“That’s not what I said,” I answered calmly. “I said I serve in an integrated army and that I have no issues with race.”
Beckwith was still snorting his disbelief when Burruss spoke up. “You know, last year the Germans assaulted an aircraft in Mogadishu to rescue some German hostages. One of the German troops went to the rear of the plane, jerked the toilet door open and found a woman, a known terrorist, wearing a Che Guevara t-shirt and holding an AK-47. What would you do if that happened to you?”
“I’d shoot her,” I said.
Burruss’s eyes got big. “You would shoot a
woman
?”
“You just said she was a known terrorist and she was armed. I’d shoot her.”
Burruss scoffed. “I don’t believe you’d do that.”
Next, Country Grimes took a shot. “During a mission, you come across two little girls. They’re lost and alone. Helping them might compromise your operation. What do you do?”
“Well, I’ll tell you,” I said. “I couldn’t do those little girls any harm. I’d have to call the mission off.”
“You would compromise a mission for
two little girls
?” Grimes sneered.
“Yes, sir. I would.”
Nickle opened his mouth to launch the next salvo, but Beckwith held up his hand. “Okay, stop. Just hold on, everybody.”
Looking me square in the eye, he said, “Captain Boykin, you’re a religious man, aren’t you?”
My confidence slipped a little.
Here it comes
, I thought.
The bottom line. This is where he tells me I’m too religious to serve in his unit
.
“Yes, sir, I guess I am,” I said. It wasn’t that I was unsure. I just didn’t like the way he framed the question. Lots of people are religious, but have no faith in God.
“Is that the way you were raised?” Beckwith asked.
“Well, Colonel, I’ll tell you, my mother is a saint, and yes, that’s the way she raised me.”
For reasons I couldn’t guess, Beckwith looked perplexed. He looked down at the floor for a moment then back up at me. Then he said, almost softly, “Yeah, so was mine.”
Beckwith stood. “Captain Boykin, we’d be glad to have you,” he said. Then he walked over and shook my hand. Joy and relief washed over me. I rose from the hot seat and crossed the room to shake hands with the other board members.
When I got to Bucky Burruss, he gripped my hand firmly and without smiling said, “Welcome to Delta.”
Surprise, Speed, And Violence Of Action
Delta Force 1978–1979
ONE-HUNDRED-EIGHTEEN MEN started the selection course. Twenty-five made it to the Long Walk. Of those who finished, nineteen made it into the unit. After the Commander’s Board, I drove back to Eglin, packed up my wife and kids, and in a matter of two weeks, relocated to a rented house outside Fort Bragg and enrolled the kids in school. At the end of March I reported back to the stockade for the nineteen-week Operator Training Course (OTC). At about the same time Charlie Beckwith was giving me my shot, a fresh crop of a hundred new hopefuls was starting the Delta selection course. By the time my group started OTC, the dozen or so survivors of that second course came to join us, giving us around thirty men, enough to form a single operational counterterrorist element.
Project DELTA, the unit Charlie commanded in Vietnam, performed deep jungle insertions, recon, and “snatch” operations in which they would capture VC operatives, proving Sir William’s theories about special operations accurate. Still, though the Viet Cong’s methods were unconventional, even terrorist-like, Charlie’s unit was fighting a uniformed, nationalist combatant in a theater of war. But events in the early 1970s turned the Pentagon’s attention to a new kind of enemy: the international terrorist.
One trigger was the simmering Jewish-Islamic hatred that in 1970 erupted into battle in Jordan. Yasir Arafat’s Palestinian Liberation Organization, backed by both the Soviet Union and Syria, planned to launch raids on Israel from inside the territory of Hussein ibn-Talal, king of Jordan. But the king ordered a full-scale assault on the PLO, and the Jordanian Army crushed Arafat’s forces, chasing them back across the Syrian border. The battle returned control of Amman, the Jordanian capital, to King Hussein—but with an unpleasant aftereffect that haunts the West even today. Radical splinter cells formed, fueled now by both rabid anti-Semitism and embarrassment. Groups like Black September now added a new tactic for forcing their will on Israel and its allies: kidnapping and murdering civilians.
In September 1970, Black September hijacked three civilian airliners, and held three hundred passengers captive for a week. After releasing the hostages, the terrorists blew up the planes at an abandoned airfield near Amman, Jordan—then provided film footage of the event to television stations all over the world. Terror was no longer local; it was now worldwide and in living color, puffing up the importance of fledgling terrorist groups. They were well aware of the spectacular multiplier effect of images of ski-masked men holding hostages at gunpoint. The media became the terrorists’ most effective weapon.
Two years after the Black September hijacking, the same group kidnapped and murdered the Israeli athletes at Munich. Over and over, global media broadcast the killings, shocking and terrifying the world.
Western European countries responded by forming elite counterterrorist units. The Germans formed
Grenzschutzgruppe 9
, GSG-9, led by Colonel Ulrich Wegener. The French formed the
Groupe d’Intervention de la Grendarmerie National
(GIGN). The Brits modified training for its already legendary SAS. But Americans had not yet been made targets. And internal debate over the separation of military and police power hampered U.S. military planners. One camp argued that hostage rescue was a police matter; others favored a military approach. While other countries trained, America talked.
Then in May 1972, the Baader-Meinhoff Gang, a German Marxist group, bombed the U.S. Army officers’ club in Frankfurt and the U.S. Army, Europe, headquarters building in Heidelberg. The assaults underscored the need for an American military counterterrorist unit. Charlie Beckwith teamed with powerful Pentagon allies like Army Chief of Staff (and Rhodes scholar) Bernard Rogers and Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations General Edward “Shy” Meyer to argue for a unit modeled on the British SAS. Beckwith’s quest was a ten-year slog through infighting, skepticism, power grabs, money grabs, and plain old bureaucratic foot-dragging. But in 1977, the 1st Special Forces Operational Detachment–DELTA, or Delta Force, opened for business.
Charlie’s blueprint called for us to build a unit that could be deployed in response to a terrorist crisis anywhere in the world on a moment’s notice. Delta would move in below the radar and work with local officials, military, and police to get the bad guys. Then, we would simply fade away, so that as far as anyone else knew the resulting counterterrorism action had been a local operation.
In some ways, this was a counterintuitive approach to military ops: no credit, no glory, no ticker-tape parades. There would be no public awards ceremonies or receptions. Our names would not appear in the newspapers. Success would be celebrated and war stories swapped only privately, among an inner circle of special ops and intel professionals already privy to information about SCI-level (Sensitive Compartmented Information) missions. In fact, the Pentagon did not even officially acknowledge our existence. After Delta began, a standard search of military personnel records for a “William G. Boykin” would reveal that no man with that name served in the United States Army.
But I did, of course, and here I was, one of thirty young hotshots reporting for training. Already, the selection course had forged a bond between us. In addition to being an assessment, it was a rite of passage. By the time we few emerged on the other end of it, most men had already fallen by the wayside. That in itself was enough to forge a strong connection. Each of us knew that the men beside us were cut from the same cloth we were.
Charlie put it this way: “If I’m going to put you in a spider-hole for a week and tell you that when a certain man walks out of a building, you’re going to shoot him, I have to know that you’re going to shoot him. I know this because I know that we’re alike.”
In nineteen weeks, Beckwith and an initial cadre of instructors would train us in marksmanship, room-clearing, close-quarters battle, hostage management, and forced entry at crisis points from hotel rooms to airliners, and much, much more. We would learn macro-functions like establishing and maintaining a command post and secure communications, to microskills like how to pick a pin tumbler padlock. We would learn how to drive anything from a Jeep to a track-vehicle to a diesel locomotive. Delta instructors would teach us how to blow stuff up and how to keep hostages safe from terrorists blowing stuff up. We would learn to live under a cover story, collect intelligence, conduct surveillance, and avoid it ourselves. We would climb and rappel, and learn to do it without making a sound. And perhaps most important of all, we would learn how best to disarm a hostile opponent—and if he resisted, how best to kill him.
Since we would be operating in small teams in faraway places with no backup, we would even go through emergency medical training to be able to save each other’s lives. (Once, when we had to learn how to start IVs, I practiced on this giant ginger-haired fellow from Boston whose muscles were so big we called him Popeye. He was really mad when I collapsed his vein.)
On the first day, we all headed down to the arms room, where a sergeant issued us each an M-1911 .45 caliber pistol. Even though it was the old Army standard, that gun would stop a man cold with a single round. He also issued us each a .45cal M-3A1 “grease gun,” a vintage automatic weapon that went out of production in the 1950s. Grease guns hadn’t been used much since, but it turned out their low muzzle velocity and slow rate of fire made them a perfect weapon for room clearing. Their heavy slugs would slam into, but not through, a terrorist, and assaulters could squeeze off single shots without disturbing their aim.
Our marksmanship instructor was Ginger Flynn, a ruddy, carrot-topped Irishman on loan from the British SAS. Ginger loved his beer, but during his time in the States, he also developed an affection for American sour mash whiskey.
“Awright, chaps, you’re not getting any prettier and I’m not getting any drunker,” Ginger would say on the firing range. “Move your asses so I can get to the pub!”
We all knew how to shoot straight, but we had to learn how all over again—now using instinctive fire techniques rather than aimed fire. Here’s the difference: In hunting or target shooting, you’re developing a sight picture with your feet planted, one eye closed, aligning the front and rear sights on the target. Instinctive fire is more like the Old West, the quick draw you see in all the movies. In a gunfight, John Wayne never raised his Colt, developed a sight picture, then pulled the trigger. Instead, he drew his pistol, pointed, and fired.
Some Army training manuals call instinctive fire the least desirable way to kill bad guys in close-quarters combat, or CQB. That’s because it is thought to be the least accurate, as the shooter does not develop a sight picture at all, but relies on muscle memory to tell him where to fire the kill shot. But in hostage rescue, the two seconds it takes to aim and fire are one more than it takes for a terrorist to kill a hostage. So for a month, we spent at least four hours a day on instinctive fire techniques. We started out with targets on stakes and hour after hour, reduced them to shreds. We learned to raise our weapons and fire in a single motion. We learned to fire, reload, and clear weapons jams on the run. Shooting at man-size silhouettes, we had to put two shots—a double-tap—in a “kill zone,” the head or chest, within certain time and distance standards. I can’t share what those standards were, but trust me: by the end of the month, accuracy wasn’t a problem.
Ginger developed and honed our skills relentlessly and we calculated that before moving on to CQB training, we expended more ammo in thirty days than the entire 82nd Airborne used in a year.
By June, we were able to get rid of the target cloth and move into the “House of Horrors,” a state-of-the-art CQB training ground. The four-room complex featured ballistic walls and portable, interchangeable target systems. One of the best things was the stop-motion projection target system. The instant you fired your weapon, the film froze on the screen so you could see exactly what you hit. Another system featured pop-up targets that allowed each operator only seconds to enter a room, identify hostile targets, and fire.
Ginger taught us to put two headshots into every terrorist—“Happiness is a headshot!” he’d say—to check to be sure they were dead, and to handcuff
everyone
, even dead guys. We practiced blowing doors and rolling flash-bang grenades, not only to gain entry but to stun the enemy, putting them on the defensive. We learned to hit terrorists with three spears that became Delta’s motto: surprise, speed, and violence of action.
During the half of the day when Ginger Flynn wasn’t teaching us to shoot straight, Wade Ishimoto was teaching us spy stuff, more formally known as “tradecraft.” Born and raised in Hawaii, Ish was a Japanese-American who, after finishing his baccalaureate degree, enlisted in the Army and went to Vietnam. He served with the 5th Special Forces, a unit that was investigated after a double-agent mysteriously fell to his death from a helicopter. (The Defense Department suspected he was pushed.) Ish was one of those interrogated and later exonerated. In 1978, Charlie brought him into Delta to assist with intel and also convinced Pentagon brass that Ish, a detail oriented, no-nonsense man with a knack for planning, needed a commission. So Sergeant Ishimoto became Captain Ishimoto, and here he was with us.
From Ish, I learned “elicitation” and how to live under a cover story. Elicitation is the art of teasing information out of people without letting them know what you’re really after. Once during training, I had to travel to the National Guard Armory in Richmond, Virginia, with an NCO and fellow operator-in-training from Indianapolis named Mark Gentry. Our mission was to learn the exact location of weapons storage on the post, and to actually be shown the weapons and granted access to the space. Our cover story was that we were working with an Army unit that was relocating from Fort Bragg to Fort Dix, New Jersey. We were coordinating en route logistics for the entire unit, our story went, and would need fuel, billeting for twenty people, and a place to store weapons overnight.