Boykin William G - Never surrender: a soldiers journey to the crossroads of faith and freedom

Copyright 2008 by William Boykin

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FaithWords

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First eBook Edition: July 2008

ISBN: 978-0-446-53758-2

To my family: Mom, April, Randy, Aaron, Grant, and Mimi. And to my best pal, Ashley.

I love you all.

Special Forces Creed

I am an American Special Forces soldier. A professional!

I will do all that my nation requires of me.

I am a volunteer, knowing well the hazards of my profession. I serve with the memory of those who have gone before me: Rogers Rangers, Francis Marion, Mosbys Rangers, the first Special Service Forces and Ranger Battalions of World War II, the Airborne Ranger Companies of Korea.

I pledge to uphold the honor and integrity of all I amin all I do.

I am a professional soldier. I will teach and fight wherever my nation requires. I will strive always, to excel in every art and artifice of war.

I know that I will be called upon to perform tasks in isolation, far from familiar faces and voices, with the help and guidance of my God.

I will keep my mind and body clean, alert and strong, for this is my debt to those who depend upon me.

I will not fail those with whom I serve.

I will not bring shame upon myself or the forces.

I will maintain myself, my arms, and my equipment in an immaculate state as befits a Special Forces soldier.

I will never surrender though I be the last. If I am taken, I pray that I may have the strength to spit upon my enemy. My goal is to succeed in any missionand live to succeed again.

I am a member of my nations chosen soldiery. God grant that I may not be found wanting, that I will not fail this sacred trust.

De Opresso Liber.

Washington, D.C. 2003

WASHINGTON, D.C., IS A FICKLE BEASTespecially in February. In that month, the worlds most powerful city can wrap itself in sheets of ice and dare folks to step outside. Or it can flirt a little, enticing with a false glimpse of spring. During the first week of February 2003, temperatures spiked into the fifties and I saw bureaucrats braving the Beltway in shirtsleeves when I arrived from Fort Bragg for an interview with Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.

I was a two-star Army general at the timecommander of the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School at Fort Braggand the Army had nominated me for a third star. Heres the way that works: Up through their second star, military officers advance in rank through promotion boards. But for any stars after that, the defense secretary has to submit a nomination to the President. Then the President has to endorse the nomination. Then the Senate has to confirm. Thats one more hoop than a Supreme Court justice has to jump through.

And Rumsfeld added another hoop: anyone nominated for a third star had to come in and interview with him personally.

Which was why I made the trip to D.C. Rumsfeld was still in the medias good graces then, which meant he was in Americas good graces. (The former, I would soon learn the hard way, is finely calibrated with the latter.) The Secretary had just overseen the U.S. militarys crushing defeat of the Taliban, the group U.S. intelligence identified as the primary backer of Osama Bin Ladens September 11 attack. Now for some months, his attention had been tuned to a new target: Iraq. As Saddam Hussein pretended to cooperate with weapons inspections ordered by the United Nations Security Council, Rumsfeld, a former fighter pilot who served in Congress and under three presidents, sparred with the press over the Bush administrations case for war. In the midst of all that, I walked into the Pentagon, just a routine item on the defense secretarys daily calendar.

The worlds largest office building, the Pentagon is built in five concentric rings. More than seventeen miles of corridors wind through the place, and I truly believe a person could wander for days and never find the office he was looking for. As I made my way to the inner sanctum, the powerful E Ring where the Secretary has his office, I remembered my first time there twenty-five years before. I had arrived just days after Iranian terrorists loyal to the radical cleric Ayatollah Khomeini seized the American embassy in Tehran. I was a young captain then, one of the first three officers to make the cut for Americas brand-new, highly secret counterterrorism unit, Delta Force. I could recall hunkering down for days in a cipher-locked secret room off the E Ring, helping plan Deltas first missionrescuing American hostages from Iran. I had done a Pentagon tour since then, but those tense, smoky sessions spent calculating against impossible odds were what flashed through my mind as I headed for Secretary Rumsfelds office.

His senior military aide, Lieutenant General John Craddock, showed me into a large, dark-paneled executive space with a sweeping view of the Potomac and the Capitol complex beyond. Rumsfeld kept a large mahogany desk in his office, backed by a matching credenza. But there was no chair behind the desk. Thats because he never sat down while he worked. Instead, he did correspondence and paperwork behind an elegant chart table, standing up.

General Boykin! said Rumsfeld, striding toward me in his customary fleece vest. He always took off his jacket in his office, but thought the air conditioning chilly and usually wore a fleece vest over his shirt and tie. Thank you for coming in. Here, have a seat.

He and I sat at a small circular conference table, opposite the stretch conference table on the other side of the room. General Craddock sat down on a sofa nearby.

Rumsfeld flipped through my service record, which, because of my career in Special Operations and intelligence, was classified. You have a very interesting record here, he said. Spent a lot of years in Delta Force.

Yes, sir, I said. About thirteen. I had been a founding member of Delta Force, and later its commanding officer.

Youve spent most of your career in Special Operations?

Yes, sir. I did spend some time on the staff of the Joint Chiefs and some over at CIA, but most of my career has been in Special Ops.

With Delta, I oversaw both the rescue of CIA operative Kurt Muse from a Panamanian prison and the capture of Manuel Noriega, the brutal dictator who put him there. In Colombia, I helped hunt down the drug lord Pablo Escobar, a cruel and filthy-rich thug who terrorized a nation, personally ordering the deaths of more than a thousand people. The Secretary noted that I had also hunted war criminals in Bosnia, helped rescue hostage missionaries in Sudan, and tracked kidnappers in El Salvador. Among other things.

You have two purple hearts, Rumsfeld said. Whered you get those?

Grenada, 1983, and Mogadishu, Somalia, 1993.

You know, I still dont understand that, how Mogadishu was considered a failure, he said. When you consider the statistics, it appears to me that we won that battle.

Well, thats always been an issue with me, I told the Secretary. I felt fairly certain Rumsfeld knew that the popular version of the eventsboth the book, Black Hawk Down, and the movie made from itomitted my role as mission commander. We killed or wounded eleven hundred, but lost eighteen and had seventy-six wounded. Its an example of how you can win a battle and lose a war because of politics.