Monday, Sep. 18, 1995

MY AMERICAN JOURNEY

LIFE ON BANANA KELLY

I was born on April 5, 1937, at a time when my family was living on Morningside Avenue in Harlem. The dominant figure of my youth was a small man, 5 ft. 2 in. 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 subway station. He wears a coat and tie, 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 druggist, 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 20s, 17 years before I was born. He never discussed his life in Jamaica, but I do know that he was the second of nine children born to poor folk in Top Hill. He literally came to America on a banana boat, a United Fruit Co. steamer that docked in Philadelphia. He went to work for Ginsburg's (later named the Gaines Co.), manufacturers of women's suits and coats at 500 Seventh Avenue in Manhattan's garment district. He started out working in the stock room, moved up to become a shipping clerk, and eventually became foreman of the shipping department.

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 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.

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. She 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 die-hard Democrat. But Pop, by 1952, was supporting Dwight Eisenhower.

After early years in Harlem, 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. In those days, Hunts Point was heavily Jewish mixed with Irish, Polish, Italian, blacks and Hispanics. 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.

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 and third-generation welfare families. 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. Yet crime and violence in those days did not begin to suggest the social breakdown depicted in Fort Apache. That was yet to come.

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. Racial epithets were hurled around and sometimes led to fistfights. But it was not "You're inferior--I'm better.'' The fighting was more like avenging an insult to your team. 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 Amos 'n' 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.

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 17th birthday. Except for a certain facility in unloading prams at Sickser's, a neighborhood store where I worked part time, I had not yet excelled at anything. I was the "good kid," the "good worker," nothing 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-yd. dash, because I could get it over with faster, but I dropped out after one season. We had a basketball team at St. Margaret's Episcopal Church. 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 inability 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 at St. Margaret's. 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.

Following my sister 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 N.Y.U., a private school, was $750 a year; at CCNY, a public school, it was $10. I chose CCNY. My mother turned out to be my guidance counselor. My two Jamaican cousins, Vernon and Roy, were studying engineering. "That's where the money is," Mom advised. 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. 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. 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.

During my first semester at CCNY, something had caught my eye--young guys on campus in uniform. I inquired about the Reserve Officers Training Corps, and then 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. 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. There came a day when I stood in line 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 17. 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 forward to was ROTC and the military society I belonged to, the Pershing Rifles. For the first time in my life I was a member of a brotherhood. PRs drilled together. We partied together. We cut classes together. We had a fraternity office on campus from which we occasionally sortied out to class or, just as often, to the student lounge, where we tried to master the mambo. I served as an unlikely academic adviser, 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.

Graduating from college in 1958, Powell underwent basic training at Fort Benning, Georgia. The segregated South was a revelation for Powell as he quickly discovered he could buy what he wanted at the local Woolworth so long as he didn't try to eat there or use the men's room.

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. I was not going to let myself become emotionally crippled because I could not play on the whole field. I was not going to allow someone else's feelings about me to become my feelings about myself. I occasionally felt hurt; I felt anger; but most of all I felt challenged. I'll show you!

THE VIETNAM YEARS

After Fort Benning, Powell received his first assignment: platoon leader in the 48th Infantry, based in Gelnhausen, West Germany. When his required three-year stint in the Army was up in 1961, Powell opted to stay, much to the bewilderment of his parents. "I did not know anything but soldiering,'' he recalls. "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.''

In the late summer of 1962, the exciting news arrived: Powell was headed to South Vietnam, one of the several thousand advisers dispatched there by President Kennedy. "By God, a worldwide communist conspiracy was out there,'' Powell recalls feeling, "and we had to stop it wherever it raised its ugly head.'' He arrived in Saigon on Christmas morning, and less than one month later boarded a Marine H-34 helicopter for the half-hour ride to a jungle outpost called A Shau.

I jumped to the ground, looked around and felt as if I had been propelled backward in time. Shimmering in the heat of the sun was an earth-and-wood fortress ringed by pillboxes. But for the greenness, A Shau had a French Foreign Legion quality, Beau Geste without the sand. I stood there asking myself the question I am sure Roman legionnaires must have asked in Gaul-What the hell am I doing here?

A Vietnamese officer saluted and put out his hand. "Captain Vo Cong Hieu, commanding 2nd Battalion," he said in passable English. Hieu was my Army of the Republic of Vietnam (arvn) counterpart, the man I would be advising. He was short, in his early 30s, with a broad face and an engaging smile. But for the uniform, I would have taken him for a genial schoolteacher.

Directly behind A Shau, a mountain loomed over us. I pointed toward it, and Hieu said with a grin, "Laos." From that mountainside, the enemy could almost roll rocks down onto us. I wondered why the base had been established in such a vulnerable spot.

"Very important outpost," Hieu assured me.

"What's its mission?" I asked.

"Very important outpost," Hieu repeated.

"But why is it here?"

"Outpost is here to protect airfield," he said, pointing in the direction of our departing Marine helo.

"What's the airfield here for?" I asked.

"Airfield here to resupply outpost."

I knew our formal role here: we were to establish a "presence," a word with a nice sophisticated ring. More specifically, we were supposed to engage the Viet Cong to keep them from moving through the A Shau Valley and fomenting their insurgency in the populated coastal provinces. But Hieu's words were the immediate reality. The base camp at A Shau was there to protect an airstrip that was there to supply the outpost.

I would spend nearly 20 years, one way or another, grappling with our experience in this country. And over all that time, Vietnam rarely made much more sense than Captain Hieu's circular reasoning on that January day in 1963. We're here because we're here, because we're...

Two weeks later, Powell got the news he was waiting for: he and his 400-man battalion would embark on Operation Grasshopper, an extended patrol down A Shau Valley. The journey marked Powell's introduction not only to combat but also to its deadly consequences.

It happened on the sixth day out as we were coming down a steep hillside. I was a quarter of the way back in the column, the customary place for advisers. As usual, we were moving in single file, which meant that the V.C. could halt the entire column by picking off the first man. I had urged Hieu to break the battalion into three or four parallel columns, but the forest was so dense and the passes so narrow in places that Hieu let this bit of American wisdom go politely unheeded.

I had just arrived at the bottom of a narrow creek bed when I heard several sharp cracks. Incoming fire, the first I had ever experienced, rifles and submachine guns, I guessed. I heard a scream up ahead. The men began shouting and running around in utter confusion. I repressed my own terror and started to make my way forward to find out what had happened. When I got to the head of the column, I saw a knot of Vietnamese huddled around a groaning soldier, a medic kneeling at his side. An ARVN noncom gestured toward the creek. Another small figure lay there in a fetal crouch. His head was turned sideways, and the creek flowed across his face. This man was dead. We had been ambushed. We had taken casualties from attackers who had vanished before we had ever seen them. The whole cycle--silence, shots, confusion, death and silence again--was over in a couple of minutes.

As night fell, we camped on high ground where we would be less vulnerable to attack than down in the valley. The usual tumult of rattling pots, squealing animals, shouting men and billowing fires began. I threw down my pack, my carbine, my helmet damp with cold sweat, and slumped to the ground. I felt drained. The lark was over. The exhilaration of a cocky 25-year-old American had evaporated in a single burst of gunfire. Somebody got killed today. Somebody was liable to get killed tomorrow, and the day after. This was not war movies on a Saturday afternoon; it was real, and it was ugly.

We were ambushed almost daily, usually in the morning, soon after we got under way. The point squad took the brunt of the casualties. We switched companies around, giving everybody an equal chance at being blown away. Still, I found it maddening to be ambushed, to lose men day after day to this phantom enemy who hit and ran and hit again, with seeming impunity, never taking a stand, never giving us anything to shoot at.

The entry in my notebook for May 18 is significant. "Contact 0805. 1 V.C. KIA..." We had been patrolling a gorge fed by a rushing stream that covered up our noise. For once, our point squad spotted the V.C. before they spotted us. For once, we did the ambushing. We nailed them. A hail of fire dropped several V.C., and the rest fled. We approached gingerly. One man lay motionless on the ground, the first Viet Cong that I could definitely confirm we had killed in action. He lay on his back, gazing up at us with sightless eyes. The man was slightly built, had coarse, nut-brown features and wore the flimsy black short-legged outfit we called pajamas. My gaze fixed on his feet. He was wearing sandals cut from an old tire, a strip of the sidewall serving as the thong. This was our fearsome unseen enemy. I felt nothing, certainly not sympathy. I had seen too much death and suffering on our side to care anything about what happened on theirs. We took the wounded V.C.s prisoner and left.

The first confirmed kill produced a boost in morale among the ARVN. The numbers game, later termed the "body count," had not yet come into use. But the Vietnamese had already figured out what the Americans wanted to hear. They were forever "proving" kills to me by a patch of blood leading from an abandoned weapon or other circumstantial evidence. Not good enough, I told them. I became the referee in a grisly game, and a V.C. kia required a V.C. body. No body, no credit.

Soon after the first sure kill, a Vietnamese lieutenant came to me excitedly reporting another sure KIA. "Show me," I said. "Too far, too dangerous," he replied. I repeated the rule. He shook his finger as if to say, I'll show you. Half an hour later, he returned and handed me a handkerchief. I opened it and gaped at a pair of freshly cut ears.

That night around the campfire, I summoned the company commanders and senior noncoms. The rules needed refinement. A kill meant a whole body, not component parts. No ears. And no more mutilation of the enemy.

Six months later, coming out of the A Shau Valley , Powell stepped into a punji trap, and a dung-tipped spike ran through his right foot. He recovered quickly enough, but his days as a field adviser were over. "It would be dishonest to say I hated to leave combat,'' recalls Powell. "But by the time I was injured, I had become the battalion commander in all but name. I had taken the same risks, slept on the same ground and eaten from the same pots as these men and had spilled my blood with them. Shared death, terror and small triumphs in the A Shau Valley linked me closely to men with whom I could barely converse. I left my comrades with more than a tinge of regret.'' He was reassigned to 1st arvn Division Headquarters in Hue, where he worked as an assistant adviser on the operations staff.

When I left the A Shau Valley, I shifted from a worm's-eye to a bird's-eye view of the war, and the new vantage point was not comforting. One of my assignments was to feed data to a division intelligence officer who was trying to predict when mortar attacks were most likely to occur. He worked behind a green door marked no entry doing something called "regression analysis." My data got through the door, but not me. I was not cleared to enter. One day the officer finally emerged. There were, he reported, periods when we could predict increased levels of mortar fire with considerable certainty. When was that? By the dark of the moon. Well, knock me over with a rice ball. Weeks of statistical analysis had taught this guy what any arvn private could have told him in five seconds. It is more dangerous out there when it is dark.

The McNamara-era analytic measurements that were to dominate American thinking about Vietnam were just coming into vogue. We rated a hamlet as "secure" when it had a certain number of feet of fence around it, a militia to guard it and a village chief who had not been killed by the Viet Cong in the past three weeks. While I was in the Be Luong base camp, Secretary McNamara had made a visit to South Vietnam. "Every quantitative measurement ," he concluded after 48 hours there, "shows that we are winning the war." Measure it and it has meaning. Measure it and it is real. Yet nothing I had witnessed in the A Shau Valley indicated we were beating the Viet Cong. Beating them? Most of the time we could not even find them.

In time, just as I came to re-examine my feelings about the war, the Army, as an institution, would do the same thing. We accepted that we had been sent to pursue a policy that had become bankrupt. Our political leaders had led us into a war for the one-size-fits-all rationale of anticommunism, which was only a partial fit in Vietnam, where the war had its own historical roots in nationalism, anticolonialism and civil strife beyond the East-West conflict. Our senior officers knew the war was going badly. Yet they bowed to groupthink pressure and kept up pretenses, the phony measure of body counts, the comforting illusion of secure hamlets, the inflated progress reports. As a corporate entity, the military failed to talk straight to its political superiors or to itself. The top leadership never went to the Secretary of Defense or the President and said, "This war is unwinnable the way we are fighting it."

I remember, during my second Vietnam tour of duty in 1968-1969, a soldier who had stepped on a mine. One leg hung by a shred, and his chest had been punctured. We loaded him onto a helicopter and headed for the nearest evac hospital at Duc Pho, about 15 minutes away. He was just a kid, and I can never forget the expression on his face, a mixture of astonishment, fear, curiosity and, most of all, incomprehension. He kept trying to speak, but the words would not come out. His eyes seemed to be saying, Why? I did not have an answer, then or now. He died in my arms before we could reach Duc Pho.

THE GULF WAR

Powell began his day on Aug. 1, 1990, the usual way: up at 5:30 a.m., a workout on the Lifecycle, a breakfast of raisin bran, banana, orange juice and coffee. He arrived at his Pentagon office before 7 a.m., where a CIA analyst provided an overnight briefing. After a day of meetings that included a photo op with a colonel and a lunch at Blair House for the visiting President of Togo, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff headed home to his wife Alma and dinner by 7 p.m. A little before 8, the secure phone in his study rang: Michael Carns, his Joint Chiefs of Staff director, was calling to tell him that Saddam Hussein had just invaded Kuwait.

The news was not a total surprise. Saddam's growing deployment of troops near the Kuwaiti border during the previous few weeks had already led Powell to ask General H. Norman Schwarzkopf to draw up options in case of an Iraqi attack. As Commander in Chief of centcom (U.S. Central Command), Schwarzkopf was responsible for U.S. military activities in that part of the Middle East. President George Bush and his senior advisers met the day after the invasion to review Schwarzkopf's plans, but the meeting, in Powell's words, was "disjointed and unfocused.'' On Friday, Aug. 3, Bush and the National Security Council met in the Cabinet Room to hash out more scenarios. Among the participants were Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney, Deputy Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger and National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft.

Cheney turned to me to review military options. Again, I went over the Schwarzkopf plan for defending Saudi Arabia, describing the units we could put into the Gulf region in a hurry. I was reasonably sure that the Iraqis had not yet decided to invade Saudi Arabia. "But it's important,'' I said, "to plant the American flag in the Saudi desert as soon as possible, assuming we can get their O.K.''

Cheney and Eagleburger agreed. Scowcroft had taken this position within hours of the invasion. "We're committed to Saudi Arabia,'' the President said. We could start alerting units to be prepared to defend the country.

I then asked if it was worth going to war to liberate Kuwait. It was a Clausewitzian question, which I posed so that the military would know what preparations it might have to make. I detected a chill in the room. The question was premature, and it should not have come from me. I had overstepped; I was only supposed to give military advice. Nevertheless, as National Security Adviser for Ronald Reagan, I had wrestled with the politics and economics of crises for almost two years in the White House, in this very room. I had participated in superpower summits. More to the point, as a midlevel career officer, I had been appalled at the docility of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, fighting the war in Vietnam without ever pressing the political leaders to lay out clear objectives for them. Before we start talking about how many divisions, carriers and fighter wings we need, I said, we have to ask, to achieve what end? But the question was not answered before the meeting broke up.

Later that day, President Bush and Scowcroft spoke with Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the Saudi ambassador to the U.S. and an old racquetball partner of mine. They wanted Bandar to understand the threat his country faced and to know that we were prepared to come to its aid. Afterward, Scowcroft called Cheney. Bandar was coming over, he said, and we were to give him another dose of reality. On his arrival at Cheney's office, Bandar played his usual Americanized, jaunty fighter-pilot role, drinking coffee from a foam cup and stirring it with a gold pen. Ordinarily, we addressed each other in terms bordering on the obscene, with my printable favorites including "Bandar the Magnificent" and "Bandar, you Arab Gatsby," while he called me "Milord." This day we did not kid around.

"We're ready to help you defend yourselves from Saddam," Cheney said.

Bandar gave us a look of bemused skepticism. "Like Jimmy Carter did?" He was referring to an earlier crisis in which President Carter had come to Saudi Arabia's aid with unarmed F-15 aircraft.

"Tell Prince Bandar what we are prepared to do," Cheney said to me.

"We'll start by bringing in the 1st Tactical Fighter Wing," I began, "and the 82d Airborne, and a carrier." I kept adding follow-up units.

Bandar's interest quickened, and he interrupted me. "What's that add up to?" he asked.

"All told," I said, "about 100,000 troops, for starters."

"I see," Bandar said. "You are serious."

"We suggest you urge King Fahd to accept our offer to protect the kingdom," Cheney concluded. Bandar left, assuring us that he was on his way to report what we had advised.

After he was gone, Cheney brought up our earlier meeting with the President. "Colin," he said, "you're Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. You're not Secretary of State. You're not the National Security Adviser anymore. And you're not Secretary of Defense. So stick to military matters." He made clear that I had taken liberty for license. I was not sorry, however, that I had spoken out at the White House. What I had said about giving the military clear objectives had to be said.

Within two days, George Bush expanded his objectives to include ousting Saddam from Kuwait. Thus, preparations began to assemble a force that would eventually total 541,000. During the course of the next few months, Powell would make thousands of decisions, ranging from helping to pick a name for the defensive part of the operation (Peninsula Shield and Crescent Shield were rejected in favor of Desert Shield) to getting around Riyadh's insistence that religious services for Jewish soldiers could not be held on Saudi soil (choppers picked up Jewish soldiers and brought them to ships stationed in the gulf to worship).

At one point, Cheney asked Powell to explore hypothetical nuclear-strike options against Iraqi units. Powell responded , "We're not going to let that genie loose.'' Cheney agreed, but he was curious to know what would be required. "The results unnerved me," recalls Powell. "To do serious damage to just one armored division dispersed in the desert would require a considerable number of small tactical nuclear weapons. I showed this analysis to Cheney and then had it destroyed.''

The air war began in Iraq on Jan. 17, 1991, one day after the U.N. Security Council deadline for Saddam to leave Kuwait had passed. The bombing went so well that by mid-February, Bush was eager to start the ground offensive. Powell relayed the President's wishes to Schwarzkopf, but setting a date proved to be trickier than Powell expected.

Norm Schwarzkopf, under pressure, was an active volcano. I occasionally found myself in transoceanic shouting matches with him that were full of barracks profanity. The cussing meant nothing; blowing up acted as a safety valve for his frustrations. Cheney occasionally required my reassurance that we had the right man in Riyadh; at one point, he said, "This is for all the marbles, you know. The presidency is riding on this one. Are you absolutely confident about Schwarzkopf?" I told him that my faith in Norm was total.

On Feb. 20, Norm called saying he had talked to his commanders and needed still another delay to start the ground war, to the 26th. He had the latest weather report in hand, he said, and bad weather was predicted for the 24th and 25th, maybe clearing on the 26th. Bad weather equaled reduced air support, which equaled higher casualties. I was on the spot. So far, Cheney had accepted my counsel. But now I did not feel that Norm was giving me sufficiently convincing arguments to take back to Cheney and the President. What should I expect next, a postponement to the 28th?

"Look," I told Norm, "10 days ago you told me the 21st. Then you wanted the 24th. Now you're asking for the 26th. I've got a President and a Secretary of Defense on my back. You've got to give me a better case for postponement. I don't think you understand the pressure I'm under."

Schwarzkopf exploded. "You're giving me political reasons why you don't want to tell the President not to do something militarily unsound!" He was yelling. "Don't you understand? My Marine commander says we need to wait. We're talking about Marines' lives." He had to worry about them, he said, even if nobody else cared.

That did it. I had backed Norm at every step, fended off his critics with one hand while soothing his anxieties with the other. "Don't you pull that on me!" I yelled back. "Don't you try to lay a patronizing guilt trip on me! Don't tell me I don't care about casualties! What are you doing, putting on some kind of show in front of your commanders?"

He was alone, Schwarzkopf said, in his private office, and he was taking as much heat as I was. "You're pressuring me to put aside my military judgment out of political expediency. I've felt this way for a long time!" he said. Suddenly, his tone shifted from anger to despair. "Colin, I feel like my head's in a vise. Maybe I'm losing it. Maybe I'm losing my objectivity."

I took a deep breath. The last thing I needed was to push the commander in the field over the edge on the eve of battle. "You're not losing it," I said. "We've just got a problem we have to work out. You have the full confidence of all of us back here. At the end of the day, you know I'm going to carry your message, and we'll do it your way." It was time to break off the conversation before one of us threw another match into the gasoline.

Within half an hour, Norm was back on the phone with the latest weather update. The 24th and the 25th did not look too bad after all. "We're ready," he said. We had a go for the 24th.

By the afternoon of Feb. 27, the ground war had gone so well that Powell met with Bush and other aides in the Oval Office to discuss ending the offensive.

I had already spoken to Norm Schwarzkopf earlier in the morning and told him I sensed we were nearing endgame. The prisoner catch was approaching 70,000. Saddam had ordered his forces to withdraw from Kuwait. The last major escape route was choked with fleeing soldiers and littered with the charred hulks of nearly 1,500 military and civilian vehicles. Reporters began referring to this road as the "Highway of Death."

I would have to give the President and Secretary Cheney a recommendation soon as to when to stop, I told Norm. The television coverage, I added, was starting to make it look as if we were engaged in slaughter for slaughter's sake.

"I've been thinking the same thing," Norm said. I asked him what he wanted. "One more day should do it," he answered. By then he would be able to declare that Iraq was no longer militarily capable of threatening its neighbors. And he added, "Do you realize, if we stop tomorrow night, the ground campaign will have lasted five days? How does that sound, the Five-Day War?"

Since that chipped one day off the famous victory of the Israelis over the Arab states in 1967, I said, "Not bad. I'll pass it along."

"We don't want to be seen as killing for the sake of killing, Mr. President," I said. "We're within the window of success. I've talked to General Schwarzkopf. I expect by sometime tomorrow the job will be done, and I'll probably be bringing you a recommendation to stop the fighting."

"If that's the case," the President said, "why not end it today?" He caught me by surprise. "I'd like you all to think about that," he added, looking around the room. "We're starting to pick up some undesirable public and political baggage with all those scenes of carnage. You say we've accomplished the mission. Why not end it?"

"That's something to consider," I replied. "But I need to talk to Norm first." I excused myself and went into the President's study just off the Oval Office. I picked up a secure phone, and the White House military operator put me through to Riyadh.

"Norm," I said, "the President wants to know if we can end it now."

"When is now?" he asked.

"We're looking at this evening." Given the eight-hour time difference, that would mean stopping the war in the middle of the night in the Gulf region.

"I don't have any problem," Norm said. "Our objective was to drive 'em out, and we've done it. But let me talk to my commanders, and unless they've run into a snag I don't know about, I don't see why we shouldn't stop."

By 5:30 p.m. Cheney and I were back at the White House, where we joined the President in the small office off the Oval Office. I took note of the time the President made his final decision to suspend hostilities, 5:57. It was the Commander in Chief's decision to make, and he had made it. Every member of his policymaking team agreed. Schwarzkopf and I agreed. And there is no doubt in my mind that if Norm or I had had the slightest reservation about stopping now, the President would have given us all the time we needed.

We moved into the Oval Office and started discussing the timing and content of the announcement President Bush would make to the American people that night. Shortly after 6 p.m., I got on the phone again with Schwarzkopf. I told him the President would speak at 9 our time to announce that the fighting would stop at 8 a.m. the following morning Riyadh time. That would give Norm almost the one more day he had asked for in our conversation earlier in the morning.

The President and then Cheney came on the line to congratulate him. "Helluva job, Norm," the President said.

Schwarzkopf was soon back on the phone with a cautionary note. The gate was still slightly open, he told me. Some Republican Guard units and T-72 tanks could slip away. I told him to keep hitting them, and I would get back to him. I passed Norm's report to the President and the others. Although we were all taken slightly aback, no one felt that what we had heard changed the basic equation. The back of the Iraqi army had been broken. What was left of it was retreating north. There was no need to fight a battle of annihilation to see how many more combatants on both sides could be killed. The President reaffirmed his decision to end the fighting. I then called Schwarzkopf again and relayed to him that the White House understood that there would be some leakage of Iraqi forces, but that this condition was acceptable.

Over 130 years after the event, historians are still debating General George Meade's decision not to pursue General Robert E. Lee's forces after the Union victory at Gettysburg. A half-century after World War II, scholars are still arguing over General Eisenhower's decision not to beat the Soviet armies to Berlin. And, I expect, years from now, historians will still ask if we should not have fought longer and destroyed more of the Iraqi army. Critics argue that we should have widened our war aims to include seizing Baghdad and driv ing Saddam Hussein from power. The critics include even my predecessor as Chairman, Admiral William J. Crowe Jr., who testified in Congress for continued sanctions and against going to war; but in his memoirs he argues that we should have continued fighting and expanded the mission to go after Saddam Hussein.

While the belief that Saddam pulled off some sort of Dunkirk at the end of Desert Storm may have a superficial attraction, I want to cut it off and kill it once and for all. It is true that more tanks and Republican Guard troops escaped from Kuwait than we expected. And yes, we could have taken another day or two to close that escape hatch. And yes, we could have killed, wounded or captured every single soldier in the Republican Guard in that trap. But it would not have made a bit of difference in Saddam's future conduct. Iraq, a nation of 20 million, can always pose a threat to Kuwait, with only 1.5 million people. With or without Saddam and with or without the Republican Guard, Kuwait's security depends on arrangements with its friends in the region and the U.S. That is the strategic reality. The other reality is that in 1991 we met the Iraqi army in the field and, while fulfilling the U.N.'s objectives, dealt it a crushing defeat and left it less than half of what it had been.

But why didn't we push on to Baghdad once we had Saddam on the run? Or, to put it another way, why didn't we move the goalposts? What tends to be forgotten is that while the U.S. led the way, we were heading an international coalition carrying out a clearly defined U.N. mission. That mission was accomplished.

Of course, we would have loved to see Saddam overthrown by his own people for the death and destruction he had brought down on them. But that did not happen. And President Bush's demonizing of Saddam as the devil incarnate did not help the public understand why he was allowed to stay in power. It is naive, however, to think that if Saddam had fallen, he would necessarily have been replaced by a Jeffersonian in some sort of desert democracy where people read the Federalist papers along with the Koran. Quite possibly, we would have wound up with a Saddam by another name.

One hundred and forty-seven Americans gave their lives in combat in the Gulf; another 236 died from accidents and other causes. Small losses as military statistics go, but a tragedy for each family. I have met some of these families, and their loss is heartbreaking. I am relieved that I don't have to say to many more parents, "I'm sorry your son or daughter died in the siege of Baghdad." I stand by my role in the President's decision to end the war when and how he did. It is an accountability I carry with pride and without apology.

MY FUTURE

After 35 years in uniform, Powell retired from the military on Sept. 30, 1993. Though Powell legally could have served a third two-year term as Chairman, he felt "ready to go. I had had a good run. And though President Clinton's national-security team was now working reasonably well, I was sure my departure would not be mourned.''

For his retirement ceremony at Fort Myer, Virginia, Powell donned his "suit of lights" for the last time. As thousands of guests, including George and Barbara Bush, looked on, Clinton awarded Powell the Presidential Medal of Freedom with Distinction. "Drum and bugle corps played, cannons fired a 19-gun salute, a flyover of jets and helicopters roared above the parade ground. As I looked over this spectacle of color and pageantry, I would have to be soul-dead not to marvel at the trajectory my life had followed, from an rotc second lieutenant out of ccny to the highest-ranking officer in the U.S. armed forces; from advising a few hundred men in the jungles of Vietnam to responsibility for over 2 million soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines; from growing up with tough kids in the South Bronx to association with leaders from all over the world. My only regret was that I could not do it all over again."

During my service in both military and civilian national-security posts, I studiously avoided doing or saying anything political, and it has taken me a while to shed the lifetime habits of a soldier. Gradually, however, as I speak around the country, the reticence is leaving.

To sum up my political philosophy, I am a fiscal conservative with a social conscience. Neither of the two major parties, however, fits me comfortably in its present state. Granted, politics is the art of compromise, but for now I prefer not to compromise just so that I can say I belong to this or that party. I am troubled by the political passion of those on the extreme right who seem to claim divine wisdom on political as well as spiritual matters. God provides us with guidance and inspiration, not a legislative agenda. I am disturbed by the class and racial undertones beneath the surface of their rhetoric. On the other side of the spectrum, I am put off by patronizing liberals who claim to know what is best for society but devote little thought to who will eventually pay the bills. I question the priorities of those liberals who lavish so much attention on individual license and entitlements that little concern is left for the good of the community at large. I distrust rigid ideology from any direction, and I am discovering that many Americans feel just as I do. The time may be at hand for a third major party to emerge to represent this sensible center of the American political spectrum.

As I speak around the country, I am constantly questioned about my future: specifically, am I going to run for President? I am flattered by my standing in public-opinion polls. To be a successful politician, however, requires a calling that I do not yet hear. I believe that I can serve my country in other ways, through charities, educational work or appointive posts.

Nevertheless, I do not unequivocally rule out a political future. If I ever do decide to enter politics, it will not be because of high popularity ratings in the polls. I am fully aware that in taking stands on issues, I would quickly alienate one interest group or another and burn off much popularity. And I would certainly not run simply because I saw myself as the "Great Black Hope," providing a role model for African Americans or a symbol to whites of racism overcome. I would enter only because I had a vision for this country. I would enter because I believed I could do a better job than the other candidates of solving the nation's problems. I would not expect or desire to have anything handed to me; I would fight for the right to lead. And I would enter not to make a statement but to win. I understand the battlefield, and I know what winning takes.

Frankly, the present atmosphere does not make entering public service especially attractive. I find that civility is being driven from our political discourse. Attack ads and negative campaigns produce destructive, not constructive, debate. Democracy has always been noisy, but now, on television and radio talk shows, demagoguery and character dismemberment displace reasoned dialogue. As you dial through the current flood of talk shows, you will hear endless whining and not much constructive advice for our country. Any public figure espousing a controversial idea can expect to have not just the idea attacked, but his or her integrity. And Lord help anyone who strays from accepted ideas of political correctness. The slightest suggestion of offense toward any group, however innocently made, and even when made merely to illustrate a historical point, will be met with cries that the offender be fired or forced to undergo sensitivity training, or threats of legal action.

Ironically, for all the present sensitivity over correctness, we seem to have lost our sense of shame as a society. Nothing seems to embarrass us; nothing shocks us anymore. Spend time switching channels on daytime television, and you will find a parade of talk shows serving up dysfunctional people whose morally vacant behavior offers the worst possible models for others. None of this mass voyeurism is more offensive to me than the use of black "guests" by talk-show producers, reinforcing the most demeaning racial stereotypes. At least in the old days of Amos 'n' Andy, Amos was happily married and hardworking, and he and his wife together were raising sweet little Arabella, who said her prayers every night.

We say we are appalled by the rise of sexually transmitted disease, by the wave of teenage pregnancies, by violent crime. Yet we drench ourselves in depictions of explicit sex and crime on television, in movies and in pop music. Language that I heard--and used--only on all-male Army posts is now scripted into the mouths of women, even children.

A sense of shame is not a bad moral compass. I remember how easy it was for my mother to snap me back into line with a simple rebuke: "I'm ashamed of you. You embarrassed the family." I would have preferred a beating to those words.

American voters channel-surfed right past a Republican President in 1992 and a Democratic Congress in 1994, looking, in my judgment, not so much for a different party but for a different spirit in the land, something better. How do we find our way again? How do we re-establish moral standards? How do we end the ethnic fragmentation that is making us an increasingly hyphenated people? How do we restore a sense of family to our national life?

We have to start thinking of America as a family. We have to stop screeching at each other, stop hurting each other, and instead start caring for, sacrificing for and sharing with each other. We have to stop constantly criticizing, which is the way of the malcontent, and instead get back to the can-do attitude that made America. We have to keep trying, and risk failing, in order to solve this country's problems. We cannot move forward if cynics and critics swoop down and pick apart anything that goes wrong to a point where we lose sight of what is right, decent and uniquely good about America.

Jefferson once wrote, "There is a debt of service due from every man to his country, proportioned to the bounties which nature and fortune have measured to him.'' As one who has received so much from his country, I feel that debt heavily, and I can never be entirely free of it. My responsibility, our responsibility as lucky Americans, is to try to give back to this country as much as it has given to us, as we continue our American journey together.