Colin Powell on the Vietnam War
If you were in the stateside service in the early to mid-70s – as I was – you may have noticed a certain lack of discipline and esprit de corps among the troops.
Even a lowly recruit serving in the Army Reserves sensed something was wrong. Toward the tail end of basic training at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, in the late fall of 1970, at the point where everyone was receiving word of their next assignment, the regulars who were going on to the infantry or to armor, for instance, were, to put it mildly, heart sick. Several spoke of fleeing to Canada. No one wanted to be zipped inside the last body bag hauled out of Vietnam.
A few years later, during Reserve summer camp at Fort Lee, Virginia, a group of soldiers, egged on by a contingent from Massachusetts, staged an open rebellion against the West Point-trained officer in charge of their outfit.
Things was dangerously amiss.
Colin Powell, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Secretary of State who died Oct. 18 at the age of 84, was himself a captain and later a major in Vietnam.
“The Army and Marine Corps troops that started deploying in ’65 were very professional,” Powell told an interviewer. “They had good leadership.
“But over the next several years, we started to have a lot of people and were rotating a lot of people with one-year tours and six-month command tours.”
“The quality of the force deteriorated. We started to have drug problems. There were some fragging problems, not as many as some people suggested, but I used to be careful in my own hooch, move my bed around because there was the potential to be fragged” – killed – “by your own troops.”
Powell told Vietnam Magazine’s Chuck Springston in 2016 that the “young soldiers coming in reflected the society they were coming from. Support for the war was dropping. Racial tension was rising. Conscription was seen as a problem.”
As a regimental commander in Korea, following the end of the draft and the beginning of an all-volunteer force, Powell confronted these and other problems. It was tough. The early volunteers tended not to be high school graduates.
“The challenge was immense, but it was the most rewarding year I’ve ever had – getting these kids in shape,” Powell said.
“We constantly had competitions. Best clerk, best mess hall, best anything, to make sure every youngster who had never been successful in high school had a chance to win.”
Many of the troops in Korea under Powell’s command earned general education degrees. The goal was not just better soldiers but to send them home better prepared for civilian life than they otherwise would have been.
Powell said by the time he was put in charge of the 2nd Brigade of the 101st Airborne Division at Fort Campbell in 1976, the Army was on the road to recovery.
“The real end to this period … was Ronald Reagan. He and my boss, (Secretary of Defense) Cap Weinberger, put tons of money into the military and restored pride. And from then on it’s been a fabulous force.”
Powell’s role in the restoration of Army discipline and morale in the uncertain ’70s deserves the highest commendation. Today, the armed services are indispensable instruments of American foreign policy, just as they should be.
Powell has frequently been compared to Dwight Eisenhower, the former supreme allied commander in Europe who was in the White House in 1958, the year Powell joined the Army.
World War II’s top Army general, Uniontown’s George C. Marshall, was a personal hero. “He was that kind of selfless leader I have always admired,” Powell told Springston.
What lessons did Powell draw from the policy debacles of Vietnam? “The major lesson … make sure you understand what you’re getting into. Don’t fight a war with someone who has a greater investment and a greater cause than our own.”
“The second … (be) decisive.”
Presidents, commanders, and the American people, before engaging, should analyze the goal of the use of force. “An objective should have a political basis to it,” Powell said. “Why are we doing this politically? Not just can we do it militarily.”
On the still thorny issue of whether the U.S. could have prevailed in Vietnam, Powell said that wasn’t in the cards. “The losses were hundreds a week. I do not think the American people had the will to fight the kind of war the North Vietnamese were going to fight.”
The Vietnam War was a messy, disillusioning, and bitter experience for millions of Americans. “But we came out of it,” Powell said. “We are a country of enormous resiliency.”
Richard Robbins lives In Uniontown. He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com.