from
Hubert Wetzel, Washington
Colin Powell learned how senseless war can be early on in his soldier career. In 1962 he was assigned to a unit of the South Vietnamese Army as an American military advisor. One of the tasks of the unit was to secure an airfield in the jungle. The airfield, however, was only used to supply this unit. During all the years in which the United States fought in Vietnam afterwards, Powell later wrote in his autobiography “An American Journey” that he could never find a purpose in the war that went beyond this absurd circular argument. At that time Powell only saw the enemy in the form of a few sharpened bamboo sticks that he stepped into.