IN JULY 2003, I arrived on the Pentagon’s E-Ring as deputy undersecretary of defense for intelligence. I thought it would be my final Army tour. My military career had offered me a way to make a difference, a way to do some good in the world. I had not served perfectly, but with God’s help, I had served faithfully. Now appointed by Defense Secretary Don Rumsfeld as a member of the cabinet staff, I looked forward to pouring 100 percent into this last task, then moving on to new callings—teaching or speaking, probably. Maybe both.
I had been tucked into my breadbox office for just a few weeks when I had a visitor, David Martin of the CBS news magazine 60 Minutes. He sat down across the desk from me. “General Boykin, my wife and I saw a tape of you speaking at an event in Daytona, Florida,” he said. “I want you to know that it really motivated us to start going back to church.”
I looked at Martin and saw sincerity in his eyes. “Thanks for sharing that, David,” I said. “I’m glad to hear it.”
“General, I’d like to know if you’d consider letting me do a 60 Minutes piece on you, a profile focusing on your faith,” David said.
I thought about that for a second. The idea of going on a national program to talk about my faith and how it informed my military service was appealing. On the other hand, I had managed to keep my mug out of the news for more than thirty years. It was an unwritten code in the Special Ops community: stay out of the limelight.
“You know, David, I really appreciate your interest, but I don’t think I’m ready to do that,” I said. “If you wanted to do a larger story about faith with me as just a part, I’d consider it. But I wouldn’t want to do a story that’s just about me.”
“Okay, I can understand that. I appreciate that,” he said. Then his face changed, taking on a shadow of worry. “I wanted to ask you one more thing, General. My producer, Mary, has cancer. Would you please pray for her?”
Instantly, I admired him. So many reporters in the Washington press corps seemed cutthroat, just out for the Big Story, and yet David showed this compassion.
“Absolutely,” I said. “I’d be honored.”
That was in September. The following month, I got a call from a very different reporter, Aram Roston of NBC News, the one who wanted to talk about what a “controversial character” I was.
“They’ve chosen you to go after these high-profile Islamic figures, and you have a track record of hating Islam,” Roston said.
An ironic statement considering that the last operation I’d led was hunting down Goran Jelisic and his Muslim-murdering friends. The conversation deteriorated from there, as Roston, pretending to get my side of a story that in reality had already been written, tallied the “evidence” against me:
“You’ve made a statement to a Somali warlord that your God was bigger than his.”
“You’ve made statements like, ‘God put George Bush in the White House.’ ”
“You’ve said that this is a Christian nation.”
And perhaps what Roston considered his most damning evidence: “You’re an evangelical.”
The next night, I stood in the secretaries’ office as NBC News carried its story with Tom Brokaw anchoring: “NBC News has learned that a highly decorated general has a history of outspoken and divisive views on religion, Islam in particular.”
As I thought back over my career, about how and when I had lived out my faith in my military service, about where I had served and whom I had fought for and with, this characterization stunned me.
Then Lisa Myers broke her big story:
He’s a highly decorated officer, twice wounded in battle, a warrior’s warrior. The former commander of Army Special Forces, Lieutenant General William Jerry Boykin has led or been part of almost every recent U.S. military operation from the ill-fated attempt to rescue hostages in Iran to Grenada, Panama, Colombia, and Somalia . . . But [his] new assignment may be complicated by controversial views General Boykin, an evangelical Christian, has expressed in dozens of speeches and prayer breakfasts around the country. . . . NBC News military analyst Bill Arkin, who’s been investigating Boykin for the Los Angeles Times, says the general casts the war on terror as a religious war.1
The next morning, the Los Angeles Times story hit. I walked into my office to find it included in the October 16 edition of The Early Bird, a compilation of the day’s media stories published every morning by Pentagon public affairs. As I began to read, my heart sank:
The Pentagon has assigned the task of tracking down and eliminating Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein and other high-profile targets to an Army general who sees the war on terrorism as a clash between Judeo-Christian values and Satan. . . . [T]he former commander and 13-year veteran of the Army’s top-secret Delta Force is also an outspoken evangelical Christian who appeared in dress uniform and polished jump boots before a religious group in Oregon in June to declare that radical Islamists hated the United States “because we’re a Christian nation, because our foundation and our roots are Judeo-Christian . . . and the enemy is a guy named Satan.”2
Right out of the gate, Times reporter Richard T. Cooper got it wrong. It was not my job to track down and eliminate terrorists, and I never saw the war on terror as a “clash” between my values and Satan. I saw it as a clash between God and Satan. And I was not the only one: Islamic jihadists saw it that way, too—except in reverse—with Allah as the true god and America as the “great Satan.”
“Boykin’s religious activities,” Cooper wrote, “were first documented in detail by William M. Arkin, a former military intelligence analyst who writes on defense issues for The Times Opinion section.” I kept reading:
Discussing the battle against a Muslim warlord in Somalia, Boykin told another audience, “I knew my God was bigger than his. I knew that my God was a real God and his was an idol.”
“We in the army of God, in the house of God, kingdom of God have been raised for such a time as this,” Boykin said last year.
On at least one occasion, in Sandy, Ore., in June, Boykin said of President Bush: “He’s in the White House because God put him there.”3
Statement after statement, ripped out of context. Now the first hint of anger started simmering in my veins. Yes, I thought the Somali warlord in question—Mohamed Farah Aidid’s right-hand man Osman Atto—served an idol: money. Yes, I thought that we “in the house of God”—believing Christians—had been called to battle, but on our knees, as spiritual warriors as the Apostle Paul wrote, to “put on the whole armor of God . . . take up the shield of faith . . . and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God . . . with all prayer and supplication.”
But juxtaposed with his discussion of a “Christian nation” and the terror war, Cooper made it appear that I was calling all Americans to fight in the “army of God.” Meanwhile, he buried a fact that would later be lost as the media painted me a Muslim-hater. Way down in the story, Cooper whispered, “In his public remarks, Boykin has also said that radical Muslims who resort to terrorism are not representative of the Muslim faith.”
Cooper’s selective reporting and ordering of facts struck me as vintage drive-by journalism, and I was furious. But not as furious as when I read the words of the man behind Cooper’s curtain, Times “military analyst” William Arkin. In the same edition of the Times, Arkin wrote an op-ed in which he revealed that he had been conducting “a monthlong journalistic investigation” of me.
The Times had been investigating me for a month, and no one from the paper has bothered to call me to get my side of the story?
At least NBC News had called. Aram Roston hadn’t listened to me, but at least he’d gone through the motions. Sitting at my desk, I read on:
Boykin is . . . an intolerant extremist who has spoken openly about how his belief in Christianity has trumped Muslims and other non-Christians in battle. He has described himself as a warrior in the kingdom of God and invited others to join with him in fighting for the United States through repentance, prayer and the exercise of faith in God. . . .
[W]hen Boykin publicly spews this intolerant message while wearing the uniform of the U.S. Army, he strongly suggests that this is an official and sanctioned view—and that the U.S. Army is indeed a Christian army. But that’s only part of the problem. Boykin is also in a senior Pentagon policymaking position, and it’s a serious mistake to allow a man who believes in a Christian “jihad” to hold such a job.
For one thing, Boykin has made it clear that he takes his orders not from his Army superiors but from God . . .4
I finished the piece and set The Early Bird aside in disgust. I didn’t know whose life this clown Arkin had been investigating, but it wasn’t mine.