As if on cue, the sky erupted with red and green tracers, arrows of light speeding up at us. For a surreal moment, my world went quiet. Suddenly, I found myself thinking in real time, but sensing in slow motion—
Looking below, I see an anti-aircraft gun emplacement, a Quad 50.
No intel on that.
I see fatigue-clad Latin men manning it, their faces turning slowly up toward mine.
Cubans.
I raise my M-4.
On the ground, a red tracer leaves the cannon’s barrel.
I aim, fire, aim, fire.
The tracer is coming up straight and slow, almost lazy. I seem to see its entire path from the gun barrel to the Black Hawk.
The tracer round misses the helo, and suddenly time snaps back into place.
Now, the air crackles with gunfire. Don and Dennis are returning fire on my right and left. The door gunner is squeezing off staccato bursts, the rattle of his M-60 muted by the furious beating of the Black Hawk’s rotor.
I aim and fire. I hear others firing around me. On the ground, some of the triple-A gunners fall.
Who killed them? Was it me? It is the first time I may have killed a man. I don’t know how to feel.
The smell of cordite fills the air. I begin to hear popping noises and realize that each one is a .50 caliber round punching a hole in the Black Hawk. The engine roars as Bill circles the gun emplacement.
Muzzle reports from behind me, on Cheney’s side. Don, Dennis and me: Fire. Fire. Fire.
The door gunner’s fire slows. He’s having trouble picking out targets on the ground. Another staccato burst, then his weapon jams. He struggles to clear it.
From behind him, Collinwood looms up, yelling, “Move!”
Collinwood yanks the gunner from his saddle, instantly clears the jam and fires. The M-60 thunders. On the ground, two men fall.
Don’s magazine is out. He reloads. Dennis reloads, then me. I brace myself on my rucksack, eject a spent magazine and snap in a full one. I pick up the empty with my left hand.
I am stashing it when an invisible sledgehammer crashes into my left shoulder.
I feel a massive jolt, but there is no pain. I try to finish stashing the empty so I can reengage, but my left hand no longer works. My left arm no longer works.
It’s been shot off.
My next thought: You’re not the first guy to lose an arm, now just stay alive.
Don and Dennis are still firing. I lay down my carbine and reach over with my right hand to find the stump of my shoulder.
Can I stop the bleeding before I bleed out?
Instead of a stump, I find an upper arm.
I’ve still got my arm. It is more of a factual notation than a rush of relief.
I slide my right hand down to see how much of my left arm remains. It’s all there, but completely numb and useless. I lift it with my right hand and flop it into my lap.
A .50 caliber round meant to bring down aircraft had blown through the Black Hawk’s floor and through my rucksack, shattering the radio inside it. The round continued its upward trajectory, carrying radio shrapnel and bullet fragments up at a slight angle through my armpit into my shoulder and chest. I would later learn I was a centimeter from death: One fragment missed my brachial artery by the width of a bullet.
The drumbeat of rotors continued as Bill banked and dove, trying to pick a way to Richmond Hill through the barrage of incoming fire. I still felt nothing. From the doorway, I could see Cuban forces reloading a Quad, a different one. M-4’s cracked from both cargo doors.
Suddenly the blessed numbness in my arm vanished and pain roared in, a deep, terrible searing as though somebody stuck a blowtorch under my armpit and was steadily cranking up the flame. Pulsing fire radiated into the left side of my chest, a consuming pain worse than I had ever imagined.
On my right, Don Simmons was firing. I looked at him: “Don, I’m hit.”
He pulled up his M-4 and leaned over my lap, searching for the wound. Then I heard Collinwood: “Don, he’s hit in the chest and shoulder. He’s bleeding bad.”
Collinwood stopped shooting. The roar of guns and rotors continued around us. He plunged his hand into his medical kit, snatched out a bandage, and tore it open with his teeth. Still holding the bandage in his mouth, he used both hands to rip my shirt open.
He pressed the bandage to my chest. “Hold that!” he yelled.
I reached up with my right hand to hold the bandage in place.
Collinwood grabbed the M-60 and squeezed off three more bursts. He turned back to me and adjusted the bandage, trying to stop the bleeding. He then grabbed the M-60 again and resumed firing.
In my peripheral vision, I glimpsed Don Simmons pulling a morphine syrette out of his medical kit.
“No morphine!” I yelled as he prepped it. “No morphi—”
Don jabbed the needle into my thigh. I hadn’t known whether the morphine would cause me to pass out, which was why I didn’t want it. But within 30 seconds, the fire in my chest and shoulder had subsided to almost nothing.
“We’re going to take you to the airfield!” Simmons shouted over the battle roar.
“No!” I said. “Go around one more time and land at the target!” I thought he wanted to abort the mission because I’d been shot. I did not want to be the reason for that.
But the pilot had already decided that the triple-A fire was too heavy. “We can’t land in this stuff!” Simmons yelled and at that moment Bill cranked the Black Hawk in a looping 270 degree turn and headed back over the jungle and toward the sea.
The morphine didn’t knock me out, but it made me a little dopey. Leaning back a little on my ruined rucksack, I gazed out the cargo door and could see that the invasion had begun. I knew that an earlier Ranger airdrop was supposed to have already secured the airfield at Point Salinas. Now I could see the next wave of Rangers parachuting in, popping out of a C-130 in a straight line, their gray-green chutes billowing like giant man-o’wars.
The island is ours, I thought blearily. There’s nothing they can do to stop us now.
3
NONE OF THE ANALYSTS AT CIA OR DIA believed we would face much resistance in Grenada. Due to that critical intelligence failure, we flew into a hornet’s nest. All six Black Hawks in the Delta flight were shot to pieces. Maintenance crews later counted 54 holes in the one I was riding. I wasn’t the only casualty. Bill had a slight wound to his leg, and Dave Cheney was shot through the arm. A young Delta radio operator named Scott Perry was also wounded—three times with one bullet: He had been squatting on the deck near Cheney when a .50 cal round pierced the Black Hawk floor then ripped a tunnel up through his shin and calf, his thigh, and the hand he’d had resting on it.
In addition to the casualties on our bird, ten other Delta operators and eight men from Task Force 123 were wounded. One Black Hawk pilot was killed by gunfire. His copilot, also wounded, kept the bird airborne until it smashed into a ridgeline, its rotor breaking free and pinwheeling over the ridgeline and into St. George’s Bay. Miraculously, no one else was killed in the crash.
Now, as our Black Hawk went feet-wet over the water, I looked out and saw the Navy ships I spotted earlier, beyond St. George’s. Soon, it became clear that’s where we were headed.
In my boozy haze, I thought, Man, I hope this Army pilot knows how to land on a moving Navy ship.
Bill guided the Black Hawk toward the nearest vessel, the USS Moosbrugger. The Spruance-class destroyer was poorly equipped to care for a batch of bloody Special Ops guys, but it was the closest port in a storm.
With the morphine dousing the fire in my wound, I had time to think about other things. Right next to the bullet fragments and shrapnel, deep disappointment settled into my chest. In Iran, we’d gotten as far as Desert One. Now, on our first major test since, we’d been unable to reach the target and complete our portion of the mission.
I also began to consider the ramifications of my wound. Don Simmons’s face, like Collinwood’s, told
me it was serious. I began to pray: Lord, spare my life. Please don’t let me die without seeing my family again. I thought about Lynne, the kids, my mom.
After that, I started to get a little angry. Why have You allowed this? I wanted to know. Have You abandoned me?
I tend to do that—question God, wonder where He is when things go bad. Then I go through a process: Okay, this has happened for a reason. I may not know what the reason is, but I do know that I trust God.
When Bill set the Black Hawk down on the Moosbrugger, Simmons and Wolf helped me out onto the helo pad and below deck. A Navy corpsman bandaged me up as best he could and told me that a Marine Corps helo would arrive shortly to take us to the USS Guam, a ship with a fully equipped surgical bay.
The corpsman put me on a litter and two sailors carried me back up near the helo deck to wait. Soon I could hear the distinctive twin-rotor beat of a CH-46. A few minutes later, the helo settled its strange buglike bulk onto the ship, its rotor-wash whipping the tropical air across the deck. As the sailors carried me toward the helo, I glimpsed a man hanging part way out of the cockpit, waving his arms wildly in my direction.
I couldn’t believe it: The pilot was Frank Brewer, executive officer of the helo squadron, and a close friend of mine. Frank grew up thirty-five miles from me in Greenville, North Carolina, but I didn’t meet him until 1982, when we sat next to each other in a seminar class at the Armed Forces Staff College. Because I was up there without my family, I spent a lot of time with Frank and his wife and daughter. Frank was a member of the Church of Christ and we saw eye to eye on a lot of spiritual issues. We became very close.
When I saw him in the cockpit of that CH-46, I felt God saying to me, See? I haven’t abandoned you. Then Glenn Nickle suddenly appeared beside me, and before I knew it, he was with me on Frank’s helo and starting an IV. I knew there was not a better combat medic in the entire Army and a warm comfort spread through me. Between Frank and Glenn, I knew God had placed me in good hands.
No more than ten minutes later, a pair of corpsmen carried me down a series of decks and ladders to the hospital bay on the USS Guam.
“Hey, sir, how are you feeling?” said a doctor who came to examine my wounds.
I chuckled a little. “Except for a couple of holes in me, I’m doing okay.”
A corpsman added some kind of painkiller to my IV. Then the doctor lifted my arm to examine my wound. Every time he moved my arm, I could feel crunching in my shoulder. I didn’t know it then, but the ragged hole in the side of my chest was about the size of a softball. The doctor and his helper asked me at least three times if I was breathing okay. I think they were amazed that my lungs still worked.
“We’re going to have to take you into surgery,” the doc finally said. “We really can’t tell the extent of your injuries until we get in there and take a look.”
“Okay,” I said. “Let’s do it.”
After surgery, I lay in the hospital bed all night as helos ferried in more casualties. One bird brought Delta’s unit physician, Ward Dean. We discussed the extent of my injuries. The triple-A round had destroyed my bicep and shredded the long bone in my arm to kindling. Two major pieces of the bone remained, splintered at the ends and separated by a wide gap where the bone had been completely destroyed. A small piece of the round had exited at the top of my shoulder. Because the projectile carried pieces of the shattered PRC radio with it, my upper chest and shoulder were riddled with embedded metal fragments. On an X-ray, my left side looked like a chocolate chip cookie—heavy on the chips.
“Hey, uh, doc,” I said to Dean twice when he came to see me. “Is this something they are going to be able to repair?”
“They’ll have to determine that when you get back,” he said. I couldn’t read his face and he wouldn’t commit. That’s when I knew I might be facing the end of my career.
If they board me out, what will I be able to do? I wondered, lying alone in the hospital bay. I started trying to remember people I had seen who were unable to use one of their arms. Oddly, the first guy I thought of was Senator Bob Dole, whose right arm was mangled by German machine-gun fire during World War II. Of course, Dole was in politics now. I knew for sure I didn’t want to do that.
I thought about my dad, who forged a career as a civil service electronics technician, even though he was half blind. But I knew losing the use of an arm was different, limiting in a way I wasn’t sure I could tolerate. I dreaded telling my mom and dad about the wound and the possibilities I faced. And as I lay there, I prayed nobody had yet told my wife.
I also began to pray about my arm, asking God to heal it and let me return to duty. I had good reasons to believe that He could. When I was a little boy, my mother was bedridden with an acute form of hepatitis. Her illness dragged on for months and was so debilitating we went to live in Richmond, Virginia, with my aunt, who was a registered nurse. It terrified me to see that on many, many days, Mom was so weak she could barely lift her head off the pillow.
After I was grown, she told me that one day, when she was at her sickest, I stood beside her bed and said, “Mama, if you die, I’m gonna kill myself.”
She told me, “Jerry, I’m not going to die anytime soon.”
Not long after that, another aunt came from North Carolina and drove my mother to Baltimore to see a minister who prayed for the sick. Two days later, they came back to Richmond and my mother did not have to go back to bed. The hepatitis was gone.
4
THE NEXT DAY, A TEAM OF NAVY CORPSMEN came to the hospital bay, transferred me to a litter and carried me down to the hangar deck in preparation to move me off the ship. Frank Brewer came down to see me. I got a battle update: It took the Rangers two and a half hours to complete their drop, and just as long again to take full control of the airfield. Meanwhile, part of the 1st Ranger Btn rescued 138 medical students at the True Blue medical campus. But then they learned that 224 more were holed up in a hotel near Grand Anse, a second medical campus behind enemy lines.
The next day, the Rangers rescued them in a daring helo assault, but learned in the process that another 202 students were on still another campus that no one in Grenada’s rightful government thought important to mention to the Americans. Twelve Rangers remained behind at Grand Anse to make enough seats on the helicopters for the students. They waited until dark, captured a boat and made their escape by sea.
After Frank and I visited for a few minutes, he reached into his pocket and pulled out a small pin, the emblem of his Marine helicopter squadron. He bent and fastened it on my hospital gown.
“Frank, you don’t know how much it meant to me when I saw it was you flying that helo off the Moosbrugger,” I said.
He grinned. “You know, when we got the call I had no idea who we were going to pick up. But all the other aircrews were already flying. It was just me and the maintenance officer left. So when we got the call, I said, ‘Let’s do it,’ and when we got there and I saw it was you, I couldn’t believe my eyes.”
Now it was my turn to smile. “Frank, it was the Lord’s way of letting me know He was still with me.”
“Brother,” he said, “anything short of murder or treason, I’ll do it for you.”
The corpsmen loaded me onto a CH-46 and flew me back to Grenada. Someone unloaded my litter at the Point Salinas airfield, and I lay there, flat on the tarmac in a lineup of other litters filled with other shot-up guys.
“Boykin!” I heard my name but in the bustle of activity around me, I couldn’t see who was calling me.
“Hey, Boykin!”
I lifted my head as best I could, and about five feet away saw John Carney, bent over and shooting me the moon. Carney was the Air Force combat controller who’d gone into Iran ahead of us all to embed covert lighting at Desert. Now, hooting with laughter, he pulled up his pants and walked over.
I grinned at him. “John, I hate to tell you this, but you’ve gotten uglier since we started this operation.”
We laughed and talked
a bit, then Bucky Burruss came over to check on me.
Two C-141 flights later, I was back at Bragg. During the flights, I had hours to pray, to ask God to give me use of my arm again. At some point during those hours in the air, my anxiety melted away, replaced by an absolute assurance that He would. I can’t explain why I felt that way. I just did.
On the ground at Bragg, a medical team whisked me off to Womack Army Medical Center, right there on post. After a round of x-rays, another team rolled me into the OR for more exploratory surgery. Back in a regular hospital room after recovery, three doctors in white coats came to explain my injuries to me. The news wasn’t good.
“The bone in your upper arm is shattered, your bicep is severely damaged and you have a significant nerve injury, which is why you can’t move your arm,” said a lieutenant colonel, the oldest of the three. “It would not be prudent to go in and try to repair your arm now. You have so much shrapnel in you that there is an extremely high risk of infection.”
I listened, nodding as he spoke.
“So what we’d like to do is, in six to eight months, go back in and use plates and screws to repair the broken bone,” the doctor went on. He stopped and took a breath, then delivered the worst news of all: “Your nerve is so damaged that it is very unlikely that it will regenerate. There’s a very good possibility that you’ll never use your right arm again.”
I took all this in, considering what to say to this group of men who I considered able medical professionals. Finally, I broke into a smile and looked at the doctor who had given me the prognosis.
“Doctor,” I said, “you will never have to go back into my arm again, because God will heal my arm.”
A beat passed, and it appeared to me that the three physicians were each trying to figure out the appropriate thing to say to a patient so obviously out of touch with reality.
Finally, one of them smiled indulgently. “Well, you have the right attitude, sir,” he said. “We’ll come back and check on you in the morning.”
Jerry Boykin & Lynn Vincent Page 16