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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.