11

I took the red-eye out of San Francisco to Baltimore/Washington International Airport on Thursday, July 23, 1970. As we made our final approach early on Friday morning, we flew straight into a thunderstorm. Wind buffeted the plane, lightning flashed, and just as we reached the runway I watched the right wing outside my window dip sickeningly toward the ground. “Great,” I thought, “I’ve survived two tours in Vietnam and I’m gonna crash here in front of my wife.”

Both Brenda and Sally were waiting at the gate. We hugged and kissed one another and then Brenda stepped back and I looked at her in all her eight-months-pregnant glory. She was beautiful. I told her diplomatically that she looked as if she hadn’t even gained a pound. Brenda laughed and hugged me again. After we collected my bags, Sally had to say good-bye because she was already late for work at the National Security Agency. Brenda and I walked alone to the car. “You’re tired. Let me drive,” she said. So I settled into the passenger seat for the thirty-mile trip to our modest two-bedroom apartment in the Virginia suburb of Annandale. It was a dreary, rainy day, and I worried whether Brenda should be driving in her condition; but as she talked happily about our baby and our family and all that had happened while I’d been gone, I felt myself start to relax. The war was ten thousand miles away.

Over the next few weeks we immersed ourselves in baby preparations, turning the second bedroom of our apartment into a nursery complete with a music-box merry-go-round mobile over the crib, and reading to each other from Dr. Spock. I plotted the route to the hospital with military precision—the fact that there was a drawbridge on the way made me very nervous. On August 23—the day after my thirty-sixth birthday—Cynthia Pauline Schwarzkopf came into the world. I was pacing in the waiting room like a classic 1950s dad when a nurse emerged, announced that we’d had a girl, and told me that I couldn’t see Brenda for a few minutes but that the baby was in the nursery. I ran down the hall to the viewing window with my heart in my throat, and there was a tiny, perfect baby with lots of dark hair and big dark eyes. I could almost imagine the “Made in Hong Kong” label on her bottom and loved her from the minute I set eyes on her. I got back to the delivery room just as the orderlies wheeled Brenda out. All I could say was, “She’s beautiful!”

“I’m so happy,” Brenda smiled. I gave her a kiss and then was ordered home by the nurse and instructed not to come back until tomorrow. I went, phoned everyone I could think of, and finally sat for hours in my big reclining chair wondering how I’d measure up as the father of a daughter.

The next day Brenda’s mother Elsie arrived from Timberville and stayed for a week after Brenda and Cindy came home. With her help and that of a formidable babysitter named Mrs. Murphy, Brenda and I realized that Cindy would thrive despite our inexperience and clumsiness.

I hate to think what my life would have been like if I hadn’t had Brenda to come back to after Vietnam. I’d read about Kent State and the antiwar upheavals that spring—at Oberlin, my sister Ruth had organized a workshop to make placards for demonstrations. I’d also heard about antiwar protesters spitting on soldiers. I’d made up my mind even before coming home that I’d punch out anybody who spit on me. Luckily, no one did. But one day that fall, I stopped at a mall in Virginia after work wearing my green uniform. I walked into a department store, and salespeople and other shoppers glared at me. I paid and left as quickly as possible, but getting into the car I thought, “I am in the nation’s capital, wearing the uniform of the United States Army, and the people around me see me as some kind of monster!” The mood of the country had turned ugly.

Ironically, I was now in the business of sending people to Vietnam. My new job was in the personnel office at Infantry Branch, a thirty-man organization that dealt out assignments to more than thirty thousand infantry officers worldwide. To be chosen for this was a compliment, as Branch had its pick of all infantry officers; but you’d never guess that from the working conditions. The Officers Personnel Directorate in Washington across the Potomac from the Pentagon consisted of a cluster of so-called tempo buildings—wooden structures that had been thrown up during World War II. Infantry Branch occupied a large, fluorescent-lit and roach-infested first-floor bay; we’d brought down our file cabinets from the second floor after Army building inspectors had warned that if we left them upstairs, we’d come in some morning to find they’d fallen through the ceiling. I ran a group called the Professional Development Section, which consisted of seven officers and was separated from the Assignment Section by a series of low partitions. Assignment plugged officers into jobs the Army needed filled, while we checked to make sure each assignment made sense for the individual selected.

It was all desk work, twelve to fourteen hours’ worth each day because, despite the reduction of forces committed to Vietnam, we were still an army at war. As head of the section, I often dealt with lieutenant colonels who, as they neared the twenty-year mark in their careers, wanted to know if they had a future in the Army. The toughest to face were men who had been misled by their bosses—for example, a battalion commander whose brigade commander had promised him, “You’ve done a great job and you’re gonna be rewarded with a terrific efficiency report.”

The fellow had expected to be selected to attend the Army War College, an honor accorded to the top fifteen percent of lieutenant colonels. When his name hadn’t appeared on the list, he came to Infantry Branch to find out why and I had to tell him, “You got a bad efficiency report as a battalion commander.”

“But my brigade commander said he was going to give me a wonderful report, and I know the assistant division commander also thought I was really good.”

“Here’s your report.”

He looked at it, stunned. “What does this mean?”

“It probably means you aren’t going to the War College. Your chances for promotion to colonel are fifty-fifty. And if you do get promoted, you probably won’t be selected for brigade command, and you’ll retire as a colonel.” Colonel Hugh “Pat” Patillo, the chief of Infantry Branch, felt strongly that we ought to level with the men, and I agreed. Once an officer understood that his Army career had probably peaked, he could make other plans. Perhaps he’d always wanted to be a National Guard advisor in Hawaii, move his family there, and start a business once he retired. Rather than wait around for a brigade command that was never going to materialize, he could request a more appropriate assignment now. The frequency with which we saw people who had been lied to was astonishing to me.

That summer of 1970, the Army War College issued a scathing report—commissioned by General William Westmoreland, who was now chief of staff—that explained a great deal of what we were seeing. Based on a confidential survey of 415 officers, the report blasted the Army for rewarding the wrong people. It described how the system had been subverted to condone selfish behavior and tolerate incompetent commanders who sacrificed their subordinates and distorted facts to get ahead. It criticized the Army’s obsession with meaningless statistics and was especially damning on the subject of body counts in Vietnam. A young captain had told the investigators a sickening story: he’d been under so much pressure from headquarters to boost his numbers that he’d nearly gotten into a fistfight with a South Vietnamese officer over whose unit would take credit for various enemy body parts. Many officers admitted they had simply inflated their reports to placate head-quarters.

To any of us who had served in Vietnam, none of this was news. But what was disconcerting was the extent of unscrupulous behavior right there in Washington. High-ranking officers were pulling strings to prevent favored subordinates from being assigned second tours in Vietnam, even though it meant others would serve a third time. Other officers were tampering with the school selection process. One case was that of a major who was in his last year of eligibility for Command and General Staff College. He’d already been passed over several times because his record wasn’t good enough, but his brother-in-law was a long-standing member of the House Appropriations Committee. That fall, Brigadier General John A. Kjellstrom, from the Army Comptroller’s Office, came to see the head of the Officers Personnel Directorate and told him we had a problem: the congressman was threatening to stonewall the entire Army budget if we didn’t let his brother-in-law into Leavenworth.

My staff and I, naive and idealistic, declared, “Ha! That’ll never happen.” But sure enough, someone arranged for the guy to occupy a slot that should have gone to a more qualified man. Later the major had the nerve to write us from Leavenworth: “Now that I’m here, my next goal is to attend the Army War College.”

I found myself in a quandary: morally and ethically the Army was in as bad shape as when I’d joined, yet my own career was going great. I’d been promoted early to major, been promoted early to lieutenant colonel, and commanded a battalion in combat successfully. When the list for the War College appeared in November, I was on it—one of only five people from my class to be picked in our first year of eligibility. Without having compromised, I’d become a front-runner in the officer corps of an institution that I felt was tarnished.

I was able to put off my growing ambivalence that winter of 1970–71 because there were more immediate problems to attend to. I was in trouble physically. For years I’d known I had a cracked vertebra in my lower back—a chronic fracture that one doctor suspected had occurred at birth and that I had aggravated by years of jumping out of airplanes. By the end of my tour in Vietnam, simply sitting in the fiber seat of my helicopter had become agony. But I’d ignored it until I’d taken a shower my first day home and, for the first time in a year, looked at myself in a full-length mirror. It was a real shock: the muscles of my right leg had atrophied to the point that the leg appeared markedly scrawnier than my left. I knew this was a symptom of nerve damage and told myself I had to do something about it. But then I’d pushed aside the thought because, with our baby about to be born and a new job to start, I had no intention of going into the hospital.

Since Cindy’s birth the pain had worsened—Brenda would rub my back each night to try to alleviate it—and the leg continued to waste away. I finally went to Walter Reed hospital in February, and the doctors presented me with an ultimatum: either undergo major spinal surgery and lengthy rehabilitation, or risk eventual paralysis. Brenda was concerned for my health but left the decision to me. After making sure that I could defer my entry into the War College for a year, I opted for Walter Reed.

On June 15, 1971, I checked into Ward 1, the officers’ orthopedic ward, which was to be my home for months. I walked through the door into a long hallway crowded with men in wheelchairs and on crutches—all amputees. I was suddenly back in Vietnam. “Hey, Colonel Schwarzkopf!” a familiar voice called. I turned, and limping toward me with a huge grin on his face was Tom Bratton. I hadn’t seen or heard from him since the day he had nearly died in the minefield and I’d left him in the emergency room at Chu Lai. But this was Bratton all right—a big, dark-haired, jovial southerner. He grabbed my hand. “How are ya, sir? I read your name on the admitting list. It’s great to see you!”

“Bratton! Why didn’t you let me know you were here?”

“I didn’t know where to find you.” Bratton explained that he’d been in the ward for more than a year and was now learning to use his artificial arm and leg. “Come on, sir, let me show you around.”

The hallway had doors mostly on one side. One opened into a semiprivate room, a second into a long porch ward with seven beds; finally, down at the end, there was a large square bay with beds against three walls. “Here’s where I live,” Bratton announced as we entered the bay. “Hey guys, this is Colonel Schwarzkopf. He’s thinking about moving in.” Suddenly he stopped and pointed to the middle of the floor, where someone had inlaid a one-and-a-half-foot mosaic of a rattlesnake into the linoleum. “We call this place the Snake Pit,” he explained.

Then he introduced me to some of his pals: Mike Sinclair, who had lost both legs and an arm to a mine; Larry de Meo, whose arm had been blown off at the shoulder; and Henry Schroeder, whose bed was mounted on a huge round frame that the medics rotated to balance his circulation as they tried to save his legs. They all knew I was scheduled for surgery the next day. “Don’t worry about a thing,” Bratton reassured me. “We know how this place works and we’re gonna make goddamn sure you get the kind of care you’re supposed to.” I was deeply touched. Here were guys who’d lost limbs, and they’d taken it upon themselves to worry about me.

As scheduled, the doctors performed a spinal fusion, which entailed taking bone from my hip, grinding it into paste, and using it to cement together three vertebrae in the small of my back. I spent the first two weeks after surgery strapped to an eight-foot-long metal and canvas device called a “Foster frame”; I had to be turned every four hours like a pig on a barbecue spit. By the end of June I had graduated to a body cast: forty-five pounds of plaster that went from my shoulders to my hips and down one leg to just above the knee. The day it went on, the orderlies brought me back to the ward and literally flopped me onto a bed. All I could think of was a turtle turned on its back. I’d started out in the semiprivate room, but soon they moved me to the porch ward, where Bratton and other guys in wheelchairs and on crutches were constantly wandering in and out.

Brenda visited every day, even though it was an hour’s drive each way and she wasn’t feeling well—she’d discovered, to our great delight, that she was pregnant again. Apart from her visits, life was measured by mealtimes, which I looked forward to because my arms were free and I could feed myself. I was dependent on nurses for virtually everything else. It wasn’t long before the days and nights ran together. I read until my eyes ached. The Red Cross librarian would wheel in a cart twice a week and I’d grab whatever was there—spy novels, historical novels, mysteries, classics, even an occasional book of poetry. But after forty or fifty volumes I didn’t want to read anymore. Brenda brought me a little television, and I watched until my brain got numb. I slept whenever I could because sleeping passed time. But as a consequence, I often found myself awake in the middle of the night, staring at the ceiling of the dimly lit ward. I thought constantly about Vietnam.

My mind went back to the spring just past, when it had seemed as though our whole country had gone insane. In April hundreds of Vietnam veterans, some in wheelchairs, had come to Washington to protest the war and had thrown their medals onto the steps of the Capitol; the newspapers reported that the medals included some Silver Stars and Purple Hearts. I couldn’t make myself believe that anyone would throw away such decorations—I figured they must be just the administrative medals that were automatically awarded to everyone who served in the war zone. A couple of days later 200,000 people showed up in Washington for an antiwar march, and the week after that the police arrested thousands of protesters who impeded traffic and blocked government buildings in the so-called Mayday demonstrations. Finally, two days before I was admitted to Walter Reed, The New York Times started publishing the Pentagon Papers, secret documents from early in the war. Ostensibly, the papers raised questions about whether President Johnson had deceived the public concerning America’s growing involvement.

I hated what Vietnam was doing to the United States and I hated what it was doing to the Army. It was a nightmare that the American public had withdrawn its support: our troops in World War I and World War II had never had to doubt for one minute that the people on the home front were fully behind them. We in the military hadn’t chosen the enemy or written the orders—our elected leaders had. Nevertheless, we were taking much of the blame. We soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines were literally the sons and daughters of America, and to lose public support was akin to being rejected by our own parents.

Bitterly, I recalled an incident that had taken place during my first tour in 1965. My Vietnamese airborne unit had overrun a Vietcong headquarters, and among the documents we’d captured had been a directive from Ho Chi Minh. It said in effect: “I know you’re facing more and more Americans right now, but don’t worry. We’re going to win the war against America the same way we won the war against the French: not on the battlefield, but in the enemy’s homeland. All you have to do is hang on. The American people are not tough enough to see this war through and we are. We have fought for twenty years; we can fight another twenty years; before then, they will give up and not support their troops anymore, and we will claim victory.”

I’d brought it back to the Manor BOQ and we’d talked about it as a joke. “Look at this crap! Look at the propaganda these people are printing!” But Uncle Ho had known what he was talking about—he was an astute student of the western mind and understood his enemy better than we understood ourselves.

I slowly realized that I’d have to think long and hard before ever going to war again. The Army would get ready to send me and I’d have to stop and ask, “Is it worth it?” I felt stuck: I couldn’t imagine refusing to obey orders, yet I also couldn’t imagine fighting another war to which my country wasn’t fully committed.

I reflected on my military career. I’d been in the Army fifteen years; in five more I could retire. Actually, I probably could arrange a medical discharge and retire right away. I was sure I could get a job on the outside, teaching or maybe working with one of my classmates who had already left and gone into business. But as I imagined leaving, I knew that that wasn’t really what I wanted. I was good at being a soldier and what I wanted was to see the Army—and the attitude of the public—change so that I could proudly remain one. But who was going to change it?

Whenever I became depressed and withdrawn, Bratton would shake me back to reality. He’d come over to my bed and say, “Goddammit, sir, if I can walk with just one leg, how come you can’t walk with two?”

“You don’t have this turtle shell on your back,” I’d shoot back. But I was embarrassed because I was eventually going to have a normal life, while Bratton never would. He and his pals were in and out of my ward every day, joking, playing cards, and generally terrorizing the orderlies. I began to understand how the Snake Pit worked. Newcomers just back from Vietnam were often bitter and consumed with self-pity. If a man didn’t snap out of it, the doctors would assign him a bed down in the Snake Pit. Like Bratton, most of the guys had been there for months or years and were fighting to overcome terrible injuries. So they were merciless when the newcomer would start moaning. They’d yell, “You fuckin’ wimp. Shut up! What are you moaning about? There’s a lot of guys here who are hurt worse than you. You’re gonna walk again, you little bastard. Shut up, goddammit! We don’t want to hear it.”

They’d often reduc the new man to tears. But after that, he’d grind his teeth and fight back, which was precisely what they wanted. They knew that mastering artificial limbs required tremendous physical conditioning and mental discipline, particularly for multiple amputees; a man consumed with self-pity simply wasn’t going to make it. The guys in the Snake Pit were relentless, but they brought people back to life. In my eyes they were heroes.

Gradually as I recuperated my morale improved. My brightest day was August 22, my thirty-seventh birthday, because the staff bent the rules to let Brenda bring Cindy. The two of them were waiting in a dayroom when the orderlies wheeled me in on a gurney. I was worried that the baby wouldn’t remember me—I’d been gone ten weeks and she was just one year old—but the minute she saw me she said “Da-Da” and started climbing happily all over my body cast. I was elated and relieved. Brenda had brought me the birthday present I’d requested: a tennis racquet. I asked an orderly to hang it up opposite my bed.

I started physical therapy, which in my case meant learning to walk in the body cast. They tilted me upright on a giant rotating table—I’d been off my feet so long that my soles hurt like hell when I stood on them—and a tiny, birdlike nurse steadied me as I took my first steps. “You’d better get out of the way if I fall,” I warned her. “I’ll squash you flat.”

In late September the day finally came when the doctors switched me to a body cast that only went from my shoulders to my hips. I could go home! I was still assigned to the hospital and would still have to check in for therapy every other week, so there were no long good-byes with the guys in the Snake Pit. We had a momentary crisis in the hospital driveway when I couldn’t fit through the door of the car, but with the help of Brenda and an attendant I was able to slide in and prop myself diagonally across the backseat. It didn’t matter—I’d have ridden tied to the roof if that’s what it took.

Shortly after coming home from the hospital, I got a letter from C. D. B. Bryan, a writer for The New Yorker magazine. In it, he explained that he was working on an article about the family of a young sergeant named Michael Mullen who had been killed by so-called friendly fire in the Rocket Pocket while under my command. He wanted to interview me about what had happened.

The soldier’s parents had come to see me at the hospital. They were ordinary Iowa farm people trying to absorb not only the death of their son, but the tragedy that he’d been killed by his own side. The Army had made things worse: by being clumsy and evasive about the accident, it had caused the Mullens to become convinced that there was a conspiracy to cover up the truth about Michael’s death. Their faith in the government was destroyed and Mrs. Mullen had become an outspoken member of the antiwar movement. Before I left Vietnam, she’d sent me a half-page advertisement she and Mr. Mullen had placed in The Des Moines Register. It began: “A silent message to the mothers and fathers of Iowa. We have been dying for nine, long, miserable years in Vietnam in an undeclared war … how many more lives do you wish to sacrifice because of your silence?” Printed underneath, in neat rows, were 714 tiny crosses—the number of Iowans who had died in the war. Mrs. Mullen was fiercely proud of that ad: she’d paid for it with Michael’s two-thousand-dollar Army death gratuity.

I’d agreed to meet with the Mullens in the hope of setting their minds at rest: I couldn’t bring back their son, but they had a right to a straightforward explanation of how he’d died. I’d answered their questions and laid out the facts as clearly as I could. On the night of February 18, 1970, C Company had dug in on a jungle hilltop. They’d made a routine request for our artillery to zero in on the trails near their position in case the Vietcong attacked during the night. One of the test rounds detonated directly above them, spraying the men with shrapnel and killing Michael Mullen and another soldier. A subsequent investigation concluded that a lieutenant at the artillery fire direction center, in calculating trajectories, had forgotten to take into account the vegetation on the hilltop. The round had been meant to sail over C Company; instead it had hit a tree and exploded.

The mood when the Mullens first arrived had been tense, but the conversation had become more cordial as we went along. I’d provided all the information I had and suggested other people for them to talk to, and at the end Michael’s father had shaken my hand, which he’d refused to do at the start. But I now saw from Bryan’s letter that the Mullens hadn’t believed me; Bryan wanted to hear my explanation for himself.

I called the Army public affairs office to notify them of the request. The officer I spoke to quickly said, “You don’t have to talk to him.”

I thought that was crazy. “But I want to talk. I don’t have anything to hide.”

“Fine. You’re on your own.” He suggested I use a tape recorder during the interview to make sure nothing was taken out of context, then added, “Be sure to stay within your level of expertise.” By that he meant I shouldn’t criticize my commanders or the President.

Bryan showed up on the morning of October 6, 1971, a tall, beanpole-thin fellow with combed-back hair, sharp features, intelligent eyes, and a soft, pleasing voice. He explained that the C. D. B. Bryan of his byline stood for “Courtlandt Dixon Barnes Bryan,” but that everyone called him “Courty.” We set up at the dining room table and talked—first about what had happened that night in Charlie Company, and later more generally about the 1/6’s operations in the Rocket Pocket and on the Batangan Peninsula.

He asked very detailed and precise questions and I think found me more candid and down-to-earth than he’d expected. Whenever he asked, “How can I verify that?” I was able to provide the names of people to corroborate. As the hours passed, I surprised myself by talking about what it meant to be a military officer and voicing many of the doubts I’d wrestled with during those long nights in the hospital. To me the death of Michael Mullen was not just one tragedy but two: the needless death of a young man, and the bitterness that was consuming his parents.

Late in the afternoon Brenda came home—she’d been visiting friends with Cindy—and cooked dinner and we invited Bryan to stay and eat with us. Then I drove him to his hotel. We finished the interview the following morning and corresponded for weeks after that. Bryan’s notion was that the story of the Mullen family was a symbol of how Vietnam was tearing America apart. I just hoped I’d finally been able to set the record straight. Bryan ultimately published a book on the subject, Friendly Fire. When it came out, in 1976, I found it an honest and moving account of the incident.

By the early spring of 1972 I’d pretty much picked up my life where I’d left off. I’d graduated to a back brace that fit under my uniform and returned to work at Infantry Branch. In March our daughter Jessica was born. What a joy she was—her baby smile could light up a room. Having a toddler and an infant in the house, coupled with my physical condition, limited our ability to socialize—but neither Brenda nor I took much interest in the Washington whirl. We spent most of our social time with classmates and their wives, such as Pete and Ginger Lash, Ward and Judy Le Hardy, and Bill and Nancy Cody, who lived close by. We also managed occasional visits to Brenda’s parents in Timberville, one hundred miles south of Washington. We both looked forward to the summer, when we’d move to Pennsylvania to start our year at the Army War College.

One Saturday evening that spring Sally came over for dinner bringing a magnum of Châteauneuf-du-Pape. Sally was practically a part of our household: every Thursday she’d come over to play cards, watch TV, or just talk, and often she’d turn up one evening on the weekend, too. Sally lived right across the Potomac in a hilly, wooded section of Bethesda, Maryland, where she’d rented a wonderful, eccentric log cabin that had once been a summer cottage. She had immersed herself in her career and never married—and while she could tell us very little about her job, we knew she was one of a handful of women to achieve an executive position at the National Security Agency. Sally had also become the glue that held the Schwarzkopf family together. More than the rest of us, she looked after Mom, who, at seventy-one, suffered serious medical problems and had moved to Chevy Chase, Maryland, in order to have access to Walter Reed. Sally also stayed in close touch with Ruth, who in the past year had moved to Middlebury, Vermont, where Simon had a new teaching job. I had grown particularly close to Sally, and though she was older than me—she was now forty—I’d come to think of her as my kid sister.

After cocktails and a long, lively dinner—Brenda hardly drank, so Sally and I polished off the magnum between us—we all settled down in front of the TV. Sally and I were always great talkers and tonight we’d started some desultory discussion about civil liberties when I noticed the screen. There was a Korean War movie on, and a number of soldiers in combat fatigues were moving out across a large open field. The minute I saw that, I knew what was going to happen: they were walking into a minefield. Sure enough, a guy stepped on a mine, and I recoiled in horror. The other guys kept walking and I heard myself saying, “Don’t do that. Don’t do that. Don’t do that.” They hit the mines too.

Sally was looking at me in amusement. “Come on, Norman, it’s just a movie. It’s not even about Vietnam. Aren’t you overreacting?”

“I’m not,” I said. I was shaking.

“Oh, you are. It’s not that bad.”

“What the hell are you talking about, not that bad? People died! Arms were blown off! Legs were blown off! You have no idea what you’re talking about. How can you tell me it’s not that bad!”

“Why worry about it? It’s behind us,” she insisted.

I deeply resented that. “It’s not behind us. It’s still going on. Goddammit, I can’t stand the people in this country who say it’s over, who are trying to put it behind us, who are trying to pretend it never happened! Don’t tell me I shouldn’t react. You sound just like the peaceniks!”

Sally misread how strongly I was reacting. She thought I was just being argumentative and pressed on: “You can’t just dismiss everything the peaceniks say. They have some legitimate points.”

“You don’t know anything about it.”

“Oh, yes, I do. I read the newspaper every day.” That really burned me up—Sally always believed every word in The Washington Post. Before I knew it, she was going on about the South Vietnamese—how their government was corrupt and didn’t really represent the people, how they weren’t capable of running their own country, and on and on. I couldn’t believe my ears. I’d always thought Sally was on my side. But what I was hearing was a dismissal of the war and a willingness to walk away from everything we stood for in Vietnam—an attitude that, to my mind, was contributing to the loss of more American lives. I couldn’t tolerate that. “I’m sorry,” I interrupted, “but if you honestly believe these things, if you honestly feel that way, then I don’t want you in this house.”

Sally bristled. “Well, I honestly do feel that way.”

“Then get out.” I was in tears because I felt so betrayed, and now she was crying, too. “Get out of my house.”

“Oh, now, Norman, I …”

“There’s nothing to talk about! Get out.” Sally left.

Brenda had watched in shock as the scene unfolded. “You shouldn’t have said that, Norm. Why don’t you go after her?”

“Hell, no! I meant every word.” I went to bed.

When I woke up the next morning, I remembered what I’d done and some of the things we’d said. I couldn’t believe the insane way in which I’d treated my sister. Lying there, I came to two conclusions. Number one, I had to put Vietnam behind me. I would never forget the lessons it had taught me, but I couldn’t allow it to consume me and destroy my family. Number two, I reminded myself: “Schwarzkopf, your mother is an alcoholic. What happened last night was largely a result of your having had too much to drink.” I’d been a heavy weekend drinker since my days as a second lieutenant at Fort Campbell, and I’d always assumed I could handle it. Now I saw I really couldn’t, and made up my mind that I’d never let booze take control of my life.

Then I got up, called Sally, and told her I was sorry. She, in turn, apologized for getting me upset. That ended the fight between us, which was really not where the anger had come from at all. It had come from inside me.

The site of the Army War College was a beautiful, sleepy town called Carlisle in Pennsylvania Dutch country about one hundred miles west of Philadelphia. We qualified for a two-bedroom apartment on post, but Brenda and I opted to take the quarters allowance and rent a small, three-bedroom, brick house in town. This effectively took us out of the social mainstream—pickup softball games in the afternoon and spur-of-the-moment parties that seemed to go on at all hours—but for our young family it was just right, and I savored the time spent with Brenda and the girls.

The War College devoted very little time to lessons on waging war. Its aim was to take lieutenant colonels accustomed to seeing the world from the worm’s-eye perspective of a battalion commander and whet their appetites for knowledge that had application far beyond the battlefield. Accordingly, the program ranged across contemporary history, world affairs, international relations, U.S. policy-making, and numerous other aspects of national and international thinking—a curriculum that even faculty members frequently described as “a mile wide and an inch deep.” My class, which numbered 234 and included a sprinkling of Navy, Air Force, and Marine officers, was segmented into fifteen-person seminar groups. A typical day had the entire class assembling for a lecture in the morning, then breaking for lunch, moving on to our respective seminar rooms for an hour of discussion in the early afternoon, and then heading home, ostensibly to read or work on case studies for the balance of the day. So much latitude was built into the schedule that at first no one could believe it—we kept looking over our shoulder to see if someone was checking on us.

It was a strange time to attend the War College. Not only had Vietnam demoralized our soldiers and wrecked our credibility with the American public, but it had soaked up a huge share of the Army’s budget. Meanwhile our fighting equipment had become obsolete, our bases and facilities had fallen into disrepair, and our ability to fight anywhere else in the world—even in Europe against the Warsaw Pact, which was still the Army’s number-one mission—had seriously deteriorated. Many officers looked to Creighton Abrams, who had succeeded Westmoreland as chief of staff, to lead the Army to recovery, but we all knew the process would take years.

My class, which consisted almost entirely of Vietnam veterans, didn’t hesitate to challenge speakers who tried to paint rosy pictures. One morning that winter, a brigadier general presented a detailed description of how NATO would turn back a Warsaw Pact invasion. In his scenario, the enemy—sustaining terrible losses—would gradually force NATO all the way back across Germany and France to the beaches of Spain. There huge U.S. Air Force C-5A transport planes would swoop in, land on the sand, and unload thousands of fresh troops and hundreds of tons of equipment, thus enabling NATO to launch a counterattack that would repulse the Red horde. There was an embarrassed silence in the lecture hall. Then an Air Force lieutenant colonel stood up: “Sir, I know a lot about the C-5A and the bearing weight of runways. There are no runways in that part of Spain that the aircraft can land on, and it certainly can’t land on a sand beach.” Another officer rose and asked: “Where are these nonexistent troops and equipment coming from?”

The general looked around, and it finally dawned on him that he was in a room full of critics. “What I detect here,” he said, “is a non-can-do attitude.”

On Saturday, January 27, 1973, Henry Kissinger, our national security adviser, and Le Duc Tho, the principal negotiator for North Vietnam, signed a cease-fire agreement in Paris and the war officially came to an end. Nobody felt like celebrating. That same day Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird announced an end to the draft. We would somehow have to attract volunteers at the exact moment when virtually nobody wanted to serve. The Army had an answer to this challenge—its so-called Modern Volunteer Army initiative—which had been in the works for almost two years. It called for us to make military service more attractive by making it more like a civilian job. To kick off the new recruiting strategy, we launched a big advertising campaign built around the theme “The Army Wants to Join You.”

I was curious to see how all this was going to work and had my chance on a class field trip to Fort Carson, Colorado, the home of a mechanized division that served as a test-bed for Modern Volunteer Army innovations. We were shown into a large briefing room where a brigade commander was ready with a presentation. I was expecting descriptions of new training programs, improvements in family living quarters, and the like, but the first thing he did was to pull out a multicolored baseball cap. “These specially made caps help the troops to relate to the task force they’re in,” he said. Each color meant something different. If a task force consisted of, say, two infantry battalions and an armor battalion supported by an artillery battalion, the cap would have two blue panels, one yellow, and one red. He went into this in great detail and then moved on to such innovations as beer vending machines in the barracks and topless go-go dancers in the officers’ and NCOs’ clubs. He told us, absolutely straight-faced: “This is the modern era! We in the military have to adjust to the way civilians think.”

“This is crazy,” one of my classmates muttered. He was right—the entire program we were shown consisted of bells and whistles, with not a single fundamental change that would have meant anything to the troops. It suddenly struck me that the Army was lost and groping to find its way.

Meanwhile, I had known that December 1972 was the first time the Army would consider officers in my year group for early promotion to full colonel. We could expect routine promotions two more years down the road. All autumn everyone had told me they were sure I’d be picked; I’d even gotten feelers from various Army units that wanted me for a colonel’s job. Having served in personnel, I knew that only a very small percentage of officers got selected, and while I thought I had a pretty good chance, I believed very strongly that no one had a right to expect an early promotion. All the same, being promoted early buoyed an officer’s reputation and I’d secretly let myself look forward to it.

The list came out on a January weekend, and by the time I walked into the War College Monday morning and saw several of my classmates patting each other on the back, I knew my name wasn’t on it. I was disappointed, confused, and shaken: I’d have another shot at early promotion the next winter, but this was the first time in my career when I was clearly no longer at the front of the pack. People offered condolences, which drove me crazy, as well as theories as to why I’d been bypassed. The main one was that I’d never served on the Army staff at the Pentagon. I found that convincing: at Infantry Branch we’d always advised lieutenant colonels that for early promotion they needed battalion command, the War College, and high-level staff service. We’d considered ourselves high-level staff at Infantry Branch, but maybe we’d been wrong.

Soon I got a call from my friends Bob Riscassi and Dick Larkin, colonels who worked for an assistant secretary of the Army at the Pentagon and knew I’d now be looking for a lieutenant colonel’s job. I’d met Dick during my second tour in Vietnam, and Bob when I’d worked at Infantry Branch. “There’s an opening here at the Pentagon,” they said. “If you take it, you’ll be working in the highest circles of the Army. If you’re interested, we’ll throw your hat in the ring.” I asked what the job was; they told me, military assistant to the assistant secretary of the Army for financial management. It wasn’t exactly the sort of work I’d aspired to, but I was comfortable with numbers and knew I could handle it.

My alternative was to go to Fort Benning, Georgia, where I was being offered a role in the Army’s effort to recover from Vietnam. One of the first major reforms had been the institution of a new four-star command, Training and Doctrine Command, or TRADOC. Its head was General William DePuy, who had proven himself a brilliant, innovative field commander in Vietnam. DePuy’s mission was nothing less than to totally rethink the way the Army trained its forces and fought its wars, and my job would have been to help test and refine the new ideas at the Infantry School at Fort Benning. The prospect excited me: not only did I like innovation and enjoy teaching, but I knew I’d have terrific colleagues—DePuy had selected some of the Army’s most talented officers to work at the service schools.

The only problem was that TRADOC was new and everyone was advising me to return to Washington, so I reluctantly decided the Pentagon was where I had to be. In early February I asked Riscassi and Larkin to speak up on my behalf, and before long I was invited to Washington to meet Hadlai Hull, the Army’s assistant secretary for financial management. The interview went very well; within days the job was mine.

For the first time in my Army career, I’d opted for an assignment not because I wanted it, not because I felt it was where I could make the greatest contribution to the Army or my country, but because I thought it would help me get ahead. I’d decided to ticket punch.

Working in the so-called Army secretariat—the civilian-dominated section of the Pentagon that included the offices of the secretary of the Army, his undersecretary, his assistant secretaries, and their deputies—took some getting used to. On my first afternoon I’d gone to attend to a bureaucratic task elsewhere in the building, and when I came back to our office at five o’clock, I found myself locked out. Everyone had gone home. The Pentagon staff manual stated that business hours were from 8:00 A.M. to 4:30 P.M., and those were the hours the secretariat kept. This was a pleasant change from the fourteen-hour days at Infantry Branch.

The bad news was that Riscassi and Larkin had exaggerated somewhat when they’d implied that my name would be known in the highest circles of the Army: being a military assistant was actually a fairly obscure job. My first inkling of this came early on, when I was assigned to do a lot of work for Deputy Assistant Secretary Ekhard Bennewitz. He was a dark-haired, middle-aged man with a friendly disposition who for some reason got it into his head that my name was Marvin. Whenever we passed each other in the hall, he’d say, “Hi, Marv!” After about two months it really got to me, and I asked his executive officer to discreetly let him know my real name. The next week, whenever Mr. Bennewitz saw me in the hall, he’d grin and say, “Hi, Norm! Good to see you, Norm!” I felt much better.

That Friday I was scheduled to give a briefing on a major study we had in the works that concerned Army-base closures and was known as Project Concise. The meeting was a strategy session and all the deputy assistant secretaries assembled in Mr. Bennewitz’s office. When the moment came for me to speak, Mr. Bennewitz called me in and introduced me to his colleagues: “Of course you all know one of Mr. Hull’s military assistants. This is Norm Schwarz-mueller.” Riscassi and Larkin, who thought this was hilarious, promptly nicknamed me Marvin Schwarzmueller.

Project Concise opened my eyes to the inner workings of Washington. Early in 1972 the Army had faced up to the fact that, because of budget cuts, it could no longer sustain all its bases across the United States. The staff had set out to determine objectively which would have to close. During the autumn of 1973, we digested tens of thousands of pages of mission analyses, economic-impact studies, environmental-impact studies, and the like, representing thousands upon thousands of hours of work, to derive a final list. We were confident that this was the best and fairest base-closure list in military history.

Howard “Bo” Calloway, the secretary of the Army, decided that, as a courtesy, we would brief senators from the states involved before we made a public announcement. So he dispatched a team of staff officers to Capitol Hill and I went along as an observer. Our first call was on Senator John J. Sparkman, the powerful Alabama Democrat whose state was home to Fort McClellan—the base we’d identified as the least efficient in the entire U.S. Army. We’d prepared a superb briefing, crystal clear in its evidence and irrefutable in its logic as to why Fort McClellan had to close. The senator, a kindly old gentleman, listened intently as my colleagues laid out our case. Finally, in his deep southern accent, he said, “Young men, ah wanna compliment you on this wonderful briefing. It’s obvious that you have gone to a great deal of hard work, and the facts that you have assembled are startling, and I feel quite sure that you think every one of ’em is true.” We all started to preen. Smiling, he continued, “There’s something else I’d like to say about this wonderful presentation.”

We all leaned forward. “Yes, sir? What is it?”

“You go back and tell your bosses in the Pentagon that as long as I am the senator from the great state of Alabama, you ain’t nevuh gonna close Fort McClellan!” With that he stormed out of the room.

I was in Bennewitz’s office on a Saturday morning two weeks later when we made up the final list for public announcement. It was one hundred percent political: “Well, we can’t close that base, and we can close this one, and here’s another we’ll probably get away with, but we won’t be able to …” Eighteen months of hard work counted for nothing: we could have put together the list without a single day of study. To accomplish anything in Washington meant having to compromise, manipulate, and put in the fix behind the scenes.

Despite my disenchantment with the Pentagon and Washington, my decision to ticket punch now looked as if it was going to pay off. In early November the Army nominated me to serve as a military aide to Vice President Ford—a prestigious Executive Office Building job that would leave me with powerful connections in the event I decided to retire. I was flattered to be chosen out of all the lieutenant colonels in the Army, and didn’t even mind when I got a call from my West Point classmate Don O’Shei, a fellow lieutenant colonel who said he’d been nominated too. After I congratulated him, Don remarked, “I hope you know that Jack Walker’s name has cropped up also.” Walker was a friend from the Army War College and a great officer who had served as a military assistant to Defense Secretary Melvin Laird for years.

“Jeez, I had no idea,” I said. I thought about it for a minute and concluded, “Let’s not be naive. If Walker is really up for the job, it’ll go to him. Melvin Laird is one of the Vice President’s best friends. Why should we even consider ourselves in the running?” Don agreed.

Shortly afterward I ran into Walker at a cocktail party and asked about the military aide job. “I’m not interested in that at all,” he said. “I want to command a brigade. As a matter of fact, I’m pushing for you to work with Ford.”

As the selection process went on, I really got my hopes up. I was interviewed by Jack Marsh, the Vice President’s assistant for national security affairs—and, as it happened, a former congressman from the Shenandoah Valley. A banker Brenda knew there sent a note on my behalf, and the interview went very well. Then I had an opportunity to meet the Vice President himself. I thought we really hit it off. Ford was famous for having played center during his football days, and I had been a nose guard; he joked that he wouldn’t hold it against me that I’d beat up on so many centers. Finally I was interviewed by his chief of staff. All the while, Don O’Shei was going through the same beauty contest—he and I kept comparing notes—and periodically Jack Walker would call to check on how we were doing. November and December passed.

Early January 1974 brought two events in quick succession. First, the Army released its list for early promotion to colonel, and to my utter shock, again I’d not been selected. I sat in my office reading and rereading it in stunned disbelief. On it were the names of several friends and classmates and contemporaries—my West Point roommate Leroy Suddath was on it—but not mine. I felt a wave of revulsion at the manipulations I’d been party to in my eagerness to get picked—the secretariat, for instance, had submitted my efficiency report way ahead of schedule to make sure the promotion board knew that I’d gotten my Pentagon ticket punched.

A few days later Jack Walker called me at work. “Norm, I’ve just been notified that I’ve been selected to go to work for Gerald Ford,” he said. “But I’m sure it’s not the same job that you’re competing for.”

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. “Jack, of course it’s the same job. Congratulations. I’m happy that you got the assignment—if that’s what you wanted.” I got off the phone as quickly as I could and sat at my desk feeling like a total fool. The whole thing had been rigged and I hadn’t seen it. Obviously Walker had had the job from the start; O’Shei and I had just been there for show.

I raced downstairs to the Pentagon athletic center, where I worked out every day, and started punching the heavy bag. I didn’t even bother to put on gloves. I pounded it and pounded it, angry at the whole damned dumb system. How could I have allowed myself to ticket punch? How could I have gotten caught up in a race to join a political world I detested? I beat that punching bag until it was smeared with blood from the knuckles of both fists. I think I was imagining it to be me.

I kept my sanity that year through physical activity. I swam and went running every day, consumed quantities of vitamins, and by the time I turned forty, was in the best physical shape of my life. At home, I played with my kids, immersed myself in hobbies, including wine making and magic, my old favorite, and developed into quite a handyman. When we’d moved back to Annandale from the War College, Brenda and I had bought our first house, a brand-new five-bedroom colonial with a large unfinished basement. I’d promptly boned up on home-repair manuals, spent lots of money on tools and supplies, and set out to build a rec room. I paneled the walls, laid a linoleum floor, hung the ceiling, and installed wiring—all to the amazement of Brenda’s dad. Until that moment, I think, Jesse Jefferson Holsinger had honestly believed that his son-in-law was in the military because he wasn’t really capable of anything else. The fact that I’d graduated from West Point, earned a master’s degree in missile engineering, and commanded a battalion in Vietnam meant virtually nothing to him compared with my being able to finish a rec room with my own two hands. For the first time Jesse seemed persuaded that I would survive in the real world if I ever got out of the Army.

Meanwhile, life at the Pentagon went on. The Army had announced its intention to develop and build a whole new generation of weapon systems over the next ten years—the M-1 tank, the Bradley Fighting Vehicle, the Apache and Black Hawk helicopters, the Sergeant York air-defense gun, and the Patriot and Pershing missiles. A good part of my job was to weave these costly programs into both our annual budget and the five-year plan and then help the Army staff and secretariat figure out how to sell them to Congress. I worked hard and gained a reputation as a team player who knew how to get things done in the bureaucracy—something of which I wasn’t entirely proud.

I knew I had to make a change. I had two years left at the Pentagon; three before hitting the twenty-year mark in my career. I could extend my current assignment a year and then retire without ever leaving Washington. But that didn’t seem to be a real choice. I asked myself why I was wasting my time as a staff officer and I thought back over the jobs that had made me happy, starting with my earliest days as a second lieutenant commanding a platoon. I realized that even if I were destined to end my career at twenty years, I wanted to get back to the troops. Yet I knew the odds were against that: officers on the Pentagon staff were considered essential and were rarely permitted to leave Washington before their tour was complete.

In November, my name finally appeared on the list for colonel—no cause for celebration, as far as I was concerned, because the promotion was practically automatic for officers with more than six years as a lieutenant colonel who had commanded a battalion and attended the War College.

A few weeks later I got a call from a friend, Brad Johnson, whom I’d met during my first tour in Vietnam—he was the helicopter pilot who medevacked me the day I got shot riding in the armored personnel carrier with Colonel Truong. We’d been drinking buddies afterward as instructors at West Point, and our paths had crossed again during these last few years in Washington. He was now commanding a helicopter battalion in Fairbanks, Alaska. Brad knew how miserable I was at the Pentagon. After congratulating me drily on my promotion he said, “There’s something up here that you ought to know about.” He launched into an elaborate description of U.S. Army Alaska, the command to which he was attached. He explained that, in addition to an unusually large combat brigade, it included the garrisons of three bases, the Arctic Test Center, and several National Guard and Army Reserve support units, so that it totaled twelve thousand personnel, nearly enough for a full division. As part of a major reorganization of the Army, U.S. Army Alaska was being renamed the 172nd Infantry Brigade (Alaska) and placed under a single brigadier general. He would be swamped with administrative work, so actual command of the combat brigade would fall to the deputy brigade commander, a colonel.

“What’s the point of telling me this?” I asked.

“They can’t find anybody to take the deputy job. If you grab it, you’ll be a brigade commander in everything but title and you’ll have one of the largest brigades in the Army. It’s perfect!”

Something clicked in my brain: Brigadier General Willard Latham, who was reputedly the most hard-nosed general in the entire Army, had just been assigned the Alaska command. I’d heard friends from Infantry Branch complain that nobody wanted to be his deputy. They’d tried to recruit an experienced brigade commander because the combat unit was so large, but every colonel they’d approached had said in effect, “Are you nuts? I’ve already got my brigade-command ticket punched. Why should I risk my career to work as a deputy for Will Latham?”

But I was through worrying. Here was my chance to be a troop commander again—in a setting about as far away from the Pentagon as I could get. All week at my desk I could scarcely get Alaska out of my mind. Finally I made an appointment at the Colonels Division of the Officers Personnel Directorate. Since I was now on the promotion list to full colonel, that office would handle my next assignment.

The Assignment officer had been there when I’d run the Professional Development Section. He was happy to see me until I asked whether I could be considered for a new assignment. Then he began to hem and haw: “Well, you’re in a very key job. It would have to be something very important for us to try to break you loose.”

“How about Alaska?”

His eyebrows shot up. “Are you interested?” I thought he was going to leap across the desk and kiss me. He said, “I think we can make this work.”

Two weeks later, I had my orders. They read something like this:

THE FOLLOWING NAMED OFFICER IS RELEASED EFFECTIVE 7 DECEMBER 1974 FROM ASSIGNMENT AS MILITARY ASSISTANT, OFFICE OF THE ASSISTANT SECRETARY OF THE ARMY (FM) AND WILL REPORT NOT LATER THAN 11 DECEMBER 1974 TO REPLACEMENT COMPANY, FORT RICHARDSON, ALASKA, FOR FURTHER ASSIGNMENT AS DEPUTY COMMANDER, 172ND INFANTRY BRIGADE, FORT RICHARDSON, ALASKA: SCHWARZKOPF, H. NORMAN, LTC(P)

I was free. But while my friends offered congratulations, they couldn’t understand why I would give up a plum career assignment in order to command troops in the Arctic in the dead of winter, working for a notoriously fierce boss. The ticket punchers thought I was crazy.