Jerry Boykin & Lynn Vincent (36 page)
“Did you know we had you under observation?” the interrogator asked.
“
Nyet
.” He knew he was a target, he said, but living in the Russian sector, he became complacent because he did not believe the Russians had any intention of apprehending war criminals.
Then the ammo bunker door opened and in walked Rick Shinseki. Four stars glistened on the collar of his camouflage uniform, and on his hip he wore a 9 mm pistol. Already pale with fear, Jelesic now turned paper-white. His chin dipped and his shoulders hunched as he seemed to try to make himself smaller. I watched his eyes lock on Shinseki’s sidearm. Jelisic seemed certain that the Japanese-American general had come to kill him.
Very deliberately, Shinseki closed the door behind him. Then he strode straight to the little table and looked down at Jelisic. The Serb kept his eyes on the pistol. For several moments, the general said nothing. Then: “Are you Goran Jelisic?”
Jelisic looked up and nodded, just barely, as though afraid any movement might provoke Shinseki to draw his weapon.
“I’m General Shinseki, commander of the Stabilization Force. You are now under the control of the Stabilization Force.”
Again, Jelisic managed a timid nod. I thought I could see anticipation in his face, as though he was expecting Shinseki to say, “You have been found guilty and I am now going to put a bullet in your head.”
Instead, the general stood stock still and stared at Jelisic until the prisoner looked away. Then Shinseki spun on his boot heel and walked out of the bunker. I left with him so I cannot report whether Jelisic at that point wet himself, but I would not be surprised.
BY MARCH 1998, Pete Schoomaker was a four-star general and had taken over as commander of SOCOM in Tampa. He flew out to see me in the Balkans and we sat down to talk in my office. “As soon as I can get you out of here, I want you to take over the Special Forces Command at Bragg. I’d like to get you over there by next month.”
“I’d love to do that,” I told my old friend. By then, we’d bagged seven of our PIFWC dirty dozen. I was ready to spend some time at home. On March 11, I flew back to the States to attend my son Aaron’s graduation from Ranger school. Randy had joined the Army reserves. I was proud that both my boys continued the family tradition of military service. After the ceremony at Benning, I went back to D.C. to check on my apartment, and to see Ashley, Grant, and Mimi.
It was a quick-turn trip. When it was time to fly back to the Balkans, Ashley drove me to Reagan National Airport. Sitting in the car in the parking lot, I turned in my seat to face her. “Pete told me last week that I’m coming back to Bragg to take command of Special Forces,” I said. “Now you can either agree to marry me before I go down there, and you can go with me to the change of command ceremony. Or I’ll go down there by myself and do the ceremony, and you can marry me when I get back.”
Ashley eyed me for a moment with skeptical good humor, waiting for me to crack. Finally, I smiled. She laughed out loud and without hesitating said, “I’ll marry you before you go.”
I gave her a big kiss. “Okay, today is Friday,” I said. “In a few minutes, I’m going to get on that plane, and I’ll be back in exactly two weeks, on Friday. We’ll get married on Saturday. How’s that?”
“That’ll be fine,” she said, still smiling.
“Okay,” I said. “Everything else is up to you.”
I kissed her, got out of the car, and hopped a plane back to the Balkans.
Two weeks later, Ashley and I were married in a church in Springfield, Virginia.
Three years later, as I was finishing up my tour in command of Special Forces, Ashley and I attended a going-away dinner in my honor. My officers put together a little dinner, maybe fifty or sixty people, in a banquet room at a nice restaurant called The Barn. When it came time for me to speak, I stood at my table and began by thanking all the folks who’d made my tour there a successful one. Then I guess a little bit of the devil got into me.
“You know, the best thing that’s happened to me in the past few years was when I married Ashley,” I said. “Y’all probably don’t realize that she had exactly two weeks to prepare for a wedding, and that she did it all on her own because I was in the Balkans.”
At this point, Ashley, seated beside me, smiled up at me, listening to my little speech. “You know,” I went on, “I asked Ashley to marry me because I loved her.”
Ashley smiled wider.
“But another factor for our getting married,” I said, “was that I hadn’t had sex in about four years.”
The room just exploded with laughter. Ashley collapsed on the table, head in her hands. But I could see her shoulders shaking and when she raised her head, she was laughing, too.
Washington, D.C. 2003–2004
WHEN HISTORY TICKED PAST MIDNIGHT on September 11, 2001, I was airborne over a nation on the verge of a terrible new era. I didn’t know it, of course. Still in command of the JFK Special Warfare Center and School (SWC) at Bragg, I had just finished a military tactics tour of the battlefield at Little Big Horn, Montana. There in 1876, warriors overran and killed 263 soldiers and other Army personnel along with their commander, Lieutenant Colonel George A. Custer. I had gone on the tour with the commandants of the other major Army schools and a military historian who replayed for us Custer’s Last Stand. When the tour was over, I took a redeye flight home. I arrived after dawn, kissed Ashley and crawled into bed—
“Jerry?” Ashley gently shook my shoulder.
I cracked an eyelid, and my foggy brain told me I hadn’t been asleep long. “What time is it?”
“It’s a little before nine o’clock. Listen, a plane just hit the World Trade Center.”
“Commuter type?”
“No, an airliner. I thought you’d want to know.”
That’s going to be a mess
, I thought sleepily. “Okay, thanks,” I said. “I’ll be up in a couple of hours.”
Ashley left the room, snicking the door shut behind her. I drifted back to sleep—
“Jerry, wake up.” Ashley’s voice was urgent this time. “I just turned on the news. A plane just hit the Pentagon, and another plane crashed into the World Trade Center. They’re saying it’s a terrorist attack.”
Instantly, I came wide awake and peered at my bedside clock: 9:40 a.m. Inside four minutes, I was in uniform and out the door, headed to my office. At Bragg, I took the stairs two at a time up to the Army Special Operations Headquarters. CNN was on up there, and events were unfolding quickly: 9-1-1 calls reveal Muslim hijackers aboard U.S. flights . . . Air Force One airborne . . . An unprecedented ground stop on all air traffic over the U.S. . . . The south tower of the World Trade Center collapses . . . United Flight 93 crashes in a Pennsylvania field . . .
Senior officers from around Bragg gathered with me at Special Ops headquarters and we triggered our emergency plan for securing the post and its various installations. Within thirty minutes, the place was shut down like a vault, bristling with roadblocks and gate guards, with snipers locked and loaded.
Then at 10:28 a.m., we watched CNN in stunned silence as the World Trade Center north tower crashed to earth.
In the days following the 9/11 attacks, it quickly became clear the Special Operations community would play a major role in going after Osama Bin Laden and his enablers, the Taliban. There was no question America would strike in Afghanistan. But as discussions progressed with the Pentagon and the Joint Chiefs, there was a lot of speculation as to whether we would bomb or invade. And if we invaded, would we send in conventional forces for maneuver warfare, or send in Special Operations units to work with indigenous rebels and oust the Taliban?
In the end, we did both, with Special Operations leading the way. That meant a huge new stream of people coming through the SWC as seemingly overnight, the need for engineers, medics, communicators, civil affairs, and other specialists trained in special warfare increased geometrically.
As a soldier with a thirty-year track record, I wanted to be part of whatever military response America launched. I wanted to be on the battlefield in Afghanistan, doing my part to strike back against this outrageous attack on my country. Still, in the months that followed, I reluctantly accepted that my role was to train and prepare young men and women to go to war.
Soon, though, I began to receive requests—from churches, civic groups, and other private organizations—to speak to civilian audiences, and I saw another role taking shape: to encourage Americans and help them understand this new war. The War on Terror was not a war over money or territory or politics. This was a war over worldviews. One worldview, based in Judeo-Christians beliefs, was that all men are created equal, endowed “by their Creator,” as Thomas Jefferson wrote, with the right to be free. The other worldview, based in the teachings of the Q’uran, held that all people on earth were to be subject to Allah and to Sharia law. In this jihadist view, those who refused to bow would be murdered. I had fought murder and oppression on live battlefields all over the world. But since I couldn’t go to Afghanistan, I figured this was my battlefield now, enlisting Americans to pray for our country.
In the beginning, I spoke mainly to Christians, at patriotic observances such as Veteran’s Day and the Fourth of July. But other groups also invited me and I found myself speaking to mixed-faith groups, including Muslims. I couldn’t accept all the invitations because of the clip of operations at the SWC. But I spoke when and where I could, always tailoring my message to the particular audience.
No matter where I spoke, though, the main message I brought my audiences was that America’s biggest battle was right here at home against societal enemies, many of them triggered by the so-called Cultural Revolution of the 1960s. The “Revolution”—which depended heavily on a rejection of traditional morality—and often on an outright rejection of God—had broken its every promise. Instead of liberty and equality, it had delivered broken families, irresponsible fathers, impoverished mothers and children, rampant addiction, violence, disease, and death. I asked people to recognize that our country was now locked in a spiritual battle for its own soul.
“Fight with me!” I would say, urging Christian audiences to pray for justice, for the safety of our troops, and for our civilian and military leaders.
As it turned out, there were quite a few folks in influential places who decided that was some kind of war crime.
IN JULY 2003, I arrived on the Pentagon’s E-Ring as deputy undersecretary of defense for intelligence. I thought it would be my final Army tour. My military career had offered me a way to make a difference, a way to do some good in the world. I had not served perfectly, but with God’s help, I had served faithfully. Now appointed by Defense Secretary Don Rumsfeld as a member of the cabinet staff, I looked forward to pouring 100 percent into this last task, then moving on to new callings—teaching or speaking, probably. Maybe both.
I had been tucked into my breadbox office for just a few weeks when I had a visitor, David Martin of the CBS news magazine
60 Minutes
. He sat down across the desk from me. “General Boykin, my wife and I saw a tape of you speaking at an event in Daytona, Florida,” he said. “I want you to know that it really motivated us to start going back to church.”
I looked at Martin and saw sincerity in his eyes. “Thanks for sharing that, David,” I said. “I’m glad to hear it.”
“General, I’d like to know if you’d consider letting me do a
60 Minutes
piece on you, a profile focusing on your faith,” David said.
I thought about that for a second. The idea of going on a national program to talk about my faith and how it informed my military service was appealing. On the other hand, I had managed to keep my mug out of the news for more than thirty years. It was an unwritten code in the Special Ops community: stay out of the limelight.
“You know, David, I really appreciate your interest, but I don’t think I’m ready to do that,” I said. “If you wanted to do a larger story about faith with me as just a part, I’d consider it. But I wouldn’t want to do a story that’s just about me.”
“Okay, I can understand that. I appreciate that,” he said. Then his face changed, taking on a shadow of worry. “I wanted to ask you one more thing, General. My producer, Mary, has cancer. Would you please pray for her?”
Instantly, I admired him. So many reporters in the Washington press corps seemed cutthroat, just out for the Big Story, and yet David showed this compassion.
“Absolutely,” I said. “I’d be honored.”
That was in September. The following month, I got a call from a very different reporter, Aram Roston of NBC News, the one who wanted to talk about what a “controversial character” I was.
“They’ve chosen you to go after these high-profile Islamic figures, and you have a track record of hating Islam,” Roston said.
An ironic statement considering that the last operation I’d led was hunting down Goran Jelisic and his Muslim-murdering friends. The conversation deteriorated from there, as Roston, pretending to get my side of a story that in reality had already been written, tallied the “evidence” against me:
“You’ve made a statement to a Somali warlord that your God was bigger than his.”
“You’ve made statements like, ‘God put George Bush in the White House.’ ”
“You’ve said that this is a Christian nation.”
And perhaps what Roston considered his most damning evidence: “You’re an evangelical.”
The next night, I stood in the secretaries’ office as NBC News carried its story with Tom Brokaw anchoring: “NBC News has learned that a highly decorated general has a history of outspoken and divisive views on religion, Islam in particular.”
As I thought back over my career, about how and when I had lived out my faith in my military service, about where I had served and whom I had fought for and
with
, this characterization stunned me.
Then Lisa Myers broke her big story:
He’s a highly decorated officer, twice wounded in battle, a warrior’s warrior. The former commander of Army Special Forces, Lieutenant General William Jerry Boykin has led or been part of almost every recent U.S. military operation from the ill-fated attempt to rescue hostages in Iran to Grenada, Panama, Colombia, and Somalia . . . But [his] new assignment may be complicated by controversial views General Boykin, an evangelical Christian, has expressed in dozens of speeches and prayer breakfasts around the country. . . . NBC News military analyst Bill Arkin, who’s been investigating Boykin for the
Los Angeles Times
, says the general casts the war on terror as a religious war.
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