Democratic Underground - Time: Long Career of Marching with the Cross (General Boykin)

I just read this in last week's issue of Time. There are some facts on Boykin that may come as a surprise to his wingnut supporters.

(snip)

As a captain in 1980, Boykin vainly tried to help rescue the 53 U.S. hostages held by Iran, a secret mission that ended in flames at Desert One, killing eight U.S. servicemen. Three years later, as a major, he helped invade Grenada. In 1992, as a colonel, he led the manhunt in Colombia for drug lord Pablo Escobar. The next year he advised Attorney General Janet Reno on what kind of gas to use to end the Federal Government's standoff with a religious group in Waco, Texas. But the experience that perhaps marked him most came six months later, in October 1993, in downtown Mogadishu. He and his troops were there when 18 soldiers died in an effort to snatch a Somali warlord—a tough day immortalized in Mark Bowden's book Black Hawk Down. Boykin told a Florida audience last year that he collapsed in his bunk that day, angry that God had let him down. "There is no God," Boykin sobbed in the wake of their deaths. "If there was a God, he would have been here to protect my soldiers." But in the same address, Boykin says he heard God answer him, "If there is no God, there is no hope." Now that he faces another trial, Boykin may hope for a high-level intervention again.

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http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1101031103-526381,00.html

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