Colin Powell: And then I think in one of the sad chapters of American history, having promised the South Vietnamese that we would come to their assistance with more weapons and ammunition if they needed it, the United States Congress finally abandoned them. That went against our word. Whether they would have prevailed even if we hadn’t abandoned them is, I think questionable. I think they would probably have lost anyway, but I wish they had not lost on the heels of an American abandonment. So it was a very dismal period. And when it was all over, I was still a professional soldier, now a lieutenant colonel. And we were in an army that had been seen as the loser in this war. We were shaken to our core. We had lost a generation of leaders. We’d had the scandal of My Lai. We had racial relations. The American people said, “We want out of the draft. We no longer want to have a draft.” In fact, they were separating themselves from the army. “You just go out and recruit and that’s what you get. But no more draft.” So we ended the draft. There was an estrangement between the American people and its military. But I was a professional soldier, and so it was my job to work in that world and try to fix it, repair it. And one of the things I’m proudest of in my life is that over the next 15, 17 years, working with great leaders and finally with the new political leadership that came in with the Reagan Administration — political leaders who told us to be proud of ourselves once again and gave us the resources to really finish the transition to a modern, powerful army — we became a force that the nation once again was proud of. And we saw the result of that in Desert Storm.