Free Jerry Boykin & Lynn Vincent by Never Surrender Page B

I called my mother.
    She picked up the phone on the first ring and I didn’t waste words. “Mom, I’ve been asked to volunteer for something that’s being formed at Bragg. I don’t know anything about it. I don’t know if this is where God wants me. But I want you to pray that if it is, I’ll make it through this thirty-day program.”
    Right on the spot, we prayed together over the phone.
    “Jerry?” she said after the amen, “I want you to know that I’m going to keep on praying.”
    “I know, Mom.”
    I hung up and decided to go tell Lynne, who was at home in our quarters, a block-long walk away through Florida sunshine. When I told her, she was completely supportive—even though she didn’t know what she was supporting.
    “Obviously this is something you’ve got to do,” she said. I marveled at her patience with the Army’s habit of turning life on its head. At the time, we really had no idea what that really meant.
    For the next month, I trained hard with two Ranger NCOs who had also been invited to try out for whatever it was we were trying out for. Then on February 8, 1978, the three of us reported to Fort Bragg’s Old Stockade, a nine-acre chunk of real estate isolated from the rest of the post and surrounded by a high fence of double chain-link topped with barbed wire.
    The stockade once housed prisoners. But in contrast to the barbed wire and concrete, a cheery royal blue awning covered the building’s entrance, and the walkway leading up to it featured the beginnings of a rose garden. I didn’t know it at the time, but my future commander would one day have me on my hands and knees planting three different kinds of roses there. (“We want ’em to know we’re steely-eyed killers here,” he said. “But we also want ’em to know we’re not barbarians.”)
    The NCOs and I walked between the roses, went inside, and checked in with a duty officer who sent us over to a guest house to spend the night.
    “Be back at 0900 hours tomorrow morning,” he said.
    The next morning, we showed up way before that. I filled out some paperwork, then headed down to gear issue and drew seventy pounds’ worth of equipment. Later in the day, I was assigned a bunk in one of six major cell blocks converted into spaces for housing, classrooms, briefings, weapons storage, and classified materials. Following a diagram, I wound my way through the corridors until I found the space holding my bunk. When I walked in, the first thing I saw was a burly, dark-haired man who was already setting up housekeeping.
    I put out a hand and smiled. “I’m Jerry Boykin.”
    The man accepted my handshake. “Hi, there. I’m Pete Schoomaker.”
    “Where you comin’ from?”
    Pete told me he was from Army Personnel, an assignments officer in the armor branch. I told him I was coming from the Florida Ranger camp.
    “Glad to meet you,” I said. “Guess we’re gonna be seein’ a lot of each other.”
    In fact, Pete and I became best friends and would spend the better part of three decades in each other’s career orbits. I liked him instantly. He was an Army brat who’d earned a football scholarship to Michigan State. But as a freshman, Pete got in trouble for some offense he would never confess. The college yanked his scholarship. Pete wound up walking on at the University of Wyoming and went on to star in the 1969 Sugar Bowl.
    There was something charismatic about Pete; his warmth and humor immediately drew you in. He was a rare blend: a soldier who was serious about his craft, but who didn’t take himself—or the minor trials of a given moment—too seriously.
    “Well, that’s about as screwed up as a football bat,” Pete would say, chuckling.
    I would learn later that Pete’s charisma extended to leadership. Men
wanted
to follow him. But back then, we were both just a couple of young officers, excited and itching to find out what we’d gotten ourselves into.

2
    THERE WERE RUMORS. The gossip was that a Special Forces