Jerry Boykin & Lynn Vincent (38 page)

5

ON OCTOBER 18, my son, Aaron, called me at home. “Dad, did you hear what Nina Totenberg said?” Totenberg was a journalist with National Public Radio.

Phone in hand, I sighed. “No. What did she say?”

“She said she hoped you aren’t long for this world.”

“You’re kidding. You mean, like she wants me dead?”

“That’s what it sounded like to me.”

That’s what it sounded like to the host of
Inside Washington
, too. Totenberg made the remark on the program, one of those televised journalist roundtables, this one hosted by a man named Gordon Peterson. Colbert King, a
Washington Post
editorial writer, was there, as was syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer.

Totenberg said, “Now they’ve got this guy who’s head of the intelligence section in the Defense Department who’s being quoted as telling various groups, while he’s in uniform, that this is a Christian crusade against Muslims. I mean this is terrible, this is seriously bad stuff.”
⁵

Bad enough that she had her facts dead wrong. But then Totenberg said, “Well, I hope he’s not long for this world because you can imagine—”

Several people spoke at once, interrupting her.

PETERSON:
“You putting a hit out on this guy or what?”

KING:
“Are you Reverend Pat Robertson?”

TOTENBERG:
“No, no, no, no, no, no!”

Peterson: “What is this,
The Sopranos
?”

TOTENBERG:
“In his job, in his job, in his job, please, please, in his job.”
⁶

That might’ve been easier to believe if I hadn’t found out what Totenberg said on the same program in 1995. After Senator Jesse Helms said he felt a disproportionate share of federal research funding went to AIDS research, Totenberg said, according to the
Boston Globe
, “I think [Helms] ought to be worried about what’s going on in the Good Lord’s mind, because if there is retributive justice, he’ll get AIDS from a transfusion, or one of his grandchildren will.”
⁷

Apparently it’s not okay for a taxpayer-supported general to suggest that spiritual forces are at work in the world, but it’s okay for a taxpayer-supported journalist to do so—especially if it’s God doing the killing.

Totenberg’s
Inside Washington
attack was just part of the national blitzkrieg triggered by William Arkin’s report. An editorial in
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
claimed that “for a ranking military officer, [Boykin’s] beliefs are surprisingly benighted.”
⁸

A letter writer to
The Los Angeles Times
said, “Boykin, for all of his apparent professional skill, shows the markers of a religious fanatic . . . Let the general retire and find a private pulpit somewhere to preach his intolerant brand of Christianity, and let the fight against terrorism be waged by officials who understand their role and who bother to read the Constitution.”
⁹

As Arkin’s story burned up cable news and then spread to international and Islamic media, few people outside Fox News and conservative talk radio wondered whether an “analyst” who had foamed at the mouth on the editorial page could be trusted to supply objective information for Page One.

I began to wonder: Who is William Arkin?

The first thing I learned was that his qualifications as a “military analyst” seemed pretty thin. Arkin served in the Army for four years during the 1970s. Some bios listed him as a “former military intelligence analyst,” but the specifics remained . . . unspecific. I also learned he is a pedigreed leftist, a former political director for Greenpeace who in 2002, barely a year after 9/11, gave a speech claiming President Bush had declared war on terror in order to “enhance the economic interests of the Enron class.” But I had to wait until 2007 for Arkin to fully reveal himself.

That February, on his blog on the
Washington Post
’s Web site, Arkin whined about an NBC story in which some soldiers serving in Iraq expressed frustration with war protests and asked for the support of the American people:

I’m all for everyone expressing their opinion, even those who wear the uniform of the United States Army. But I also hope that military commanders took the soldiers aside after the story and explained to them why it wasn’t for them to disapprove of the American people . . .
¹⁰

When I read that, I thought,
The soldiers
are
the American people
. Arkin continued:

These soldiers should be grateful that the American public . . . [does] still offer their support to them, and their respect . . . Through every Abu Ghraib and Haditha, through every rape and murder, the American public has indulged those in uniform, accepting that the incidents were the product of bad apples or even of some administration or command order . . .
¹¹

Those behind Abu Ghraib and Haditha were investigated and punished, not indulged. Was Arkin hinting here that Abu Ghraib and Haditha were the American military standard?

So, we pay the soldiers a decent wage, take care of their families, provide them with housing and medical care and vast social support systems and ship obscene amenities into the war zone for them, we support them in every possible way, and their attitude is that we should in addition roll over and play dead, defer to the military and the generals and let them fight their war, and give up our rights and responsibilities to speak up because they are above society?
¹²

Then Arkin refers to the comments of soldiers who, in an NBC report, asked for the support of American citizens as:

. . . an ugly reminder of the price we pay for a mercenary—oops sorry, volunteer—force that thinks it is doing the dirty work . . . America needs to ponder what it is we really owe those in uniform.
¹³

So this is the “military analyst” who engineered the
L.A
.
Times
hit piece. A man who apparently believes that the American military is riddled with rapists and murderers. Who divides the American people and American soldiers into “us” and “them.” Who believes that American soldiers are mercenaries and that despite the Twin Towers, suicide bombers and video-taped beheadings, the terror war is about money.

After a seven-year investigation, I have concluded that William Arkin is an anti-military, leftwing conspiracy nut and a religious bigot. I did not call him to ask whether this is true.

6

AS THE POUNDING IN THE PRESS CONTINUED, the nasty e-mails started rolling in. One person wrote to tell me that I had insulted every Jew in the nation. He went on to say that I should leave the Army, since I clearly did not value soldiers of other faiths. An Arab group sent me a Koran and told me that I was an “intolerant extremist.” Many people wrote to Secretary Rumsfeld, urging that I be disciplined or fired.

And as the bullets flew, the firepower of the folks doing the shooting increased. Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John Warner and Democratic Senator Carl Levin wrote to Rumsfeld, urging him to launch an inspector general probe.

“Remarks by a senior military officer denigrating another religion could be exploited by America’s enemies,” they wrote, “and even endanger U.S. troops serving in Muslim nations.” Had anyone noticed that I hadn’t denigrated Islam, but had specifically said
on tape
that a radical wing of Islam was to blame—a wing that was to Islam as the Ku Klux Klan was to Christianity?

Congressmen Barney Frank and John Conyers circulated petitions calling for my ouster. Senators John Kerry and Joe Lieberman, both still vying for the Democratic presidential nomination, trashed me. “Our cause in the war on terror isn’t helped when we have army officers like Lieutenant General William Boykin speaking in evangelical churches and claiming this as some sort of battle for the Christian religion,” Kerry said. “That’s wrong. That’s un-American.”

If I hadn’t been under so much stress, I might have laughed out loud at that one. I guess Kerry felt it was more American to come back from Vietnam and testify to Congress about American war atrocities—testimony that was later shot full of holes.

On Sunday, October 21, national security advisor Condoleeza Rice was asked about me on a national news program. “I think the president is very clear here on what [the president] means here,” she said. “This is not a war between religions. No one should describe it as such.”

Rice had just put the first measure of distance between me and the Bush administration.

7

I WASN’T SLEEPING MUCH. Each new accusation, each new twist on the truth stacked up on my shoulders like another lead weight. But as I prayed—moaned and groaned to God, really—I sensed Him saying to me,
Lift up your head. Open your eyes and look at what’s going on around you
.

When I got my eyes off myself long enough, I realized that I was getting calls and e-mails every day from friends who said, “We’re behind you. We’re praying for you.” Similar calls and letters poured in from my family and church in North Carolina, and from people I had never met before in places all over the world. In the Pentagon, people would walk up to me in the halls and say, “I know you don’t know who I am, but I want you to know that I’m praying for you.”

I had congressmen calling me to offer private encouragement, including Robin Hayes of North Carolina. “I’m standing with you, Jerry,” he told me. “All you need to do is call me.”

Twenty-seven members of Congress, both Republicans and Democrats, signed a letter to President Bush saying, in effect, “You need to stand by this man.”

Conservative commentators like Sean Hannity, Hugh Hewitt, and Ann Coulter stood with me.

In
WorldNetDaily
, Pat Buchanan wrote, “Lt. Gen. William G. ‘Jerry’ Boykin, the former Delta Force commander, seems to be exactly the kind of warrior America needs to lead us in battle against the kind of fanatics we face.”
¹⁴

But the mainstream media continued their shelling until finally Ashley got fed up. Desperate to let people know what I had really said and what I really stood for, she called Gary Bauer, a Christian activist. He immediately used his radio program and newsletter to urge conservatives to support me.

Then Ashley called Focus on the Family.

We didn’t really know anyone there, but when she told the switchboard who she was, they quickly connected her to Focus president James Dobson. After Ashley explained our position, Dobson immediately took up my cause. First, he issued a press release: “Since when does a man not have the right to express his private religious views in the company of fellow believers? Does a man forfeit his freedom of speech when he becomes a military leader?” he wrote, adding that my remarks with regard to spiritual warfare were made to audiences comprised exclusively of Christians who clearly understood the meaning of my message.

The following week, Dobson devoted an entire radio broadcast to my situation. At the end, he urged listeners who wanted to express their support for me to call the White House and the Pentagon. Dobson also provided two telephone numbers, one of which, it turned out, connected callers directly to Don Rumsfeld’s office.

Problem was, Dobson has
millions
of listeners. In the first couple of hours after the broadcast, thousands of callers swamped the Secretary’s private line. Finally Rumsfeld’s junior military aide, Steve Bucci, a Special Forces veteran and a man of strong faith, called Focus.

“First, the Secretary gets the message,” Bucci told Focus. “Second, can you please call this thing off? It’s kind of an emergency. We’ve got to be able to keep some lines open to the Secretary’s office.”

“Sorry,” came the message from Dobson: “Once it’s out there, I can’t turn it off.”

8

A WEEK LATER, the inspector general’s office called me in for questioning. I wound my way from the E Ring to the C Ring, where two guys waited for me in a room with a conference table. Both were civilians and had that tightly wound, self-important “I’m an investigator” air about them—dark suits, white shirts, pagers on their belts. One was dark-haired and heavyset. The other was thin and wiry. The skinny one introduced himself as a lawyer.

We all sat down at the conference table. A microcassette recorder sat in the center of the table. The big guy reached forward to switch it on, and a quiet hiss spun up from the table. Then he read me my rights.

My
rights
. That immediately pissed me off. Not because they did it—I knew they had to, and expected it—but because I was being read my rights over unsubstantiated allegations reported in the media. As though I was a criminal suspect. My anger might have passed, but then the suits started
treating
me like a criminal suspect.

“We’ve looked at tapes of your speeches,” the big guy said. “What do you mean the real enemy of this country is Satan? Who authorized you to wear your uniform while giving these speeches?”

Then Skinny chimed in: “Did you have your JAG review your planned speaking activities?” He meant the judge advocate general, or command attorney, at the JFK Special Warfare Center and School where I had served at the time of my talks.

The interrogation, as I quickly came to think of it, went on for two hours. The big guy kept worrying with the cassette recorder, checking it to be sure the tape was still documenting my evil deeds. I tried not to let my frustration show, but I’m not sure I did a very good job of it.

Finally, Skinny said, “That’s all we have for now. We’re going to go down to Bragg and speak to some people. We’re also going to talk with people at those places where you spoke. We’ll contact you when we’re ready to talk to you again.”

I was dismissed.

On October 28, I watched from the secretaries’ office as President Bush held a Rose Garden news conference. He had just returned from a trip to Asia and Indonesia, and was set that night to meet with Muslim leaders at an Iftaar dinner, a breaking of the fast during the Islamic holy month of Ramadan. During the press conference, the president called on reporter Tom Hamburger.