Jerry Boykin & Lynn Vincent

by Never Surrender

  A Medal And A Body Bag

  Fort Bragg 1978

  1

  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.

  The next morning, we showed up way before that. I filled out some paperwork, then headed down to gear issue and drew seventy pounds’ worth of equipment. Later in the day, I was assigned a bunk in one of six major cell blocks converted into spaces for housing, classrooms, briefings, weapons storage, and classified materials. Following a diagram, I wound my way through the corridors until I found the space holding my bunk. When I walked in, the first thing I saw was a burly, dark-haired man who was already setting up housekeeping.

  I put out a hand and smiled. “I’m Jerry Boykin.”

  The man accepted my handshake. “Hi, there. I’m Pete Schoomaker.”

  “Where you comin’ from?”

  Pete told me he was from Army Personnel, an assignments officer in the armor branch. I told him I was coming from the Florida Ranger camp.

  “Glad to meet you,” I said. “Guess we’re gonna be seein’ a lot of each other.”

  In fact, Pete and I became best friends and would spend the better part of three decades in each other’s career orbits. I liked him instantly. He was an Army brat who’d earned a football scholarship to Michigan State. But as a freshman, Pete got in trouble for some offense he would never confess. The college yanked his scholarship. Pete wound up walking on at the University of Wyoming and went on to star in the 1969 Sugar Bowl.

  There was something charismatic about Pete; his warmth and humor immediately drew you in. He was a rare blend: a soldier who was serious about his craft, but who didn’t take himself—or the minor trials of a given moment—too seriously.

  “Well, that’s about as screwed up as a football bat,” Pete would say, chuckling.

  I would learn later that Pete’s charisma extended to leadership. Men wanted to follow him. But back then, we were both just a couple of young officers, excited and itching to find out what we’d gotten ourselves into.

  2

  THERE WERE RUMORS. The gossip was that a Special Forces officer named Colonel Charlie Beckwith, who had trained with the legendary British Special Air Service, was involved here. In Vietnam, the story went, Beckwith had been hit in the belly with a fifty-caliber round and survived. By reputation, he was a tactical genius with the personality of a porcupine. Low on patience, he pissed off almost everybody he came into contact with, but was also very often right. Pete heard Beckwith was forming some kind of elite unit. We couldn’t wait to find out more.

  The next morning at 0800 hours, dozens of recruits gathered in a small utilitarian conference room that had once been the stockade chapel. Pete and I sat down next to each other. I took an informal head count and tallied 118 men.

  The room buzzed with anticipation.

  “What is this?”

  “Do you know anything?”

  The name “Beckwith” floated around, but most guys shrugged and shook their heads at each other, mystified but hoping this was something big.

  Suddenly, the door opened and a hush blanketed the room. I don’t know what I had been expecting—brass and lots of ribbons, maybe—but I was completely unprepared for the man who slouched in looking as if somebody’d just poured him out of a duffel bag. A big fellow with a paunch hanging over his belt, he stood before us in civilian clothes—a green golf shirt, rumpled khaki slacks, and a big .45 caliber pistol hanging off his hip. I had just arrived from Ranger camp, where every man was spit-and-polished to within an inch of his life, so this man’s appearance was a little disconcerting.

  Another man, tall, thin, and also in civilian clothes, entered next and stood in the background. One thing you noticed right away was that this guy had a nose on him that rivaled Jimmy Durante’s. It turned out he was a rather renowned Special Forces officer named Lewis H. “Bucky” Burruss.

  “I’m Colonel Charlie Beckwith,” said the man in disheveled clothes. “We’re forming a new unit here along the structure of the British Special Air Service.”

  Pete leaned in close and whispered out of the corner of his mouth, “Is that really Beckwith?” He looked as skeptical as if a vagrant had just claimed to be George S. Patton.

  After a stint with the British SAS, an elite and unorthodox unit specializing in counterterrorism and clandestine operations, Beckwith became familiar with the work of Sir William J. Slim, a British field marshal. Sir William’s book, Defeat into Victory, was a military classic, and in a section called “Afterthoughts” he held forth on his opinion of Special Operations. Most SO units were wasteful, he wrote, saddled with more liabilities than advantages. But there was one kind of unit that the field marshal felt was an indispensable element of modern warfare. Soldiers in such a unit penetrated deep into enemy territory; blended in and collaborated with indigenous citizens; sabotaged enemy installations and disrupted operations; gathered intelligence; and, if necessary, assassinated enemy leaders.

  Then they vanished. Like smoke.

  Beckwith knew the American Army fielded no such unit. We had Special Forces, yes. But not the kind of secret and lethal organization Sir William meant—not an
SAS. After his tour with the Brits, Beckwith wrote an after-action report that would, as he put it, “change the world.” In it he explained the differences between the SAS’s lean, mean, unorthodox—sometimes unmilitary—approach to Special Operations, and the Americans’ more cut-and-dried, field-manual approach. Elite U.S. fighters were loyal, brave, and true, but they were conventional, Beckwith argued. Some in the Special Forces community agreed. Most thought he was full of bull. A few screamed in his face and ordered him out of their offices. Charlie Beckwith knew how to bring out the best in people.

  Still, in 1965, he landed an assignment commanding an experimental Special Forces group in Vietnam. It was his first chance to test the SAS concept using American fighters. The Army gave Beckwith thirty men. The name of the unit was Project DELTA.

  Now, in the stockade conference, the man who claimed to be Beckwith said this: “Our mission is counterterrorism. We’re going to train to rescue hostages and perform other Special Forces operations.”

  A slight kick of adrenaline buzzed through me, tingling in my fingertips. Suddenly, I didn’t care what this rumpled colonel looked like. This was what I’d been waiting for.

  Beckwith then peered around the room, raking his eyes over each of us. “I’ll only promise you two things,” he said: “A medal and a body bag.”

  Pete and I exchanged a look: I can live with that.

  3

  MY FELLOW RECRUITS ranged from crackerjack to crackpot, with every shade of soldier in between. I remember one guy out of the 1st Ranger Battalion who liked to smear dog biscuits with peanut butter and eat them. Another fellow sat around sharpening his knife all the time. Thin and wiry, he had scarily blank eyes. He might’ve reminded me of a serial killer, except I’d read where serial killers are usually charming. Then there was the guy who ranted constantly about how ugly his wife was. Another would wake up in the middle of the night and argue with his rucksack: “Don’t you move, you sombitch! I see you!”

  Then there was the guy who baby-powdered a pair of pantyhose every day and wore them under his uniform. He was just trying to stay warm, but that still didn’t go over very well in a camp full of testosterone-charged would-be commandos.

  At first I didn’t feel much like a commando, though. I had envisioned a lot of tests involving shooting, close-quarters combat, and clandestine insertions. But after a pretty demanding physical training test, we found that this top secret selection course involved . . . walking around in the mountains.

  Just land navigation, and lots of it, using a simple map and a compass while carrying a heavy rucksack. There has to be more to it than this, I thought. There wasn’t. But what there was, was more than enough.

  The proving ground was this: the snowy mountains of North Carolina, through dense hardwood forests, over and through rivers and streams, tangled deadfalls, and steep, unforgiving slashes of untamed range. We each carried a full rucksack, load-bearing gear, and an AK-47 assault rifle. It being February, the mercury dropped into the teens. Icy winds whipped through the trees, blowing in the kind of miserable cold that makes you wish you could simply amputate your toes.

  Early each morning, instructors would give us each an “RV,” a rendezvous, to which we were to march as fast as we could using only our compass and a 1:50,000 scale topographic map that often depicted no more than a ridgeline, waterways, and some prominent clearings. Each man had to walk alone, find his own way. To be caught following another man was to be dropped from the course.

  When a recruit reached an RV, instructors gave him another, with only one instruction: get there as fast as you can. There was a time limit to make each point, but never were we told what it was. The only way you’d know you didn’t make it was that Burruss or one of his men kicked you out of the course. I prayed that wouldn’t happen to me.

  On the first night, our base camp was a primitive group of two-man poncho tents.

  “Pair up and make camp,” an instructor shouted.

  Pete and I put up our ponchos together. But due to simple arithmetic, one staff sergeant, Pat Hurley, from the 2nd Ranger Battalion, was odd man out. He sort of stood around watching as the rest of us made camp. Finally, he edged up to Pete and me.

  “I don’t have anyone to pitch a tent with,” he said.

  I glanced at Pete, who went about six-three and 230 pounds to my six-one and 210. With just the two of us, it was going to be a tight squeeze. But I didn’t hesitate. “Okay, pitch in here with us,” I told Pat.

  That night, freezing and deeply exhausted from what would turn out to be the shortest hump we’d make, the three of us unrolled our sleeping bags in a space big enough for two. Pat tossed his bag smack between Pete and me, burrowed in, and dropped off snoring with his boney butt wedged firmly into my back. I tried to inch away, but there wasn’t much real estate for escape and evasion.

  There’s some strange folks out here, I thought. But it’s cold out there and I’m not going to make him move. For two days, I slept like that, with Pat Hurley’s tailbone drilling into my spine.

  4

  BECKWITH’S RECRUITS SPENT their average days alone and set loose on a task both simple and maddening. The course, in some ways, seemed an exercise in cruel futility. What possible purpose could it serve to make a man hump a heavy pack from one random spot to another with no particular destination, no known time limit, and no right method, only wrong ones?

  Each march was successively longer, and we’d heard a rumor that the last one would stretch forty miles. We began to refer to it as the Long Walk. Aside from reaching a checkpoint, I rarely saw another human being. If I did, I wasn’t allowed to speak to him. Using nothing but a crude map and a compass, I chose my own routes, trudging X number of miles to this hilltop or that trail junction. One of the rules was that we were not allowed to use existing trails or roads.

  As I walked, I prayed. “If it’s Your will that I be part of this organization, sustain me, Lord,” I would say. “Give me strength. Keep my family safe and comforted.” Those were my more spiritual moments. But there were times when I called down curses on Beckwith’s mother. Other days, I made the RV times only because I was too stubborn to quit.

  I worried about my knees. Achilles had his heel and I had my knees, both of which I’d had operated on in college. Playing football wore down the cartilage like old tire tread. Also, the medial collateral ligament in each knee had torn in half. If anything in my body was going to break down, it was my knees. After a ten-mile hike, they throbbed dully. After twenty miles, they screamed. I prayed fervently that God would shut them up.

  I wasn’t the only one with problems. Beckwith and Burruss designed the course to stretch every man beyond his physical limits. We bowed under the heavy weight of our rucksacks, which started off heavy and got heavier, rubbing rashy red holes in our backs. We lost men every day. Most of them just quit. A few didn’t make their time between points and were dropped. Others had to leave because of injuries. The biggest trouble was our feet. Mile after mile, the rough interior of our jump boots sanded the skin off our heels and toes. At night, we’d make elaborate preparations. Drying our feet, coating them in benzoin, plastering them with moleskin in places reddened to the danger point.

  I remember this one guy, Jimmy. Both his feet looked like raw beef. Every evening, he’d limp back into camp, gritting his teeth to keep his face from showing how much it hurt. Each night, medics came in and peeled dead and dying skin off his feet in thick, nasty patches. Then they doused his feet with disinfectant and bandaged the bloody parts. The next day, Jimmy would haul on his rucksack, pick up his weapon, and limp off into the mountains again.

  He didn’t make it through the course. I was amazed when he came back three months later and tried again, fully aware of what he’d have to go through. That time, he passed. That’s the kind of man the unit was looking for—the one who wants to be part of the team so badly he would endure whatever it took to get it done.

  Every day, our numbers dwindled visibly as men fe
ll by the wayside in twos, threes, and half dozens. Making the RV wasn’t the only problem. Some days it seemed as if even the rocks and trees were in cahoots with Charlie Beckwith, conspiring to weed out the unfit. Branches thwacked me in the face. Shallow streams developed sinkholes that swallowed me up to my hips. Rocks snuck into my path to trip me and I’d tumble thirty yards down an embankment, ass over rucksack. Many days, I was black and blue, and nearly frozen by the time I dragged myself back to camp. I was surprised at how hard they pushed us and at how far we actually went.

  One day during the course, I found myself on top of a mountain, hopelessly lost. I sat down, shed my ruck, and looked up toward heaven. “Lord, I don’t know where I am, but You do,” I prayed. “Now I ask You to guide me to where I need to go.” Then I stood, put my rucksack back on, and walked off the mountaintop straight to my RV.

  At night, Pete and I traded horror stories. He told me about the time he spent nearly half a day climbing over a wickedly thorny deadfall. I told him about the time I tried to jump a small creek and missed, landing knee-deep in icy water in the middle of a snowstorm. For another two hours, as I trudged through the snow, my pants and boots literally froze to my legs and feet.

  Since the instructors usually rousted us for the day’s reindeer games at around 5:00 a.m., there wasn’t time to do much else at night besides wolf down some dehydrated chili con carne, repack our rucksacks, drop into our racks and try to block out the guy at the other end of the tent who snored like a freight train.

  By the fourth week, our selection class of 109 had shrunk to no more than twenty-five people. I’d lost fifteen pounds and had to cinch up my belt to keep my pants on. I saw my exhaustion mirrored in the gaunt, grizzled faces of others who had survived to this point. The punishing course cut down eighty-some warriors, most of them combat veterans; there seemed to be nothing reasonable left to say about why we few remained.