I turned to the crowd. “Go home. No fight today.”
Then, for the first time, I looked at John. “Let’s go. It’s over,” I said. He followed me out to the parking lot and without a word, we parted ways.
I knew I was risking scorn and accusations of being a “nigger lover.” But I also knew that the whole time I was growing up on the farm, Junior’s parents treated me like one of their own. And besides all that, I just couldn’t abide a bully.
4
AFTER GRADUATION, I went on to Virginia Tech on a football scholarship and was accepted into the Corps of Cadets, a military program that led to an army commission. My dad and uncles had laid down the pattern for Boykin family military service and I wanted to do them proud. Since the Spanish American war, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University has trained officers to lead the nation’s forces, and I knew VT cadets had earned a truckload of decorations for valor.
Since I was playing football on scholarship, I lived in the athletic dorm instead of the upper quadrangle with the rest of the corps. During the last weeks of the summer of 1966, while the other cadets were in indoctrination classes learning how to march and salute and so forth, I sweated my butt off in two-a-days and fell into bed at night, exhausted. In fact, I don’t think I even looked at the contents of my standard-issue olive-drab duffel bag until the night before the first day of classes. That was a mistake.
Late that evening, alone in my dorm room, I thought I’d better take a look at what I had. I unhooked the top of my duffle bag, upended it, and inspected the mess: a large pile of grey shirts and trousers, some wool and some cotton. A hodgepodge of brass insignia, a saucer cap, and some kind of bizarre harness used for who-knew-what. At that moment, I made two important discoveries. First, I had absolutely no clue what went with what. Second, I didn’t have any shoes. Had I been attending indoc classes like the other freshman rats, I would have known I had to go buy shoes separately. But now it was too late. And I had just two choices of my own: football cleats or penny loafers.
I had seen cadets wearing black shoes, so I thought I’d try to scare some up in the athletic dorm. After a trip down the hall knocking on doors, the best I could come up with was a big old pair of work boots from a big lineman named Shorter who was taller than me and whose feet were two sizes bigger.
The next morning, damp and smelling of shower soap, I put on an ensemble that I thought looked pretty good: a pair of charcoal gray winter-wool pants and a light gray summer shirt. Shorter’s size fourteen boots poked out from under my pants legs like houseboats.
I grabbed my books and clomped outside, a light feeling of anticipation percolating in my belly. It was my first day of college, yes. But I was more excited that it was the first day of my Army career. I knew my shoes weren’t regulation, but I felt I’d done a pretty good job with the rest, and was proud to finally be wearing the uniform.
Walking up to the upper quad, I saw two Army captains walking toward me. These officers were sharp as bayonet points, with tightly clippered haircuts, knife-edge creases in their slacks, and spit-polished shoes. About a car length from me they stopped dead in their tracks and stared at me, astonished. I glanced down at my clothes and back at the captains. Compared to them, I looked mighty crappy.
“Mornin’!” I said, trying to blind them with cheer. “How y’all doin’?”
“Cadet!” snapped the officer on the left, who looked as if he just stepped out of a recruiting poster. He scanned me up and down as though I had just blown in from a carnival sideshow.
“What company are you in, Cadet?” the officer snapped.
“T Company—” I ventured, now dead certain I was in for some demerits or pushups five minutes into my military career.
But then the two officers just looked at each other and chuckled, shook their heads, and walked on by.
Relieved and vowing silently to at least iron my uniforms in the future, I started walking again. When I got to my first class, I sat down next to one of the cadets from the upper quadrangle and looked him over: matching summer uniform, sharp creases, and high-gloss shoes.
I sank down in my chair. Great start, Boykin.
5
IN THE CORPS OF CADETS, I was drawn to the instructors who came from the infantry. All of them had recently returned from Vietnam and I noticed they were the most highly decorated. Most of them were wearing Purple Hearts. As much as I could, I followed what was going on in the war. Now I was able to get firsthand information and I peppered my instructors with questions. What was it like there? What kinds of operations were they involved in? And they would tell me their stories—of patrols and ambushes, artillery strikes and firefights.
One of my instructors had been at Ia Drang Valley during the bloody battle in which 450 American soldiers faced two thousand North Vietnamese Army regulars in November 1965. The battle had tested our new air-mobility tactics—troops dropped in landing zones by helo, then supported by air, artillery, and rocket fire called in from a distance. At the end of the four-day battle, the U.S. lost 234 men to the NVA’s one thousand dead. One ambush, on November 17, would stand as the deadliest in the entire war. The first major U.S. battle in Vietnam, Ia Drang is history now. But then, my instructor’s memories of raging infantry clashes and hand-to-hand combat still fell into the category of current events. I hung on every word.
I noticed there was a brotherhood among the infantry men in my cadre. These were tough men who had done tough things. They had led men, seen death, and survived. They had faced down the enemy and had the scars to prove it.
In addition to my weekly helping of war stories, I studied military history and tactics, along with my general ed courses, plus classes in my major, distributive education, which emphasized work-study programs for high school kids. On Sunday mornings, I showed up at a little Baptist church. But I didn’t pray outside of a crisis and I didn’t read the Bible. My mother, Katie Gwendolyn Page, was a devout evangelical who raised me in church, starting with a plain little country church way off in the sticks of Wilson County, North Carolina. Before he went into civil service as an electronics technician, Daddy worked a small farm out there.
On Sundays, Mother would take me to this white wood-frame church where the main image that stuck in my mind was the preacher, who scared me to death. He was an older man who wore glasses, and the longer he preached, the louder he yelled. And the louder he yelled, the redder his face would get. I always felt as if he was yelling at me.
“Mother,” I would say nearly every week, “I don’t feel very good. Can I go sit out in the car?”
Every once in awhile, she’d let me. But even though I couldn’t wait to get away from that lobster-faced preacher, I kind of liked Sunday school. I had fun filling in Bible scenes with lick-and-stick pictures—I especially liked that story about the big whale swallowing Jonah whole—and learned to give all the right answers about Moses, Abraham, Noah, Mary, and Joseph. I also learned that Jesus died on the cross for my sins, although I wasn’t quite sure what “sins” were.
When I was young, Dad went to church with us—not out of any great conviction, but because that was just what people did. But suddenly, when I was in the sixth grade, he stopped. From then on, Dad read the paper and watched football on Sunday mornings. I kind of liked his style and wished I could do that, too. But I didn’t want to disappoint my mom, and later, at college, I didn’t want to have to lie to her if she asked about it. And I definitely didn’t want the head football coach, Jerry Claiborne, to think I was a heathen. So I went to church.
Coach Claiborne was a Southern Baptist so conservative he’d make Ronald Reagan look like a liberal. He had played football for Bear Bryant when Bryant coached at Kentucky. Now in his forties, Coach Claiborne was a compact, powerful man with a coiled athleticism packed into his five-foot-ten frame. On the field, he was hard and tough, and demanded an extraordinary effort from every player. He did not tolerate laziness, half-heartedness, or prima donnas. To his way of thinking
, athleticism was a gift from God, like the ability to paint or teach or build or manage investments, and he expected his athletes to be good stewards of their gifts.
Coach Claiborne was very open about his Christian faith. Enormous compassion and integrity tempered his toughness, and that’s why we all respected him. If a player was injured, had family problems, or no place to go during a holiday, Coach would take care of it personally. When other football programs were breaking NCAA recruiting rules, Coach Claiborne didn’t. He also was a man of few vices, a strict teetotaler who didn’t use any type of profanity. The closest I ever heard him come to cursing was when he hollered at a player, “You’re just fartin’ around!”
I had another Christian coach, a faith-forward firebrand named Rock Royer. In the locker room, we used to joke that Coach Royer must be on amphetamines because the man was a nonstop blur of action and commentary. Coach Royer would wade in padless among the towering linemen, and slug it out with us on the field. And he was just as likely to tell you he loved you as to get up off your lazy ass and take one for the team.
Both coaches inspired me. As I said, during my teen years Dad stayed home. Meanwhile, the men in our home church were, well, church men. It was almost as though the fact that I met them in church, and not out in the “real world,” cancelled their credibility in matters of real life. Meanwhile, my dad was a Purple Heart winner, an outdoorsman, a hardworking husband and a devoted father—not a man of faith, but unarguably a good man. Coach Claiborne and Coach Royer were the first men in my life who demonstrated to me a man could be both.
6
DURING THE FALL SEMESTER OF 1967, I married Lynne, my high school sweetheart. The following summer, our first child, April, was born. At first, Lynne and April lived with my mom and dad back in New Bern, North Carolina. But later they moved down to Blacksburg to be with me at school. April changed my life. Up until then, I had been a typical young athlete: The only reason to go to class and perform at all was to maintain my football eligibility. But after April made her debut, I got serious about school and surprised everyone by making the dean’s list.
By 1970, I was a senior cadet, training every day to go to war. By then, antiwar protests had been boiling for a couple years on college campuses. I had nothing against the hippies who marched in them; I just didn’t agree with their politics. And I definitely disagreed with the opinion of some that American soldiers were persecutors. My VT instructors had served in the mud and sweat of the jungle, surviving rocket fire, snipers, and the horror of seeing their buddies’ heads blown off, all to keep a people free. I believed we were fighting in Vietnam not only to help those people, but also to hold back the global spread of communism. Subsequent world events, such as the utter devastation of Cambodia by the Khmer Rouge, proved that a worthy goal.
It wasn’t until the early spring of 1970, just weeks before the tragic clash between Kent State students and Ohio national guardsmen, that the first big antiwar protest hit the VT campus. I had a late class that day and when I walked out of Burruss Hall onto the parade field, it was already dark. The smell of wood smoke hit me immediately. Looking across the field, I could see dozens of students clustered around a van-sized bonfire. Sparks whirled up into the night and I could hear chanting and clapping and the snap of burning wood.
I walked toward the blaze, offended that the protesters lit this fire on the very field where the cadets drilled, the field where we would graduate before going off to war. While privileged college kids chanted and sang protest songs, many of us would fight and bleed. Some of us who drilled on this very field wouldn’t come home alive.
I walked faster.
From a distance, I could see that only about a hundred students seemed to be active in the protest. Several dozen others stood at the fringes, watching. As I got closer to the fire, I could feel my own temperature rising. I knew some of the students chanting slogans cared about the American war dead. I also knew many of them were ignorant of what their protests really meant, that there was no such thing as the armchair communism that suburban kids liked to think was a better way to run a country than the democratic republic that gave them the right to march against the government and not be executed for it.
Suddenly, to my left, I noticed two guys also walking toward the fire. One, wearing ragged jeans and shoulder-length curly hair, carried an American flag wadded up under his arm. Real anger bloomed inside me, as though someone ignited a gas flame inside my chest and was turning up the dial.
I closed in. “Hey! Where are you going with that flag?”
The two guys stopped and squared off on me. I remember their exact words: “This war sucks! We’re gonna burn this flag!”
The flag my father lost half his sight for. The flag my uncles and eight million others had rushed to defend. The flag thousands of young men died for in Vietnam, and were dying for now, maybe at this minute.
“The hell you are,” I said.
They stood their ground. The curly haired one glared at me. “Who are you to stop us?”
I didn’t think I was anybody special. But I knew I wasn’t going to let them do what they’d come to do.
“Well,” I said very deliberately, “if you try to burn that flag, I’m going to kick both your asses. Take your choice.”
They contemplated that scenario, then turned around and walked in the opposite direction, away from the fire.
Wise decision, I thought.
7
I DIDN’T GRADUATE THAT SUMMER as I expected, having failed organic chemistry. The subject made no sense to me at all, maybe because I was completely uninterested in things like carboxyls and the medicinal properties of willow bark. The F on my transcript meant I had to go back for fall semester. Still, when I finally graduated in December, I was a Corps of Cadets honor grad. I received my commission and headed for Fort Benning, Georgia, and the Infantry Officer’s Basic course.
Shortly after I arrived, a no-nonsense officer with an unusual name began scheduling appointments with us, the freshest crop of second lieutenants. When I went in to see Captain Major, a Fort Benning assignments officer, my first thought was to wonder how long before his nametag would read “Major Major.”
Captain Major was a crisply mannered paper pusher whose trade was matching names with jobs. We sat down across an industrial-looking desk from one another in a small, sparse office.
“Where do you want to be assigned?” Captain Major asked me without much in the way of preceding small talk.
“I want to go airborne, then Ranger training, then Vietnam,” I said, not wasting any more words than he did.
Captain Major scribbled a bit in a file folder lying open on the desk between us. “Okay. I’ll send you to jump school and Ranger training. Then I’ll send you to Fort Hood, Texas. About four months after that, I’ll send you to Vietnam.”
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.
Jerry Boykin & Lynn Vincent Page 4