Jerry Boykin & Lynn Vincent (20 page)

It was the first time we had done that as a unit since our failure at Desert One. I think we all hoped this would be our chance to regain something we lost in the flames of Iran.

2

FROM POPE, we took off for Barbados on C-5s loaded with men and Black Hawks. After a miserably muggy stopover at the airfield there, I boarded one of the helos with about a dozen Delta operators. We were so crammed in that bird that hanging our feet out the door wasn’t a matter of romance and daring—it was what we had to do to fit.

Sergeant Major Don Simmons, a tough and serious Special Forces veteran, sat on my right. Squeezed in on my left was Master Sergeant Dennis Wolf, a wiry, gray-haired explosives specialist. Dennis knew nothing about infantry tactics when he joined Delta, but once in the unit, he took to it like a bird to flight and became a first-rate operator. Just behind us sat Sergeant First Class Chuck Collinwood, a lionhearted man who came to Delta from the Golden Knights, the Army’s elite parachuting team. Collinwood was a world freefall champion who, after he left the Army, went on to become a sniper with a big-city SWAT team, where he famously ended a hostage standoff by nailing the hostage taker with a well-placed bullet. The poor criminal never had a chance.

Dave Cheney, the big man who forced the C-130 door open at Desert One, was wedged in among others in the open door on the port side of the Black Hawk. Somewhere in between, Glenn Nickle was in there, too. We were in the flight lead, piloted by Chief Warrant Officer 3 Bill Flannery.

As the helo’s massive main rotor beat the air, I caught glimpses of the five Black Hawks in trail, their position lights red against the dark.

Designed to carry more fully armed assault troops and bigger payloads than its predecessor, the Huey, the Black Hawk had been in service since 1980. We’d been training in them since just after Eagle Claw and in fact had planned a return mission to Tehran using the Black Hawk as the primary aircraft. But when the Iranians released the hostages, the mission, like so many Delta planned, became one that never happened. Grenada would be the Black Hawk’s first test in actual combat. The bird’s critical components and systems were either armored or redundant, built to withstand small arms and medium-caliber high-explosive projectile fire. We would now find out whether the armor worked as advertised.

The intel section briefed us to expect little resistance, so we carried pretty standard equipment: .45s, M-4 carbines, harnesses with two canteens, four ammo pouches, a strobe light, and the medical kits we always carried. My part of the mission was to set up an alternate command post, so I had a rucksack containing some smoke grenades and a PRC-66 air-to-ground radio. We didn’t see a need to wear Kevlar or even helmets, which was nice since it was hot. On the other hand, the door gunner, a member of the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, was zipped up tight in an OD-green flight suit and wearing a crew helmet and goggles. I felt kind of sorry for him.

We’d been en route for an hour when the sunrise began on Dave Cheney’s side of the aircraft, the light quickly turning the water from grey to aquamarine as it pushed out beneath my feet. Fifteen minutes later as we approached the Grenadian coastline, the water brightened from aquamarine to turquoise to crystal shallows. Then we crossed the beach, a white ribbon there and quickly gone.

At my two o’clock, I could see the capital city of St. George’s, and beyond it, three Navy ships floating on the postcard sea. Below us, island jungle formed a lush cover, broken by tiny, square farms and occasionally a village. When we did pass over open ground, I was surprised to see people looking up at us, smiling and waving. We were low enough to see their faces.

Then I saw our target: Richmond Hill Prison, a small fortress of brick and concrete set on a hill. Three minutes straight ahead.

One of the crew chiefs yelled back into the cargo bay: “Hey, Radio Free Grenada is announcing that we’re coming!”

Well, that explains the friendly villagers
.

It also meant there would be zero element of surprise.

As if on cue, the sky erupted with red and green tracers, arrows of light speeding up at us. For a surreal moment, my world went quiet. Suddenly, I found myself thinking in real time, but sensing in slow motion—

Looking below, I see an anti-aircraft gun emplacement, a Quad 50.

No intel on that
.

I see fatigue-clad Latin men manning it, their faces turning slowly up toward mine.

Cubans
.

I raise my M-4.

On the ground, a red tracer leaves the cannon’s barrel.

I aim, fire, aim, fire.

The tracer is coming up straight and slow, almost lazy. I seem to see its entire path from the gun barrel to the Black Hawk.

The tracer round misses the helo, and suddenly time snaps back into place.

Now, the air crackles with gunfire. Don and Dennis are returning fire on my right and left. The door gunner is squeezing off staccato bursts, the rattle of his M-60 muted by the furious beating of the Black Hawk’s rotor.

I aim and fire. I hear others firing around me. On the ground, some of the triple-A gunners fall.

Who killed them? Was it me?
It is the first time I may have killed a man. I don’t know how to feel.

The smell of cordite fills the air. I begin to hear popping noises and realize that each one is a .50 caliber round punching a hole in the Black Hawk. The engine roars as Bill circles the gun emplacement.

Muzzle reports from behind me, on Cheney’s side. Don, Dennis and me: Fire. Fire. Fire.

The door gunner’s fire slows. He’s having trouble picking out targets on the ground. Another staccato burst, then his weapon jams. He struggles to clear it.

From behind him, Collinwood looms up, yelling, “
Move
!”

Collinwood yanks the gunner from his saddle, instantly clears the jam and fires. The M-60 thunders. On the ground, two men fall.

Don’s magazine is out. He reloads. Dennis reloads, then me. I brace myself on my rucksack, eject a spent magazine and snap in a full one. I pick up the empty with my left hand.

I am stashing it when an invisible sledgehammer crashes into my left shoulder.

I feel a massive jolt, but there is no pain. I try to finish stashing the empty so I can reengage, but my left hand no longer works. My left arm no longer works.

It’s been shot off
.

My next thought:
You’re not the first guy to lose an arm, now just stay alive
.

Don and Dennis are still firing. I lay down my carbine and reach over with my right hand to find the stump of my shoulder.

Can I stop the bleeding before I bleed out?

Instead of a stump, I find an upper arm.

I’ve still got my arm
. It is more of a factual notation than a rush of relief.

I slide my right hand down to see how much of my left arm remains. It’s all there, but completely numb and useless. I lift it with my right hand and flop it into my lap.

A .50 caliber round meant to bring down aircraft had blown through the Black Hawk’s floor and through my rucksack, shattering the radio inside it. The round continued its upward trajectory, carrying radio shrapnel and bullet fragments up at a slight angle through my armpit into my shoulder and chest. I would later learn I was a centimeter from death: One fragment missed my brachial artery by the width of a bullet.

The drumbeat of rotors continued as Bill banked and dove, trying to pick a way to Richmond Hill through the barrage of incoming fire. I still felt nothing. From the doorway, I could see Cuban forces reloading a Quad, a different one. M-4’s cracked from both cargo doors.

Suddenly the blessed numbness in my arm vanished and pain roared in, a deep, terrible searing as though somebody stuck a blowtorch under my armpit and was steadily cranking up the flame. Pulsing fire radiated into the left side of my chest, a consuming pain worse than I had ever imagined.

On my right, Don Simmons was firing. I looked at him: “Don, I’m hit.”

He pulled up his M-4 and leaned over my lap, searching for the wound. Then I heard Collinwood: “Don, he’s hit in the chest and shoulder. He’s bleeding bad.”

Collinwood stopped shooting. The roar of guns and rotors continued around us. He plunged his hand into his medical kit, snatched out a bandage, and tore it open with his teeth. Still holding the bandage in his mouth, he used both hands to rip my shirt open.

He pressed the bandage to my chest. “Hold that!” he yelled.

I reached up with my right hand to hold the bandage in place.

Collinwood grabbed the M-60 and squeezed off three more bursts. He turned back to me and adjusted the bandage, trying to stop the bleeding. He then grabbed the M-60 again and resumed firing.

In my peripheral vision, I glimpsed Don Simmons pulling a morphine syrette out of his medical kit.

“No morphine!” I yelled as he prepped it. “No morphi—”

Don jabbed the needle into my thigh. I hadn’t known whether the morphine would cause me to pass out, which was why I didn’t want it. But within 30 seconds, the fire in my chest and shoulder had subsided to almost nothing.

“We’re going to take you to the airfield!” Simmons shouted over the battle roar.

“No!” I said. “Go around one more time and land at the target!” I thought he wanted to abort the mission because I’d been shot. I did not want to be the reason for that.

But the pilot had already decided that the triple-A fire was too heavy. “We can’t land in this stuff!” Simmons yelled and at that moment Bill cranked the Black Hawk in a looping 270 degree turn and headed back over the jungle and toward the sea.

The morphine didn’t knock me out, but it made me a little dopey. Leaning back a little on my ruined rucksack, I gazed out the cargo door and could see that the invasion had begun. I knew that an earlier Ranger airdrop was supposed to have already secured the airfield at Point Salinas. Now I could see the next wave of Rangers parachuting in, popping out of a C-130 in a straight line, their gray-green chutes billowing like giant man-o’wars.

The island is ours
, I thought blearily.
There’s nothing they can do to stop us now
.

3

NONE OF THE ANALYSTS AT CIA OR DIA believed we would face much resistance in Grenada. Due to that critical intelligence failure, we flew into a hornet’s nest. All six Black Hawks in the Delta flight were shot to pieces. Maintenance crews later counted 54 holes in the one I was riding. I wasn’t the only casualty. Bill had a slight wound to his leg, and Dave Cheney was shot through the arm. A young Delta radio operator named Scott Perry was also wounded—three times with one bullet: He had been squatting on the deck near Cheney when a .50 cal round pierced the Black Hawk floor then ripped a tunnel up through his shin and calf, his thigh, and the hand he’d had resting on it.

In addition to the casualties on our bird, ten other Delta operators and eight men from Task Force 123 were wounded. One Black Hawk pilot was killed by gunfire. His copilot, also wounded, kept the bird airborne until it smashed into a ridgeline, its rotor breaking free and pinwheeling over the ridgeline and into St. George’s Bay. Miraculously, no one else was killed in the crash.

Now, as our Black Hawk went feet-wet over the water, I looked out and saw the Navy ships I spotted earlier, beyond St. George’s. Soon, it became clear that’s where we were headed.

In my boozy haze, I thought,
Man, I hope this Army pilot knows how to land on a moving Navy ship
.

Bill guided the Black Hawk toward the nearest vessel, the USS
Moosbrugger
. The Spruance-class destroyer was poorly equipped to care for a batch of bloody Special Ops guys, but it was the closest port in a storm.

With the morphine dousing the fire in my wound, I had time to think about other things. Right next to the bullet fragments and shrapnel, deep disappointment settled into my chest. In Iran, we’d gotten as far as Desert One. Now, on our first major test since, we’d been unable to reach the target and complete our portion of the mission.

I also began to consider the ramifications of my wound. Don Simmons’s face, like Collinwood’s, told me it was serious. I began to pray:
Lord, spare my life. Please don’t let me die without seeing my family again
. I thought about Lynne, the kids, my mom.

After that, I started to get a little angry.
Why have You allowed this?
I wanted to know.
Have You abandoned me?

I tend to do that—question God, wonder where He is when things go bad. Then I go through a process:
Okay, this has happened for a reason. I may not know what the reason is, but I do know that I trust God
.

When Bill set the Black Hawk down on the
Moosbrugger
, Simmons and Wolf helped me out onto the helo pad and below deck. A Navy corpsman bandaged me up as best he could and told me that a Marine Corps helo would arrive shortly to take us to the USS
Guam
, a ship with a fully equipped surgical bay.

The corpsman put me on a litter and two sailors carried me back up near the helo deck to wait. Soon I could hear the distinctive twin-rotor beat of a CH-46. A few minutes later, the helo settled its strange buglike bulk onto the ship, its rotor-wash whipping the tropical air across the deck. As the sailors carried me toward the helo, I glimpsed a man hanging part way out of the cockpit, waving his arms wildly in my direction.

I couldn’t believe it: The pilot was Frank Brewer, executive officer of the helo squadron, and a close friend of mine. Frank grew up thirty-five miles from me in Greenville, North Carolina, but I didn’t meet him until 1982, when we sat next to each other in a seminar class at the Armed Forces Staff College. Because I was up there without my family, I spent a lot of time with Frank and his wife and daughter. Frank was a member of the Church of Christ and we saw eye to eye on a lot of spiritual issues. We became very close.

When I saw him in the cockpit of that CH-46, I felt God saying to me,
See? I haven’t abandoned you
. Then Glenn Nickle suddenly appeared beside me, and before I knew it, he was with me on Frank’s helo and starting an IV. I knew there was not a better combat medic in the entire Army and a warm comfort spread through me. Between Frank and Glenn, I knew God had placed me in good hands.