Jerry Boykin & Lynn Vincent (8 page)
Not every wartime soldier articulates it the same way, but at some point the crossover happens, the turning point between training and the real thing. There is a moment, sharp as a blade, when you realize:
this is not a drill
. There is a flesh and blood enemy out there with real bullets and bombs. He wants me dead. If he can, he will kill us all.
As a young lieutenant floating over secret-filled jungles, I had my pivotal moment and that moment produced fear. But fear was only a faint instinct compared with the adrenaline rush of the challenge.
Mano a mano
. Us against them. A macho territorial drive older than Moses. As much as anything, I yearned to be tested. I wanted to get out there and mix it up, walk through the fire, and live to tell about it.
That’s why I so clearly remember the first time I thought I was going to die. It was only a week after I got to Vietnam. The Huey I was riding in that day lifted off from an airfield in Natrang, skimming across the rice paddies until the pilot snapped a steep climb to get us through a high saddle in some mountains directly ahead. I was crowded in with General Faul, four other soldiers, plus the aircrew and the door gunners. The helo cruised along at six thousand feet. Warm wind rushed through the open cargo doors, blending with the loud chop of the rotors. Out the port side of the aircraft, I could see the Huey’s shadow flitting across the mountainside like a ghost.
Without warning, the helo plunged wildly. The wind now rushed suddenly upward, past the cargo door. The aircraft fell from the sky like an elevator car cut free of its cable. A single thought flashed through my brain:
we’ve been hit
. As we dove toward earth, my stomach hung in my throat and fear ripped at my heart like a vulture.
I have no idea what General Faul and the others did because I was completely engulfed by a white-knuckled terror. The bird felt in total freefall and I could still see the helo’s shadow, now screaming down the mountainside. I said one of those emergency prayers—not devout, but desperate:
Lord, don’t let us get killed!
As we plunged through five thousand feet . . . four . . . three . . . two, my brain clung to scraps of hope:
Can the pilot crash-land? In a rice paddy? Better chance for rescue there than on the side of this mountain
.
It was not to be. As we broke through a thousand feet, the pilot pulled back on the stick and ended our nosedive, leveling off low enough for me to make out individual villagers in the paddies, and even the hoes and rakes they were using. Relief flooded through me as I realized the pilot had the helo under control. The villagers glanced up at us, then returned to their tilling, unafraid. The pilot now commenced a low, slow racetrack pattern orbiting the paddies. After about ten minutes, we climbed again, up and through the mountain pass, landing at a Korean fire base somewhere out in the jungle.
Legs shaking, I exited the helo with Faul and the others. The pilot got out and came around to where we all stood trying to figure out what had just happened.
“Helluva ride, wasn’t it?” he said, smiling.
It turned out that we had nearly been the victims of friendly fire. The Koreans had a fire base on one side of that mountain pass, the pilot told us. They had received a call for artillery support from a unit engaged in a firefight on the other side of the pass.
“I saw artillery rounds crossing literally right in front of us,” the pilot said. These were 105 rounds—two feet long and as big around as a fence post, passing just feet off the nose of the helicopter. “I had to take her down fast to get below them.”
The chances of artillery rounds crossing our flight path at our exact altitude—and the pilot spotting them with his naked eye—were infinitesimal. I imagined what might’ve happened if he hadn’t and thought maybe now would be a good time to change my trousers.
I HAD BEEN IN VIETNAM for only three months when Henry Kissinger finally hammered out his ceasefire. Just that quickly, my combat tour was over. Faul and I headed back to Korea. Four months later, I returned to the States and, in May 1973, reported to Fort Campbell, Kentucky, as the new executive officer of D Company, 1/506 infantry, in the 101st Airborne. The 101st had returned from Vietnam and was transitioning from its role as an airborne outfit specializing in parachute insertions, to becoming an air assault unit. I was privileged to be in on the ground floor of that historic shift, helping to develop Army air assault tactics and procedures built around helicopters like the OH-58 Kiowa Warrior and the lethal AH-1 Cobra.
Lynne and the kids joined me from New Bern. April was almost five years old by then, and our son, Randy, was nearly two. They were, of course, the cutest kids ever born. We rented a little house off-post, and it was great to have the family back together again. Randy was by now old enough that I could take him fishing, the way my father had taken me. I spent most of the time baiting his hook and chuckling as I untangled his line from the bushes. That’s what my dad did with me, and when I was out on the creek with my own little boy, I felt like that was about as good as life could get.
Our time in Kentucky marked the first real opportunity we had to get involved in a local church. We joined an Assemblies of God congregation pastored by a slender, dark-skinned, and extraordinarily wise man named Bob Jones (no relation to the university). I got really involved in the church’s bus ministry. On Saturdays, I would walk around the neighborhoods on post, asking parents’ permission to invite their kids to Sunday school. Then on Sundays, I’d drive the church bus around and pick up the kids whose families had said yes. A lady from our congregation rode along, teaching the kids the songs they’d be singing at church. I got a kick out of driving through the streets with the joyful voices of twenty-five or thirty children spilling out of the bus windows into the Sunday morning sunshine. Of course, if an officer did that now, he’d likely be the subject of a federal probe. He might even get a call from William Arkin.
I hadn’t been at the 1/506 long when I also started inviting members of my platoon to church. Some came, some didn’t. But one of them, a young Spec 4 from Alabama named Stephen Collins, surprised me with a challenging question. I had invited him to church a couple of times. He said he’d come, but then never showed up. Then one Monday morning, I was sitting in my office when Steve walked in and sat down.
“Lieutenant, you don’t know much about me,” he began. “When I was real little, my daddy walked out on us.”
Sitting across the desk from this young soldier, I flashed to my own father. I wasn’t that much older than Steve. What might my life look like if my dad had been the kind who would abandon his son?
“We wound up going to live with my granddaddy,” Steve went on. “So he raised me as long as I can remember, and he was a Christian. Went to church every Sunday, read his Bible. But he was a farmer, not a soldier. And I’ve never been able to figure out how you can be in the Army and be a Christian. Lieutenant Boykin, how can you believe it’s okay to be a Christian and yet be in a job where you train to go out and kill people?”
His question took me completely by surprise, and I realized immediately that I had no good answer.
“You know, Steve, that’s a good question,” I said. “I’ve always just accepted that there’s no inconsistency there. But to tell you the truth, I really haven’t thought it through. Let me think about it and I’ll let you know.”
That Wednesday night, Lynne and I went to church. After the service, I caught Pastor Bob in his office and presented my dilemma.
“Jerry, one of the things people have to understand is that life is all about warfare,” he said. “Life is a battle, a spiritual battle. And, at the root of every war, there is a spiritual battle.”
He let me think about that for a second. Hitler ordered the murder of six million Jews. The communist regimes in Korea and Vietnam depended on V. I. Lenin’s belief that religion is “opium for the people,” “medieval mildew,” “a sort of spiritual booze, in which the slaves of capital drown their human image.” The very acceptance of the existence of God was a stake in the heart of communist ideology. If religion could truly liberate a man not from hardship but in the midst of it, there would be no need for socialism—or its dictators. And so “science” was Lenin’s god.
Even wars without overt signs of religious strife—struggles for land, power, treasure, freedom—could be, at their core, spiritual battles. Attempts by men to serve mammon—or to fight for the right to liberty divinely imprinted on each person’s heart.
Then Pastor Bob began to talk about America. “What you need to understand is that God ordained this nation to be a place where people could worship freely, and a place where other nations could look and see the foundation of that freedom is the belief that it is God who grants freedom to all men. He’s called this country to be a light in a world of darkness. And He didn’t create a country where believers could have freedom with the expectation that unbelievers would defend it.”
That made so much sense to me. Biblical passages flashed through my mind: Joshua at Jericho, David and his armies. I could see that the concept of fighting for your country, of defending your land, was taught in Scripture, even ordered by God.
“It is not only right for Christians to defend this nation,” Pastor Bob went on, “it’s their responsibility. If God calls you to defend this country, He’s not offering you a job, He’s calling you to service.”
AFTER FORT CAMPBELL, I served in a number of short assignments, and God blessed Lynne and I with a third child, Aaron. By 1977, I made captain and transferred to Florida Ranger Camp at Eglin AFB, where I became an RI and branch chief, overseeing various aspects of training and supervising patrols in the field. Outside my office, I had a great view: an alligator pond occupied by the camp mascot, Big John, a fifteen-foot gator. Big John brought back memories of hunting alligators with my dad. He would’ve loved to take on Big John, who on January 5, 1978, was sunning himself outside my office window at Eglin when my phone rang.
“Captain Boykin,” said the man on the phone, “this is Lieutenant Colonel Gene Blackwell with the Army Personnel Center.”
“Hey sir, how’re you doing?” I was puzzled as to why he was calling me, but tried to sound casual, which I almost always did anyway because of my Carolina drawl.
“Fine, fine,” Blackwell said. Then he got right to the point: “We want to ask you to volunteer for a new unit that’s being formed at Fort Bragg. It’s highly secret and I can’t tell you much about it.”
Instantly, he had my attention.
“What I can tell you,” Blackwell went on, “is that when you get to Bragg, you’ll undergo a thirty-day assessment and selection program and you need to be in top physical condition for it. At the end of that, if you make it, you’ll be asked to volunteer for an assignment with this unit. We need to know your answer this afternoon.”
That was exactly how he laid it out. Zero details. Take it or leave it. And almost before the last word was out of his mouth, I realized I was going to say yes.
Fort Bragg 1978
I TOLD LIEUTENANT COLONEL Gene Blackwell I’d consider his offer and call him back. Whatever he was talking about, it was so secret he asked me to commit without even knowing what I was committing to. The mystery intrigued me. I wondered whether the Army was actually standing up some kind of new unit, or preparing for a sensitive mission. I knew that prior to the Son Tay raid, in which a small task force swooped into a North Vietnamese prison camp to free American POWs, Colonel Bull Simons had recruited and trained his men in secret. Man, I wanted to be part of something like that.
I also knew Blackwell had to be sitting up there at personnel reviewing records. I tried to imagine what spurred him to call me, among what had to be hundreds or even thousands of candidates. Maybe it was the combination of my Virginia Tech commission and Ranger experience. In any case, his words, “if you make it,” lay before me like a dare.
So I did the thing I always do when confronted with a serious dilemma: I called my mother.
She picked up the phone on the first ring and I didn’t waste words. “Mom, I’ve been asked to volunteer for something that’s being formed at Bragg. I don’t know anything about it. I don’t know if this is where God wants me. But I want you to pray that if it is, I’ll make it through this thirty-day program.”
Right on the spot, we prayed together over the phone.
“Jerry?” she said after the amen, “I want you to know that I’m going to keep on praying.”
“I know, Mom.”
I hung up and decided to go tell Lynne, who was at home in our quarters, a block-long walk away through Florida sunshine. When I told her, she was completely supportive—even though she didn’t know what she was supporting.
“Obviously this is something you’ve got to do,” she said. I marveled at her patience with the Army’s habit of turning life on its head. At the time, we really had no idea what that really meant.
For the next month, I trained hard with two Ranger NCOs who had also been invited to try out for whatever it was we were trying out for. Then on February 8, 1978, the three of us reported to Fort Bragg’s Old Stockade, a nine-acre chunk of real estate isolated from the rest of the post and surrounded by a high fence of double chain-link topped with barbed wire.
The stockade once housed prisoners. But in contrast to the barbed wire and concrete, a cheery royal blue awning covered the building’s entrance, and the walkway leading up to it featured the beginnings of a rose garden. I didn’t know it at the time, but my future commander would one day have me on my hands and knees planting three different kinds of roses there. (“We want ’em to know we’re steely-eyed killers here,” he said. “But we also want ’em to know we’re not barbarians.”)
The NCOs and I walked between the roses, went inside, and checked in with a duty officer who sent us over to a guest house to spend the night.
“Be back at 0900 hours tomorrow morning,” he said.