Jerry Boykin & Lynn Vincent (3 page)
Inwardly, I groaned. Lifted out of context, it sounded terrible.
Myers: “In a phone conversation, Boykin tells NBC he respects Muslims and believes the radicals who attack America are ‘not true followers of Islam.’ ”
When did I say that?
Myers: “Boykin also routinely tells audiences that God, not the voters, chose President Bush.”
Now there’s some red meat for the anti-religion Left
.
Then NBC trotted out a “military analyst,” Bill Arkin, the reporter who had apparently been investigating me for a month but who hadn’t bothered to interview me.
Arkin: “I think that it is not only at odds with what the president believes, but it is a dangerous, extreme, and pernicious view that really has no place.”
Based on what?
I thought.
Your extensive conversations with me?
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. The report concluded. Stunned, I walked back to my office and flipped off my light. Tish walked out into the main corridor beside me. “I’m really sorry,” she told me. “That’s exactly one of the reasons it’s hard to get good people to serve in Washington.”
“Thanks, Tish,” I said. I struggled to find something to add, but it seemed as if a great weight was pressing down on my soul, and I couldn’t find any words. “I don’t know what else to say.”
That night at home, my wife, Ashley, was my comforter. She had seen the report. When I walked through the door, she hugged me. “How are you doing?”
I looked at her and shook my head. “I just can’t believe it.”
I skipped dinner and slumped on the couch in my living room. My mind raced. I most certainly had not been out on an anti-Islam campaign. In fact, I was on the record in print, saying the war on terror was
specifically not
a war between Christianity and Islam. I had never contradicted that, but only discussed my personal faith and tried to encourage other Christians—many of whom had sons and daughters in harm’s way—with this message: they had the weapon they needed to affect the outcome of a war between good and evil—prayer.
They were not powerless
.
But now I felt completely powerless. My first instinct should have been prayer, but it wasn’t. I wanted to charge in. I wanted to fight back. But I immediately realized that despite my more than two decades in special warfare, I had no idea how to fight in this situation. In my career, I had faced down warlords and drug lords, dictators and terrorists, kidnappers, guerillas, and murderers. Them, I knew how to deal with.
Osman Atto flashed into my mind. He seemed to be exhibit A in NBC’s “case” against me—and yet the man was corruption in human skin. In addition to helping Mohamed Farrah Aidid starve his own people, Atto built “technicals,” half-ton pickups with gun mounts in the beds Aidid and his Habr Gidr clan used to intimidate and murder members of rival clans. The warring factions often spilled each other’s blood in Mogadishu’s narrow, dusty streets, with Aidid’s more heavily armed clan mowing down men, women, and, if they got in the way, children.
Also, Atto was a major dealer in
khat
, a narcotic weed that transformed so many otherwise strong and able Somali men into walking zombies.
A medium-sized man with eyes like onyx, Atto spoke nearly perfect English, which made him a good PR man for Aidid when news cameras rolled through the area. Despite his dark profession, Atto, whenever possible—and especially whenever a camera was in range—invoked Allah, trying to create the impression he was a devout, practicing Muslim. In fact, Osman Atto’s gods were the oldest idols of all: money and power.
In the summer of 1993, Joint Chiefs chairman General Colin Powell signed off on a plan to send an American unit, Task Force Ranger, to capture Aidid and restore peace to Mogadishu. The task force was under the command of General Bill Garrison, a cool-headed Texan who, it is rumored, has never been seen without an unlit cigar poking out of his mouth. Composed of an Army Special Operations unit, about three hundred Rangers, the task force also included 150 men from Delta Force, of which I was in command. But we’d named the entire operation Task Force Ranger to obscure that fact. In August, we set up a joint operations center (JOC) on the ragged edge of Mogadishu, and commenced operations.
As Aidid’s chief of finance, Atto topped our list of high-value targets. In September, we received a snippet of intel on his location. Within thirty minutes, we launched a helo assault, dodging rocket-propelled grenade fire to land a H-6 Little Bird gunship with four black-clad Delta Force operators riding shotgun on the pods on top of one of Atto’s garages.
We missed him by sixty seconds. But CNN gave Atto more time than that to crow to the world about how we would never catch him. Less than a week passed before we had an opportunity to put Atto’s prophecy to the test. A CIA informant offered to lead us to Atto in exchange for a position in the new, legitimate government he hoped would be restored after Task Force Ranger booted Aidid out of Somalia. Hours later, five H-60 Black Hawks lifted skyward, their massive rotors drumming the air like thunder. Four carried the assault element—Rangers and Delta operators, including six Delta snipers. One carried a combat search-and-rescue (CSAR) package—Delta operators and Air Force PJ’s, or parajumpers, medics who parachute in to tend wounded friendlies.
To that point in Mogadishu, the Rangers had been an untouchable force. With an average age of twenty-two or twenty-three years old, each had completed the Army’s physically and psychologically punishing Ranger School, where they trained in air assault, close quarters combat, demolitions, and marksmanship. They were well prepared, but young and untested in the field. Still, they were ready to mix it up, kick some warlord ass. I remembered the feeling from my first Huey flights over the jungles of Vietnam.
The Delta operators weren’t built quite the same way. With an average age of thirty-two, they were more circumspect. They had seen combat and knew its gritty horror. I had worked with some of them for as long as fifteen years. For them, an op wasn’t a chance to test themselves in a real firefight. It was more of a craft. They were professional soldiers. Swift. Efficient. Lethal. When they rode shotgun in the Black Hawks, they surveyed the city streets as cold-eyed analysts, tabulating targets, enemy firing positions, and exfiltration routes as they went.
Back in the JOC with Garrison and our action officers, I directed the assault, watching the op unfold via a helo-mounted camera. On wall-mounted video screens, we spotted the target: Atto’s two-vehicle motorcade.
I keyed my mike and gave the order: “Execute.”
As all eyes in the JOC focused on the screens, a Black Hawk swooped into the picture over the top of the two vehicles. With no audio feed, its sudden appearance was silent, but I knew its beating rotors sounded like hellfire to Atto and his men. In only seconds, the big helo squared off facing the Mercedes, flared and dropped to the street, sending up thick tornadoes of dust.
The car braked to an abrupt halt and in the same instant, I knew the Delta snipers snapped off warning shots. Two more Black Hawks roared in behind the motorcade. The car’s doors flew open. Two men spilled out of the Mercedes and darted for the nearest building. Another man exited the rear vehicle and sprinted toward the adjacent structure. Both were office buildings, about three stories high.
On the JOC monitors, I saw a man from the Mercedes fall in the street. A sniper’s bullet had ripped into his right thigh, a potentially mortal wound. The man clutched his leg, rolling back and forth, but the camera was too far away to see his face.
I hope that’s not Atto
, I thought.
I want him alive
.
The other men disappeared into the buildings, one in each, just as the three Black Hawks touched down in the street, disgorging an assault force of twenty men. Black-clad Delta operators and green-clad Rangers surrounded the vehicles and poured into the buildings, now hunting just two targets.
The assault force radio crackled: “Sir, we’ve got somebody. We’re not sure it’s Atto.”
The assault commander radioed back. “I’m in the other building. Take him up to the roof.”
Within moments I saw two Delta operators burst onto the roof of the left-most building, holding a docile captive. Then the assault commander, a Delta officer, emerged from a stairwell door atop the other building. He jogged to the edge of the roof, and on the other roof, the young Rangers hustled their captive over to meet him.
Two seconds passed, then: “We got him,” the commander radioed. “It’s Atto.”
A character named Osman Atto appears in the movie
Black Hawk Down
. There is a scene in which Atto, captured by Task Force Ranger, has a brief confrontation with Garrison, played by actor Sam Shepherd. That scene, with an erudite and condescending Atto puffing on a Cuban cigar while sneering at Garrison’s cheaper Miami brand, is pure Hollywood fiction. When that confrontation really happened, there were three people in the room—not two, as the film depicts—and Garrison was not one of them.
Instead there was only Osman Atto, Captain Mike Steele, and me.
I did not participate in the making of the movie, but I did attend the private premiere. When I saw the way director Ridley Scott portrayed Atto, I didn’t know whether to be angry or amused. The
Black Hawk Down
Atto was cool and arrogant, unfazed by the fact the most powerful Army in the world held him captive.
The real Osman Atto was terrified.
After we captured him, I wanted him to know I saw him brag to the world that the Americans would never capture him because of the great and powerful Allah. And I wanted him to know that he was not the only fighter in the conflict who claimed to serve a powerful God.
Our meeting did, as the movie shows, occur in a Conex, an empty steel shipping container converted into a small one-room shelter. Our security forces had put Atto in there because we knew we wouldn’t hold him very long. We wanted to keep him safe from mortar attacks so we could gather intelligence from him before sending him off to be prosecuted for helping Aidid oppress and murder his own people.
I remember my first impression upon meeting Atto, perhaps the second most powerful man in all of Somalia who, it was rumored, had close ties to Osama Bin Ladin and other Muslim terrorists. When I walked into the Conex, intense equatorial sun poured through the wide doorway behind me, lighting the swirling dust motes that were as constant in Mogadishu as air. Atto was leaning over a small table, his hands resting on it.
The instant he saw me, fear stretched his eyes wider. He straightened and backed up against the opposite wall, feeling his way backward with his hands as though searching for a secret exit. In
Black Hawk Down
, the Garrison character and Atto have a tense little chat in which Atto seems to come off cooler than Garrison (which could be true only if Atto were Clint Eastwood). In reality, Atto said nothing.
I walked to the table opposite where he had been standing and looked him in the eye. “Are you Osman Atto?” I said.
He cringed back, as though he thought I was there to kill him. He nodded yes.
“Mr. Atto,” I said, “you underestimated our God.”
SO, YES, while serving in the United States Army, at the conclusion of an armed assault that bagged a thieving coward, I invoked the name of God. The same God whose name is mentioned twice in the Special Forces creed. The same God discussed in the Bible every U.S. commander-in-chief since General George Washington has placed his hand on at his swearing-in. The same God whom the Declaration of Independence says is the very author of the freedom I spent my life defending.
But now the media was using the faith that had been my anchor to club me over the head. Suddenly, I was being portrayed as some kind of religious fanatic perpetuating a holy war. I was under assault by an enemy in my own country, and already this enemy seemed huge, unaccountable, and immune to challenge—killing reputations instead of people.
I didn’t know where the media’s charge that I was heading up an anti-Islam crusade would lead. I did know that in the current political environment, civil liberties groups, Muslim groups, and others would accept the NBC News and
L.A. Times
reports at face value, with possibly devastating consequences for Muslims’ perceptions of America’s intent.
These were the thoughts racing through my head as I sat slumped on the couch in my living room on October 15, 2003, and they were bad enough. But I had no idea of the national firestorm that lay ahead—that pundits would concoct outright lies—such as that I had said the terror war was “a continuation of the Crusades,” or that I had issued instructions on how to torture the detainees at Guantanamo Bay—and that I would face
criminal charges
based on those lies. I had no idea that within days, Muslim extremists across the globe would begin issuing death threats against me and my family, and that George W. Bush, my commander-in-chief, would stand in the White House Rose Garden and, without even an investigation, publicly disavow me.
1948–1970
I NEVER KNEW A TIME when I didn’t dream of being a soldier. The tradition of military service stretched back to my daddy’s family and World War II. When I was growing up, Dad told the story of how, at age sixteen, he told his mama he had decided to drop out of high school and join the Navy so he could go fight the Nazis. His four older brothers, my uncles, were already serving in Europe.
“Ed and Mickey and Wilton and Martin are already
over
there!” he said to Lily Boykin, my grandmother, as she sat at the table in her country kitchen in Wilson, North Carolina, shucking corn into a paper sack. “I’m gonna go sign up!”
In her younger days my grandmother was reported to have been a beautiful woman. But the strong Roman nose that once gave her face the look of an aristocrat gave it a stern cast in middle age. She was as hardcore a Republican as she was a Baptist and could have run her husband’s sizable tobacco operation with one eye closed while arguing a man into knots on politics and religion.