Jerry Boykin & Lynn Vincent Read Free Page A

new red fruit.” My job wasn’t a secret, I wasn’t coordinating intelligence, and I wasn’t leading a “unit.” They didn’t even get the “new” part right: the Senate confirmed Steve Cambone eight months prior, in March. Apparently, Aram Roston hadn’t listened to a word I’d said.
    As these thoughts flashed through my mind, Brokaw finished his segue: “NBC News has learned that a highly decorated general has a history of outspoken and divisive views on religion, Islam in particular.”
    NBC’s Lisa Myers began her report: “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. In a half dozen video and audio tapes obtained by NBC News, Boykin says America’s true enemy is not Osama Bin Laden . . . 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.”
    NBC then began to air audio and video clips from talks I had given at churches, interspersing them with commentary from Myers.
    Myers: “Boykin recalls a Muslim fighter in Somalia who bragged on television the Americans would never get him because his God, Allah, would protect him.”
    Then, audio only of me, speaking at First Baptist Church in Daytona, Florida: “Well, you know what I knew, that my God was bigger than his. I knew that my God was a real God, and his was an idol.”
    Inwardly, I groaned. Lifted out of context, it sounded terrible.
    Myers: “In a phone conversation, Boykin tells NBC he respects Muslims and believes the radicals who attack America are ‘not true followers of Islam.’ ”
    When did I say that?
    Myers: “Boykin also routinely tells audiences that God, not the voters, chose President Bush.”
    Now there’s some red meat for the anti-religion Left
.
    Then NBC trotted out a “military analyst,” Bill Arkin, the reporter who had apparently been investigating me for a month but who hadn’t bothered to interview me.
    Arkin: “I think that it is not only at odds with what the president believes, but it is a dangerous, extreme, and pernicious view that really has no place.”
    Based on what?
I thought.
Your extensive conversations with me?
    I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. The report concluded. Stunned, I walked back to my office and flipped off my light. Tish walked out into the main corridor beside me. “I’m really sorry,” she told me. “That’s exactly one of the reasons it’s hard to get good people to serve in Washington.”
    “Thanks, Tish,” I said. I struggled to find something to add, but it seemed as if a great weight was pressing down on my soul, and I couldn’t find any words. “I don’t know what else to say.”
    That night at home, my wife, Ashley, was my comforter. She had seen the report. When I walked through the door, she hugged me. “How are you doing?”
    I looked at her and shook my head. “I just can’t believe it.”
    I skipped dinner and slumped on the couch in my living room. My mind raced. I most certainly had not been out on an anti-Islam campaign. In fact, I was on the record in print, saying the war on terror was
specifically not
a war between Christianity and Islam. I had never contradicted that, but only discussed my personal faith and tried to encourage other Christians—many of whom had sons and daughters in harm’s way—with this message: they had the weapon they needed to affect the outcome of a war between good and evil—prayer.
They were not powerless
.
    But now I felt completely powerless. My