Jerry Boykin & Lynn Vincent (35 page)
For me, the aftermath of Mogadishu was already like an emotional grave, and now it was as if someone was standing up top, shoveling in the dirt.
To make matters even worse, the admiral I worked for on the joint staff hated me. Not just me, but Special Operations types in general: He thought we were aloof and insubordinate, and that we thought we were better than everybody else. That doubled my misery.
Meanwhile, Lynne and I moved into a town home in Alexandria, a bedroom community for the D.C./Northern Virginia military-government complex. April, Randy, and Aaron had grown up and left the nest. Just prior to our move up from Bragg, I read a book,
Tender Warrior
, by an author named Stu Weber. Living out its principles, one in particular, changed my life.
Weber wrote that if you are a Christian man, and there’s a young man without a father living in your neighborhood, it’s your responsibility to mentor him.
We hadn’t been in Alexandria long when I noticed two kids, a little boy and a little girl, playing a couple of doors down. I often saw their mom, a petite, short-haired woman, but I never saw a dad. One day when the mom was out in the yard with the kids, I went over and introduced myself as the new neighbor.
Ashley Steele was a 39-year-old single mom who operated a daycare in her home to support Grant, 9, and Mimi, 8.
Well
, I thought,
maybe this is my chance to mentor
.
One day a couple of months after Lynne and I got settled in, I asked Ashley if she would allow me to take Grant fishing. She said yes, and suddenly, I had a new little buddy. Grant and I went on several fishing trips then when hunting season rolled around, we took off for the woods. He was a quiet, contemplative boy who still spoke of his dad fairly frequently even though Ashley told me he hadn’t seen him for years.
“My dad has a truck like that,” he’d say, pointing out the window. I could tell Grant missed him. I hoped I could be a comfort to him, a friend.
THE IG INVESTIGATION triggered by the anonymous letter lasted from August 1994 until February 1995. When the final IG report came out, I was completely exonerated. The investigators found not only that the letter writer’s views did not reflect the attitude of Delta, but also that the writer hadn’t even been in Mogadishu. He had his facts all wrong.
In September, I was nominated for brigadier general. Two months later, I moved from the Pentagon to CIA, where I became deputy chief of the special activities division. In December, the Dayton Accords brought about an uneasy peace between Muslims and Orthodox Serbs in war-torn Bosnia-Herzegovina. Ambassador Richard Holbrooke and General Wesley Clark helped negotiate the settlement. Part of the agreement was that PIFWCs (People Indicted for War Crimes) would be turned over to a tribunal at The Hague, Holland, where they would stand trial. The warring factions themselves were supposed to turn in the PIFWCs (pronounced “piffwicks”). But a large group remained at large, operating in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Belgrade, Yugoslavia, and Macedonia.
Goran Jelisic, for example. During the war, the Serbian side systematically imprisoned, tortured and murdered Muslims, all under the euphemism “ethnic cleansing.” Jelisic, a slim, sharp-featured man with a strange little mouth, took particular pleasure in cutting Muslim prisoners with broken glass and beating them with clubs and truncheons. He didn’t care whether they were men or women, old or injured. And when he was finished torturing them, he forced them to kneel over a grate, then executed them with two shots to the back of the head. Jelisic once told detainees in a camp called Luka that before he could enjoy his morning coffee, he needed to execute twenty to thirty people. The little monster called himself the “Serb Adolf.”
One of my jobs at CIA was coordinating the collection and analysis of intel on people like Jelisic so the CIA and military units keeping peace in the Balkans could go after them.
A year had passed since Mogadishu nearly ripped away my faith in God. I was still healing slowly, day by day. With the anonymous letter, IG investigation, and the unpleasant admiral behind me, I felt as if I was beginning to contribute again, doing what I did best: hunting bad guys. Things seemed to be looking up. That is until Christmastime.
Lynne took a trip home to see friends in Fayetteville, North Carolina. When she returned she told me she wanted a divorce.
After she informed me of her plans to leave, I lay across my bed, and plunged back into despair.
I had had a great military career, but at what cost? Lynne’s leaving was my fault, I felt. I had failed as a husband. I’d been a part-time father. The years of separation, years of stress from the secrecy associated with my assignments—my going away and not being able to tell her where I was going or when I was coming back—for her all of that had finally come to a head.
As I stared up at the ceiling, I prayed what Isaiah prayed:
Lord, just take me. I am a total failure
.
LYNNE AND I KEPT OUR SEPARATION CIVIL. She moved to Fayetteville and I stayed in Alexandria. We didn’t play tug-of-war with the kids, and April, Randy, and Aaron were tender with both of us and tried not to take sides. It seemed that since Mogadishu, I’d claw my way up out of that emotional grave, getting to where I could just stick my head out, then something would happen to send me tumbling back to the bottom again.
Now, on the brink of what I considered to be the lowest point of personal failure, I prayed to God for comfort. And the comforter He sent was only four feet tall.
I continued to take Grant hunting and fishing, but now Ashley’s daughter, Mimi, took a shine to me. She began going with me to do simple things like grocery shopping. She was just charming and would ride along, chattering away about ten-year-old things. After a few weeks, when we’d run an errand, she’d reach up and put her little hand in my big one, and all the heavy baggage in my life was stripped away. I wasn’t the failed husband, the part-time father, the suspect commander, the tough-guy manhunter. I was just Jerry—a guy who, it seemed, was at least still decent enough that a little girl would consider me her friend.
On a Sunday night in February 1996, I went to church to be baptized. Ashley, Grant, and Mimi were there. Standing in the baptismal pool, I looked out at the three of them sitting together on a pew and realized that I loved them all. Still, I kept my distance from Ashley, not wanting to create the appearance that Lynne and I had separated because of her. But as weeks passed, I found that I couldn’t stop thinking about her. I called my mother.
“I know divorce is wrong,” I told her over the phone. “But I think I have feelings for Ashley.”
“Look, your wife has left you,” my mother said. “It’s not something you wanted and she’s not coming back. I think you have to follow your heart.” As always, she told me she’d be praying for me.
In early spring, I decided to ask Ashley out to dinner. I was as nervous as a school boy. I was forty-nine years old and hadn’t asked a girl for a first date since I was seventeen.
So I was amazed when she said yes.
IN APRIL 1997, I drove down to Fayetteville to meet my attorney, Debra Radtke, who accompanied me to family court. The judge called me to the stand, reviewed the dates I had been married, and said, “Is it your desire that this marriage be terminated by divorce?”
My desire had never been divorce. But by now I knew for sure that Lynne wasn’t coming back. “Yes,” I said quietly.
I signed a set of papers and walked back to a table with Debra.
“That’s it?” I said.
“That’s it.”
“You mean after all these years, that’s all it takes?”
“Yes,” she said.
I drove back to Alexandria wrestling with my emotions. It was hard for me to believe that so many years of your life could end with just five minutes in court.
WHEN I LEFT CIA IN JUNE 1997 FOR A JOB with the Army staff, I thought I had left Goran Jelisic behind. But two months after moving into my office at the Pentagon, Lieutenant General Tom Burnett, the Army operations director, called me into his office.
I had been promoted to brigadier general by then, but I wasn’t in uniform. I had just come out of the gym and was still sweating from my workout when I showed up in his office.
“Today is Monday,” Burnett said. “By Friday, you are to be in the Balkans to head up a new task force assigned to chase war criminals.”
I had done this before—Noriega, Escobar, and others. But my mind flashed instantly to Mohamed Aidid. Would this be another Mogadishu? Given the way Bill Clinton cut and run from Somalia, I was not confident he’d have the stomach to actually go after these people if we located them.
“Yes, sir,” I said, and got the rest of the brief.
Not long later, I boarded a plane for SHAPE (Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe) in Mons, Belgium, for a meeting with General Wesley Clark. I had served with Clark in the Pentagon when he was on the joint staff, and I also worked with him after he relieved George Joulwan at SouthCom. I saw him as a deep thinker who had an idea a minute, and thought through most of them out loud. He was aggressive, and also politically astute. Now Clark was serving as NATO commander. As a broker of the Dayton Accords, he had the Balkan war criminals in his sights and wasn’t about to let them walk free.
The story on the Balkans operation was that Clark had originally appointed a retired Marine Corps general to head up the PIFWC task force there. But with a multinational military coalition, plus CIA, that marine decided after several weeks of treading water, his status as a civilian was hurting the operation. He just wasn’t perceived as having the firepower to get things done. So Clark asked for a general officer and when my name came up, he decided I was the right man for the job.
“It is essential to the implementation of the Dayton Accords that we bring these war criminals to justice,” he told me after we’d settled into his office at SHAPE. “We have five nations who have agreed to work together on it—the U.S., the UK, France, Germany, and the Netherlands. Your job is to provide leadership to this task force. You work for me. You’ll coordinate your activities with Rick Shinseki.”
He meant General Rick Shinseki, commander of NATO forces in the Balkans, a careful, circumspect man who preferred high-percentage options. Born in Hawaii and of Japanese descent, Shinseki was the first Asian-American to ascend to four-star rank. In 2003, he would famously tell Congress “something in the order of several hundred thousand soldiers” would probably be required to manage post-war Iraq. Don Rumsfeld and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz publicly disagreed.
The day after my meeting with Clark, I was in the Balkans, where I found . . . practically nothing. While the war criminal task force had a little headquarters way up in Stuttgart, Germany, no presence had been established in the Balkans themselves. Immediately, I directed my staff to set up command-and-control centers in Sarajevo and Tuzla, both in Bosnia-Herzegovina, and also a series of satellite centers scattered across the Balkans from which we would run our intel collection activities.
My job wasn’t to go after the PIFWCs myself. It was my task to find them, then send in the hounds. I already had the CIA paramilitaries in-country. From the U.S., I brought in elements from DELTA and the SEALs, and from Britain, elements of the S.A.S. France, Germany, and the Netherlands also sent Special Ops personnel. The hunt was on.
We worked from a list of about twenty-five PIFWCs, but we had a top tier of most-wanted men, a dirty dozen on whom we concentrated our efforts. Goran Jelesic was on that list. By then, the Balkans had been parted out into “sectors” under the control of NATO peacekeeping countries, including the task force nations. SEAL operators located Jelisic in a north central region controlled by the Russians. Using video surveillance, they tracked his routines until they practically knew when the man was going to take a leak.
Clark, Shinseki, and I formed an interesting trio. On one end, you had Clark up in Mons, who was very aggressive and wanted the task force to launch on anything reasonably credible. On the other, you had Shinseki down in Sarajevo, who was much more conservative, and also faced with the on-site daily details of dealing with the task force countries. Shinseki wanted to make sure every op was precisely planned and the intel was as good as it was ever going to get. They were both right. But guess who was caught in the middle?
One of our first targets was the Muslim-murdering Goran Jelisic. We had accurately pinpointed his location. The SEAL element knew Jelesic’s movements down to a T. This time Clark and Shinseki agreed: the snatch operation was a go. The SEALs pulled up in a van outside Jelisic’s apartment building. When he emerged as per his normal routine, four SEALs jumped out, grabbed Jelesic, threw him through the sliding door, and were back in the van rolling. Time elapsed: sixty-one seconds. Jelisic was supposed to be this serious bad guy, but he went down like a scarecrow.
The SEALs took him down to a landing zone south of the city and put him on a helo back to Tuzla where I was waiting for him. Soldiers escorted him down to an old ammo bunker the Slavs had used. Stark and dirty with concrete floors, the air inside the bunker was stale. Naked light bulbs hung from the ceiling. Interrogators seated Jelisic at an old wooden table the size of a school desk. A Slavic-speaking military translator stood nearby. Two guards stood outside the bunker door, and two inside, all fully armed.
I stood inside the bunker, off to the side, watching Jelisic in the chair, pale and shaking. His eyes darted back and forth like a trapped rodent.
This is the feared and terrible “Serb Adolf?”
The interrogator approached him, and Jelisic looked up, flinching as though expecting a bullet. “Are you Goran Jelisic?” the interrogator asked.
“Da.”
“What was your role in the internal civil war here in the Balkans?”
Jelisic, voice quaking, answered in Slavic and the translator said, “I helped to defend my homeland.”
