Jerry Boykin & Lynn Vincent (40 page)
Still shaking our heads, Ashley and I walked out to the car. During the drive home, my cell phone rang.
“Jerry! Sorry to call you so late, buddy.” It was a friend of mine whom I hadn’t heard from in six months.
“That’s okay,” I said. “I’m on my way home from church.”
“Me, too. Listen, at our prayer meeting tonight, my pastor told me to tell you something.”
“What?”
“You’re going to be exonerated.”
I looked over at Ashley, eyes wide. “That’s amazing,” I said to my caller. “Someone in church just told me the same thing.”
Fifteen minutes later, I pulled into our driveway on Fort Myer. When I walked in my front door, the phone was ringing.
I picked up the cordless handset. “Hello?”
“Jerry? It’s Gordon.” A dear friend for more than a decade.
“Hey, Gordon. What’s up?”
“Brother, I’ve been praying and I believe I’ve got a message for you.”
“Let me guess: I’m going to be exonerated.”
“How in the world did you know that?”
“You’re the third person to tell me that in the last twenty minutes.”
THE NEXT DAY WAS A THURSDAY. By the time I got home from work, I had made a decision.
“I’m not going to rebut the charges,” I told Ashley. We were standing in the kitchen.
“What?” she said, taken aback. “You
have
to rebut.”
“I don’t
have
to . . . ” I had put the IG report in God’s hands, I told her.
“Jerry, you owe it to everyone who has prayed for you and stood by you. You have to make sure the truth comes out.”
That stopped me in my tracks, and I started thinking about it. Maybe she was right. We decided to ask our pastor, Wendell Cover, and he agreed: “You have to rebut this, Jerry,” he told me. And for the same reason Ashley gave: “The people who supported you need to know the truth.”
I decided to listen to the counsel of my pastor and my wife. And once I made the decision to rebut, I went about it as though preparing for battle. I called the people who had coordinated several of the events where I had spoken and got statements from everyone who had heard me give a disclaimer. I had churches send me materials showing that events where I spoke were open to the public. I received photographs of posters advertising events to entire communities. At one time, the investigators had accused me of taking money for speaking, so I obtained statements showing that I never once was paid. I got copies of invitations and letters proving that I’d been asked to appear in uniform. I got brochures of programs that clearly showed other speakers. Finally, I got a statement from my former secretary avowing that she was the one who submitted invitations to the JAG and received legal approval for every event where I’d spoken.
I submitted my rebuttal in April. Collectively, my evidence proved I had not been out pressing some personal anti-Islam agenda, but only speaking at patriotic, open events that also featured other invited guests—or speaking at churches to exclusively Christian audiences. I think the Constitution calls that freedom of association and religious exercise.
IN MAY 2004, news broke about prisoner abuse at a prison outside Baghdad called Abu Ghraib. It would become one of the most embarrassing episodes in the U.S. Army experience in Iraq: Using physical cruelty and sexual humiliation, a handful of poorly led and unsupervised soldiers brought worldwide scorn on the American military, overshadowing the heroism and dedication of the men and women serving in the war on terror.
Incredibly, critics began to speculate that I had ordered the abuse.
I was “the heart of a secret operation to ‘Gitmoize’ the Abu Ghraib prison,” former Clinton advisor Sidney Blumenthal wrote in
Salon
magazine. “He had flown to Guantanamo, where he met Major General Geoffrey Miller, in charge of Camp X-Ray. Boykin ordered Miller to fly to Iraq and extend X-Ray methods to the prison system there, on Rumsfeld’s orders.”
The headline on Blumenthal’s piece was “Smiting the Infidels.” He, along with other writers wearing tinfoil hats, seemed to reason that since it was a well-known “fact” that I hated Muslims, the abuses at Abu Ghraib were my way of vicariously seeking revenge. The facts, however, were different. First, Geoff Miller is one of the most honorable men I’ve ever served with. If anyone
had
ordered him to do such a thing, he’d have seen to it they were court-martialed. Second, in sworn congressional testimony, Miller stated that he neither spoke to me before he went to Iraq nor after he returned. In fact, the decision to send him to Iraq occurred before I ever arrived at the Pentagon.
Still, the leftwing blabocracy spun the story that I had dispatched Miller to Iraq to teach Lynndie England how to hold a leash. The truth, apparently, was optional.
BY JUNE, I still hadn’t heard anything from the IG about my rebuttal. But one evening, a friend who was, as they say, “in a position to know,” called me at home.
“Your rebuttal was so powerful they had to start all over,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“They had to start a new investigation,” he said. “They had to start over from square one.”
Finally, in late June, Skinny, the lawyer from the IG’s office, came down to see me. Though my source had given me reason for hope, my experience with Skinny said that bad things tended to happen when he appeared.
He sat down across from me. I thought I detected a self-satisfied look on his face. “We’ve been reviewing everything very carefully,” Skinny began. “We’re adding a new charge. You went to a men’s conference in Toronto. You had a plane ticket bought for you and you didn’t report it on your financial disclosure.”
What?
“I specifically talked to the JAG about that,” I objected. My JAG had approved both the Toronto ticket and a follow-on flight.
“Oh, that’s not the problem,” Skinny said. “The problem is you didn’t list it on your disclosure form.”
That was the moment my fuse ran out. I had proven their charges wrong so now they were picking me apart to save face. This wasn’t even an issue of reimbursement or using government travel money or concealing a gift. It was a typographical omission on a legal and approved action, a missing entry on a form that was of zero consequence.
I looked Skinny straight in the eye. “I want to see the inspector general.”
“That’s not going to be allowed,” he said as though I had asked for an audience with the Pope. “No one sees the IG directly. That’s just not done.”
I pressed forward. “I think you are holding me to a standard of proof that does not apply to everyone. I want to see the IG. In person.”
“It’s not going to happen,” Skinny said. He seemed determined not to be the first to look away.
I leaned across the desk and said very carefully, “I am sending you an e-mail with my request and I want it forwarded to the IG. Now, let me suggest that you take your paperwork and get out of my office.”
Never surrender.
IN CHURCH ABOUT A WEEK LATER, a friend of mine, Victor Filaye, a Nigerian dentist, walked up to me. “I was praying for you this morning,” he said. “God impressed upon me that I needed to pray for a Gamaliel for you.”
Gamaliel was a man who lived during the time of Jesus’s apostles and the early church. When the apostles were on trial for heresy and about to be railroaded to a guilty verdict, Gamaliel reasoned with their accusers.
“Thank you, Victor,” I said.
The next morning, I was walking down the E-Ring corridor, when I glanced into the open door of an office. A man in there was in the middle of a conversation and as I passed, he happened to turn and look out.
“General Boykin?”
I stopped and turned around. The man had stepped out into the hall.
“Yes,” I said.
“I’m Joe Schmitz, the Department of Defense inspector general.”
That knocked me for a loop. Instantly, I wondered whether he knew I had asked to see him.
Schmitz smiled. “General, I just want to assure you that I have read every word of your rebuttal and that I will ensure you are treated fairly,” he said.
I could hardly believe what I’d just heard. As I watched Schmitz walk away down the corridor, I thought:
That’s Gamaliel
.
IN EARLY AUGUST, I was in Germany on NATO business when a Pentagon number rang on my cell phone. It was Larry Di Rita’s deputy, a public affairs officer named Bryan Whitman.
“General, the IG’s final report is in.”
I was standing in a hotel room in Stuttgart. It had been nearly a year since I had been caricatured as the lunatic, holy-war general. Because of a “journalist” with an agenda, my name had become globally synonymous with “religious nut.” Worse, in Middle Eastern countries, I had become a target, a wanted man.
“As soon as it’s released to you,” Whitman went on, “they’ll release it to Senator Warner and the Armed Services committee, then probably to the press.”
Senator Warner was one of the Democrats who asked the President to fire me. Still, as I held the phone, I felt strangely confident.
There are two possibilities
, I thought.
They either found nothing, or something insignificant
.
“Have you seen a copy of the report?” I asked.
“Yeah, I’ve got it right here.”
“What does it say?”
“It says you sometimes didn’t provide a disclaimer when you spoke . . . ”
Meaning I hadn’t said every time that my speech represented only my personal views and not those of the government.
“. . . . You didn’t clear your talks with public affairs, and you didn’t list your airplane ticket to Toronto.”
In an instant, the cloak of dread I’d been wearing for nearly a year dropped away and relief surged through me. These were minor infractions—the result of oversights despite my best efforts to follow the rules. In fact, Whitman said, the IG found that I had made “good faith” efforts to have my activities reviewed and approved by my legal counsel.
“Basically,” Whitman told me, “they’ve exonerated you.”
THAT DIDN’T MEAN THE PRESS GAVE ME A BREAK. After the Pentagon released the report, typical newspaper headlines said, “Report finds general broke rules” and “Wrist slap for general.” (As though Skinny and the boys had given me the old wink and nod.) Among major newspapers, only the
Washington Times
, under the headline “General cleared in church speeches case,” put the IG report in its proper context:
The Pentagon inspector general did not substantiate complaints that Lt. Gen. William G. Boykin misused his Army uniform, violated travel regulations or used improper speech when he addressed 23 church groups on his views on faith and warfare. Investigators also found Gen. Boykin did not improperly accept speaking fees. . . . [T]here was no finding that Gen. Boykin in any way violated expense-account rules. In fact, the Pentagon encourages private groups to reimburse military personnel for speaking-engagement expenses.
One official, who asked not to be named, said the disclaimer violation was nit-picking because the topic of his speeches was his faith, not Pentagon policy. And, the rule on getting after-hours speeches approved beforehand by public affairs is so obscure that officials could not remember the last time such a case arose.
17
Another Pentagon source told the
Washington Post
that the report was a “complete exoneration.”
18
Back in Washington later in August, David Martin came to see me. “Now that this is behind you, would you do the
60 Minutes
piece?” he asked.
I said I would. And on September 11, 2004, Ashley and I appeared on the program. Mary Walsh, David’s colleague who beat cancer, produced the piece. It was the first time I’d gotten to tell the world my side of the story, what I’d really said, and as importantly, what I’d really meant. And once I did, everything just stopped. The hammering, the badgering, the jeering in the editorial pages.
It all just stopped.
By then, of course, I’d had plenty of time to think about how unfair it had all seemed. I thought many times that if I could quickly exfiltrate into obscurity, I would have. Looking back over my life, there were many times when I wanted to give up. During Delta selection, when I fell into that freezing creek and lost the feeling in my feet, I really thought maybe I ought to just stop and build a fire and let them find me. After Mogadishu, my personal sense of loss and failure was so great that I considered quitting the Army. After my divorce, I just wanted to quit life altogether.
But I knew people were pulling for me, praying for me. And in those trials and others, God constantly reminded me of His presence. I had to get beyond not only my own weakness, but also my own strength and learn to rely on Him alone. It was God who sustained me through three decades of defending this country. It was God who gave me the courage to face death in order to rescue others.
It was God I had relied on when I nearly lost an arm in battle.
It was God I prayed to when my men went to war.
It was God I cried out to when they returned maimed and bleeding.
And when they didn’t return at all.
When I stood at pulpits and podiums rallying Christians to pray and encouraging non-Christians to stand strong for America, I was honest about all that. I declared the truth of this country’s Judeo-Christian heritage, a truth reflected in our founding documents and reaffirmed by the Supreme Court in 1991. I declared the truth that the jihadists want Christians and Americans dead. And I declared the truth of God’s sovereignty over man’s affairs in war and peace and even in the White House.
For that the media branded me “an intolerant extremist” and turned me into a global target.
So, yes, during my year of public humiliation, I reflected on the unfairness of it all. But then I thought about Bill Garrison, who has a homespun saying on fairness that reflects his Texas outlook on life: “If you think the world will treat you fairly because you’re a nice person, then you probably think a bull won’t charge you because you are a vegetarian.”
