The General's lady - Colin Powell's wife Alma

DURING the Persian Gulf War, Colin Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, spent more nights in the Pentagon than at home. But his wife Alma still kept a pot of vegetable soup simmering on the stove.

"I make comfort foods so when he comes home, the house will be warm and welcoming, an oasis of quiet and calm for him in the midst of a storm...," she says.

"She's the perfect military wife," says P.X. Kelley, retired commandant of the Marine Corps, who first met the Powells in 1966 when they were all stationed in Fort Benning, Ga. "She is always unrumpled. On post, her first thought has always been to take care of the young wives and the troops. In that situation, you become a senior mother, and she filled the role very well."

Five feet five, with large hazel eyes and a winning smile, 53-year-old Alma Powell seems at once strong and vulnerable, stoic and warm.

"There are some things you don't talk to him about [at moments of crisis]," she says of her husband. "I wouldn't go to him ... to say the car's not running or the bathroom needs a new plunger. Nor would he be interested, except on the surface, in some little story about what the children are doing."

As for speculation that her husband might become a vice presidential or presidential candidate, she says, it's "not anything either one of us would seek or have any idea about." They've discussed the idea, she admits, but "not with any seriousness at all. He jokes about it. I simply say, 'Listen, I don't want any part of this.' Public life is very difficult for people."

As America's top soldier, the first Black officer to hold the nation's highest military post, and also, at 53, one of the youngest, Colin Powell's fate seemed inextricably linked to the outcome of Operation Desert Storm.

After almost 30 years as a military wife, 1, moves and two stints during which her husband served in and was wounded in Vietnam, Alma Powell has few illusions about war. "We know better than anybody what war brings. It brings deep scars. You absorb a lot of hurt in the process. Things happen to people that you really care about. People die, and as a wife, you always sit at home and wonder if it's your turn," she says.

The view from Grant Avenue, Quarters Six, the spacious house reserved for the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, is particularly tranquil. Alma Powell has decorated the house in soft pastel colors. In the library is her husband's signature standing desk, a present from the staff when he served as Ronald Reagan,s national security advisor. Outside, the flag waves at full mast. Seen from across the Potomac River, Washington is the picture of calm.

But when the television is on, that mood changes. The general's wife says she limits the amount of TV news she watches, but concedes that footage of the allied POWs in Iraq conjured up a storm of feelings. "Unfortunately, you have that pain. But the families also know that they are alive," she says. "I think you always know you have to build up a defense inside against those conflicting emotions that are going to come. You have to brace yourself for whatever comes."

The memory of Vietnam is still with her. "Once again, we all knew that clutch in the pit of our stomachs, and fear because you think, 'Oh God. It's starting all over again.' This time we didn't have to worry about our husbands. It's our sons and daughters," she observes. The Powells themselves have three children, Michael, a civilian employee of the Pentagon, Linda, an actress, and Annemaire, who is still a student.

Thinking about the families of soldiers serving brought tears to her eyes. they came, she says, from compassion, not doubt. "Do you want to walk off and leave a job undone, something that our leaders deem as necessary? You can't do that," she states.

When Colin Powell first went to Vietnam in 1963, Alma Powell was a bride off four months. The pair had met on a blind date in Boston, where Alma, who attended Fisk University and did her graduate work at Emergson College, worked as a speech pathologist.

"I was pregnant with my first child," she recalls of Colin's first Vietnam tour. So she went home to live with her parents in Birmingham, Ala., then in the grip of race riots. Her father and uncle were principals of the city's two Black high schools.

"It was like we had two wars going on at once," she says. "In Birmingham, people were hurt, children were killed. What made it more difficult in the early days of the Vietnam War was that no one knew you were over there. But then again, you didn't have the anti-war demonstrators, either."

Families then were much more cut off from each other than they are now, she says. "Our son, Michael, was three weeks old before Colin knew he had a son. He got his mother's letter before he got mine," she recalls. During his second Vietnam tor in the spring of 1969, she remembers finding a letter hanging on her fron tdoor that said there was a telegram waiting for her at Western Union. "My father came with me. It said, 'Your husband has been injured in a helicopter crash, and you can address mail to a hospital at such-and-such address.' He wasn't even there. He never got the letter.