Jerry Boykin & Lynn Vincent (6 page)
And that was that.
With Captain Major’s promise tucked under my hat, I felt my career was finally under way. I threw myself into my classes on infantry tactics, leadership, and logistics, absorbing every detail. I was up early each morning for physical training, and studied late into the evening. I really wanted to learn everything the Army had to teach.
Even though I was busy with classes, at Benning life slowed down some. Lynne and the baby were at home with my folks in New Bern. Now that I was on active duty, I didn’t have to hold down an extra job. And, of course, football wasn’t eating up my time anymore. For the first time since reaching adulthood, there was space in my life to reflect. That’s when a vague disquiet began to stir in my heart.
At first, I couldn’t pinpoint the problem. For days, between classes I laid on my bunk in the BOQ, the bachelor officers quarters, trying to figure out why I felt so anxious. Then one day, a thought crystallized in my brain:
You’re not a boy anymore
.
Suddenly I realized that in some sense, I’d spent the last four and a half years in a bubble. Yes, I had spent that time as a husband and father, and was even technically in the Army. But I had also been a student and an athlete, pursuits in which the consequences of half measures or even failure, though embarrassing, didn’t ripple far. Now college was over and I was in the real world: a husband and father earning a living for my family, and also stepping into another position that carried a lot of responsibility. As a new platoon leader, I would lead forty men whose lives literally depended on me.
At Fort Benning, I went to classes, went back to the BOQ, and sat on my bunk. I stared at the walls, grappling with the discontent I felt inside. I couldn’t pinpoint the problem. I was married with a beautiful daughter, I had graduated the Corps of Cadets with honors, and my lifelong dream of military service was finally a reality. Still, sitting in my barracks room, I felt—empty.
Then one night, seeking some kind of answer, some kind of comfort, I got up from my bunk and rummaged in a box I’d brought from New Bern until I came up with a Bible. I sat back down and without knowing why, turned to the Gospel of John, and began reading. Twenty minutes later, a verse printed in red jumped off the page at me: “I am the light of the world,” Jesus was saying to His disciples. “Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.”
Thanks to the diligence of my mother and my Sunday school teachers, I could recite the gospel verses in my sleep. But I had to admit: I’d taken all that on board as general principle—it didn’t have anything to do with me personally.
Now a thought burst in my consciousness like a rocket:
That doesn’t make any sense
.
Either the gospel story is personally true or it isn’t. Otherwise, showing up for church on Sunday is nothing more than social fakery, and I am nothing more than a hypocrite.
Sitting on my bed with the Bible in my lap, I remembered the first time I thought Jesus might be more than just someone to learn about in church.
During Prohibition, Bill Page, my grandfather on my mother’s side, was a bootlegging kingpin who made a mint running Canadian whiskey through Baltimore into Eastern North Carolina. Granddaddy Bill was a big man—huge, in fact—close to three hundred pounds. When he drove his old round-fendered Ford step-side pickup, distributing his whiskey to his sprawling network of local bootleggers, Granny Page rode shotgun. While Granddaddy chugged through North Carolina back country, Granny carved slices from a big stick of baloney and made him sandwiches as they went. The family lore is Granddaddy put gas in the car and Granny put gas in him.
During Prohibition, the Pages made so much money you’d have thought they were cranking off counterfeit cash in the storm cellar. Granny Page told me once she would stuff forty thousand dollars at a time into Mason jars and bury it in the backyard in case the revenuers raided the house. You’d think that after Prohibition, with all that money and a little age on him, Grandpa Bill might have turned philanthropist or at least retired on a nice-sized farm. Not so. Instead, he took all his money and bought a carnival, and spent the rest of his life trooping up and down the eastern seaboard with a Ferris Wheel, a sideshow, and a troop of hoochie-coochie girls.
After Grandpa Bill ran off with some carnie lady from Kentucky, Granny Page started drinking. I was four or five years old at the time, and I remember how Granny changed. She had always doted on me, telling me tall tales and slipping me treats, but after Grandpa Bill left, it was as though all the life drained from her eyes. In my little-boy logic, I thought maybe it had something to do with cigarettes. She had taken to smoking Raleighs like a coal train.
I remember one night Mother came into my bedroom and shook me softly. “Jerry, wake up. We have to go out for a little while, take a little trip.”
I crawled out of my bed and could see stars through my bedroom window. It was still the middle of the night.
“Where are we going?” I asked sleepily.
“We’re going to get Granny.”
Mother bundled me in a blanket and guided me out to the car, where I crawled into the back, still wearing my favorite flannel PJs, the ones with the cowboys printed on them. Daddy made the short drive to Granny’s place, which was the little house trailer she pulled for years while she was still in the carnival business with Grandpa. I stayed in the car while Mother and Daddy went in. I was wide awake by then. It was strange being out so late at night. I knew something must be wrong.
Then I saw Daddy and Granny come out of the trailer, and Mother behind them, shutting the door. It seemed as though my sweet grandmother couldn’t walk right. She was staggering left and right and Daddy had to hold her up so she could make it to the car.
Granny must be awful sick
, I thought. I was very worried.
Daddy put Granny in the front seat. I could smell her perfume and another smell I couldn’t quite make out.
Mother crawled in the back seat with me. “Granny, we’re going to take you to the hospital,” she said.
Granny tried to talk but it seemed she couldn’t form any words. Now I was really worried. Daddy drove to the hospital. I later learned Mother and her sister, my Aunt Belle, had made many such trips before. Those trips ended, though, sometime in my fifth year, when a drastic change bloomed up in Granny like a sunrise. The sparkle returned to her eyes. Her smile came back. She was my grandmother again. I knew better than to ask about what was going on with the grownups. But Mother sat me down on the divan one day and told me something I’ll never forget.
“Your grandmother has accepted Jesus,” Mother said. “She’d been drinkin’ a lot of liquor, but she’s stopped now and has started to go to church.”
I nodded. Mother seemed unusually serious.
“Jerry, I want you to remember somethin’. No matter what we’ve done, no matter what sins we’ve committed, no matter what mistakes we’ve made, Jesus will always forgive us,” she said. “Do you understand that?”
I looked in Mother’s eyes and nodded. I didn’t have any idea about fancy theological words like “grace” and “regeneration.” But I knew my granny had been changed from the inside out. That was the first time I saw a real person changed by faith, and I never forgot it.
Now, at Fort Benning, I thought about Granny Page’s conversion. I also thought about my dad. He believed in God in a general way. If I chose a different path, did that mean my father was going to hell? I thought about Coach Claiborne and Coach Royer, their commitment, their passion, the way they inspired me and the young men around me.
My father is a great man
, I thought.
But these are great men, too
.
The next day, and for several after, I plodded joylessly through my class schedule at Benning as these thoughts worked themselves through the fabric of my mind. I couldn’t stop thinking about God, about what I now suspected was the root of my anxiety: a deep spiritual anemia had somehow elbowed its way to the surface of my life. It wasn’t as though
I
decided the time had come to place the evidence for and against the truth of Scripture into some kind of intellectual balance, and see which side dropped. I felt a
pressing
in my soul, a forceful insistence coming from somewhere outside myself that I deal with matters of eternity, and that I do it
now
.
I went to sleep thinking about it. I woke up thinking about it. Then one morning in late January, I knelt alone in my room, right down on the tile beside my bunk, and did business with God.
1971–1977
I’VE HEARD PEOPLE ASK THE QUESTION, “Why would
anyone
jump out of a perfectly good airplane?” After airborne training at Fort Benning, my question was, why would anyone not? From my first static line parachute jump, I thought it was an absolute blast, and I never changed my mind. I reveled in the adrenaline rush I got from leaping into space, and in the freedom I felt floating down through the Georgia sky. I was sorry the school only lasted three weeks. But I was also eager to move on. From there I was off to complete the next leg of Captain Major’s training plan: Ranger school.
In March 1971, I reported to the Ranger Training Brigade at Fort Benning, Georgia. I breezed through some of the first tests—breaking down and loading an M-60 machine gun; setting and detonating a Claymore mine; encoding and decoding a radio message; and several tasks with M-16s, hand grenades, and the M-203 grenade launcher. These were basic infantry skills I had learned in ROTC, so they were no problem. Next came a confidence course, hand-over-hand rafter crossings over mud pits, and land navigation skills using a map and compass. I was still in great shape from playing football, so none of these things presented a real challenge.
In fact, I thought I was doing great. That is, until we left Fort Benning and moved to the Mountain Ranger Camp at Dahlonega, Georgia.
Our main focus there was learning how to conduct successful patrols under conditions meant to simulate combat. That meant little sleep, less food, and almost zero shelter. For two weeks, we lived, ate, and slept mostly in the open. It was April by then, but still bone-numbing cold in the deep North Georgia woods. Our only shelter was found in the green rubber ponchos we carried in our rucksacks. When it rained, we were wet and miserable. When it didn’t rain, we were wet and miserable anyway from slogging through rivers and streams up to our hips.
Each patrol had an objective—attacking an enemy position, for example—and lasted three to six days. I had heard that the ranger instructors (RIs) would keep us on the move from 5:00 a.m. until 2:00 a.m., twenty-one hours a day. That was true, except when they marched us for twenty-four. Very quickly, I learned to snatch sleep where I could. It got to the point where if we stopped for five minutes, I could sleep for four of them.
Meanwhile, the grand total of our food intake on patrol was one C-ration a day. At some point during the day, we dropped our rucksacks in the dirt and squatted down for a deluxe meal of canned pork slices or canned beans and weenies, or my favorite, canned ham and lima beans. On our first patrol, it took maybe three days before I noticed that some guys’ britches had started to sag. After five days, their faces were hollowed out from hunger and haggard from lack of sleep. If I’d had a mirror, I would’ve known I looked just as bad. Because of severe sleep deprivation, most of us started to hallucinate. And the thing we hallucinated about most was food. I imagined I could smell bacon frying or fudge cooking. I think I would’ve traded my boots for a piece of chocolate.
I guess I could blame all those things for my initial spectacular failure. We had been in Dahlonega for only a few days when the RIs tasked our patrol, about eighteen men, with assaulting an enemy base camp. I hadn’t slept in two days. Blearily, I helped plan the mission, but when we finished, the plan was as clear in my head as oatmeal.
After dark, we moved out toward the objective, walking single file through an oak and cedar forest, underbrush crunching beneath our jungle boots. My back ached under a seventy-pound combat load. Ahead, I could hear frogs and crickets. Their night chatter stopped as we approached, then tuned up again as we passed, closing behind us like water. For me, the sound was hypnotic. As I plodded along near the middle of the pack in something like a trance, my mind drifted to nights spent in the North Carolina woods hunting with my dad. Some of his deer jerky sure would be good right now—
“Ranger Boykin!”
The patrol had clustered at a rally point just short of the objective for final preparation and a leader’s recon, and an RI now demanded my attention. “You are now the patrol leader,” he barked. “You have thirty minutes to brief your team and move out.”
My head swam with panic. I scanned the surrounding tree stand and realized I had no idea where we were. I had not anticipated having to lead, and now couldn’t remember a single detail of the assault plan.
“Yes, sir,” I said miserably.
During the brief, I faked it as best I could, but when we moved out, I was completely inept. As we crossed potential danger areas, I was supposed to post security. I didn’t. I was supposed to issue instructions to the soldier walking point. I didn’t. On top of that, I was literally lost in the woods, and finally, my assistant leader had to take over the patrol. We did reach our objective, but without any help from me.
Later that night, I burrowed under my poncho as much to hide my embarrassment as for shelter. The next morning, the cadre called us over one at a time to give us our first formal grade in Ranger school.
“Ranger Boykin,” said the RI who had observed my incompetence, “I have given you a failing grade for your patrol last night.” He then proceeded to explain what I had done wrong, which was basically everything.
When he was finished, I slunk away, now not only ashamed, but worried about passing the school. Under an overcast sky, I trudged back to my position on the perimeter and sat on the ground near a cedar tree. Rummaging in my rucksack, I came up with a can of beans and weenies. Even as hungry as I was, the food seemed to go down my throat in large, mealy lumps that tasted like failure.