneak up on them in amorous embrace and make a nuisance of myself. John would buy me off with a quarter. Marilyn would rage at her little brat brother. I thought of her in those days as a fink who turned me in for playing hooky, and I'm sure she found me a pain in the neck. On the whole, it was a normal sibling relationship.

One summer, when I was eight, my folks and some relatives rented cabins at Sag Harbor on Lon^ Island. I was outside by myself playing mumblety~peg, trying to make the knife stick into the ground, when a piece of dirt flew up and lodged under my eyelid. I ran crying into the cabin, where my Aunt Laurice managed to get the irritant out, while I continued bawling. When I went back outside, I overheard her say to Aunt Gytha, "I don't know about that boy. He's such a crybaby." It stung me then, and the fact that I vividly remember the incident almost fifty years later suggests my youthful devastation. I remember thinking, nobody's ever going to see me cry again. I did not always make it.

When I was nine, catastrophe struck the Powell family. As a student at RS. 39,1 passed from the third to the fourth grade, but into the bottom form, called 'Tour Up," a euphemism meaning the kid is a little slow. This was the sort of secret to be whispered with shaking heads in our family circle. Education was the escape hatch, the way up and out for West Indians. My sister was already an excellent student, destined for college. And here I was, having difficulty in the fourth grade. I lacked drive, not ability. I was a happy-go-lucky kid, amenable, amiable, and aimless.

I was not much of an athlete either, though I enjoyed street games. One of my boyhood friends, Tony Grant, once counted thirty-six of them, stickball, stoopball, punchball, sluggo, and hot beans and butter among them. One day, I was playing baseball in an empty lot and saw my father coming down the street. I prayed he would keep on going, because I was having a bad day. But he stopped and watched. All the while Pop was there, I never connected. A swing and a miss, again and again, every time I was at bat. I can still feel the burning humiliation. It was always painful for me to disappoint my father. I imagined a pressure that probably was not there, since he rarely uttered a word of reproach to me.

I did enjoy kite fighting. We would smash up soda bottles in a big juice can and lay the can on the trolley tracks until the passing cars pulverized the glass. We then glued the powdered glass onto a kite string. We fixed double-edged razor blades at intervals on the kite's tail. Then we flew our kites from the roofs of the tenements. By maneuvering the glass-coated string and razored tail, we tried to cut down the kites of kids on other roofs, sometimes a block away, and watch the kites flutter to earth—our version of World War II dogfights.

Luther and Arie's Son ^ 13

I have no recollection of the Depression. My parents were lucky enough to stay employed throughout the thirties, and we were never really in want. And I was only four when America entered World War II, almost ending hard times overnight. Young as I was, I have vivid memories of the war years. I remember assembling ten-cent model airplane kits of balsa wood and colored tissue paper. I deployed legions of lead soldiers and directed battles on the living-room rug. My pals and I scanned the skies from the rooftops looking for Messerschmitts or Heinkels that might get through to bomb Hunts Point. We sprayed imaginary enemies with imaginary weapons. "Bang! Bang! You're dead!" "I am not!" One thrill of my childhood occurred when Uncle Vic, who had served in the 4th Armored Division, came home after the war and gave me a yellow German Afrika Korps helmet. I carried that helmet around for forty years until it finally disappeared on a move between Germany and Washington, liberated, I am sure, by the German movers. In 1950, when I entered high school, the country was at war again, in Korea this time. Warfare held a certain fascination for me, as it often does for boys who have not yet seen it up close.

World War II changed my name. Before, I was Cah-\in, the British pronunciation that Jamaicans used. One of the first American heroes of the war v/as Colin P. Kelly, Jr. (pronounced Coh-lin), an Air Corps flier who attacked the Japanese battleship Haruna two days after Pearl Harbor and won the Distinguished Service Cross posthumously. Colin Kelly's name was on every boy's lips, and so, to my friends, I became Coh-lin of Kelly Street. To my family, I remain Cah-lin to this day. I once asked my father why he had chosen the name, which I never liked. Was it for some illustrious ancestor? Pop said no, he had read it off a shipping ticket the day I was bom.

As a boy, I took piano lessons; but the lessons did not take with me, and they soon ended. I later studied the flute. Marilyn thought the noises coming out of it were hilarious. I gave up the flute too. Apparently, I would not be a jock or a musician. Still, I was a contented kid, growing up in the warmth and security of the concentric circles my family formed. At the center stood my parents. In the next circle were my mother's sisters and their families. My father's only sibling in America, Aunt Beryl, formed the next circle by herself. These circles rippled out in diminishing degrees of kinship, but maintained considerable closeness. Family members looked out for, prodded, and propped up each other.

I sometimes felt as if I were half spectator and half participant in a play populated by character actors. We usually went to my Aunt Dot's house in Queens on New Year's Day for curried goat. Dinner was followed by much drinking of Appleton Estate rum, dancing of the cho-tisse and singing of calypso songs.

A note on the etiquette of Jamaican rum. Appleton Estate is the most famous. It comes in different colors, proofs, and ages. In my family, to serve anything else was considered an affront; to serve Puerto Rican rum, such as Bacardi, was an insult. Appleton Estate ninety proof golden was the most popular. A white version of 150 proof was used for punch. Real men drank the 150 proof neat. The smell stayed with them for a week, which is also about how long it took a drinker to recover. Rum to Jamaicans is like tea to an Oriental or coffee to an Arab, a sign of hospitality and graciousness, usually served over ice with ginger ale or Coke. The Coke version later became too Americanized for us because of the Andrews Sisters' hit song "Rum and Coca-Cola." Ladies, especially my mother, when offered a snort would respond with a demure "Just a touch." My mother would then complain that I had made her "touch" too strong and had put it in too big a glass, just before she downed it.

As a kid, I did not understand the lyrics of the calypso songs I heard at family gatherings. But as I grew older I started to decode the sly double entendres. My favorite calypso singer was Slinger Francisco, a Trinidadian known as "the Mighty Sparrow," a master of the naughty phrase. I played calypso tapes in my office even after I became Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. My aides did not get the pidgin lyrics and missed most of the innuendo in such tunes as "The Big Bamboo" and "Come Water Me Garden." But then, you do not hear much calypso music in the Pentagon's E-Ring.

At family gatherings, talk would invariably turn to "goin' home." No matter how many years my aunts and uncles had been in America, when they said home, they meant Jamaica. "Hey, Osmond, you goin' home this year?" "No, don't have the money. Next year, for sure." "Hey, Lau-rice, you goin' home?" "No, but I'm packin' a barrel to send to the folks." They would slip into nostalgia, all but my godfather. Uncle Shirley, Aunt Dot's husband, a dining-car waiter on the Pennsylvania Railroad. Uncle Shirley was Jamaican too, but in their eyes, he had gone "American," even shedding much of his West Indian accent after

riding the rails for so many years with native-born blacks. "Goin' home?" Uncle Shirley would say. "You damn fools sit around talking about *home.' You forget why we left? Ain't been home in twenty years, and I ain't never going home." At which point the kids would laugh uproariously, delighted to see Uncle Shirley provoked to heresy.

We liked to get Aunt Dot and Uncle Shirley into an argument, because their spats had the reliability of a Punch and Judy show. ^'Shirley, you come over here with the folks, instead of sitting in front of that TV all day," Aunt Dot would begin. Shirley do this, and Shirley do that. It was like watching a fuse bum. Finally, Shirley would explode: "Woman! Mind your own damn business!" I later understood that the only way those two could fight like that for over forty years had to be out of deep love.

During summer vacations, I sometimes stayed with Aunt Dot and Uncle Shirley. I especially enjoyed my godfather's idea of breakfast on his day off, steak, eggs, and ice cream. Dottie and Shirley are gone now; yet every time I spend an evening with their sons, my cousins, Vernon, Roger, and Sonny, we amuse ourselves by reenacting one of their parents' long-ago tiffs. Sometimes these memories will strike me suddenly out of nowhere, and I start laughing all by myself.

Our family was a matriarchy. I loved my uncles—they were the sauce, the fun, and they provided the occasional rascal. But most were weaker personalities than their wives. The women set the standards, whipped the kids into shape, and pushed them ahead. The exception was my father. Luther Powell, maybe small, maybe unimposing in appearance, maybe somewhat comical, was nevertheless the ringmaster of this family circle.

In 1950, my sister transferred to an upstate New York college, and Marilyn's send-off was pure Pop. We all went down to Grand Central Station to put Marilyn on the Empire State Express bound for Buffalo State Teachers College. My father strode into the station, overcoat flapping, smiling through his tears, tipping everybody in sight, the porter, the conductor, the trainman, telling them, "Take care of my httle girl, make sure she gets there safe and sound." I was embarrassed to see him doling out the money, but that was his way. Around the holidays, he would tip the mailman, the fuel man, the garbageman. When he was young, hving in Harlem, Pop would dress up every Saturday in a vested suit, a checkbook with a zero balance stuffed into his pocket. He would

16 ^ COLIN L. POWELL

Start off the weekend at a shoeshine stand, where he also had a reputation as a heavy tipper. Afterward, as he strode down Morning side Avenue, the world was his oyster.

During football season, his son had to have the best helmet on the block, though I was far from the best player. My first two-wheeler bike had to be a Columbia Racer, with twenty-six^inch whitewall balloon tires. When I needed a suit, it was "Son, here's the charge card—go to Macy's and take care of yourself." All this from a shipping room foreman who never earned more than $60 a week. One Christmas, my mother objected to my father's inviting so many people over, which he did every year. The work was getting too much for her, she said. He went out and invited about fifty people and told Mom that if she could not handle it, he would hire a caterer.

His take-charge manner was reassuring. Luther Powell became the Godfather, the one people came to for advice, for domestic arbitration, for help in getting a job. He would bring home clothes, seconds and irregulars, end bolts of fabric, from the Gaines Company, and sell them at wholesale or give them to anybody in need. Downtown, Pop was not always able to play this lordly role. Maybe that was why it meant so much to him on Kelly Street. When Gaines changed hands, he tried to buy a piece of the company, but he was turned down. He had given the firm twenty-three years of his life, and, in his view, had been unfairly frozen out. Whether or not Pop was a serious bidder, I never knew. But after this disappointment, he left Gaines and went to work in a similar position for Scheule and Company, dealers in wholesale cloth. And that is where he spent the rest of his working days until the firm folded, and he was too old to get another job.

Luther Powell never let his race or station affect his sense of self. West Indians like him had come to this country with nothing. Every morning they got on that subway, worked like dogs all day, got home at 8:00 at night, supported their families, and educated their children. If they could do that, how dare anyone think they were less than anybody's equal? That was Pop's attitude.

Of course, there was always the dream that it might not have to be earned by the sweat of your brow, that one day Dame Fortune might step in. I remember the morning ritual, my father on the phone talking confidentially to his sister: "Beryl, what you doing today? Four-three-one? Hmmm. Straight or combination? Okay. Let's make it fifty cents."

Later, the numbers runner would come by to pick up the bet. Someday, they knew, they were going to strike it rich.

In 1950,1 entered Morris High School. Instead of turning left when I went out of the house I turned right for a few blocks. Marilyn had gone to the elite Walton High School. And, at my parents prompting, I tried to get into Stuyvesant High, another prestigious school. I still have the report card with the guidance counselor's decision: "We advise against it." Morris High, on the other hand, was like Robert Frost's definition of home, the place where, when you show up, they have to let you in.

I was still directionless. I was not fired by anything. My pleasures were hanging out with the guys, "making the walk" from Kelly Street, up 163rd Street around Southern Boulevard to Westchester Avenue, and back home. Our Saturday-morning rite was to go the the Tiffany Theater and watch the serial and then a double feature of cowboy movies.

Sundays meant attending St. Margaret's Church, where we had our own family pew. Pop was senior warden. Mom headed the altar guild, and Marilyn played the piano at children's services. I was an acolyte. My folks always worked on the bazaar, the bake sale, and the annual dance, where you could let your Episcopalian hair down, do the calypso, get a little tipsy, and even share a nip with the priest.

In our neighborhood, we also had Catholic churches, synagogues, and storefront churches. On Friday nights I earned a quarter by turning the lights on and off at the Orthodox synagogue, so that the worshipers could observe the sabbath ban on activity. I had definite ideas of what a church was supposed to be, like the high Anglican church in which my family was raised in Jamaica, with spires, altars, priests, vestments, incense, and the flock genuflecting and crossing itself all over the place. The higher the church, the closer to God; that was how I saw it. At Christmas, our priest. Father Weeden, turned St. Margaret's into a magical place of candles, lights, ribbons, wreaths, and holly. The incense burning during the holidays almost asphyxiated Marilyn. I loved all of it.

I can still remember confirmation, watching those sweet, scrubbed children as the bishop seized them one by one by the head: "Defend, O Lord, this thy Child with thy heavenly grace; that he may continue thine forever; and daily increase in thy Holy Spirit more and more, until he come unto thy everlasting kingdom." I would swing the incense burner, lustily chanting "Amen," convinced that I was witnessing the spirit of God entering that child's head like a bolt of lightning. St. Margaret's

18 ^ COLIN L. POWELL

was imagery, pageantry, drama, and poetry. Times change, and the liturgy has changed with the times. I suppose I have to yield to the wisdom of the bishops who believed the 1928 book of Common Prayer needed updating, just as it replaced its predecessor. But in the change, something was lost for me. Long years afterward, I buried my mother from St. Margaret's Church at a time when the ©Id lituVgy had been displaced by the new. God now seemed earthbound and unisexed, not quite the magisterial, heavenly father figure of my youth. It saddened me. I miss the enchantment of the church in which I was raised.

I was a believer, but no saint. One summer, in the early fifties. Father Weeden selected me, the son of two pillars of St. Margaret's, to go to a church camp near Peekskill. Once there, I promptly fell into bad company. One night, my newfound friends and I snuck out to buy beer. We hid it in the toilet tank to cool, but our cache was quickly discovered. The priest in charge summoned all campers to the meeting hall. He did not threaten or berate us. Instead, he asked who was ready to accept responsibility. Who would own up like a man? We could probably have gotten away with our transgression by saying nothing. But his words struck me. I stood up. "Father, I did it," I said. When they heard me, two more budding hoodlums rose up and also confessed.

We were put on the next train back to New York. Word of our sinning preceded us. I dragged myself up Westchester Avenue and turned right onto Kelly Street like a felon mounting the gallows. As I reached number 952, there was Mom, her usually placid face twisted into a menacing scowl. When she finished laying into me. Pop began. Just about when I thought I was eternally damned. Father Weeden telephoned. Yes, the boys had behaved badly, he said. "But your Colin stood up and took responsibihty. And his example spurred the other boys to admit their guilt." My parents beamed. From juvenile dehnquent, I had been catapulted to hero. Something from that boyhood experience, the rewards of honesty, hit home and stayed.

As for the neighborhood gang I traveled with, getting thrown out of church camp, plus having my father catch me playing poker in Sam Fiorino's shoe repair shop—with off-duty cops, no less—boosted my image. Usually, the other guys looked on me, not quite as a sissy, but as a "nice" kid, even a bit of a mama's boy.

One day when I was fourteen, my mother sent me to the post office to mail letters. I was passing Sickser's, on the comer of Westchester and

Luther and Arie's Son 'A 19

Fox, a baby furnishings and toy store, when a white-haired man crooked a finger at me. Did I want to earn a few bucks? he asked in a thick Yiddish accent. He led me to a truck backed up to the warehouse behind the store, where I proceeded to unload merchandise for the Christmas season. The man was Jay Sickser, the store owner. Later, when he came by to check on me, he seemed surprised that I had almost finished the job. "So you're a worker," he said. 'Tou want to come back tomorrow?" That day began an association with Sickser's that was to last throughout my youth.

Many of the store's customers were Jewish, and after a while I started picking up Yiddish. Relatives of Jay's would come in looking for a deal. Jay would call me over and say, "Collie, so take my cousins upstairs and show them the good carriages." I would escort them to the second floor, where they would talk confidentially in Yiddish—which model they liked, how much they were ready to spend. This schwarz knabe, what could he understand? I'd excuse myself and go down and report to Mr. S., who would come up, armed with my intelligence, and close the deal.

After I had worked at Sickser's for a few years. Jay took me aside one day. "Collie," he said, "you got to understand, I got two daughters. I got a son-in-law. Get yourself an education someday. Don't count too much on the store." He evidently thought that I had worked out well enough to deserve being brought into the firm, which I had never considered. I took it as a compliment.

I have been asked when I first felt a sense of racial identity, when I first understood that I belonged to a minority. In those early years, I had no such sense, because on Banana Kelly there was no majority. Everybody was either a Jew, an Italian, a Pole, a Greek, a Puerto Rican, or, as we said in those days, a Negro. Among my boyhood friends were Victor Ramirez, Walter Schwartz, Manny Garcia, Melvin Klein. The Kleins were the first family in our building to have a television set. Every Tuesday night, we crowded into Mel's living room to watch Milton Berle. On Thursdays we watched Am^7^ Andy. We thought the show was marvelous, the best thing on television. It was another age, and we did not know that we were not supposed to like Amos 'n 'Andy.

Racial epithets were hurled around Kelly Street. Sometimes they led to fistfights. But it was not "You're inferior—I'm better." The fighfing was more like avenging an insult to your team. I was eventually to taste the poison of bigotry, but much later, and far from Banana Kelly.

The inseparable companion of my youth was Gene Alfred Warren Norman, also West Indian, a year or two older, a better athlete, and a more restless soul. A close white friend was Tony Grant. I remember their haste to get out of the neighborhood, to peer over the horizon. Gene via the Marine Corps and Tony via the Navy. Tony remembers two groups on Banana Kelly in our youth,^ "the drugged and the undrugged." Among the latter were the three of us. Gene went on to become landmarks commissioner of New York City, and Tony corporation counsel for White Plains.

In February of 1954, thanks to an accelerated school program rather than any brilliance on my part, I graduated from Morris High School two months short of my seventeenth birthday. My picture in the Tower, the yearbook, shows a kid with an easygoing smile and few screen credits beside his name. My page in the yearbook also reflects the Hunts Point mix of that era, three blacks, one Hispanic, four Jewish kids, and two other whites.

Except for a certain facility in unloading prams at Sickser's, I had not yet excelled at anything. I was the "good kid," the "good worker," no more. I did well enough at Morris to win a letter for track, but after a while I found slogging cross-country through Van Cortlandt Park boring, and so I quit. I switched to the 440-yard dash, because I could get it over with faster, but I dropped out after one season. We had a church basketball team at St. Margaret's. I was tall, fairly fast, and the senior warden's son, and the coach was inclined to give me a chance. I spent most of the time riding the bench, so I quit the team, to the relief of the coach. In later years, I frequently found myself asked to play or coach basketball, apparently out of a racial preconception that I must be good at it. As soon as I was old enough to be convincing, I feigned a chronic "back problem" to stay off the court.

My inabihty to stick to anything became a source of concern to my parents, unspoken, but I knew it was there. I did, however, stand out in one arena. I was an excellent acolyte and subdeacon, and enjoyed my ecclesiastical duties. Here was organization, tradition, hierarchy, pageantry, purpose—a world, now that I think about it, not all that unlike the Army. Maybe my 1928 prayer book was destined to be Field Manual 22-5, the Army's troop drilling bible. Had I gone into the ministry in those days, it would have pleased my mother. I did not hear the call.

Luther and Arie's Son ^ 21

I remained unprecocious and unaccomplished in another department. I never received a word of sex education at home. The street was my teacher, and a crude one. All the guys carried condoms in their wallets, mine yellow and brittle with age. I had a puppy-love romance with a girl who lived a few blocks away that lasted throughout high school. I invited her to a family party once, where Marilyn spent the whole evening giggling at her. Later, my sister said, "What's so special about that girl?" Not special? I had thought my girl was beautiful. For all our squabbling, Marilyn's opinion mattered to me. If my girlfriend was not pretty in Marilyn's eyes, she began to look less attractive in mine, and the romance faded.

In later years, I would turn out to be a good student, but no one would have predicted it then. Marilyn continued to set the Powell standard in education. She had been an honor student at Walton High, and she excelled at Buffalo State. And so, in spite of my final high school average of 78.3,1 started looking at colleges because of my sister's example and because my parents expected it of me. Education meant the difference between wrapping packages or sewing buttons all day and having a real profession. Education had led to an extraordinary record of accomplishment in my family. Among my blood relatives and extended family of lesser kinship, my cousin, Arthur Lewis, served as U.S. ambassador to Sierra Leone, after a career as a Navy enlisted man. His brother, Roger, became a successful architect. Cousin Victor Roque became a prominent lawyer. James Watson became a judge on the U.S. Customs Court of International Trade. His sister, Barbara, was U.S. ambassador to Malaysia and the first woman assistant secretary of state; another sister, Grace, served as an official in the Department of Education. Another cousin, Dorothy Cropper, became a New York State Court of Claims judge. My cousin Claret Forbes, one of the last to migrate from Jamaica, is a nurse, with two children in Ivy League colleges. My sister's daughter, Leslie, is an artist with an M.A. from Yale. Yet another cousin, Bruce Llewellyn, Aunt Nessa's son, is a businessman, philanthropist, former senior political appointee in the Carter administration, and one of this country's wealthiest African-Americans.

Not every cousin became a professional. Some worked as motor-men on the New York subway, some had small businesses, some clerical jobs. But all of them have been good providers and parents, keeping their families together and educating offspring who continue

22 * COLIN L . POWELL

to turn out well. I look at my aunts and uncles, their children and their children's children, and I see three generations of constructive, productive, self-reliant members of society. And all my relatives, whatever their professional status, enjoy equal standing in the family. No cousin stands above another in respect or affection. Some have experienced disappointment. Some did not achieve l^e success they desired. But they have all been successful in what counts in the end; they are useful human beings, useful to themselves, to their families, and to their communities.

Most of my parents' brothers and sisters stayed in Jamaica, and their children have turned out well there too. My Meikle cousins, Vernon and Roy, went to the University of Toronto and the University of London respectively. In the 1970s, when the Jamaican government took a socialist turn and practically wrecked the economy, more relatives left the island, this latest immigrant wave settling in Miami. And the pattern of success began repeating itself.

American blacks sometimes regard Americans of West Indian origin as uppity and arrogant. The feeling, I imagine, grows out of an impressive record of accomplishment by West Indians. What explains that success? For one thing, the British ended slavery in the Caribbean in 1833, well over a generation before America did. And after abolition, the lingering weight of servitude did not persist as long. The British were mostly absentee landlords, and West Indians were left more or less on their own. Their lives were hard, but they did not experience the crippling paternalism of the American plantation system, with white masters controlling every waking moment of a slave's life. After the British ended slavery, they told my ancestors that they were now British citizens with all the rights of any subject of the crown. That was an exaggeration; still, the British did establish good schools and made attendance mandatory. They filled the lower ranks of the civil service with blacks. Consequently, West Indians had an opportunity to develop attitudes of independence, self-responsibility, and self-worth. They did not have their individual dignity beaten down for three hundred years, the fate of so many black American slaves and their descendants.

Of course, my ancestors had also been ripped ruthlessly out of Africa, the ties to their past severed by slave traders. In Jamaica, some blacks replaced this hole in their culture with British culture, its church, its traditions, its governmental institutions, its values. Others remained at-

Luther and Arie's Son 'A 2 3

tached to their African roots through the Rastafarian movement with its rehgious Hnkage to the late Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopa. I appreciate and admire the impulses that have led many African-Americans as well to reclaim the culture that was stolen from them and to draw spiritual sustenance from it.

American blacks and West Indians also wound up on American soil under different conditions. My black ancestors may have been dragged to Jamaica in chains, but they were not dragged to the United States. Mom and Pop chose to emigrate to this country for the same reason that Italians, Irish, and Hungarians did, to seek better lives for themselves and their children. That is a far different emotional and psychological beginning than that of American blacks, whose ancestors were brought here in chains.

There is, undeniably, a degree of clannishness among West Indians, Jamaicans included. My family socialized and found friends almost entirely within the Jamaican community. Consequently, my sister, Marilyn's behavior came as a real jolt. Ever since she had gone off to college, Marilyn had been bringing home girlfriends, some of whom were white. The South Bronx was a bit different from what they were used to, but Marilyn was not concerned. She was proud of her family, and my parents welcomed all her friends. In 1952, she announced that she was bringing home a boyfriend. She was in love. They wanted to get married. His name was Norman Bems, and Norman was white.

This bit of proposed integration was occurring two years before Brown v. Topeka Board of Education, a time when few people, black or white, could have identified Martin Luther King, Jr., when Americans would not have known a sit-in from a sofa. Marilyn's choice was the source of much tut-tutting in the family. Our girl from Banana Kelly going with some white boy from Buffalo? What's going on? Why do they want to get married?

The time came for Norm to meet the family and answer the question. He turned out to be a prince and obviously in love with my sister. An interracial marriage, nevertheless, troubled Pop, and he understood the shelf life of youthful passions: "You two want to marry. Fine. Wait a year," he said. "See if you still do."

In the meantime, we went to meet Norm's folks. An adventure for me. Buffalo, New York, 460 miles from New York City. Out West! The Bems, it turned out, were a little more tolerant than the Powells. They

took the attitude that if the kids were in love and wanted to get married, let's wish them godspeed.

In the end, love triumphed, and the wedding was planned for August 1953. Luther Powell's only daughter was getting married, and only the best would do: best caterer, biggest cake, finest band, and poshest site, the Concourse Plaza Hotel on the Grand Concourse, the biggest hotel in the Bronx. A decade of skimping, saving, and sacrifice must have vanished that day. But the light dancing in my father's eyes said, what's money for?

I might add that Marilyn and Norm, with their two daughters and one granddaughter, recently celebrated their fortieth wedding anniversary.

Following Marilyn's example and Mom and Pop's wishes, I applied to two colleges, the City College of New York and New York University. I must have been better than I thought, since I was accepted at both. Choosing between the two was a matter of simple arithmetic; tuition at NYU, a private school, was $750 a year; at CCNY, a public school, it was $10.1 chose CCNY. My mother turned out to be my guidance counselor. She had consulted with the family. My two Jamaican cousins, Vernon and Roy, were studying engineering. "That's where the money is," Mom advised. And she was not far wrong. In the boom years of the fifties, demand for consumer goods and for engineers to design the refrigerators, automobiles, and hi-fi sets was strong. And so I was to be an engineering major, despite my allergy to science and math.

The Bronx can be a cold, harsh place in February, and it was frigid the day I set out for college. After two bus rides, I was finally deposited, shivering, at the comer of 156th Street and Convent Avenue in Harlem. I got out and craned my neck like a bumpkin in from the sticks, gazing at handsome brownstones and apartment houses. This was the best of Harlem, where blacks with educafions and good jobs lived, the Gold Coast.

I stopped at the comer of Convent and 141 st and looked into the campus of the City College of New York. I was about to enter a college established in the previous century "to provide higher education for the children of the working class." Ever since then. New York's poorest and brightest have seized that opportunity. Those who preceded me at CCNY include the polio vaccine discoverer. Dr. Jonas Salk, Supreme

Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, the muckraker novelist Upton Sinclair, the actor Edward G. Robinson, the playwright Paddy Chayefsky, the New York Times editor Abe Rosenthal, the novelist Bernard Malamud, the labor leader A. Philip Randolph, New York City mayors Robert Wagner, Jr., Abraham Beame, and Edward Koch, and eight Nobel Prize winners. As I took in the grand Gothic structures, a C-average student out of middling Morris High School, I feU overwhelmed. And then I heard a friendly voice: "Hey, kid, you new?"

He was a short, red-faced, weather-beaten man with gnarled hands, and he stood behind a steaming cart of those giant pretzels that New Yorkers are addicted to. I had met a CCNY fixture called, for some unaccountable reason, "Raymond the Bagel Man," though he sold pretzels. I bought a warm, salty pretzel from Raymond, and we shot the breeze for a few minutes. That broke the ice for me. CCNY was somehow less intimidating. I was to become a regular of Raymond's over the next four and a half years. And it either speaks well of his character or poorly of my scholarship that while my memory of most of my professors has faded, the memory of Raymond the Bagel Man remains undimmed.

As I headed toward the main building, Sheppard Hall, towering like a prop out of a horror movie, I passed by an undistinguished old building. I do not remember paying any attention to it at the time. It was, however, to become the focus of my life for the next four years, the ROTC drill hall.

My first semester as an engineering major went surprisingly well, mainly because I had not yet taken any engineering courses. I decided to prepare myself that summer with a course in mechanical drawing. One hot afternoon, the instructor asked us to draw "a cone intersecting a plane in space." The other students went at it; I just sat there. After a while, the instructor came to my desk and looked over my shoulder at a blank page. For the life of me, I could not visualize a cone intersecting a plane in space. If this was engineering, the game was over.

My parents were disappointed when I told them that I was changing my major. There goes Colin again, nice boy, but no direction. When I announced my new major, a hurried family council was held. Phone calls flew between aunts and uncles. Had anybody ever heard of anyone studying geology? What did you do with geology? Where did you go with it? Prospecting for oil? A novel pursuit for a black kid from the

South Bronx. And, most critical to these security-haunted people, could geology lead to a pension? That was the magic word in our world. I remember coming home after I had been in the Army for five years and visiting my well-meaning, occasionally meddling Aunt Laurice. What kind of career was this Army? she asked, like a cross-examiner. What was I doing with my life? Snatching at the nearest defense, I mentioned that after twenty years I would get a half-pay pension. And I would only be forty-one. Her eyes widened. A pension? At forty-one? The discussion was over. I had it made.

During my first semester at CCNY, something had caught my eye— young guys on campus in uniform. CCNY was a hotbed of liberahsm, radicalism, even some leftover communism from the thirties; it was not a place where you would expect much of a military presence. When I returned to school in the fall of 1954, I inquired about the Reserve Officers Training Corps, and I enrolled in ROTC. I am not sure why. Maybe it was growing up in World War II and coming of age during the Korean conflict: the little banners in windows with a blue star, meaning someone from the family was in the service, or a gold star, meaning someone was not coming back. Back to Bataan, Thirty Seconds over Tokyo, Guadalcanal Diary, Colin Kelly, Audie Murphy, the five Sullivan brothers who went down with the cruiser U.S.S. Juneau, Pork Chop Hill, and The Bridges at Toko-Ri. All these images were burned into my consciousness during my most impressionable years. Or maybe it was the common refrain of that era—you are going to be drafted anyway, you might as well go in as an officer. I was not alone. CCNY might not have been West Point, but during the fifties it had the largest voluntary ROTC confingent in America, fifteen hundred cadets at the height of the Korean War.

There came a day when I stood in hne in the drill hall to be issued olive-drab pants and jacket, brown shirt, brown tie, brown shoes, a belt with a brass buckle, and an overseas cap. As soon as I got home, I put the uniform on and looked in the mirror. I liked what I saw. At this point, not a single Kelly Street friend of mine was going to college. I was seventeen. I felt cut off and lonely. The uniform gave me a sense of belonging, and something I had never experienced all the while I was growing up; I felt distinctive.

In class, I stumbled through math, fumbled through physics, and did reasonably well in, and even enjoyed, geology. All I ever looked for-

Luther and Arie's Son 'A 2 7

ward to was ROTC. Colonel Harold C. Brookhart, Professor of Military Science and Tactics, was our commanding officer. The colonel was a West Pointer and regular Army to his fingertips. He was about fifty years old, with thinning hair, of only medium height, yet he seemed imposing because of his bearing, impeccable dress, and no-nonsense manner. His assignment could not have been a coveted one for a career officer. I am sure he would have preferred commanding a regiment to teaching ROTC to a bunch of smart-aleck city kids on a liberal New York campus. But the Korean War had ended the year before. The Army was overloaded with officers, and Brookhart was probably grateful to land anywhere. Whatever he felt, he never let us sense that what we were doing was anything less than deadly serious.

That fall, I experienced the novel pleasure of being courted by the three military societies on campus, the Webb Patrol, Scabbard and Blade, and the Pershing Rifles, ROTC counterparts of fraternities. Rushing consisted mostly of inviting potential pledges to smokers where we drank beer and watched pornographic movies. The movies, in the sexually repressed fifties, were supposed to be a draw. I hooted and hollered with the rest of the college boys through these grainy 8-millimeter films, in which the male star usually wore socks. But they were not what drew me to the Pershing Rifles. I pledged the PRs because they were the elite of the three groups.

The pledge period involved typical ritualistic bowing and scraping before upperclassmen, and some hazing that aped West Point traditions. A junior would stand you at attention and demand the definition of certain words. To this day I can parrot the response for milk: "She walks, she talks, she's made of chalk, the lactile fluid extracted from the female of the bovine species . .and on and on. I can spout half a dozen similar daffy definitions. When we finished the pledge period, we were allowed to wear distinctive blue-and-white shoulder cords and enamel crests on our uniforms. I found that I was much attracted by forms and symbols.

One Pershing Rifles member impressed me from the start. Ronald Brooks was a young black man, tall, trim, handsome, the sun of a Harlem Baptist preacher and possessed of a maturity beyond most college students. Ronnie was only two years older than I, but something in him commanded deference. And unlike me, Ronnie, a chemistry major, was a brilliant student. He was a cadet leader in the ROTC and an offi-

cer in the Pershing Rifles. He could drill men so that they moved hke parts of a watch. Ronnie was sharp, quick, disciplined, organized, qualities then invisible in Colin Powell. I had found a model and a mentor. I set out to remake myself in the Ronnie Brooks mold.

My experience in high school, on basketball and track teams, and briefly in Boy Scouting had never produced a' sense' of belonging or many permanent friendships. The Pershing Rifles did. For the first time in my life I was a member of a brotherhood. The PRs were in the CCNY tradition only in that we were ethnically diverse and so many of us were the sons of immigrants. Otherwise, we were out of sync with both the student radicals and the conservative engineering majors, the latter easy to spot by the slide rules hanging from their belts. PRs drilled together. We partied together. We cut classes together. We chased girls together. We had a fraternity office on campus from which we occasionally sor-tied out to class or, just as often, to the student lounge, where we tried to master the mambo. I served as an unlikely academic advisor, steering other Pershing Rifles into geology as an easy yet respectable route to a degree.

The discipline, the structure, the camaraderie, the sense of belonging were what I craved. I became a leader almost immediately. I found a selflessness within our ranks that reminded me of the caring atmosphere within my family. Race, color, background, income meant nothing. The PRs would go the limit for each other and for the group. If this was what soldiering was all about, then maybe I wanted to be a soldier.

I still worked occasional weekends and the Christmas season at Sickser's. But as the school year ended, I wanted a summer job that paid more. And that is how I became a member of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, Local 812.1 had started out the summer in a Harlem furniture plant, screwing hinges on cabinets. My father was delighted to see me get up every morning and head for a paying job. But within three weeks, I told him that I had decided to leave. Pop was not happy. "You work three weeks and just up and quit? What are you gonna tell the boss?" I explained to Pop that I could make more money shaping up every morning with the Teamsters. I could read the message in Pop's eyes. Shape up? When is this kid going to shape up? I made up some excuse for quitting and, to avoid embarrassment, sent a friend to pick up my last paycheck at the furniture plant.

Luther and Arie's Son "A" 29

I did earn more shaping up every day at the Teamsters Hall, usually working as a helper on soft drink delivery trucks. One day the Teamsters agent announced a steady summer job that did not require shaping up, porter at a Pepsi-Cola bottling plant in Long Island City. None of the white kids raised a hand. The job was mine, though I was not quite sure what a porter did in a bottling plant. When I reported in, I was handed a mop, an experience that black workers have had for generations. I noticed that all the other porters were black and all the workers on the bottling machines were white. I took the mop. If that was what I had to do to earn $65 a week, I'd do it. I'd mop the place until it glowed in the dark. Whatever skill the job required, I soon mastered. You mop from side to side, not back and forth, unless you want to break your back. It could be godawful work, as it was the day fifty cases of Pepsi-Cola bottles came crashing down from a forklift and flooded the floor with sticky soda pop.

At the end of the summer, the foreman said, "Kid, you mop pretty good."

"You gave me plenty of opportunity to learn," I told him.

"Come back next summer," he said. "I'll have a job for you." Not behind a mop, I said. I wanted to work on the bottling machine. And the next year, that is where he put me. By the end of summer, I was deputy shift leader, and had learned a valuable lesson. All work is honorable. Always do your best, because someone is watching.

I returned to college in the fall of 1955, commuting from Kelly Street. I did not have to be an urbanologist to see that the old neighborhood was deteriorating. The decline was just the latest chapter in the oldest story in New York, people moving up and out as their fortunes improved, and poorer people moving in to take their places. The Jewish families who had escaped Lower East Side tenements for the South Bronx were now moving to the suburbs. Poor Puerto Ricans were moving into their old apartments. Hunts Point had never been verandas and wisteria. And now it was getting worse, from gang fights to gang wars, from jackknives to switchblades, from zip guns to real guns, from marijuana to heroin. One day, I came home from CCNY to find that a kid I knew had been found in a hallway, dead of a heroin overdose. He would not be the last. I had managed to steer clear of the drug scene. I never smoked marijuana, never got high, in fact never experimented with any drugs. And for a simple reason; my folks would have killed me.

As better-off families continued to flee, properties began to decay, even to be abandoned. Landlords cut their losses short and walked away from their buildings. In years to come, my own 952 Kelly Street would be abandoned, then burned out and finally demolished. But that was all in the future. For now, conversation among my relatives typically began, "When you getting out?" Aunt Laurie^ move'd to the northern edge of the Bronx. So did Godmother Brash. Aunt Dot was already in Queens. When were Luther and Arie going to leave?

The secret dream of these tenement dwellers had always been to own their own home. And so the Powell family began heading for the upper Bronx or Queens, Sunday after Sunday, house hunting in desirable black neighborhoods. But the prices were outrageous—$15,000, $20,000, with my parents' combined income totaling about $100 a week. Weekends often ended with the real estate agent sick to death of us and my sister embarrassed to tears.

My father also dreamed about numbers. He bought numbers books at the newsstands to work out winning combinations. And he still went in every day with Aunt Beryl. They usually played quarters. Then, one Saturday night, my father dreamed a number, and the next morning at St. Margaret's the same number appeared on the hymn board. This, surely, was God taking Luther Powell by the hand and leading him to the Promised Land. Somehow, Pop and Aunt Beryl managed to scrape up $25 to put on the number. And they hit it, straight.

I still remember the atmosphere of joy, disbelief, and anxiety when the numbers runner delivered the brown paper bags to our house. Pop took them to his room and dumped the money on his bed, $10,000 in tens and twenties, more than three years' pay. He let me help him count it. The money was not going into any bank. This strike was nobody's business. The bills were stashed all over the house, with my mother terrified that the tax man or thieves would be coming through the door any minute.

And that was how the Powells managed to buy 183-68 Elmira Avenue, in the community of Hollis in the borough of Queens—for $17,500. The house was a three-bedroom bungalow in a neighborhood in transition; the whites were moving out and the blacks moving in. My folks bought from a Jewish family named Wiener, one of the few white families left. The neighborhood looked beautiful to us, and the Hollis address carried a certain cachet, a cut above Jamaica, Queens, and just

Luther and Arie's Son ^ 3 1

below St. Albans, then another gold coast for middle-class blacks. Our new home was ivy-covered, well kept, and comfortable, and had a family room and a bar in the finished basement. Pop was now a property holder, eager to mow his postage-stamp lawn and prune his fruit trees. Luther Powell had joined the gentry.

But owning a home frightened Mom. She worried constantly about making the mortgage payments. She talked incessantly about her old friends left at Banana Kelly. After a few months, my father came to me almost in tears. "I don't think we can stay," he said. "Your mother can't take the loneliness. I'm not sure she'll make it through the winter." Two years passed before Mom overcame her fears, realized they could carry the mortgage, and stopped running back to the South Bronx.

I now began commuting from Queens to CCNY via the subway, which led to my first serious romance, with a CCNY student. We began riding the A train from the campus downtown, where we would transfer, I out to Queens and the girl out to Brooklyn. I took her to meet my parents. They were perfectly polite to her, but reserved.

My main college interest remained ROTC and the Pershing Rifles. Geology continued to be secondary, though I did enjoy the field trips. We went upstate and clambered over formations of synclines and anticlines. We had to diagram them and figure out their mirror images. If you had an anticline here, you should be able to predict a complementing syncline bulging out somewhere else. Very satisfying when I got it right. Geology allowed me to display my brilliance to my noncollege friends. "You know, the Hudson really isn't a river." "What are you talking about? College kid. Schmuck. Everybody knows the Hudson River's a river." I would then explain that the Hudson was a "drowned" river, up to about Poughkeepsie. The Ice Age had depressed the riverbed to a depth that allowed the Atlantic Ocean to flood inland. Consequently, the lower Hudson was really a saltwater estuary. I proudly pinpointed the farthest advance of the Ice Age. It stopped at Hillside Avenue running through Queens. You can see the ground sloping down along that line into St. Albans and Jamaica. I was startled to earn an A in one of my geology courses and wound up with three A's in my major by graduation.

In my junior year, I enrolled in advanced ROTC, which paid a princely $27.90 a month. My idol was still Ronnie Brooks. In his first two years at CCNY, Ronnie had become a cadet sergeant. I became a

cadet sergeant. In advanced ROTC, Ronnie became a battalion commander. I became a battalion, commander. Ronnie was a drillmaster. I became a drillmaster. Ronnie had been the PRs' pledge officer, and in my junior year I became pledge officer, which allowed me to do something about the way we went after pledges. I told the brothers there was something wrong if the only way we could attract members was with dirty movies. Besides, I said, all the fraternities are doing the same thing. So what's our edge? Let's use a little imagination. Let's show movies of what we do, like drill competitions. Let's show them what we're all about.

The Pershing Rifles had a basement room in one of the houses along Amsterdam Avenue, provided by the CCNY administration to give this largely commuter campus a touch of college social life. I told the brothers to go out on the street, corral kids after they had gotten their jollies from pom movies at other houses, and bring them over to our place to see movies about what the PRs did. I was taking a risk. Success as a pledge officer was easy to measure. Pledges were either up or down from previous years. I anxiously awaited the day the rushees made their choice. When it was over, the Pershing Rifles had attracted the largest pledge class in years. This was a defining moment for me, the first small indication that I might be able to influence the outcome of events.

One of the student pledges during this period was a rough diamond whose destiny was set the day he joined ROTC and the Pershing Rifles. His name was Antonio 'Tony" Mavroudis, a Greek-American, also from Queens, who worked part-time as an auto mechanic. Tony was coarse, profane, street-smart, full of life. I loved him. Just as I had found my model in Ronnie Brooks, Tony found his model in me. We became as close as brothers, commuted together, dated together, raised hell together. And our lives were to be indelibly marked together, Tony's more fatefully than mine, by a place neither of us had probably heard of at the time, Vietnam.

During my last three college years, the drill hall became the center of my universe. A Major Nelson was in charge under the more remote Colonel Brookhart. The major ran interference for us with the college administration as we courted probation for mediocre grades, cutting classes, and pledge-week pranks. ROTC was also my introduction to ^ the backbone of the Army, the NCOs who drilled us and taught the nuts-and-bolts courses. I remember most vividly a rough master sergeant

Luther and Aric's Son ^ 3 3

named Lou Mohica: "Gentlemens, this is the Browning Automatic Rifle. I am going to teach youse how to disassemble and assemble the BAR. Listen to me, cuz if youse don't youse could die in combat. Any questions so far?"

I spent almost every Saturday at the drill hall, up to seven hours at a stretch, drawing an M-i rifle with the rest of the PR drill team, practicing the Queen Mary salute, rifle spins, and diagonal marching with fixed bayonets, a perilous business if you were careless. The Pershing Rifles took part in two competitions, regular drill, which Ronnie led, and trick drill, the fancy stuff, which he entrusted to me. In the spring of 1957, my junior year, we participated in a competition at the 71st Regiment Armory in New York against ROTC units from Fordham, New York University, Hofstra, and other institutions in the metropolitan region. We arrived with our mascots. Coke and Blackjack, two squirrels.

Ronnie took his team out on the floor and scored 460 out of a possible 500 points to win the regular drill competition. Then it was my turn to lead the eighteen-man trick drill team. We had polished our brass with blitz cloths until we'd almost worn out the metal. Our faces were reflected in our shined shoes. And I had a few surprises in store that we had secretly rehearsed. Ordinarily, the drill team captain would just mark time as the team moved into its next maneuver. Instead, I launched into a dance solo, a step popular at the time, the camel walk. The audience went wild. We scored 492 out of a possible 500 points and took first place. My ambition for the next year was to succeed Ronnie as cadet colonel of the entire CCNY regiment, become company commander of the Pershing Rifles, as Ronnie had been, and sweep both ends of the drill competition.

Needless to say, none of the Pershing Rifles' successes cut much ice with the general CCNY student body, which at best tolerated us as chauvinist nuts. At worst, the campus newspaper called for dissolving ROTC.

I have a desk set that I have carried with me for over thirty-five years, two Scheaffer pens and pen holders mounted on a marble base. I kept the set on my desk in the White House when I was National Security Advisor and at the Pentagon when I was Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. I cherish it for what it says on a small attached plaque, a story that begins on a day in the summer of 1957.

It was an anxious moment for my father. Pop had taken me to lunch with two ROTC pals, Tony DePace and George Urcioli, and then to the Greyhound bus terminal in Manhattan. He was fidgeting, full of dire warnings, convinced he was never going to see his son again. My friends and I were off to Fort Bragg, North Carolina, for ROTC summer training, my first venture into the South. Pop told me that he had asked our priest. Father Weeden, to find some black Episcopalians in Fay-etteville, near Fort Bragg, to look after me. I was embarrassed and told him to stop fussing.

As it turned out, we were picked up by the Army at the bus depot immediately and whisked off to Fort Bragg, where I spent the next six weeks isolated from Southern life. If Fort Bragg was an ethnic awakening for me, it was in meeting whites who were not Poles, Jews, or Greeks. Here I met virtually my first WASPs. We spent our days training on the rifle range, firing 81 mm mortars, learning how to camouflage and how to set up roadblocks, and I loved every minute of it. I also got off to a running start. My reputation for drilling troops had preceded me, and I was named acting company commander.

At the end of our six weeks, we fell out on the parade ground for presentation of honors. We were judged on course grades, rifle range scores, physical fitness, and demonstrated leadership. I was named "Best Cadet, Company D." These are the words engraved on the desk set that was presented to me that day and that I still treasure. A student from Cornell, Adin B. Capron, was selected Best Cadet for the entire encampment. I came in second in that category.

I was feeling marvelous about my honor. And then, the night before we left, as we were turning in our gear, a white supply sergeant took me aside. "You want to know why you didn't get best cadet in camp?" he said. I had not given it a thought. "You think these Southern ROTC instructors are going to go back to their colleges and say the best kid here was a Negro?" I was stunned more than angered by what he said. I came from a melting-pot community. I did not want to believe that my worth could be diminished by the color of my skin. Wasn't it possible that Cadet Capron was simply better than Cadet Powell?

I got a more elemental taste of racism while driving home. I left Fort Bragg with two white noncommissioned officers from the CCNY ROTC unit. We drove straight through the night, occasionally stopping at gas stations that had three rest rooms, men, women, and colored, the

Luther and Arie's Son ^ 33

one I had to use. Blacks were apparently ahead of their time, already unisex. I did not start to relax until we reached Washington, didn't feel safe until we were north of Baltimore. I was reminded of that old routine from the Apollo Theater: "Hey, brother, where you from?" ''Alabama." "I'd hke to welcome you to the United States and hope you had a pleasant crossing."

These brief episodes apart, the summer of '57 was a triumph for me. I was returning home to my girl. I was bringing my parents something they had never had from me—proof, with my desk set, that I had at last excelled. And I had found something that I did well. I could lead. The discovery was no small gift for a young man at age tv/enty.

Back in college, I continued doing just enough to get by, my other mediocre grades pulled up by straight A's in ROTC. The previous spring. Colonel Brookhart had informed me that I was going to succeed Ronnie Brooks. I was to be cadet colonel, running the entire CCNY regiment, then one thousand strong. I was also elected company commander of the Pershing Rifles. I was intent on winning both the regular and trick drill competitions for the PRs at that year's regional meet, as Ronnie had done before me. I led the regular drill team and delegated the trick drill team to an imposing fellow named John Pardo, a fine leader.

I sensed early on, however, that the drill team was losing its edge. John was distracted by girlfriend problems. Other members came to me complaining that his mind was not on the upcoming competition. I wanted to take the team away from John and give it to somebody else. The best solution was probably to take it over myself, since I had led the winning team the year before. But John kept saying, "I can do it." We competed that year, as I recall, at the 369th Regiment Armory. We won the regular competition, which I led, but lost the trick competition. Overall, we came in second. I was angry, mostly at myself. I had failed the trick drill team, and I had failed John Pardo too, by letting him go on that floor unprepared, when I knew better.

That day, I started absorbing a lesson as valid for a cadet in a musty college drill hall as for a four-star general in the Pentagon. I learned that being in charge means making decisions, no matter how unpleasant. If it's broke, fix it. When you do, you win the gratitude of the people who have been suffering under the bad situation. I learned in a college drill competition that you cannot let the mission suffer, or make the majority pay to spare the feelings of an individual. Long years afterward, I kept

a saying under the glass on my desk at the Pentagon that made the point succinctly if inelegantly: "Being responsible sometimes means pissing people off."

That brief lapse was not fatal to John Pardo. Nearly thirty years later, soldiers at Fort Myer were treated to a rare sight: the^ deputy national security advisor to the President and a prominent New York graphics designer (Powell and Pardo, respectively) and other paunchy, middle-aged men carrying out a rusty version of their old trick drill fireworks in front of my residence at a reunion of the Pershing Rifles.

We all still remain in touch—Tony DePace, Mark Gatanas, Rich Goldfarb, Bill Scott, John Theologos, and others who made Army careers, retiring as full colonels, and Sam Ebbesen, a black, who rose to lieutenant general. Some who stayed in were killed in Vietnam. Most of those who did not remain in the military have been successful, hke Pardo, in civilian careers. Vietnam also killed the ROTC program and the Pershing Rifles at CCNY in the early seventies, which I deeply regret. Not only did our citizen Army lose a special kind of officer, one coming out of the inner city, but we have denied to these young people an opportunity to maintain structure in their lives and to make a useful contribution to their country. Too bad.

On June 9, 1958, at 8:00 p.m., I entered CCNY's Aronowitz Auditorium. A few weeks before, my father had come into my room, sat on the edge of the bed, and, with a twinkling eye, handed me an envelope. He had cleaned out a savings account that he and my mother had been keeping for me since I was a child. Six hundred dollars. I was rich! The first thing I did was to head downtown to Morry Luxenberg's, regarded as the best military haberdasher in New York, to be outfitted.

The First Army band was playing and I was wearing Morry's uniform when I strode past my parents onto the Aronowitz Auditorium stage. "I, Colin Luther Powell, do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies foreign and domestic,'' I repeated with my classmates, "and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office upon which I am about to enter, so help me God." We live in a more cynical age today. We are embarrassed by expressions of patriotism. But when I said those words almost four decades ago, they sent a shiver down my spine. They still do.

Luther and Arie's Son ^ 37

Because I was a "Distinguished Military Graduate," I was offered a regular rather than a reserve conunission, which meant that I would have to serve three rather than two years on active duty. I eagerly accepted.

For me, graduation from college the next day was anticlimactic. The night before, after our commissioning, I had gone out celebrating with the boys. We had resumed the revelry the following noon at a college hangout called the Emerald Bar. My mother, knowing where to find me, had to send a cousin to haul me over to my graduation, which in her mind had been the whole point of the previous four and a half years. I tended to look on my B.S. in geology as an incidental dividend.

For much of our growing up, Marilyn and I had been "latchkey kids," left by ourselves or with neighbors and relatives after school. This situation is supposed to be a prescription for trouble. But that day, Luther and Arie Powell, Jamaican immigrants, garment-district workers, were the parents of two college graduates, with their son now an Army officer as well. Small achievements as the world measures success, but mountaintops in their lives. Thirty-five years later, I was asked by Parade magazine to talk about those two people. "My parents," I said, "did not recognize their own strengths." It was nothing they ever said that taught us, I recalled. "It was the way they lived their lives," I said. "If the values seem correct or relevant, the children will follow the values." I had been shaped not by preaching, but by example, by moral osmosis. Banana Kelly, the embracing warmth of an extended family, St. Margaret's Church, and let's weave in the Jamaican roots and a little calypso—all provided an enviable send-off on life's journey.

I also owe an unpayable debt to the New York City public education system. I typified the students that CCNY was created to serve, the sons and daughters of the inner city, the poor, the immigrant. Many of my college classmates had the brainpower to attend Harvard, Yale, or Princeton. What they lacked was money and influential connections. Yet they have gone on to compete with and often surpass alumni of the most prestigious private campuses in this country.

I have made clear that I was no great shakes as a scholar. I have joked over the years that the CCNY faculty handed me a diploma, uttering a sigh of relief, and were happy to pass me along to the military. Yet, even this C-average student emerged from CCNY prepared to write, think, and communicate effectively and equipped to compete against students from colleges that I could never have dreamed of attending. If the

Statue of Liberty opened the gateway to this country, pubhc education opened the door to attainment here. Schools like my sister's Buffalo State Teachers College and CCNY have served as the Harvards and Princetons of the poor. And they served us well. I am, consequently, a champion of public secondary and higher education. I will speak out for them and support them for as long as I have the good sense to remember where I came from.

Shortly before the commissioning ceremony in Aronowitz Auditorium, Colonel Brookhart called me into his office in the drill hall. "Sit down, Mr. Powell," he said. I did, sitting at attention. "You've done well here. You'll do well in the Army. You're going to Fort Benning soon."

He warned me that I needed to be careful. Georgia was not New York. The South was another world. I had to learn to compromise, to accept a world I had not made and that was beyond my changing. He mentioned the black general Benjamin O. Davis, who had been with him at West Point, where Davis was shunned the whole four years by his classmates, including, I assumed, Brookhart. Davis had gotten himself into trouble in the South, Brookhart said, because he had tried to buck the system. The colonel was telling me, in effect, not to rock the boat, to be a "good Negro."

I do not remember being upset by what he said. He meant well. Like all of us, Brookhart was a product of his times and his environment. Beneath the West Point armor, he was a caring human being. I thanked him and left.

I took my girl out to Coney Island for a final fling, and a few days after graduation, I headed for Georgia. My parents expected that I would serve the three years, and after that, come back to New York and begin to make something of my life.

Two

A Soldier Life for Me

I CAN REMEMBER THE MOMENT I HAD MY FIRST DOUBT ABOUT THE CAREER

I had chosen. It happened in the mountains of northern Georgia as I hurtled along a cable at a height of one hundred feet, seconds from being smashed against a large tree. This exercise was called the Slide for Life, and the Army was making me perform it to see if I was scared. I was.

The slide also tested our willingness to obey what seemed like suicidal orders. The cable had been strung across a river, attached to trees at either end, starting high, then sloping steeply. At my turn, I climbed the tree and looked down at the troops on the other side, who from this height looked small. I grabbed a hook attached to a pulley that ran along the cable. The challenge was to ride the cable and not let go until the instructor on the other bank yelled, "Drop!" Before I had time to think, another instructor pushed me off. Suddenly I was careening down the wire at terrifying speed, the tree on the other side, looking bigger and bigger, rushing up to meet me. Would that bastard ever say the word? At

40 ^ COLIN L. POWELL

what seemed the last possible second, he yelled, and I plunged into the water a dozen feet from the tree. It was one of the most frightening experiences of my life.

The Slide for Life was one of the joys cooked up for us during the two months at Ranger school that followed weight ■ weeks of basic infantry training at Fort Benning, Georgia. The first two weeks of Ranger school had involved physical challenges, designed to make the basic course seem like a stroll down Westchester Avenue. The idea was to weed out the weak before we moved on to Ranger training in the Florida swamplands. A couple of weeks of wading in swamp water and living off alligator and rattlesnake cured me forever of any desire to invest in Florida real estate.

We then went to northern Georgia for mountain training. Our Ranger instructors led us to wild terrain near Dahlonega, where the nights were cold and the mornings damp. We were supposed to bunk in wooden cabins, though we rarely saw the inside of them. We lived outdoors, scaling chffs, crossing gorges on three-rope bridges, patrolling in the dark of night in hip-deep water, and sleeping on the ground, never for very long. We learned the Australian rappel. With a rope slung behind, you stepped off the edge of a cliff so that you were facedown, horizontal to Mother Earth. You then proceeded to "run" down the cliff by letting out slack on the rope, a little like Fred Astaire tap-dancing on a wall. It was quite thrilling, once you accepted that you were not going to land face first on the rocks 150 feet below.

My Army career had begun a few months before on a gloriously sunny morning in June 1958. That day, I found myself standing in front of the bachelor officers' quarters at Fort Benning, Georgia, which would be my home, on and off, for the next five months. Across the road from the BOQ was the airborne training ground, and rising above it, like a thrill ride at an amusement park, stood three 250-foot practice jump towers. I studied them with considerable personal interest. If you were regular Army, if you were infantry, then you wanted to be the best, and that meant becoming a Ranger and a paratrooper. Those jump towers, however, looked terribly high.

Newly commissioned heutenants from ROTC killed time waiting for the latest class of West Pointers to finish their graduation leaves and join us for the basic course. This marked the first time any of us would be competing head to head with academy graduates, and the ROTC guys seemed to think West Pointers had a median height of ten feet. When they

A Soldier's Life for Me if 4 1

arrived, they turned out to be like colts happily out of the corral after four years of regimentation, and we all got along fine.

That first day, we mustered in front of the Infantry School by the legendary Follow Me statue, a bronze infantryman, rifle held high, leading men into battle. It was only forged metal to me at the time, but in the weeks to follow I was to learn that this statue captured perfectly the infantry officer's code. We were about to be taught a deadly serious calling, and its creed was "Follow Me."

I found the class work and weapons training easy enough. But the field course turned out to be tough. One feat especially tested a lad from the gridlike streets of the South Bronx—a five-mile, nighttime compass hike to locate a stake planted somewhere in the Georgia wilds.

By the time the basic course ended, the meaning of "Follow Me" had been hammered home. The infantry's mission was "to close with and destroy the enemy." No questions asked. No ambiguity. No gray areas. The infantry officer was to go into battle up front, demonstrating courage, determination, strength, proficiency, and selfless sacrifice. We were to march into hell, if necessary, to accomplish the mission. At the same time, we were taught to fulfill this responsibility while trying to keep ourselves and our men from being killed. For years, I have told young officers that most of what I know about military life I learned in my first eight weeks at Fort Benning. I can sum up those lessons in a few maxims:

—"Take charge of this post and all government property in view"— the Army's first general order.

—The mission is primary, followed by taking care of your soldiers.

—Don't stand there. Do something!

—Lead by example.

—"No excuse, sir."

—Officers always eat last.

—Never forget, you are an American infantryman, the best. —And never be without a watch, a pencil, and a notepad.

The soul of the Army, particularly the infantryman's Army, was captured for me in an old poem by Colonel C. T. Lanham that I first read at Fort Benning, It tells the plight of the lowly foot soldier, going all the way back to the Roman legions, and describes the fear, the death he has to face with blind obedience. It ends:

/ see these things, Yet am I slave,

When banners flaunt and bugles blow,

Content to fill a soldier's grave,

For reasons I will never know. ^ ?

We were taught at Fort Benning, however, that American soldiers must know the reason for their sacrifices. Our GIs are not vassals or mercenaries. They are the nation's sons and daughters. We put their lives at risk only for worthy objectives. If the duty of the soldier is to risk his hfe, the responsibiUty of his leaders is not to spend that life in vain. In the post-Vietnam era, when I rose to a position where I had to recommend where to risk American lives, I never forgot that principle.

I finished the basic course in the top ten of the class, validating my ROTC and Pershing Rifles preparation. I was now a certified professional. The Ranger school that followed, with its tests like the Shde for Life and the Australian rappel, occupied us for the next two months. One of our most memorable Ranger instructors was a black first lieutenant, Vernon Coffey, who seemed to be made of flexible steel. Coffey drove us mercilessly, push-ups, sit-ups, and running until we were ready to drop. Lack of motion offended Ranger Coffey. We stood in awe of the man. I could not imagine myself ever matching his strength and endurance. Coffey was the first black officer I knew who was at the top of his game, the first so good that respect for him transcended race.

The Army was becoming more democratic, but I was plunged back into the Old South every time I left the post. I could go into Wool-worth's in Columbus, Georgia, and buy anything I wanted, as long as I did not try to eat there. I could go into a department store and they would take my money, as long as I did not try to use the men's room. I could walk along the street, as long as I did not look at a white woman.

While we were training in the north Georgia mountains, the only black church was some distance away in Gainesville. I wanted to go to services on Sundays, and the Army thoughtfully provided me with a half-ton truck and a driver, a white corporal, to take me to Gainesville. There I sang and swayed with the rest of the Baptist congregation. The next Sunday, the corporal pointed out that because he had to drive me to church, he could not attend services himself. Would it be all right, he wanted to know, if he joined me? The minister was a kindly man and said

it would ordinarily give him great pleasure to have the corporal among his flock. But his presence in a black church might not sit well with the local white folks. It might be wiser if the corporal waited in the truck.

What my father had feared, what Colonel Brookliart had warned me of, the reality I wanted to ignore, was forcing its way into my life, the lunatic code that made it wrong for two men to sit together in a house of God, or share a meal in a restaurant, or use the same bathroom.

Racism was still relatively new to me, and I had to find a way to cope psychologically. I began by identifying my priorities. I wanted, above all, to succeed at my Army career. I did not intend to give way to self-destructive rage, no matter how provoked. If people in the South insisted on living by crazy rules, then I would play the hand dealt me for now. If I was to be confined to one end of the playing field, then I was going to be a star on that part of the field. Nothing that happened off-post, none of the indignities, none of the injustices, was going to inhibit my performance. I was not going to let myself become emofionally crippled because I could not play on the whole field. I did not feel inferior, and I was not going to let anybody make me believe I was. I was not going to allow someone else's feelings about me to become my feelings about myself. Racism was not just a black problem. It was America's problem. And until the country solved it, I was not going to let bigotry make me a victim instead of a full human being. I occasionally felt hurt; I felt anger; but most of all I felt challenged. I'll show you!

After Ranger school, I reported for airborne training, physically exhausted, underweight, and fighting a leg infection that I had picked up sliding down a mountain. I said nothing about the leg and just kept slathering the wound with antibiotic ointment. I was determined not to fall behind. First week: dropped from parachute trainers a few feet off the ground. Second week: dropped from the top of those 250-foot towers, astonished that the parachute actually saved me from being pulped. Third week: into the air aboard a twin-engine C-123 transport. I felt a cold anxiety as I stood in the door of the plane, battered by the wind, waiting for the jumpmaster's signal. Jumping into nothingness goes against our deepest human instincts. Nevertheless, I made five jumps in two days.

Rappelling off cliffs, sliding for life, and jumping out of airplanes answered a question that I think everyone secretly asks: Do I have phys-

ical courage? I dreaded doing Ihese things. If I never have to parachute again, that will be fine with me, yet there was never any doubt in my mind that I would do what had to be done. I usually volunteered to go first to get the chore out of the way, which may reveal more practicality than courage. These experiences are rites of passage.' Physical danger that people face and master together bonds them in some mystical way. And conquering one's deepest fears is exhilarating.

The day came when we mustered on the parade ground under the jump towers, standing stiff as pikes in our Corcoran commercial jump boots (paid for out of pocket, since no self-respecting paratrooper would be caught dead wearing Army-issue boots), and received paratrooper wings to complement our black-and-gold Ranger tabs. We were not just infantrymen, we were airborne Rangers; and the way we said it was "airborneranger," all one word. In all the American infantry, there is no cockier soldier.

I went home on leave like someone returning from another planet, from the Deep South to Queens, from rigid military disciphne to casual civilian life, from the rugged companionship of young men to mothers, fathers, aunts, and uncles. One of my first stops was at CCNY to visit the Pershing Rifles and let them see this extraordinary five-month transformation in one of the brothers. "Colin! Airbomeranger." I could see the wonder in their eyes, and I reveled in it. I was twenty-one and on the launchpad of life. I had a girlfriend. My parents were proud of me, though horrified when I told them I had jumped out of a plane. And I was about to see the world. My first orders sent me to the 3d Armored Division in West Germany. In that Cold War era, when the globe seemed divided between white and red, I was excited to be going to the front line, with our godless communist adversary deployed just across the Iron Curtain.

While home, I met a new member of the Powell household. Ever frugal, ever eager to earn an extra buck. Mom and Pop had taken in a boarder named Ida Bell. Miss Bell turned out to be a kindly soul, prompt with the rent and always ready to pitch into household chores. She even trimmed my father's fingernails from time to time. But when Mom came into the living room one night to find Ida Bell cutting Pop's toenails, she drew the line. My sister and I remain forever in Ida Bell's debt. In difficult fimes to come, when both of us would be far from Elmira Avenue, Ida Bell would serve as our parents' angel of mercy.

I was sent to Gelnhausen (which the GIs had Americanized to "Glen-haven"), a picturesque town nestled in the valley of the Kinzig River, about twenty-five miles east of Frankfurt. The Soviet zone was forty-three miles to the east. My unit. Combat Command B of the 3d Armored Division, occupied Coleman Kaseme, a former German army post near the Vogelsberg mountains, where most of the troops lived in modem concrete barracks clinging to the hillsides. I was assigned as a platoon leader to Company B, 2d Armored Rifle Battalion, 48th Infantry, my first field command—forty men. The first morning I faced them, shivering in the cold at reveille, my reaction was mixed. On the one hand, these soldiers, all shapes, sizes, colors, and backgrounds, were much like the guys I had grown up with at home. On the other hand, the Benning ethic had taken over. These men were not my buddies; they were my responsibility. I was to take care of them. I felt instantly paternal toward men close to my own age, and some even older.

I was also about to discover an Army far different from the romping, stomping, gung ho airbomerangers of Fort Benning. Captain Tom Miller, B Company Commander, my new superior, typified the breed. Miller was one of the battalion's five company commanders, mostly World War II and Korean-era reserve officers, barely hanging on. If lucky, they would stay on for twenty years and retire as majors, maybe lieutenant colonels. If less lucky, they would be reduced back to the enlisted ranks. If really unlucky, they would be mustered out and thrown onto the civilian job market in middle age.

These men may not have been shooting stars, yet there was something appealing about them, something to be learned from them, something not taught on the plain at West Point or in the texts on military science and tactics, as my experience with Captain Miller and a pistol was about to illustrate.

In those days, the Air Force and the Navy had nuclear weapons, and so the Army had to have its nukes. Our prize was a 280mm atomic cannon carried on twin truck-tractors, looking Uke a World War I Big Bertha. The Russians obviously wanted to know where our 280s were so that they could knock them out if and when they attacked. Consequently, the guns were always guarded by an infantry platoon as the trucks hauled them around the German forests to keep the Soviets guessing. One day Captain Miller summoned me. He was assigning my

platoon to a secret mission. We had been selected to guard a 280. I eagerly alerted my men. I loaded my .45 caliber pistol, jumped into my jeep, and headed for battalion headquarters to be briefed. I was excited; I was going to guard a weapon that fired a nuclear warhead!

I had not gone far when I reached down for the reassuring feel of the .45. It was gone. I was petrified. In the Army, losing a weapon is serious business. I was torn between taking time to look for the pistol and getting on with the mission. Finally, I realized that I had to radio Captain Miller and tell him what had happened.

"Powell, are you on your way yet?" he asked right off the bat.

"Yes, sir. But, you see ... I lost my pistol."

"You what?" he said in disbelief, then, after a few seconds, added, "All right, continue the mission."

After being briefed at battalion headquarters, I returned to pick up my unit, uneasily contemplating my fate. I had just passed through a ht-tle German village when I spotted Captain Miller waiting for me in his jeep at the wood Hne. He called me over. "I've got something for you," he said. He handed me the pistol. "Some kids in the village found it where it fell out of your holster." Kids found it? I felt a cold chill. "Yeah," he said. "Luckily they only got off one round before we heard the shot and came and took the gun away from them." The disastrous possibiHties left me limp. "For God's sake, son," Miller said, "don't let that happen again."

He drove off. I checked the magazine; it was full. The gun had not been fired. I learned later that I had dropped it in my tent before I ever got started. Miller had fabricated the whole scene about the kids to scare me into being more responsible. He never mentioned the incident again.

Today, the Army would have held an investigation, called in lawyers, and likely have entered a fatal black mark on my record. Instead, Miller concocted his imaginative story. He evidently thought, I've got this ordinarily able second lieutenant. Sometimes he gets a little ahead of his skis and takes a tumble. I'll teach him a lesson, scare the bejeezus out of him; but let's not ruin his career before it gets started.

Miller's example of humane leadership that does not always go by the book was not lost on me. When they fall down, pick 'em up, dust 'em off, pat 'em on the back, and move 'em on.

A Soldier's Life /or Me if 47

I gave Miller and my other superior officers plenty of opportunities to pick me up—for example, when I lost the train tickets for my platoon en route to Munich and found myself and my men stranded in the Frankfurt Bahnhof. I have never spoken of these embarrassments until now. Maybe they will help young officers learn a lesson: nobody ever made it to the top by never getting into trouble.

The Army's mission in Germany was to man the GDP, the General Defense Plan line. The line cut north-south across the Fulda Gap, a break in the Vogelsberg mountains through which the Iron Curtain ran. Every piece of artillery, every machine gun, rifle, mortar, tank, and antitank weapon in our division was intended to hit the Russians the moment they came pouring through the gap. My platoon guarded a little stretch of the Iron Curtain. Why would the Russians be coming? I did not know; the answer was above my pay grade. But we assumed the assault could come at any time. The Cold War was frigid then. The Russians had leaped ahead in space the year before with Sputnik. They were blocking our traffic to Berlin on the autobahn. The Eisenhower administration had adopted a policy of massive retaliation, which meant keeping conventional forces on short rations while beefing up our nuclear punch. Our strategists assumed that we were inferior to the Russians in conventional weaponry, so we had to rely on our nuclear superiority. All Lieutenant Powell understood of this was that we were thinly deployed along the GDP, and that once the Russians started coming, we were to fight like the devil, fall back, and watch the nuclear cataclysm begin.

I went home on leave during the sunmier of 1959 for the wedding of good CCNY friends, Chris and Donna Chisholm, and to see my new niece, Marilyn's baby, Leslie, and her older sister, Lisa. Mostly I went to see my girl. We talked about getting married before I went back. If we did, she intended to stay in New York until she finished nursing school. I would have to return to Germany alone for another sixteen months, not a promising start for newlyweds. I needed Pop's advice. And so, late one night, in the basement family room, I gingerly raised the subject. His reaction stunned me. Pop thought I wasn't ready. He did not elaborate. But he made no bones about it; he was dead set against this marriage. He had never rejected an idea of mine so flatly. Family

approval was all-important to me, and I was not ready to go up against Luther Powell, the Godfather. My leave ended and I returned, still a bachelor, to Gelnhausen.

By the end of that year, I got my first promotion, to first lieutenant, an automatic advancement that had only required nfy staying out of trouble for eighteen months.

I had my first experience with military law in Germany. Three Army truck drivers had decided to turn a German road into a racetrack, speeding and passing each other on the way back to their post. One of these five-tonners skidded out of control and slammed into a Volkswagen in the oncoming lane. Three German civilians were killed. I was tapped to prosecute these drivers for manslaughter in a special court-martial. The GIs had engaged a civilian lawyer to defend them.

Starting from ground zero, I inmiersed myself in the facts and law of the case. Still, I was not Mr. District Attorney. On the appointed day, I entered the tent where the trial was to be held, a young infantry lieutenant up against professional lawyers engaged by the defense. I nevertheless managed to win convictions against two of the defendants, including the sergeant in charge.

As I walked out of the court, I felt that I had learned as much about myself as about military law. I had first filled leadership roles with the ROTC and Pershing Rifles. Since going on active duty, I had assumed more serious responsibility. These situations, however, largely involved passing along canned orders. The trial marked almost the first time that I had had to do much original thinking, and a lot of it on my feet. That day marked an awareness of an ability I apparently had. I seemed to be able to assimilate a mass of raw information, pound it into coherent shape, and communicate it intelligibly, even persuasively.

The trial assignment continued another pattern that emerged early in my career. I was often pulled off my regular assignment for unusual duties. Once I was directed to run the division pistol team. We took the championship. Another time I was sent to command an honor guard for two months. I was detailed to brigade headquarters as assistant adjutant. I was moving around so much that I was afraid I might slip off the career track. Still, my efficiency reports were encouraging. One, dated July 20, 1959, by Captain Wilfred C. Morse, ended, "[Powell] is tenacious, firm, yet polished in manner and can deal with individuals of any

rank. His potential for a career in the military is unlimited and should be developed on an accelerated basis." I was twenty-two years old, and I was being taken seriously. But just six months after that report had me floating on air, the next one brought me back to earth.

Among the easygoing reserve officers in the battalion, we were about to meet an exception. I had recently been reassigned as executive officer. Delta Company, 2d Battalion, 48th Infantry, and we were due for a new company commander. When he was named, near panic set in. Captain William C. Louisell, Jr., was a West Pointer and a former tactics instructor at the military academy. Some of our junior officers had been cadets under Captain Louisell, whom they judged one of the all-time hardnoses. Louisell turned out exactly as advertised—tough, by-the-book, brilliant, sometimes unreasonable.

I got an early taste of Louisell in the matter of the armored personnel carriers. One of my responsibilities was to see that our APCs were always parked headed downhill, with the left front comer of one vehicle aligned with the right front comer of the next, ready to pounce against the Red Army. Louisell measured the placement of these vehicles practically with a surveyor's transit, and God help us if any comer was out of alignment.

One day, I was in the orderly room on the phone, shouting at a fellow lieutenant at the top of my lungs, when Louisell walked in. He took me aside and chewed me out for my behavior. Shortly afterward, I received my efficiency report. To the layman, it might not seem disastrous. Louisell had said of me, "He has a quick temper which he makes a mature effort to control." But in the code of efficiency report writing, I had taken a hit. These words marked the only negative comment on my performance since the first day I had put on a uniform in ROTC. Louisell called me in, sat me down, and raised the matter of the blowup on the phone. "Don't ever show your temper like that to me or anyone else," he wamed. It was demeaning to everybody. I still have a hot temper. I still explode occasionally. And whenever I do, I hear Bill Louisell's waming voice.

While working as Louisell's exec, I got a foretaste of what hot war could be like if the Cold War ever ignited. It was a moming after payday in the summer of i960. Our brigade had gone to Grafenwohr for field training. The troops were to be billeted in over six hundred general-purpose tents. Our company had not yet arrived in force, but a

3 0 * COLIN L. POWELL

sister unit, the 12th Cavalry, had come in the night before. Its tents were full of troops, still asleep at this early hour.

I was returning from a bartering mission with another company's exec, bringing rations I had traded for back to our mess hall. My ears pricked up at an odd, whistling sound overhead.'ln about a nanosecond, I realized it was an artillery shell that had strayed wildly out of the impact area. I stopped, frozen, and actually saw the 8-inch round come in. It struck a tent pole in the 12th Cavalry's sector, detonating in an air-burst. The roar was deafening, followed by a terrifying silence. I dropped the food and rushed toward the blast as dismembered legs, hands, and arms thumped to the ground around me. Money from payday came fluttering to earth. Some other soldiers joined me, wading through the acrid smoke and fumes. Inside the tent, I zipped open a sleeping bag, and what was left looked like an illustration of viscera in a medical textbook. In an instant, a dozen lives had been snuffed out and more men wounded. The tragedy was later found to have been caused by human error in aligning the gun, and the battalion conmian-der and other officers were relieved of their duties. I had seen a hundred war movies, but nothing had prepared me for the sights I saw that day.

ROTC and Fort Benning had been about officers. Gelnhausen was my indoctrination into what the Army is really about—soldiers. Here in the 48th Infantry, life revolved around the care of our men. In those days, the Army was composed mostly of draftees. They tended to be better educated than the volunteers, some even college-trained, and we chose our clerks and technical staff from them. The draftees wanted to put in their two years and get back to school, jobs, wives and kids, or girlfriends. We called them the "Christmas help," the people who came in, fought the nation's wars, and went home. They were not looking for trouble.

The volunteers were a different lot. Most were well motivated, and many would eventually work their way up to sergeant, becoming part of the Army's backbone. Others had enlisted aimlessly, and some out of desperation, since in those days judges often gave troublemakers the choice of jail or the Army. I had one eighteen-year-old volunteer come to me for permission to marry a German girl whom he had gotten pregnant. At the time, the Army deliberately made it difficult for young GIs to marry foreigners. Many of these couples were immature, and we

A Soldier's Life for Me 3 I

tried to slow down their passion. Later, in the 1970s, we were instructed not to interfere with love—an eighteen-year-old private had a constitutional right to make a fool of himself as much as any eighteen-year-old civilian. In the case of the private who came to me, since he and his girlfriend had obviously held their honeymoon in advance, I told him I would try to expedite the paperwork. That was not the whole problem, he said. He also needed permission to get his prospective mother-in-law into the United States because he had gotten her pregnant too. This situation had not been covered in the basic course at Fort Benning.

Getting rid of troublemakers and misfits in the fifties consumed months and required piles of paperwork. We tried to persuade ourselves that all we needed was better leadership to bring the delinquents around. Meanwhile, the good troops saw the bad ones getting away with murder, a situation destructive of morale overall. It would take another twenty years before the all-volunteer Army gave us the luxury of turning down people whom judges did not want to jail and to "fire" GIs who could not meet our standards.

Sergeants were a tough breed in those days. The wise lieutenant learned from them and otherwise stayed out of their way. My first platoon sergeant was Robert D. Edwards, from deepest Alabama, which was initially a cause of concern to me. I need not have worried. My color made no difference to Edwards; I could have been black, white, or candy-striped for all he cared. I was his lieutenant, and his job was to break in new lieutenants and take care of them. He always addressed me in the old Army third-person style: "Does the lieutenant want a cup of coffee?"

The troops feared Edwards, and with reason. Once, I had to explain to him why he could not keep a soldier who had gone AWOL chained to the barracks radiator. Edwards found my reasons puzzling and went off muttering about the decline of discipline. While he was feared, he was, at the same time, respected and revered by the men. They understood Edwards. He was in their comer. No matter how primitive his methods, he had one concern—the welfare of the platoon and the men in it. If they soldiered right, he looked out for them.

I came to understand GIs during my tour at Gelnhausen. I learned what made them tick, lessons that stuck for thirty-five years. American soldiers love to win. They want to be part of a successful team. They respect a leader who holds them to a high standard and pushes them to

the limit, as long as they see a worthwhile objective. American soldiers will gripe constantly about being driven to high performance. They will swear they would rather serve somewhere easier. But at the end of the day they always ask: "How'd we do?"

And I learned what it meant when soldiers t)rougftt you problems, even problems as perplexing as that of the eighteen-year-old dual lover. Leadership is solving problems. The day soldiers stop bringing you their problems is the day you have stopped leading them. They have either lost confidence that you can help them or concluded you do not care. Either case is a failure of leadership.

Another of my memorable mentors was Major Raymond ''Red Man" Barrett, our battalion executive officer. His wife, Madge, was a den mother to young officers. We adored her. One late night at the officers' club bar, the Red Man explained the essence of Army leadership to us: "You go to bed at night. Everything is hunky-dory. The unit is humming. Everyone's accounted for. You think you're doing a helluva job. You wake up the next morning and discover that in the middle of the night, when no one was looking, things got screwed up bad. Stuff happens. You guys understand? Stuff happens. And a leader's just got to start all over again." Many a morning I entered the Pentagon, as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, with the Red Man's wisdom ringing in my ear.

I have a warm spot in my heart for those long-ago officers. Men like Major Barrett and Captains Miller, Blackstock, Watson, and even Louisell taught us to love soldiering and to care about and look after our troops. And they passed on to us the fun of the Army. Do the job right, but don't take yourself too seriously. And we certainly did have fun. Our social life revolved around the O-club, which was perched on a hill overlooking the Kinzig River Valley. Every evening the heutenants adjourned to the bar to drink Lowenbrau beer served by Friedl, the bartender, while the old captains held court, regaling us with war stories and passing on legends. Dinner was followed by more drinking, after which we staggered into our Volkswagens and careened rashly downhill to our quarters.

In those socially incorrect days, we played several drinking games, at which I excelled until I encountered "7-14-21." In this game, we took turns rolling a cup of five dice, counting only aces. Whoever rolled the seventh ace ordered a twelve-ounce drink that Friedl concocted of

Straight bourbon, scotch, gin, brandy, and cr^me de menthe. As Friedl whipped this green concoction in a blender, the game continued. Whoever rolled the fourteenth ace paid for the drink. The game ended when the person who rolled the twenty-first ace was obliged to chugalug Friedl's vile brew. One night, I hit twenty-one three times in a row. I, who am today a social sipper, fulfilled my obligation, downed the stuff, and on the third glass passed out. I was poured into bed only to be hauled out again at 2:00 a.m. for a surprise alert. I had to be strapped to the backseat of my jeep to hold me up. Fortunately for this near-brain-dead lieutenant, that was not a night the Russians chose to come roaring through the Fulda Gap.

For black GIs, especially those out of the South, Germany was a breath of freedom—they could go where they wanted, eat where they wanted, and date whom they wanted, just like other people. The dollar was strong, the beer good, and the German people friendly, since we were all that stood between them and the Red hordes. War, at least the Cold War in West Germany, was not hell.

You can serve thirty-five years in the Army and rise to the top, yet your first assignment always stands out as the most unforgettable, the one against which all future posts are measured. That is what Geln-hausen meant to me. It marked the beginning of Hfelong friendships among my class of lieutenants. We needed each other to survive. We shielded each other from occasional assaults by senior officers. We covered each other's mistakes and posteriors. And we competed against each other. Steve Stevens, Keith Bissell, Ike Smith, Hal Jordan, Tiger Johns, Walter Pritchard, Bill Stofft, Jim Lee, Joe Schwar, and others remain vivid in my memory. Joe and his wife, Pat, were to save the Powells four years later when my pregnant wife and I were practically left out in the street in a less than hospitable Southern city. Some decided the Army was not for them and left. A handful made general. We were a new officer generation, post-World War II, post-Korea. We would serve our apprenticeship in places like Gelnhausen, but we would undergo our baptism of fire halfway around the world in Southeast Asia, where some, like Pritchard and Lee, would die.

However memorable and valuable it was, I discovered a downside to the German experience. An unhealthy attitude had infected these garrison soldiers, a wiUingness to cut comers and make things look right rather than be right. Here is a small but telling illustration. The Army

34 ^ COLIN L. POWELL

had installed a new equipment maintenance system for ordering parts. Nobody could figure it out. Rather than blowing the whistle, rather than saying this system stinks, it was easier to go to military junkyards and salvage the parts we needed. Then we would fudge the paperwork to make it look as if the cockamamie system had worked, thus perpetuating poor management practices. Senior officers went along with the game, and junior officers concluded that this was how it was played. This self-deception would be expanded, institutionalized, and exported, with tragic results, a few years later to Vietnam.

In November i960, while I was overseas, a presidential election took place, the first in which I was old enough to vote. Not much of the campaign penetrated Gelnhausen; I didn't see the famous televised Nixon-Kennedy debates. I did vote, however, and cast my absentee ballot for JFK. Not much searching analysis went into my choice. In those days, he and his party seemed to hold out a little more hope for a young man of my roots.

I completed my two-year tour in Germany at the end of i960. By then, I had succeeded Bill Louisell as Delta Company's CO. I was the only lieutenant in the battalion commanding a company, a job usually held by a captain. My battalion commander. Lieutenant Colonel Jim Bar-tholomees, asked me to extend. But I was homesick. I had a girl whom I had not seen for sixteen months. And I was ready for a change. Infantry Branch had assigned me to Fort Devens, Massachusetts, where I expected to have an opportunity to command another company. And Devens was just a few hours' drive from New York City, which appealed to me. I bid a sentimental goodbye to the 48th Infantry. I had joined as a rookie, and I was leaving as a fairly seasoned pro.

Long afterward, I was telling my children about this period, and they perked up at only one story. One morning, during maneuvers, we had come upon a scout jeep from another unit parked on a narrow road near Giessen.

"Hey, Lieutenant," one of my men shouted. '*Come on over. Look who's here."

I walked over to the jeep, where a grimy, weary-looking sergeant saluted me and put out his hand. It was Elvis Presley. That their father had shaken the King's hand astonished my kids. What impressed me at

the time was that instead of seeking celebrity treatment, Elvis had done his two-year hitch, uncomplainingly, as an ordinary GI, even rising to the responsibihty of an NCO.

Fort Devens is located near Ayer, Massachusetts, about thirty miles west of Boston, a post then maintained mostly through the tenacity of the Massachusetts congressional delegation. I reported to Devens in January 1961 in three feet of snow. The obsessive topic among the troops was the bitter cold. Puerto Rican GIs were especially vulnerable. We had one whom we called "Private TA-21," in reference to the Army's Table of Allowance at that time for clothing. Whenever Private TA-21 had to leave the barracks, he put on everything issued, and he was still miserable. Alas, he went AWOL, and the MPs found him weeks later sensibly basking in Santurce, Puerto Rico. Interestingly, on Saturday afternoon, after inspection, the same troops who had been shivering and griping all week could be seen in their lightest, sharpest civvies, hitchhiking to the fleshpots of Boston and New York.

I was assigned to the ist Battle Group, 4th Infantry, id Infantry Brigade. The brigade commander was Brigadier General Joseph Stil-well, Jr., son of the legendary World War II general "Vinegar Joe" Stilwell. Our Joe was known as "Cider Joe" or "Apple Juice Joe." He took up parachuting in his fifties. Not content to risk his own neck, Stilwell cajoled the brigade chaplain into jumping, after a ten-minute lesson. The chaplain hit the ground and shattered like Waterford crystal, content never to jump again. Years later, long after Devens, Stilwell taught himself to fly a DC-3, or maybe did not learn all that well, since he disappeared on a flight from California to Hawaii. Those of us who knew him expect Cider Joe to show up someday, still in the pink, on the beach at Waikiki.

My first assignment at Devens was as Uaison officer in the battle group headquarters, essentially a "gofer" for Major Richard D. Ellison, the group's S-3 officer, in charge of operations and training. Ellison was a genial Irishman, a World War II and Korean War veteran several cuts above most of my recent superiors in Germany. Commanding the battle group was a straitlaced colonel, Robert Utley, and our deputy commander, Colonel Tom Gendron, added the desired spice. Gendron, a veteran of the legendary ist Infantry Division, "the Big Red One," lived, breathed, and slept his old outfit. He named his sons after ist Infantry

3 6 ^ COLIN L. POWELL

Division generals. Only at his wife's insistence were his daughters spared that honor. "You ain't got one," Gendron liked to say, "unless you got a big red one.''

Between Cider Joe, Utley, and Gendron, ideas, good, bad, and ridiculous, bubbled up constantly. I learned from the adroit Dick Ellison how to push the smart proposals, derail the dumb ones, and strangle the most embarrassing in the cradle, all the while keeping our superiors happy. Dick and his wife, Joy, were a gregarious, fun-loving couple, and they practically adopted this lonely bachelor. Dick's death in Vietnam a few years later robbed me of a beloved friend much too soon.

I eventually managed to escape the liaison job and became executive officer of Company A, making me second in command. Shortly afterward, the company commander was reassigned and I found myself in command of my second company since I had entered the Army, and while still a first lieutenant. My fellow company commanders and I were simultaneously competitors and partners. We passed along to each other tricks of the trade. If, for example, you found yourself short on sheets, you tried the hospital trash dump or the mortuary. They always had plenty, somewhat used but recoverable.

I learned a valuable lesson about competition at Devens: it does not have to be cutthroat. I came up with competitions for my company— not just in sports, but for best barracks, best day room, best weapons inspection, any performance that could be rated and rewarded. The more competitions, the more each individual GI or platoon had a chance to stand out. I was keenly aware of this need. I had discovered my own self-worth in uniform, and I intended to help my troops find theirs. I saw far less value in "Super Bowl" competitions requiring Olympic-class performers who spent all their time training. The event was secondary. The point was to build confidence and self-esteem among a lot of soldiers. The healthiest competition occurs when average people win by putting in above-average effort.

The 2d Infantry Brigade was part of STRAC, the Strategic Army Corps, composed of elite units prepared to fight on any front on short notice. We used the acronym interchangeably as a noun and an adjective. STRAC was a state of being, a sharpness, a readiness, an esprit de corps. ("Sergeant, is the platoon STRAC?" "Yes, sir. We're STRAC") And, as often happens in the Army, we overdid it. Style overran substance. Being STRAC came to mean looking sharp more than being combat-ready. We

A Soldier's Life for Me 51

had our field uniforms starched stiff as boards to achieve knife-edge creases. "Breaking starch" meant using a broom handle to open up the pants so that we could get our legs into our fatigues without ripping off our skin. We dressed for inspection at the last possible minute; we left the pants unbuttoned and the fly unzipped; we put on our boots last—all in the interest of dressing without wrinkling the uniform. The effort was pointless, since within an hour everybody's uniform was a mass of wrinkles. But being STRAC meant breaking starch, and I broke starch with the best of them. It was tradition.

Breaking starch is an example of foolish tradition. Since Vietnam, the Army has tried to eliminate pointless practices. We have sought to make military life a little more like civilian life, with five-day work weeks and weekends free. Barracks today resemble junior college campuses rather than minimum-security prisons. We still hold inspections, but they are designed to assess the preparedness of a unit rather than to gig a soldier for having his canteen a quarter of an inch out of hne.

I accept and support most of the sensible changes we have made, and the abandonment of the senseless, like breaking starch. At the same time, traditions and rituals remain essential to the military mystique. They instill a sense of belonging and importance in the lives of young soldiers. I have to confess my nostalgia for some of the lost practices of the past. Company commanders, for example, used to handle minor infractions and record them in a green-covered company punishment book: "Private Russo, AWOL, fined $50." Today the company punishment book is gone. To carry out routine punishment, you have to read a Miranda-like statement, provide witnesses, make a lawyer available, and submit to review by higher authority. All that may have a nice civil rights ring. But it damages something vital in small army units, the sense of a family responsible for itself, of officers and noncoms, like wise parents, looking after the young people and yanking them back into line when they stray. Undeniably, occasional abuses occurred under the old system. But the benefits far outweighed the risks. Today's situation is like dragging the family into domestic court every time there is a kitchen spat. The Army lost something valuable as the power to discipline drifted upward to higher headquarters and the lawyers.

Personnel and payroll used to be managed at the battalion level. But today, computers allow the Army to consolidate these tasks higher up. It is more cost-effective, but we pay a price in an impersonalized ser-

vice. Officers are not as involved in the lives of their soldiers; they have a lesser role in advising and straightening out their problems. In some measure, we have depersonalized the human links that bind soldiers and their leaders together and make for high morale, that family feeling. I am sure that every ex-GI of a certain age remembers hfs company mess hall, a wooden building perched on cinder blocks, the kitchen at one end, picnic-style tables and benches on wooden floors, a rail in one corner separating the officers' eating area, another comer reserved for sergeants, the garbage cans at the exit, and the mop rack outside. I know that today's big, consolidated "dining facilities" make more economic sense than the old company mess halls. But the hum and clatter of a company mess hall is nostalgic music to me, and I miss the feeling of comradeship. Of course, I am mixing nostalgia with reality; and, intellectually, I know that today's GI and today's Army are superior. But I cannot help recalling those days through mists of fond memory, as all old soldiers do.

My tour as commander of A Company was short. I was sent off to become adjutant of a new unit, the ist Battalion, id Infantry. Once again, I was a first heutenant in a captain's job. A battahon adjutant handles personnel, promotions, assignments, discipline, mail, and "morale and welfare." My new commander was Lieutenant Colonel William C. Abemathy, a teetotaling Baptist from Arkansas and a graduate of Ouachita Baptist University who never uttered an expletive stronger than "golly." I was going to have to clean up my act.

Lieutenant Colonel Abemathy was no swashbuckler, but he was a solid performer who gave troop morale top priority. He expected a promotion to private first class to be handled with the same importance as a promotion to colonel. The men were to be paid on time. Soldiers freezing their butts off in the field were to have hot coffee and soup available. Any sign that a GI was not being properly looked after meant trouble right up the chain of command. Abemathy did not pamper the troops; he worked them hard and disciplined them, which was another way of caring.

One day, the colonel informed me that I was to set up a system of "Welcome Baby" letters. My mystification must have shown in my face. Every soldier whose wife had a baby, Abemathy explained, was to receive a personal letter from the battalion commander congratulating the parents. A second letter would go to the baby, welcoming the tot into

the battalion. Abernathy demanded that I get these letters out the very day the child was bom.

How was I supposed to know which men were about to become fathers? I could picture the battalion, massed on the parade ground: "Every man whose wife is pregnant, take one step forward! All right. When's she due?" I suspect my bachelor status also had something to do with my lack of enthusiasm. In any case, I dragged my feet in setting up this stork-alert system. Abernathy called me on the carpet. "Gee whiz, Colin," he said. "I'm disappointed you haven't done this yet." I would rather have had Red Barrett blister me with four-letter words than hear Abernathy's pained reprimand. I returned to my office and immediately added population reporting to my duties.

To my surprise, once we had the system in place, we started getting positive feedback. The soldiers were impressed by Abemathy's thought-fulness. Mothers wrote us that they appreciated being considered part of their husband's Army life. The babies were not talking yet, but I imagine, somewhere out there, a thirty-five-year-old woman is wondering how a letter making her a member of the ist Battalion, 2d Infantry, got into her baby book.

Another lesson learned and filed. Find ways to reach down and touch everyone in a unit. Make individuals feel important and part of something larger than themselves. Abernathy had found a way to demonstrate caring in a fundamentally rough business. And this he achieved at a time when the Army's attitude was, if we had wanted you to have a wife, we would have issued you one.

I still chafed at the adjutant's job and wanted to be commanding troops. I kept nagging Abernathy for another company until, one day, he said something curious. "You've already conmianded two companies, even if only for short periods. You're working now in a captain's slot for the third time in less than three years in the Army. At this rate, it's not likely anyone is going to assign you back to company level." He seemed to be saying I had already cleared the bar at that height. I still hoped for another company, but he was right.

In the summer of 1961, in the words of my relatives, I was "goin' home" for the first time. For all the professional challenge, Devens was not as excifing as manning the Cold War ramparts in West Germany. I was looking for an adventure; and so I scraped together $182 round-trip air fare (I was earning $290 a month at the time) for my first trip to

60 * COLIN L. POWELL

Jamaica. Before leaving, I spent time with the family, poring over genealogical data explaining who was related to whom so that I'd be spared any social blunders.

Could two parts of the same planet differ mori than ^ort Devens and Jamaica? I was suddenly drenched in sunlight, surrounded by lush flowers, and enveloped by aunts, uncles, and cousins who took me in as if they had known me all my life. In applying for my Army commission, I had had to list relatives living abroad; my answer totaled twenty-eight Jamaicans within the first degree of kindred. I did, however, commit one gaffe on this visit. I failed to bring the presents expected from a "rich" relative arriving from the bountiful U.S.A. Nevertheless, I found myself shuttled from town to town, house to house, aunt to uncle, like a prize catch.

I soon recognized the reason for the matriarchy I had observed among West Indians back home. The women here were harder-working, more disciplined. They set the standards, raised the kids, and drove them ahead. And some of the menfolk were not considered quite presentable. I had met all my aunts but fewer uncles. One day, I was driving through Kingston with my cousin Vernon Meikle, on the way to visit Aunt Ethlyn and Uncle Witte. Vernon slowed at a Hght and pointed to a man standing on a comer. 'That's your Uncle Rupee," Vernon said.

"I want to meet him," I answered.

"Can't," Vernon said.

"Why not?" I wanted to know. Rupee, it seemed, was the black sheep of the McKoys. Too many girlfriends and no visible means of support. I insisted that we bring Uncle Rupee along. After all, he was my mother's brother.

Vernon proved right. Aunt Ethlyn was not happy. But I was fascinated. In this clan of characters. Uncle Rupee turned out to be a particularly lovable rogue, willing to keep up his stories as long as I was willing to underwrite his rum consumption, my money and his stories lasting three days. I spent the last two days of my leave back in Queens getting rid of a headache, and then returned to Fort Devens.

By the summer of 1961,1 could have left the Army, since my obligated three years of service were over. The thought never entered my head. I was a young black. I did not know anything but soldiering. What was I

A Soldier's Life for Me 6 1

going to do, work with my father in the garment district? As a geology major, go drilling for oil in Oklahoma? The country was in a recession; if I stayed in the Army, I would soon be earning $360 a month, a magnificent $4,320 a year. I was in a profession that would allow me to go as far as my talents would take me. And for a black, no other avenue in American society offered so much opportunity. But nothing counted so much as the fact that I loved what I was doing. And so, much to my family's bewilderment, I told them that I was not coming home.

A certain ambivalence has always existed among African-Americans about military service. Why should we fight for a country that, for so long, did not fight for us, that in fact denied us our fundamental rights? How could we serve a country where we could not even be served in a restaurant and enjoy the ordinary amenities available to white Americans? Still, whether valued or scorned, welcomed or tolerated, hundreds of thousands of African-Americans have served this country from its beginning. In Massachusetts, where I was now serving, blacks, free and slave, were inducted into the militia as far back as 1652. During the Revolution, over 5,000 blacks served under General Washington, helping the country gain an independence that they themselves did not enjoy. Nearly 220,000 blacks served in the Union ranks during the Civil War; 37,500 of them died. Blacks were emancipated, but they still returned home to suffer bigotry, the rise of the Ku Klux Klan, and lynchings.

After the Civil War, Congress authorized four colored regiments, the 24th and 25th Infantry and the 9th and loth Cavalry. They became known as the "Buffalo Soldiers," so called by the Indians, according to legend, because of their dark skin, kinky hair, buffalo-pelt coats, and courage in battle. The creation of these regiments, however, was no act of racial enlightenment. Washington merely wanted white settlers protected from the Indians as the West was settled. The Buffalo Soldiers were to help white folks acquire and defend land that blacks, for the most part, were not allowed to own.

You can search the paintings of Teddy Roosevelt and the Rough Riders charging up San Juan Hill in the Spanish-American War and you will not find a single black face portrayed. A camera, however, would have recorded them, because they were there. Seven of them were awarded the Medal of Honor in Cuba. In World War II, nearly a million blacks wore the uniform. Some, like the Tuskegee Airmen, the first