Jerry Boykin & Lynn Vincent (10 page)
At night, Pete and I traded horror stories. He told me about the time he spent nearly half a day climbing over a wickedly thorny deadfall. I told him about the time I tried to jump a small creek and missed, landing knee-deep in icy water in the middle of a snowstorm. For another two hours, as I trudged through the snow, my pants and boots literally froze to my legs and feet.
Since the instructors usually rousted us for the day’s reindeer games at around 5:00 a.m., there wasn’t time to do much else at night besides wolf down some dehydrated chili con carne, repack our rucksacks, drop into our racks and try to block out the guy at the other end of the tent who snored like a freight train.
By the fourth week, our selection class of 109 had shrunk to no more than twenty-five people. I’d lost fifteen pounds and had to cinch up my belt to keep my pants on. I saw my exhaustion mirrored in the gaunt, grizzled faces of others who had survived to this point. The punishing course cut down eighty-some warriors, most of them combat veterans; there seemed to be nothing reasonable left to say about why we few remained.
With so few men left, Pete and I suspected the Long Walk had to be coming soon. We were right. One morning when the instructors called reveille, the rest-meter in my brain told me we’d been shorted on our beauty sleep.
I pried my eyes open and turned to Pete. “What time is it?”
He fumbled for his watch. “Couple minutes after two.”
“Well, this must be the Long Walk then.”
“Yup,” Pete said. “I’ll see you on the other end.”
After suiting up, I trudged out into the cold darkness. The pines cast long blue shadows in the snow and moonlight glinted between them. My breath made clouds in air. I wondered if I would make it.
The instructors loaded us into trucks and hauled us through the predawn darkness to separate starting points. Although no man knew the time standard at the moment of his first step, each knew that to reach the final RV in time he had to keep moving and not stop to rest. Charlie Beckwith would later write about the Long Walk:
Around the twelfth hour, if the pace was sufficient to meet the requirement, the man would be, in the medical sense of the term, almost totally exhausted. He began to look for excuses to quit, to slow down, even to hope he would injure himself. Anything to allow him to stop. It was then, after the twelfth hour, that many men quit, or rested too long, or slowed to a pace that prohibited them from meeting the time requirement.
1
Charlie wasn’t right about everything. Eight hours into the Long Walk, I hit the wall. Night had long since passed into day and I met total exhaustion. It’s hard to explain the utter sucking, draining, dry reservoir feeling. It wasn’t that every muscle hurt. Every fiber
burned
. I reached the point where the course crossed over from physical torture to mind game.
As I approached each RV, I’d see a Delta instructor waiting for me and think,
This has got to be it, the last RV
.
But when I reached the instructor, he’d just point at my map and say, “Your next point is—” Each time, I had to make this agonizing mental adjustment, to just switch off the part of my brain screaming at me to quit.
The instructors neither encouraged nor discouraged us. There was never a “Good job!” or “You can do it!” I later learned this was part of the test. Charlie Beckwith did not want men who needed cheerleaders. He wanted men who would succeed on courage, will, and guts, who reached “down inside themselves for that intangible trait that enabled them to carry on.”
For me, after thirty miles, courage and guts were just theories—abstract concepts someone invented to explain miracles. As I stumbled through the forest, each step was a mile, each mile a marathon. I would have given anything to cave in. But instead I prayed, not so much willing myself forward as trying to tap into the strength of the Lord. I prayed Scripture, especially Isaiah 40: “He gives power to the faint, and to him who has no might he increases strength. Even youths shall faint and be weary, and young men shall fall exhausted; but they who wait for the LORD shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings like eagles; they shall run and not be weary; they shall walk and not faint.”
My face sagged and my mouth hung open, lungs burning as I sucked in the icy air. My nose ran and my ears felt frozen hard to my head. At some point, I lapsed into a kind of trance, crunching under snow-laden pine branches, dragging boulder feet with rubber legs. I wanted to drop my weapon, drag my rucksack off my back and, like Elijah, lie down under a tree and wait to die.
Except that Elijah had finished his task and I had not. “Lord, just help me make it to the next RV,” I prayed. “Let it be the last.”
And suddenly, it was.
WITHOUT WARNING, I broke into a clearing where a huge bonfire blazed. I could see two instructors waiting there, and they turned to look at me when I emerged from the woods. For a second, I stopped walking.
Is this really the end?
I thought. I was afraid to be jubilant and far too tired anyway. But neither man came forward with another map. Instead, one of them brought me a canteen. It was as though a nightmare suddenly turned into a good dream.
“This is your last RV,” said the man who gave me the water. “Get some dry clothes on. You’ll be here for a while.”
I trudged toward the ring of warmth surrounding the bonfire, dropped my rucksack, shucked my boots, and laid down flat on my back looking straight up at the sky. Clouds scudded overhead and I sipped at the canteen. It was the best water I’d ever drunk in my life.
My prayers at that point were simple:
Thank You, Lord. Thank You
.
There were no other recruits to commiserate with as I was the first to make the last RV. My time: eleven hours and twenty-seven minutes. Within an hour, though, other men checked in, including Pete.
When I saw him walking toward me, I sat up painfully and grinned. “Welcome to your final point,” I said.
He peeled off his gear and sat down beside me. “Well, that was easy,” he said, and we burst out laughing. Pete had every reason not to finish, but he did, completing the Long Walk with a stress fracture in his leg.
After it was over, I came to understand that the course was designed to test one thing and one thing only: a man’s resolve. Even the British SAS didn’t know why it was effective, but this method of selection had worked for twenty-five years. Charlie had to battle long and hard with Pentagon and Special Forces brass to get Delta up and running in the first place, and one skirmish involved the lengthy selection and training process. Why, the four-stars with veto power wanted to know, did top caliber Special Ops men in peak physical condition, who could shoot the eye out of a Commie from half a mile away, need to be put through this senseless marching?
In a point paper that won the day, Charlie explained the psychology of successful counterterrorist operatives. At the 1972 Munich Olympics, Palestinian terrorists took eleven Israeli athletes hostage. A team of German sharpshooters descended on the scene, surrounded the terrorists, and took aim to get the hostages back. But when the shooting began, two of the Germans who had the terrorists in their sites failed to fire their weapons. Every hostage died.
The Germans had tested their commandos’ marksmanship, agility, and tactical expertise. They had not tested their resolve. Charlie saw the opposite truth at work in Somalia and Vietnam when German and Australian counterterrorism operatives selected by similar methods, executed flawlessly. The Army can train a man to spy, shoot, blow things up, and kill with his bare hands. But it cannot instill in a man the series of two-sided personality coins that cash out as a successful operative: patience and aggression, precision and audacity, the ability to lead or fall in line. Above all, the Army cannot instill resolve beyond physical and mental limits.
So Beckwith and Burruss designed the Delta Force selection course to test each man’s sheer willingness to
endure
, which is the common denominator that unites small groups of elite fighters who,
in extremis
, seem to have only each other to rely on.
In the freezing mountains of North Carolina, I learned to rely on God. When my legs felt made of pig iron, when I knew I couldn’t take another step, I felt His strength. Many, many times, when I was unsure of which way to go, when the terrain blurred into sameness and my map meant nothing, I sensed Him shepherding me in a literal wilderness. When life gets tough, every man draws from a different well of strength, but I am not ashamed to say I depended on God.
THE NEXT DAY, instructors ferried us back to Bragg in trucks. In the mountains, they tested our wills. Now, they would render a verdict.
After what seemed a very short night of rest, an Army psychologist brought us in for a battery of tests. The day after that, he interviewed us one-on-one. Anxiety knotted my gut. Not only did I not cotton to the idea of a head doctor, I also knew this was the last hurdle, the final test before selection.
The psychologist was a strange, slightly overweight fellow who seemed totally out of place in this Special Operations environment, where nearly every man you saw was seriously fit. We met in his office, a small cinder-block room with a metal desk and a telephone.
“Sit down, Captain Boykin,” he said, reaching down to lift the top file from a stack on his desk. I could see my name written on the border.
Most of the shrink’s questions were open-ended, designed to test my ability to reason and think rather than to spit out “right” answers.
“Could you spend several days alone in a sniper position with a homosexual?” the doctor asked. It was his first question. In 1978, it was also a weird question, and it got my attention.
I thought about it. “If it was my mission, I could,” I said. “But he’d better understand that I’m not like that.”
He continued down a list of questions.
If you observed an illegal act by one of your soldiers during a mission, and knew that reporting it would compromise the mission, would you report the illegal act?
If you were given a cover story and asked to go on a mission where you would essentially live a lie, telling lies every day, would you be able to do that?
Could you, in a very calculated way, kill a person who posed no threat to you?
Tough questions. By then, I had wrestled through questions of deception and killing in times of military necessity, and how those issues sometimes seemed to clash with Christianity. I still struggled with them. But I answered each question as thoughtfully and thoroughly as I could. I knew the psych eval was the last weight in the balance, the factor that would tip the scales for me or against me at the Commander’s Board, where Beckwith and his officers would make the final decisions on who was in and who was out. I wasn’t sure how the shrink was rating my responses, but I spoke honestly, keeping integrity, humanity, and the military mission uppermost in my thinking.
The interview lasted two hours. “Major Burruss tells me you came in first on the forty-mile march,” the psychologist finally said. “Impressive.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“I also understand you’re a man of faith.”
“Yes, sir. That’s right.”
“Captain Boykin, from my analysis of your test data, I believe you rely too much on your faith and not enough on yourself,” he said. “I’m going to recommend against your being a part of this organization.”
THE PSYCHOLOGIST’S ASSESSMENT hit me like a bullet. After the mental and physical torment of the selection course, I could hardly process it. But by the time he ended our meeting and I walked out of his office, I was certain his recommendation was the kiss of death. There was no way I was going to make the final cut.
That was on a Friday. The commander’s board was scheduled for Monday. Miserable, I drove back down to New Bern. I talked it over with Lynne. Then Mom assured me she’d been praying for me. That Sunday morning, I went to our little church and during the service, I really began to pray.
“Lord, I don’t know what Your will is, whether I’m to be part of this unit or not, but I’m relying on You to lead me,” I said.
I left there that morning with peace in my heart, knowing that whatever happened would be God’s will.
Back at Bragg on Monday, Beckwith held the board in the small conference room next door to the one where I’d first laid eyes on him. He and several of his men sat in chairs arranged in a semicircle, facing the front of the room and a lone chair. The hot seat. I assumed it was mine, and took it. Since the shrink both knocked the wind out of me and, I thought, punched my ticket back to Eglin, I expected to feel nervous—or worse, resigned to failure. Instead, I felt amazingly calm. In fact, I was even confident.
I looked around at the men who faced me. They all wore civilian clothes. There was Beckwith, of course, wearing his sidearm and, as always, looking like the inside of a laundry hamper. Bucky Burruss was there, as well as a combat medic named Glenn Nickle who had been part of the cadre that put us through the selection course. The unit’s sergeant major, William “Country” Grimes, was also there, along with a handful of others.
There is only one word to describe their faces: hostile. Without prelude, they began to machine-gun me with questions. The instant I spit out an answer to one question, here came another one.
What are your strengths?
What are your weaknesses?
If a noncommissioned officer was the best man to lead a mission, would you be willing to work for him?
During an operation, a man under your command breaks a serious rule of engagement. Later on the same day, his bravery saves the lives of three men in your unit. When the op is over, do you discipline him?
Then Beckwith fired off a question. “What’s your attitude toward blacks?”
“I serve in an army that is integrated,” I said without hesitating. “I have no issues with race.”
Beckwith rolled his eyes. “Come on, Boykin, you’re from North Carolina. You’re telling me that when you were growing up, you never called anybody a nigger?”