Jerry Boykin & Lynn Vincent (21 page)

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.”

After the doctors delivered their news and left my room, Lynne arrived and could barely hold back tears. I told her the same thing I told the doctors. I could tell she was skeptical, but she wanted to believe it with me in spite of the medical facts. The next day, April, Randy and Aaron stormed the room with get well cards, hugs and kisses. Then Mom and Dad showed up. Mom said everyone at church in New Bern was praying for me. Being home with my family was the best medicine of all. The outpouring of affection made me so glad Scotty Morgan, the Grenada task force J-4, the logistics officer, arranged for me to come home instead of being installed in a hospital in Roosevelt Roads, Puerto Rico.

After three days, the doctors said I could go home if I promised to come back every day for a bandage check and therapy. On my first return visit, an orthopedic intern from Canada strapped me into a medieval torture device he suggested might help the bones in my arm begin to grow together again. First, he casted my arm from shoulder to wrist. Then he wrapped some kind of harness around my torso, the sole purpose of which was to support a female receptacle that would hold the end of a long stick. Next, he raised my casted arm to shoulder-level. To hold it there, he placed one end of the stick in the ribcage receptacle and the other end into another female fitting on the cast.

My shoulder burst into flame. It was the most excruciating pain I had ever felt—worse, even, than the pain that scorched me in the Black Hawk before Don doped me. I went home and spent the most miserable night I had ever spent. With my arm sticking out that way, I couldn’t lie down. I tried to sleep on the couch sitting up. The misery of the Long Walk was nothing compared to this.

All through the night, I did what I tend to do in times of trouble.
Why, Lord?
I wanted to know.
Why is this happening? Why are You letting me go through this pain?

The night passed in a blur of prayer and agony, and the next morning, I showed up at Womack at the crack of dawn and made them cut me out of the intern’s awful contraption. A nurse then gave me a sedative so I could get some sleep. And when I woke up, I met the doctor who would witness my healing—whether he wanted to or not.

5

THE DOCTOR’S NAME WAS MILLER. He was a tall, wiry-haired orthopedics resident and Duke grad who had been short-suited in the bedside manners department. But he had a new plan that didn’t sound like it involved medieval torture, so I was more than happy to go along.

“Here’s what we’re going to do,” he said in his matter-of-fact New York accent. “I’m going to cast you from your wrist all the way up to your shoulder. The only thing this cast will do is provide weight and traction to try and pull the major pieces of the humerus back together.”

Miller’s theory was that if he could ever get the remaining halves of the shattered bone to touch each other, they would begin to knit together and heal.

“Doc, you just do the best you can,” I said, smiling. “God will take care of the rest.”

Miller’s face, even his eyes, remained completely blank. It appeared to me he didn’t know what to say and therefore didn’t say anything. On the other hand, maybe he’d already heard I was a religious nut.

Miller had the Womack staff cast me up. They bent my arm across my abdomen and secured it there with a wide band. At home, I still had to sleep sitting up on the couch. I never got used to it.

The following Friday, I went back in to see the doctor. Poker-faced, he told me the bones had not moved a millimeter. But I was not at all discouraged. I knew that between the church in New Bern and my church in Fayetteville, many, many people were praying that God would heal my arm.

“Are you a man of faith, Dr. Miller?” I asked him.

“I’m Jewish,” he said, and left it at that.

At the beginning of the second week I went back to work at the stockade. I mainly shuffled paper and attended meetings but from a psychological perspective, it was really important for me to feel useful and engaged. It was also early that week when my fingers began to hurt.

I was ecstatic! It was the first sensation I’d felt in my hand since being shot. By that Thursday, I was able to move three fingers on my left hand—the middle, ring, and pinky. The next day, I went to see Miller.

“Doc, you’re gonna be excited,” I told him. “God’s healing me. Look, I can move these fingers.”

I had never met a man who could keep his face so empty of expression. “That’s good,” Miller said. “But the bones still aren’t touching.”

Man
, I thought,
this guy’s missing his calling as a funeral director
.

I continued my Friday visits with Miller, always following the same routine: first I would stop by x-ray. Then, carrying the film with me in an oversized envelope, I would go to the examining room to meet the doc. He would pull out the x-ray, clip it to the illuminator, and then we’d have a short chat, with me on an examination table and him on a stool.

By the third week in the cast, I began moving my thumb and index finger. “Wait ’til you see this,” I told Miller that Friday. I demonstrated, waggling all five of my digits. “See? I told you. God’s healing my arm.”

“That’s good progress,” he said, his face a blank tablet.

By the end of the fourth week, I was able to open and close my hand completely. On the sixth Friday, I hiked myself up on Miller’s table and handed him my x-ray envelope.

“Hey, Doc, wait ’til you see these x-rays today,” I said. “The bones are going to be touching. I can feel it.”

At that point, he likely thought I had lost my mind, but I will never know since he said nothing. As usual, he quietly clipped the x-ray to the illuminator and looked at it.

Then he looked at me.

Then he looked at the x-ray again.

Slowly he turned back to face me. “The bones are touching,” he said. “I think it’s starting to heal.”

“I told you! Hey, Doc, get this cast off,” I joked. “I wanna go play some golf!”

“Well, uh, I’ll take the cast off,” he said reluctantly. “But I really wouldn’t want you to play any golf.”