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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.''