Former head of the armies, he had directed the operation “Storm of the Desert” in 1991 in Iraq. In 2003, at the UN, he had defended the thesis of the detention of chemical weapons by the regime of Saddam Hussein, which led to the Second Gulf War. He died on October 18th, at the age of 84.
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Former US Secretary of State Colin Powell died on October 18, at the age of 84, at the Walter Reed Military Hospital in Bethesda (Maryland), CVVID-19 complication suites. His family said he had been vaccinated, but he had multiple myeloma, a form of blood cancer that had weakened his immune system.
It will remain as the first African-American to access the National Security Advisor (1987-1989, under the presidency of Ronald Reagan), Chief of the Armed Force (1989-1993), Under George Bush Father and Bill Clinton, and Chief of American diplomacy (2001-2005), a position he has held during George W. Bush’s first term, at a time of intense international tensions on Iraq.
Born on April 5, 1937, in Harlem (New York), in a family of Jamaicans emigrants, Colin Powell is the incarnation of the American dream. In the bronx, where he grows up, his father is a storekeeper, his mother is seamstress. After the high school, he signed up at the City College of New York, thanks to a military scholarship. He graduated in geology and joined the Army at age 21. He will stay there more than thirty-five, until 1993, and will show a discipline ever denied.
He will also be a pioneer of racial integration in an army where he will know the segregation during training in the south, as he will recall years later in the press, when George Bush son calls him in his Cabinet after the November 2000 presidential election.
In 1958, he was stationed in Germany, then in Vietnam, where he is one of the first advisers sent in 1962 by John F. Kennedy to help the Saïgon army. He will perform two stays. In 1968, he returned with a bravery medal. Rescapped with a helicopter accident, he saved three comrades from the carcass on fire, despite a broken ankle.
On his return, he is responsible for supervising the survey on the massacre of the village of My Lai, where a GI company killed several hundred civilians in 1968. The killing, which took place on March 16 in The South Vietnamese hamlet, was only known later, in November 1969. The victims, whose balance sheet is estimated at between 347 and 504 people, were essentially old men, women and children. At the end of the investigation, Colin Powell finds nothing to say and asserts that the relations between the army and the Vietnamese population are “excellent”.
“Relicient warrior”
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