7

When orders came through in June 1959 instructing me to report for a two-year tour in Berlin, I felt as elated as I had as a kid when I learned I could leave Princeton, New Jersey, for Tehran. I was trading rural Kentucky and Tennessee for the place where war between the United States and the Soviet Union was most likely to break out.

Berlin was a fifteen- by twenty-mile enclave, a hundred and ten miles into East German territory, that had been jointly occupied by U.S., British, French, and Soviet troops ever since World War II. But that winter, Nikita Khrushchev had issued an ultimatum giving the western powers six months to pull out. And although he let the deadline pass when President Eisenhower pressed for negotiations, Berlin was still a powder keg.

When I got there I saw why Khrushchev found the place so annoying. His half of the city was still in ruins from the war, and East Berlin’s streets gave a chilling picture of life under totalitarianism. The stores were mostly bare—I once passed a grocery whose window display consisted solely of three dusty cans of condensed milk stacked in a pyramid. Pedestrians in drab coats hurried along furtively, never raising their eyes; I’d look down long avenues and there wouldn’t be a single automobile, not one. Along the Stalin-Allee, East Berlin’s grand boulevard, the government had built long rows of imposing facades; but when I looked through the archways I saw mounds of rubble behind, and the facades themselves were so shoddy that their marble panels were falling down.

West Berlin, by contrast, was like a glossy advertisement for free enterprise, having benefited from ten years of West German rebuilding. The wartime rubble had been long since bulldozed and planted over to make beautiful hilly parks. Everywhere you looked were neon lights; department stores spilled over with the latest fashions; Volkswagens and Mercedeses and Porsches zipped through the streets, and the Kurfürstendamm, the city’s main drag, was crowded with sidewalk cafes, restaurants, pastry shops, and nightclubs. Khrushchev denounced all this as decadence and predicted that “West Berlin will fall into our hands like a rotten apple.” But as East Germany was shabby and gray and oppressive, and as there was no Berlin Wall yet, East Germans who did not want to live under communism simply came to Berlin and crossed over into a western sector. Each weekend hundreds did, and the constant influx of refugees on their way to a life of freedom made West Berlin feel like one big party.

I found the U.S. Army in Germany far more professional than the Army I’d left behind at Fort Campbell. Units understood their mission, trained hard, and were ready for battle. Whereas at Fort Campbell I’d been pressed into jobs usually reserved for captains and majors, in Berlin I was back to being a rifle platoon leader—ordinary lieutenant’s work. But that didn’t bother me, because the duty was exciting and the forces here really were America’s elite. The Army carefully screened everyone assigned to the city, right down to the privates: if you had the slightest blot on your record, you didn’t go; one screw-up while you were there and they shipped you out. The Army did not want to detonate the powder keg by mistake.

My platoon patrolled the border, went on maneuvers with the British and French occupying forces, and stood guard at Spandau prison, where Rudolf Hess and two other Nazi war criminals were serving their sentences. We marched in countless parades—a way of broadcasting the American presence—and learned riot control, because of a persistent concern among western planners that communist provocateurs would someday cross over into West Berlin and create civil disturbances in order to give the Soviets a pretext to invade. Under the circumstances, motivating my men was easy—I just took them to the border, pointed to the East Germans and Soviets, and said, “There is your enemy.” That’s all it took.

After three months I was handed a plum assignment: to command the battle group reconnaissance platoon. In a typical infantry outfit, the recon platoon gets the best troops and operates with far greater autonomy than other platoons. Its primary mission in war is to run patrols and report on enemy activity in front of the battle group and on its flanks, as well as to probe and raid enemy positions. In Berlin we also had an exciting and unique peacetime mission: to conduct actual reconnaissance against East German and Soviet forces.

When we went on patrol in East Berlin, four of us would pile into a couple of Army sedans and cross the border at the Brandenburg Gate armed with nothing more than radios. (We carried no guns, in keeping with the pretense that all four occupying powers were friends.) Sometimes we were to gather intelligence; other times we were simply to exercise our right of free access, supposedly guaranteed to all members of the allied armed forces.

The rules of engagement that governed our conduct at the border seemed surreal. The border was manned by East Germans, but since the United States did not recognize East Germany, we were not supposed to acknowledge or stop for them. So if the East German guards had a barrier down, we’d keep driving, albeit very slowly, until they raised it. If one of them stepped in front of our sedan, we’d act as if he weren’t there, and continue to drive slowly, straight toward him, until he stepped aside. Then there were the times that an irritable guard would take aim at us as we drove by. We’d keep our eyes straight ahead, praying he’d stick by the principles of occupation that guaranteed us safe passage, and that machine-gun bullets would not explode through our rear window. It made for an interesting game of chicken. Once through, we’d drive around making notes on troop concentrations, types and locations of military equipment, the location of radar antennas, anything of military interest.

Every year, the Soviets and East Germans staged a big May Day parade in Marx-Engels-Platz, East Berlin’s central square, where they would show off their tanks, artillery, and rocket launchers. So as not to tie up the square during the day, they held dress rehearsals the week before at three o’clock in the morning. Our orders were to find out if the parade was going to include any new military hardware.

We crossed at the Brandenburg Gate late at night without any problem. But when we arrived at Marx-Engels-Platz, we made a wrong turn and somehow found ourselves in the middle of the practice parade itself. We went right past their reviewing stand, our two Army sedans mixed in with the Soviet rocket launchers and tanks. The East German and Soviet officials were furious and ran after us, hollering and waving their arms, but at that moment we reached a cross street, screeched around the corner, and took off. Such was the cat-and-mouse game in which we were involved.

Because our platoon was so active, we had seventy-five men, more than twice as many as an ordinary recon platoon. Our troops were handpicked by the battle group personnel officer, and the belief that we were the very best permeated everything we did. We even had a sign on the door of our weapons storage room that read:

RECON WEAPONS
Best Weapons Room in the Battle Group

The men knew that every inspector who saw that would vow, “I’ll show these guys.” But we knew our weapons maintenance was that good. By setting a standard of excellence and keeping to it, we built our pride and morale even higher.

The platoon was so close-knit that the worst punishment was to be excluded from it. If a soldier got out of line, I could chew him out or confine him to quarters. While that might bother him a little, the most fearsome threat I could make was to boot him out, although I’m not sure I fully appreciated that until I actually did it once. We had a superb radio operator, a guy from Alabama named Eiselle, who seemed to have a perverse need to buck authority. Because he knew he had an integral role in the platoon, he figured he could get away with skipping formations, coming back late when on an evening pass—an array of minor infractions. I’d talked the problem over with my NCOs and we’d warned him repeatedly. When I finally told him he had to leave, he couldn’t believe it—he broke down. Sergeant First Class Winton, the highest-ranking NCO in my platoon, witnessed the incident and later told me, “Sir, I thought you were gonna give in when he started to cry.”

“I almost did.”

“I could see that, and I was hoping that you wouldn’t. You did the right thing, sir.” Coming from a tough old soldier like Winton this was high praise indeed, and he proved to be right. The effect was to make the rest of the men more disciplined. They closed ranks, and their pride in themselves and our platoon grew even fiercer, so the loss of a good radioman was more than offset by the gain in cohesion.

Simply walking around the city was good for morale. Even though we were technically still an army of occupation, the Berliners treated us as heroes. At Christmastime German families would invite American soldiers into their homes. When the Harlem Globetrotters came over, the city’s biggest exhibition hall was packed. On weekends at bars along the Kurfürstendamm, the Germans would send over a round of beers and toast the USA. Nobody had forgotten the great airlift of 1949, when the Americans and British rescued the city from Stalin, and they never lost sight of the fact that if the United States pulled out, West Berlin would be crushed.

Bonn had an interesting refugee policy, which resulted in a four-to-one ratio of women to men in West Berlin. When people arrived in the city from the East, only those with certified skills were eligible for immediate resettlement elsewhere in West Germany. Most of the men had trades, but most of the women didn’t, so the female population of Berlin soared. Women were easy to meet—including marvelous, well-educated women from good families. It was the best place in the world to be a bachelor. A favorite night spot was the famous Resi, a bar downtown, where each table had a big number on it and a telephone. (It was also a favorite meeting place for spies.) If you spotted somebody you liked across the room, you called her up, and if you were wearing a U.S. Army dress uniform, your phone rang like crazy.

Some officers liked to flaunt their German girlfriends at the officers’ club, but I did most of my dating away from the flagpole. I’d take my girlfriend to neighborhood restaurants and quiet local night spots. Nonetheless, I was frequently confronted by one or another of the older officers’ wives at cocktail parties. “I understand you’re dating a German girl,” she’d say. “That’s all well and good. But you certainly don’t want to marry her. What you want to do is go home and marry a good American girl.” I didn’t see why marrying an American was so great, given the way many American couples treated each other. Sometimes I’d see a woman who’d spoken to me like that, or her husband, making time with somebody else’s spouse at the very same party.

Halfway through my tour in Berlin I was picked to be the aide to General Charles E. Johnson III, a one-star who commanded all the American troops in Berlin. He was a gregarious fellow who laughed a lot and with great gusto—whenever he was at the officers’ club people knew he was there. General Johnson was forty-nine years old and had served as a lieutenant colonel in Rome at the same time as my father, but I’d never met him there. Watching him maneuver in the complicated military-diplomatic world of Berlin was a little like watching Pop in Iran. We were running joint exercises with the British and French, dealing with diplomats and West German civil authorities, and, of course, confronting the East Germans and Soviets. I learned a great deal about the flexibility, patience, and professionalism required of a general in an international arena. For instance, Willy Brandt, the mayor of West Berlin, once demanded free use of U.S. Army tents, and troops to set them up, so he could hold a political rally. As commander of an occupying army, General Johnson could simply have said, “Get lost.” But in deference to Brandt’s international stature, Johnson politely turned him down, diplomatically explaining that he wasn’t authorized to spend American taxpayers’ money in this way.

I was responsible for the general’s schedule and went with him everywhere. If an invitation came for a diplomatic reception or cocktail party, it was automatically assumed I was included. If General Johnson wanted to take his fellow generals to dinner at a German restaurant, I’d set it up and sit right there at the table to make sure nobody’s order got lost in translation and that the bill was correct. Ever since my days in Tehran, I’d enjoyed dealing with foreigners, and I understood the need to adapt to them rather than force them to adapt to me. I spoke mostly German with my girlfriend, and my command of the language was so fluent that Berliners had difficulty pegging me as an American if I wasn’t in uniform. I was a very effective go-between. By this time I owned a dog, a German shepherd named Troll, and on Sunday afternoons I’d dress in a tweed jacket and lederhosen and take him for a Spaziergang, or promenade, in the Grünewald, the local wood, stopping for beer in the little restaurants along the way. I thought I was a pretty dapper fellow.

Even as I enjoyed myself, I knew the good times could end in an instant. This was a period of extreme tension between East and West—that September, Khrushchev had pounded his shoe at the United Nations, and the following summer the Berlin crisis came to a head. The flow of refugees into West Berlin became a flood, with thousands of people now crossing each weekend, and the East Germans watched as many of their most talented citizens fled in what became famous as the “brain drain.” One week after my tour ended, the Berlin Wall went up.

In the summer of 1961, the Army promoted me to captain and brought me back to Fort Benning, Georgia, for a year of advanced training in infantry tactics. The program was disappointing because it placed little emphasis on troop leadership—a subject I feared not enough Army officers understood, if my experience at Fort Campbell was any indication. Instead, the Army had become obsessed with its hardware, having by this time staked out a role for itself in the cold war arms race by amassing an arsenal of atomic artillery shells and short- and medium-range missiles capable of carrying nuclear warheads. So the course at Fort Benning that got the most attention was on the battlefield use of nuclear weapons—we learned to analyze a target in terms of the type and size of atomic blast needed to destroy it. The lectures were highly technical, very demanding, and naturally based on highly classified material; each man had his own safe and had to lock up his workbooks after class. The school let you know that if you didn’t master the subject, you didn’t have much of a future in the Army.

I did well at Fort Benning, finishing in the top third of my class, and earning high ratings in speaking and writing. I even walked off with a tennis trophy, playing doubles with my old West Point roommate Leroy Suddath, who had turned up in the same course. I also won something called the George C. Marshall Award for Excellence in Military Writing, with an essay entitled “The Battered Helmet.” It recounted a commander’s thoughts upon having won a major battle and began:

The general trudged wearily into his tent and threw his helmet on the bunk. Another large dent was noticeable in the already battered headpiece. He made a mental note that he must see about getting a new one. Obviously, as chief of all the ground forces in the area, he shouldn’t be seen wandering around the battlefield with a battered helmet.

He sank into a chair and pulled off his mud-spattered boots. It had been an exhausting day. From the predawn preparations, through the attack and smashing victory, to the relentless pursuit, the general had been on the move. Now, he had won a major battle which would probably spell the end of the campaign and might even bring about the end of the war. He felt a deep sense of accomplishment, but was too tired to be jubilant. Besides, there was still a great deal to be done.

I wrote it to demonstrate the timelessness of the principles of war: after an involved review of the day’s attacks, feints, and counterattacks, the reader learned that the general in question was Julius Caesar, and the victory his triumph on the plains of Pharsalus over the rebel Pompey.

I was eager to command soldiers in battle, but there was no war, or at least none I knew about. Reports had surfaced that President Kennedy was sending more and more forces to Vietnam, but all we knew was what we read in the papers, and nobody was calling it a war. Instead I was offered what seemed to be the ideal peacetime assignment: two years at taxpayer expense getting a master’s degree at the University of Southern California. Working with the USC School of Engineering, the Army had arranged a specially designed curriculum of mechanical engineering and aeronautical engineering courses that led to a master’s degree in guided missile engineering. Only a small number of officers was chosen to attend and the Department of Mechanics at West Point offered to sponsor me if I would agree to serve as an instructor at the academy for three years afterward. That seemed a fair trade for a graduate education that would enhance my ability to serve my country—but I confess my thinking was also influenced by the fact that I was still a bachelor, that the graduate school was in southern California, and that I had never in my adult life lived off a military post.

I did not want to arrive unprepared, so I started work on my suntan right away. It was late spring and the weather in Georgia was hot, so every day at lunch hour I’d lie in the sun outside the Fort Benning officers’ club. Just before setting out for California, I traded in my old Renault sedan for a beautiful maroon Oldsmobile F-85 convertible with a powerful 185-horsepower V-8.

I visited Mom in New Jersey in June, and then Troll and I headed west. The interstate to California wasn’t built yet, so we went to St. Louis, picked up Route 66, and drove through the southwest, stopping at the Grand Canyon to sightsee and at Las Vegas to gamble. Nobody had told me about the Las Vegas Strip, so I got a room in a hotel downtown and ended up in a seedy gambling parlor nearby thinking, “Gee, Las Vegas isn’t as glamorous as I expected.” I won two hundred dollars. As I crossed the southwestern deserts, I drove with the top down, wearing nothing but a bathing suit. I endured terrible heat, but by the time I reached Los Angeles, my tan was truly splendid.

On the day I descended into the L.A. basin, I was stunned. The weather was hazy and overcast, and before long I found out it had been that way all spring. I was the only man in Los Angeles with a tan. Everywhere I went people said, “Oh, you must be new here.” They kept asking if I was from Arizona.

I rented a small apartment in Redondo Beach. It had an ocean view—if you looked real hard between two buildings across the street you could just see the water—but to me it was like paradise. I saw USC as an opportunity to make up for a terrible gap in my education: I’d never been to a coed college. That led to a second rude shock. On the opening day of school, another bachelor officer and I went to the student union at lunchtime. We strolled up to the entrance, looked through the glass, and spotted three coeds about to come out who looked exactly like the missed cheerleaders of my dreams. I straightened up, sucked in my stomach a little, and gallantly held open the door. They looked at me, then at each other, and said, “Thank you, sir.” I suddenly saw myself as they did—a grown-up, obviously pushing thirty—and realized with sorrow that my fantasies of coed college life would remain forever unfulfilled.

The third shock was that I was strapped for cash: Army pay didn’t go very far in L.A. Counting my housing allowance and captain’s pay, I was taking home four hundred dollars a month, and I needed half of that just to cover my car and rent. The men with families had it especially tough. As a result, we all had to moonlight. One officer worked at an appliance store, another sold shoes at Sears, Roebuck. I found a job teaching calculus and basic engineering at the Northrop Institute. I also taught accounting and business math at South Bay Women’s College, a secretarial school. South Bay didn’t pay as well as Northrop, but it did wonders for my morale.

There was a place a few blocks from where I lived where the regular piano player was Bobby Troup, who was married to the singer Julie London and gave great renditions of the blues. My tastes in popular music ranged from there all the way to Elvis Presley, but I loved folk music best. I may have been the only captain in the United States Army who listened avidly to The Weavers and Peter, Paul and Mary. I owned every record Joan Baez made and was a great Bob Dylan fan. “The Times They Are a-Changin’ ” was one of my all-time favorite songs. I liked the folk singers for their sound, but the message of social activism appealed as well. I was a liberal and an admirer of President Kennedy, and Barry Goldwater made me uneasy when he blustered about rolling back the clock on civil rights and challenging the Soviet Union to war.

Getting a master’s degree was nowhere near as tough as I’d expected. We spent only a third as much time in the lecture hall as we had at West Point, and our courses were by and large easier. Most of the officers in the program were convinced that the future of the Army lay in missile warfare and atomic weapons, and took the cold war rhetoric about the imminent risk of nuclear war literally. I had trouble believing it. In Berlin I’d lived for two years with the possibility that war could break out any minute. Yet the talk of a massive Soviet attack on the United States just didn’t seem plausible. Their bombers had too far to fly; their missiles weren’t that good; and we had all kinds of early warning systems, not to mention the ability to retaliate. I didn’t approach the subject of guided missile engineering with the same reverence as some of my colleagues did.

The only time my sense of confidence was shaken was during the Cuban missile crisis. During my first October at USC, President Kennedy announced the naval “quarantine” on a Monday, calling it that and not a blockade because a blockade is an act of war; but it was clear to me that we were on the brink. On Tuesday morning I walked down to the beach. The ocean and sky were both gray, and as I looked out over the water, I spotted an airplane in the distance. I suddenly thought, “That could be a Soviet bomber coming to drop a hydrogen bomb on Los Angeles.” I knew my mind was playing tricks on me, but for the rest of the day I could not shake the feeling of impending doom. Late that afternoon I went to buy groceries at Fort Mac-Arthur, the Army post in nearby San Pedro, and stopped when they sounded retreat. I stood at attention as the flag was lowered, and told myself that if war came, I was prepared to do whatever had to be done. But at the same time I was uneasy: I wasn’t attached to a military unit—at the moment I was out on my own in the civilian world. What if the bomb had gone off in downtown Los Angeles? I had no orders. What would I do? Pick up the telephone and call the Pentagon? The telephone wouldn’t be working. And if war began, the Pentagon would have a lot more to worry about than thinking up an assignment for Captain H. Norman Schwarzkopf at the University of Southern California.

The crisis passed, and my fears had long since subsided when my fellow officers and I spent six weeks the following summer touring southern California aerospace plants and R&D facilities. At North American Aviation I met some of the engineers working on the Apollo program and stood under one of the giant Saturn rocket nozzles designed to lift astronauts on their way to the moon. I’d taken a course in astronautics that focused on the engineering theory of spaceflight, and I was in awe of these engineers who were actually making it happen. They were thinking in terms I’d never imagined—I was bound to the earth, while they were opening the doors to the heavens. It was the one time that I regretted not having set my sights higher at grad school. Sure, I’d make a good instructor of engineering at West Point, but that was all I’d be. These men were pioneers, on their way to frontiers I would never explore.

Much as I enjoyed my stint at school, and much as I welcomed the breather, the world darkened that year with the assassination of President Kennedy. The following spring I was shaken by news of a death closer to home. The Los Angeles Times landed on the doorstep one morning with a front-page story about a West Point friend named Tom McCarthy who had been killed in Vietnam. Tom had joined the Infantry a couple of years ahead of me. Whatever the politicians were calling it at that point, I realized that there was indeed a war on, and Americans were dying. Yet here I was, finishing two years of soft life in California and committed to three more years of soft life at West Point. My sense of duty told me this wasn’t right; Vietnam was where I belonged.

I left California that summer of 1964 having completed my degree plus an additional semester of coursework in computers—they fascinated me because they were the wave of the future. Back at West Point, life fell into a lazy routine once the academic year began. I taught a single course to four sections of students, so I only had to prepare three lectures per week and by noon each day my teaching was done. That gave me endless time to think.

By then the United States had twenty thousand people in South Vietnam serving as military advisors and flying missions in helicopters and fighter planes, and late in the summer, Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin resolution, declaring the freedom of Southeast Asia vital to our national interest, and authorizing President Johnson to send combat troops. Leroy Suddath, my former roommate at West Point, was already over there serving as an advisor to the South Vietnamese airborne. The war began sending predictable ripples through our officer corps, not only because people we knew were getting killed, but because promotions were coming faster as the Army expanded. In the ordinary course of events, as a captain from my West Point year group, I wouldn’t have been eligible for advancement to major for several more years. But when the list of officers approved for promotion appeared that fall, I was on it along with several of my classmates. This meant that as new majors were needed in the coming year, we’d pin on our oak leaves.

At the West Point officers’ club, the main topic of conversation was often Vietnam. Most officers stationed at the academy scoffed at serving in MACV (Military Assistance Command, Vietnam), the advisory force where most people who went to Vietnam ended up. There was no glory in it, they argued; the only job worth having was to command American troops, and the few combat units being sent to Vietnam already had full complements of officers. I saw nothing wrong with serving as an advisor: my father had been one! I was eager to go, as were a handful of other officers. Ironically, another bit of prevailing wisdom was that requesting reassignment from West Point to Vietnam would be professional suicide: the academy would consider us disloyal for trying to leave before the end of our teaching obligation, and would in any case never allow it. I felt terribly discouraged, even more so when an Army career planner I talked to said the war was sure to be over by the time my teaching stint ended in 1967, and I could expect an assignment in R&D.

But then it dawned on me that none of us had ever actually asked to leave West Point and go to Vietnam. So when a reorganization of my department made it apparent that we would have too many instructors the following year, I went to see my deputy department head, a crusty old Corps of Engineers colonel named Harvey Frazer, who scowled as I nervously made my pitch. When I finished he jumped up, pounded on the desk, and said, “Schwarzkopf, you son of a bitch! I want you to know I tried to get out of this goddamn academy during the entire Korean War, and they never let me go.”

I thought, “Oh boy, here comes the loyalty lecture. Now I’m really in trouble.”

Frazer said, “Therefore, I’m gonna see to it that you get to Vietnam.” And he did. West Point let me go, with my promise that I’d return after a year to complete my teaching obligation.

Some of the guys who’d been saying they wanted to go now joined the chorus predicting that Vietnam would be a disaster for my career. MACV wouldn’t decide what my assignment would be until I arrived, and in those days, relatively few of its officers actually made it to the battlefield. They predicted I’d end up stuck in Saigon or in one of the provincial capitals, working behind a desk as an assistant to a general or colonel who advised high South Vietnamese officials.

Their sniping made me furious. All my life I’d trained to be an infantry officer, and to fight for the cause of freedom. Sure, I was hoping for combat experience, but I wasn’t thinking about advancing my career. It was difficult for me to put this into words, but Ben Franklin in Paris, a hit Broadway musical that I saw right after volunteering for Vietnam, captured my feelings exactly. Franklin travels to France to enlist support for the American Revolution. But he learns that if he accepts an offer to go to London under safe conduct, he may be seized and executed anyway. The play ends with Franklin pondering what to do, and trying to imagine Americans two hundred years hence:

I wonder how I’d find them then—those Americans to whom the name American will not be new. Will they love liberty, being given it outright in the crib for nothing? Will they know that if you are not free, you are, sir, lost without hope, and will they who reaped that harvest of ideas be willing to strive to preserve what we so willingly strove to plant? That all men are created equal! And are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights.

He pauses and then says:

And would they die for it? That’s the question one finally has to ask oneself. Would I die for it! And the answer one has to say—is—yes, sir, I would!

That made a tremendous impression on me. It summed up succinctly why I was going to Vietnam. It had nothing to do with careerism. It had to do with ideals.