Jerry Boykin & Lynn Vincent (7 page)
Since Infantry Officer’s Basic, I had begun trying to deepen my faith. On patrol, when we rested and I could keep my eyes open, I often pulled out a little New Testament I kept in a plastic bag, and read a few verses. But now, very silently, I began to pray, asking God to help me get through the course.
Up until that point, I trusted God mainly with my spiritual well-being, the security of my eternal soul—“fire insurance,” as the old joke goes. For everything else, I now realized, I had been depending on myself, on my own mental abilities, my athleticism, my determination. But when I failed that patrol, I suddenly understood I had been relying too much on myself and not enough on God. For me, that was the beginning of a life lived relying on God moment by moment.
I began Ranger school a colossal failure. I ended it as an honor graduate.
ON JUNE 5, 1971, Lynne and I left Fort Benning with a three-year-old, a brand-new baby, Randy, and a U-Haul trailer stuffed with everything we owned. We drove as far as Meridian, Mississippi, spent the night, then got up the next day and drove to Fort Hood, a huge post sprawling over 340 chalky square miles slap in the middle of Texas hill country. My orders there fulfilled a requirement that I have at least four months’ experience in an infantry unit before shipping out for combat. But those 120 days spent leading a forty-man platoon ticked by slowly. The entire time, I felt like a racehorse at the starting gate.
Late September came, and the orders to Vietnam that Captain Major promised me had still not materialized. Nor did they arrive in October or November. Now I was really getting restless. Christmastime came and I took Lynne and the kids home to New Bern on leave. While I was home, I planned to travel up to Army Personnel in Washington, D.C., track down the infantry assignments officer, and tell him about the deal for orders I’d made with Captain Major. To my Southern way of thinking, there was nothing like a friendly personal visit to establish rapport and knock off any mud that might be slowing down the wheels of progress.
On January 3, the first business day of the new year, a Trailways bus carried me from North Carolina to the Capitol. I called ahead to tell the personnel office that I’d like to have a meeting to discuss my next assignment. When I arrived, a very nice secretary greeted me and pulled out my file.
“Okay,” she said brightly. “Major Major will see you now.”
I nearly fell over. Major
Major
? I couldn’t believe it. My good-ol’boy, personal visit plan suddenly went up in smoke. Stomach churning, I walked in to the major’s office.
“What can I do for you, Lieutenant Boykin?” Major Major said, after I sat down across the desk from him.
I reintroduced myself. Then, treading carefully, I reminded the major that he had, almost exactly a year before, told me that I would have orders to Vietnam four months after my arrival at Fort Hood. Without saying so outright, I made it clear I thought maybe he had forgotten.
Maybe I made it too clear, because the longer I talked, the more disdain collected on Major Major’s face. “Lieutenant Boykin, you serve the needs of the Army,” he said, looking me straight in the eye. “Vietnam is winding down and we do not need as many lieutenants there as we did when you were in Infantry Officer’s Basic. What you need to do is get yourself back to Fort Hood and enjoy your time as a platoon leader.”
I wasn’t ready to give up. “Is there
any
way you can find a slot for me in Vietnam?”
Major Major looked at me as though a large rock occupied the spot where my brain should’ve been. “No,” he said with what sounded like his last grain of patience. “We don’t have any requirements for platoon leaders right now.” His last sentence came out as though a period followed every word.
“Well,” I said, “I just want you to know that I’d really like to go before this war is over.”
Now, a company commander or a division officer in the field might have appreciated my eagerness to go into combat. Major Major did not. He looked at me in the exact same way a complaint department clerk might at 4:59 on a Friday afternoon. “Well, I’ll make a note here that you’re a volunteer for Vietnam,” he said, now clearly bored and ready to move on, “and that if
any
platoon leader spots open up, we’ll send
you
.”
Which was a polite way of saying, “Get out of my office.”
I KEPT PUSHING FOR ORDERS TO THE WAR. And in the first week of February 1972, I got what I thought was the big phone call from personnel. But once again, I was disappointed: “We’re giving you orders to Pusan, Korea,” a personnel officer told me. “You’re going to be an aide de camp.”
An aide de camp
! I thought.
I must have really pissed off Major Major
.
Nobody
wants
to be an aide de camp. Your first vision of it is that you’re nothing more than some general’s errand boy. As it turned out, I got a tremendous education, an exposure to the strategic level of Army operations I would never have gotten in a troop unit. My first boss was Brigadier General Jack McWhorter, a quartermaster officer and West Point grad from Mercedes, Texas. I worked for him only from March until June, but during that time, I was a back bencher during quite a number of high-level meetings on U.S. policy and strategy for the Korean peninsula.
Still, I did my share of grunt work. After McWhorter left, the new guy came: General Lloyd Faul of Sunset, Louisiana, a Cajun Catholic who loved cigars, had five kids and an infernal dog named Snoopy.
Faul first called me ahead of his arrival in Pusan. “Lieutenant Boykin, I wanted to let you know I’ll be on the two o’clock flight into Osan with my wife, my kids, and my dog.”
“Yes, sir. I’ll be there,” I said. “Looking forward to meeting you and your family.”
“We’d like you to bring someone with you to transport the family,” he said. “You transport the dog.”
Now
this
is some high-class work
, I thought. On the phone, I said, “No problem, sir. Glad to.”
Lieutenant Choi Jung Yul worked as my Korea counterpart and an interpreter for the American generals. A college graduate, he spoke fluent English and was a very serious soldier. We spent hours discussing Korean culture and he helped me learn his language. The day General Faul flew in, Yul and I climbed into a Suburban and drove up to Osan to collect the new American boss and his entourage.
“Lieutenant Boykin, you take Snoopy to the quarantine,” General Faul said after Yul and I had taken care of his luggage, his family, and his billeting.
Now you have to understand that I was used to hounds, pointers, and setters of various kinds—hunting dogs that knew how to track, retrieve, and generally do what they were told. Snoopy, by contrast, was quite possibly the dumbest animal I had ever met. Part Dalmatian, part something else, he gazed stupidly at me through the caged door of his transport kennel. Still, I wondered if I saw a devilish gleam in his eye.
All pets brought across the ocean had to be quarantined for thirty days. So all the Fauls crowded around the kennel to love on Snoopy before I took him away. That was when the general issued his warning. “Whatever you do,” he said, “don’t let Snoopy get away from you. If you do, you’ll never catch him.”
As I drove to the quarantine area, a hot June sun beat down on the Suburban’s roof. I could hear the dog panting in the back. Five minutes later, I pulled up to the quarantine area, which bordered on Pusan’s pristine, rolling golf course. Rather than try to muscle the whole kennel inside for check-in, I grabbed Snoopy’s leash and opened the kennel door to snap the leash on his collar. That was my big mistake.
That animal shot past me like a convict in a jailbreak. He landed in the parking lot and took off at a dead gallop. General Faul’s words flashed through my mind:
Don’t let Snoopy get away . . . you’ll never catch him
. That blasted dog had been lying in wait!
I cursed and sprinted after him, my two legs to his four. Maybe the mutt wasn’t as stupid as he looked because he headed straight for eighteen holes of open range.
“Snoopy! Snoopy!” I hollered like an idiot, racing past generals and colonels teeing up. I could hear the dog ahead of me, yapping in celebration of his freedom. I raced across the first fairway, nearly sideswiping a woman who almost clubbed me with a seven iron midswing. Golfers laughed at me and cursed at me as my Army career flashed before my eyes. I chased that dog for seventeen holes, alternately calling his name, sucking wind, and picturing my new assignment handing out socks and jocks at the gym.
I don’t know why, but at the eighteenth green, Snoopy suddenly faltered. Seizing the career saving moment, I launched off both feet in a commando dive and dragged him down like a felon. And as I carried that blasted animal back to quarantine, I held on so tight I was afraid the Fauls were going to wind up asking me why their dog had fingernail marks in him.
DURING MY TIME IN KOREA, I existed in a kind of cultural disconnect. By then, Vietnam war protesters stateside began lining up to scream and spit at soldiers returning from the war. Such incidents infuriated me when I saw them on Armed Forces television. By contrast, I was struck by how proudly the Koreans sent their men to the war. For most of a year, I was right in the thick of their comings and goings. Every Korean unit deployed from and returned to Pusan, a major port city. Every time a Korean unit shipped out or returned, Faul and I would head down to the bustling waterfront for the official ceremony.
Each of these events was almost like a holiday for the Koreans. The city turned out the schools and all the children would stream down to the port waving Korean flags. I remember one day in particular, going down and watching as a ship tied up and the citizens waited for disembarkation to begin. When the Koreans came off the ship, they always brought their wounded off first. Some were litter patients; others walked on their own, bandaged and limping; some were missing limbs. There was a message of honor in the fact that the wounded disembarked first: these were the real heroes. And their fellow citizens treated them that way, with this incredible combination of joy and reverence. Cheers went up when the first of the wounded appeared. A band struck up a patriotic song and the children began clapping and singing.
I stood there, my heart split by admiration and sadness as I pondered the kind of reception American soldiers were getting on our side of the Pacific. I really started to question why the Koreans were so proud of their soldiers and why some Americans had such disdain for ours. Interestingly, the Koreans I got to know in Pusan had the same questions. I had a driver named Mr. Kim who had been born in South Korea. When Kim Il-Sung, backed by the Soviet Union, took control of the north, Mr. Kim enlisted to fight and was later captured by the communists.
“During interrogations, they beat me,” Mr. Kim told me one day. “In English, they called me ‘son of bitch.’ I did not know what they were talking about.”
During a year in captivity, Mr. Kim was beaten repeatedly and starved nearly to death. After the armistice in 1953, he returned to the south in a prisoner exchange. Mr. Kim’s hatred for communists was white-hot. He told me he didn’t understand the American antiwar protesters. To him, it was a great honor that his countrymen now were fighting to keep the people of South Vietnam free from the same ideology that had nearly killed him.
Choi Jung Yul felt the same way. I remember one day sitting with him in a little cafeteria on the compound. I was munching on a hamburger with fries. Yul was having a hamburger with kimchi.
“You see the American war protests, Yul,” I said. “How do you feel about the war?”
“I am proud to fight there,” he said without hesitation. “My family saw what happened to our own country between 1950 and 1953. You know my father fought in that war. Now, when communism is threatening a country so close to us, we believe it is something that cannot be taken lightly.”
If communism got a foothold in Asia beyond China and North Korea, Yul said, it could spread rapidly into the Korean peninsula.
“When we went into this war, many Americans felt the same way—that communism is not only a threat to Asia,” I said, “but to the rest of the world. And that America is the only country strong enough to stand up to it.”
Yul nodded solemnly. He felt the American war protesters were self-righteous dilettantes, impressed by their own bluster and completely uninformed by experience.
I told him I agreed with him completely.
WHEN I FINALLY MADE IT TO VIETNAM in November 1972, I considered sending Major Major a postcard. With the war winding down, General Faul and I went there to begin helping the Koreans redeploy three divisions back to their home country. To lighten the logistical load, we wanted to persuade the Koreans to turn their equipment over to the South Vietnamese. Our plan was to replace it with American equipment once they arrived back in Korea.
In some ways, my time in Vietnam was unusual. Faul and I, and our Korean counterparts linked up with some Americans, but I didn’t find any who had been drafted and resented being there. I really found myself in a bubble, insulated from this other attitude about the war. For me that was providential, a blessing. During my time in-country working with the Koreans, I kept thinking,
This is the way it’s supposed to be, like when my dad was in
. I was serving with people who were proud of what they were doing, who were committed, and who had the support of their people.
In Vietnam, the air itself seemed like a separate, living creature. Thick and damp, it curled around my shoulders on balmy days like a friendly cat and on scorching days like an anaconda. Always, beneath the smell of cordite and sulfur that floated on the winds of battle, the air seemed pregnant with the scent of rain. Nearly every day, I’d find myself in the belly of a UH-1 Huey, my stomach dropping away as the rotors bit into low humid skies. At first, rice paddies skated by beneath us in a pale green blur. Then the pilot would edge higher through jagged emerald gorges, hugging the terrain to make us a smaller target. Peering below, I often wished I had x-ray vision so I could see down through the jungle canopy and spot the men waiting to kill me.