AS THE POUNDING IN THE PRESS CONTINUED, the nasty e-mails started rolling in. One person wrote to tell me that I had insulted every Jew in the nation. He went on to say that I should leave the Army, since I clearly did not value soldiers of other faiths. An Arab group sent me a Koran and told me that I was an “intolerant extremist.” Many people wrote to Secretary Rumsfeld, urging that I be disciplined or fired.
And as the bullets flew, the firepower of the folks doing the shooting increased. Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John Warner and Democratic Senator Carl Levin wrote to Rumsfeld, urging him to launch an inspector general probe.
“Remarks by a senior military officer denigrating another religion could be exploited by America’s enemies,” they wrote, “and even endanger U.S. troops serving in Muslim nations.” Had anyone noticed that I hadn’t denigrated Islam, but had specifically said on tape that a radical wing of Islam was to blame—a wing that was to Islam as the Ku Klux Klan was to Christianity?
Congressmen Barney Frank and John Conyers circulated petitions calling for my ouster. Senators John Kerry and Joe Lieberman, both still vying for the Democratic presidential nomination, trashed me. “Our cause in the war on terror isn’t helped when we have army officers like Lieutenant General William Boykin speaking in evangelical churches and claiming this as some sort of battle for the Christian religion,” Kerry said. “That’s wrong. That’s un-American.”
If I hadn’t been under so much stress, I might have laughed out loud at that one. I guess Kerry felt it was more American to come back from Vietnam and testify to Congress about American war atrocities—testimony that was later shot full of holes.
On Sunday, October 21, national security advisor Condoleeza Rice was asked about me on a national news program. “I think the president is very clear here on what [the president] means here,” she said. “This is not a war between religions. No one should describe it as such.”
Rice had just put the first measure of distance between me and the Bush administration.