Fallen Colin

With the chaos currently raging in Iraq, one does not have to search far for administration officials who distorted intelligence and provided wildly optimistic views of a military invasion of the Iraqi nation.  Perhaps the most disappointing, and in the end most responsible figure is Colin Powell.  With his role as an apparent centrist who had witnessed the horrors of war, Powell was esteemed as an informed, worldly diplomat who might represent the voice of reason within the administration. He presented an image of dignity, respect, and caution for those Americans who were apprehensive about the Bush administration’s motives and fearful of the potential abuse of military power.  His specious performance at the UN in February of 2003, when he used his stature and reputation to persuade council members of the imminent threat posed by Iraq, seemed an apparent betrayal of all who viewed him as an American statesman.  When one looks beneath the surface, however, the troubling evidence suggests that this was not as much a betrayal of all that the real Colin Powell stood for, as it was the emergence of his true self at a pivotal point in world history, a point where the false image of him was shattered.

It was in Vietnam that Powell developed his skills as a military fixer, a man who would place the interests of his superiors before basic standards of decency and morality.  He arrived in Southeast Asia in 1962 and was soon leading campaigns to destroy large swaths of jungle that might house the enemy.  It was a brutal mission that in his mind required the elimination of common notions of justice and respect for life.  In Powell’s words: “I recall a phrase we used in the field, MAM, for military-age male. If a helo spotted a peasant in black pajamas who looked remotely suspicious, a possible MAM, the pilot would circle and fire in front of him. If he moved, his movement was judged evidence of hostile intent, and the next burst was not in front, but at him. Brutal? Maybe so… The kill-or-be-killed nature of combat tends to dull fine perceptions of right and wrong.”  One wonders: wouldn’t running be a natural response to having a gunship fire at you from above with a machine gun?  One also wonders if Powells’s extensive experience of war truly did dull his perceptions of right and wrong, or if perhaps he lacked those perceptions to begin with.  As he remarked about his early operations in Vietnam:  “We burned down the thatched huts, starting the blaze with Ronson and Zippo lighters. Why were we torching houses and destroying crops?  Ho Chi Minh had said the people were like the sea in which his guerrillas swam. ... We tried to solve the problem by making the whole sea uninhabitable. In the hard logic of war, what difference did it make if you shot your enemy or starved him to death?”  Powell was injured by a punji-stick booby trap in 1963 and was later awarded a Purple Heart.   

Powell returned to Vietnam in 1968 and was soon deployed to the Americal Division as a major.  It was here that Powell became linked to one of the Army’s most shameful deeds, the massacre at My Lai. Though he was forwarded a letter from a young soldier named Tom Glen which described generalized atrocities within the division, Powell’s research was apparently cursory for no prosecutions were initiated and neither Powell nor his subordinates ever took the time to speak with Glen.  The My Lai massacre had taken place only a few months earlier, in March of 1968.  Powell’s written response to the Glen allegations denied any wrongdoing and even remarked on the “excellent” relations between the Americans and Vietnamese.  However, My Lai was brewing as a major scandal due to the heroic work of a young infantryman named Ron Ridenhour, who had compiled a report based on interviews with soldiers who had taken part in the massacre.   Ridenhour’s interviews led to an official Inspector General investigation, which began to look into the reported atrocities of My Lai, where Lt. William Calley and his C Company men slaughtered 347 defenseless Vietnamese, raping many of the women in the process.     

Powell was eventually questioned in May of 1969 by the army’s IG about Americal’s activities in March of 1968, yet he was apparently unaware of or unwilling to reveal what had happened at My Lai.  Though Powell remarks in his autobiography that he found a number for enemy killed of 128 on March 16 1968 on the Batangan Peninsula, and reported this to the IG during his questioning, the IG’s own records show that Powell only reported enemy killed of 14 for that sector on that day.  Whereas in his autobiography Powell attempts to create the impression that he helped the investigation along, in reality he had reported that nothing unusual took place on the day of My Lai, that the activity was normal for a “hot combat zone”.  Powell’s incorrect report of what had happened (and it is unknown if he was aware that it was incorrect) almost led to the end of the investigation, for the MACV (Military Assistance Command Vietnam) recommended closure of the matter.  It took the Pentagon’s own Inspector General to eventually uncover what actually happened at My Lai.  The number of 128 enemy killed is relevant, for though that number did not exist in the actual record books that Powell used under questioning by the IG, it did turn out that it was the stock response offered by the Army as it attempted to cover up the massacre and derail any investigations.  One can reasonably conclude that the number did not just appear out of thin air, but that Powell for purposes of his autobiography was using the Army’s contrived response to conceal his own lack of forthrightness during the investigation.