Brave Men S4E124: Man to Man - General Jerry Boykin

You know, the word warrior gets thrown around a lot. Man, that guy's a warrior or he's a warrior. But then there are men who are warriors. And that's General Jerry Boykin. We'll meet him today. He's a retired American lieutenant general. Right now, he's currently the executive vice president at Family Research Council. But this man, when you think of some of the great major conflicts in the last 40 or 50 years, this man has been part of it. 13 years in the Delta Force, high profile missions like the 1980 Iran hostage rescue attempt, the hunt for Pablo Escobar. Man, that's him, sir. And Black Hawk down. He was Aaron Mogadishu and Somalia. He was part of that whole project. He's been an amazing warrior, great man of God. And when we talk about warriors, this is a man who's not only lived it, but he lives it every day. Because the Family Research Council, we'll hear more about it, we'll hear more about what he does. But they're standing on the front edge of the cultural wars. If you can call it that, it basically is the idea that manhood and Christ's likeness, there's an animus, which is what we say here, Christian men's network with brave men. That if you're going to be a real man, you're more like Jesus Christ. And this is a real man. I'm excited about having General Boykin today with us on brave men, because this is a man. He didn't really have to talk about it. He doesn't have to, I mean, his credentials, if you look them up, speak for themselves. And so he's comfortable, if you will, secure in who he is as a man as a general in the armed forces. There are times where you and I must be warriors. You've got to stand up when we've got to speak up. And a warrior does that. This is that man who has planted himself firmly in the side of righteousness. I thank God for men like Jerry Boykin. You're going to meet him today. It's going to be a great time. If you remember, if you need materials or tools for the cycling of men, go to cmn.men, cmn.men. Christian men's network. And you get all the tools here. Thank you for being with us today on brave men. Here's General Jerry Boykin. It's brave men with Paul Lewis Cole, wisdom and courage for the journey. Talking with General Jerry Boykin, who was a standout player on his high school team in Newburn, South Carolina, then became the three star general and now executive vice president of the Family Research Council. And between those things, a whole lot happened. Yeah. So you ended up in the army. I'm going to ask you about a numerous missions. But what was the toughest one you were on? The toughest assignment? Yeah, that's a very interesting question because I've never really thought about it. And that probably sounds bizarre. But 40 years ago, just last week, I was on the mission in Iran on the 24th of April 1980 trying to rescue 52 Americans being held at the embassy. And we failed at a place called Desert Wall in about a hundred miles from Tehran. And I saw eight good men die there that night. But we carried a tremendous burden. Each of us that was on the ground, it was part of that mission. We carried a tremendous burden because we failed the nation. We had failed our fellow Americans in that embassy. It was such a burden of guilt and failure. So that was certainly one of the toughest operations that I've been on just because of that. Of carrying for years, the whole work of failure. But probably in other ways, the one that I would have to say was probably the toughest was the Black Hawk Down event where I lost 16 soldiers. They were under my command and I was wounded there. And that was Mogadishu Somalia. Mogadishu Somalia in October of 1993. And chronicled in the movie, Black Hawk Down. That was probably spiritually and emotionally the one that took the greatest toll on me because when I looked at the carnage of the dead and broken bodies of my soldiers, it was almost more than I could handle it. In many ways, I really began to question God. Not only God, what happened here, but I really began to question God, where are you? Why weren't you here? Why didn't you stop this from happening? And that's a story I write about. And both of my autobiography as well as to some extent in Man to Man. So yeah, you wrote a book called Never Surrender, which actually opens with the intrigue of Washington, DC. And then you move into it. It is a great book. And I want to recommend that to men right now. You can get on Barnes and Noble Amazon, any place like that. I'm sure Family Research Council where you're at now carries that. But Never Surrender is a great book. But let me go back to this. How do you recover? You were in the desert and we know in looking back on that rescue attempt of the 52 hostages. We know there were mechanical failures. You ended up with not enough helicopters to proceed with the mission. And how do you recover? Here we are in the middle of a pandemic. We've got 28 million people out of work. How does a man recover his balance in the midst of that kind of chaos? Yeah. Well, this is one of those situations where you have to go from how you feel to what you know. Now, if you're not grounded in the word, you don't know enough about the word, you're going to have a tougher time recovering from this kind of situation than if you are grounded in the word, you know the word of God, you've studied it. You've read it on a consistent basis and you haven't tucked away in your heart. Remember God told Joshua as Joshua was getting ready to lead the Israelites across the river into the promised land to conquer. And all that land, everywhere they set their foot. He told him, you know, to basically, my words, but he told him to tuck this word away in your heart. Tuck this away. Well, that's when you were devastated emotionally and you began to question everything around you. But ultimately you moved from those emotions to a knowledge of what God says in his word. And that's when you're able to get on the road to recovery because you know he has said, I'll never leave you North for sake you. There were no caveats on that. There were, you know, or I will be with you if you're a bad boy, you know, no, that's not what he says. Says, I'll never leave you North for sake you. And he says in Jeremiah 33, three, call unto me. And I will answer you and show you great and mighty things which you do not know. So those are the things that we have to fall back on. That's when we start on the road to recovery. It's not necessarily an instant process. It's not an overnight process. It is a road to recovery. Yeah, it's a journey. It's a process. And I think too many of us push back on the process when in fact what's happening, the half brother of Jesus, James said he said these things build endurance in our lives and build strength. So you had disappointments like that. And then at the same time you also had some great victories. And let me hit one other one. This is fascinating to me because in contemporary culture, you were part of the team or led the team. Tell me exactly how to say. Now there's some things and let me go back Delta Force which may or may not exist, right? That's right. I'll show you the confirmed deny. Exactly. It may or may not exist, but if Delta Force does exist and if you were involved, of helping start it and build its culture, you guys also or somebody went after Pablo Escobar. Yeah, right? In Colombia. In Colombia. We've seen movies about this, but you lived the real life of this. That's right. And that was a 17 month chase to find Pablo Escobar. But in that, and by the way, that all unfolded as the Black Hawk Down event was taking place as well. Wow. And it was the month after we came out of Mogadishu and I was still devastated emotionally. I was on the way to recovery. I was getting back on my feet, but it was a month after we came out of Mogadishu that one of the teams that I had put in Colombia. I stayed down there with them initially and then we realized it was going to be a long term thing. So I started rotating teams in here and then I would go in and spend time with the teams, but it was a month after the Black Hawk Down event that I got a call one morning and said, well, we got him. And when I say we, obviously that's an issue of we helped the Colombians to find him and they killed Pablo Escobar. So let me be clear. Yeah, let's just be very clear on that because I think there's still some controversy with... Yeah, there is still speculation on that. Yeah. And it's fascinating to me that we have to defend taking out somebody who was killing Americans by the thousands with the drugs that he was importing into our nation. It's that quote attributed to George Orwell who was actually written about him by George Ranier, the Richard Ranier, a writer who said, we sleep safe in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm. Yeah, and I love the statement whether Orwell actually said it or not, I love the statement. It is so true. Yeah, he said a statement something like that and then Ranier said it, repeated it back that way. But it is so true. It's because men are willing to put themselves in between us and harm and you committed yourself to that. Well, what was that process coming out of playing football being the captain of your high school football team? You went to college. What was that tipping process, General Boykin, that took you into, I'm gonna serve my nation? There was no question when I came out of high school that I was gonna ultimately serve my nation. And that was because my dad was one of four brothers that were in World War II. And in fact, my new book, Man to Man, I start out and I start that book out with sort of an exposal my father, my idol. Yeah. So I talk about him too at the very beginning of the book, but he and his, and four of his, three of his brothers were in World War II. Now, no, it's four of his brothers, I'm sorry. And now that set the stage for me knowing that because my name was Boykin and I was going to be a man one day, I had to serve the country. Yeah. And dad didn't talk a lot about his time in the military until he got around his brothers. And they all, they all, you know, revealed things that I'd never heard of before. And I would say that's my dad was the only one who were two vets just sitting at the bridge. And I would listen to them as they were talking. My dad was the only one that was wounded. He lost the vision of his eye on D-Day and Omaha Beach driving a landing craft. He was a name. But I knew that I was going to serve. Now, I came out of Virginia Tech having a play football there for four years. And I went to for Benning, Georgia. And but I was not serving the Lord. I'd grown up in the church, but I was not serving the Lord. Because I had things I wanted to do. And commitment to Christ was going to interfere with those things. And I just had things I wanted to do. You know, well, when I got to Fort Benning, I became so burdened with, you know, the life that I had been living. That I actually, right by myself, I knelt down in the Bachelor Officer quarter room there at one room that I slept in. And I just asked the Lord to take away my sins, cleanse me, and I said, Lord, I'm tired of running. My athleticism really means very little here in the Army. It's far more. I need to transcend the cause. I need something that helps me to understand, you know, why it's worth me serving in our military. And why it's my best interest to turn my life over to you. And those two things came together. And God gave me a piece about it. And then gave me the, the wherewithal, the talent or whatever to actually be able to stay for 36 and a half years. Yeah, and move up the ranks. But you were in battle, Vietnam, and all the way through all these different conflicts we've had. You know, and you led men, but you also had to help shape men. You know, I, in reading, I was, you know, grew up in the same era that you did on the West Coast. And I was 1A and ready to go and didn't serve, but it was sort of like, Lord, if this is your will, I'll go. But Sebastian Younger in his book on great book called War, he describes, he embedded in Afghanistan. He talks about men. And as they served, and as they fought side by side, he said, there's a moment where you're not thinking about the flag or the national anthem. But the, the risk or flight, you know, the flight thing that would happen in your body said the reason you don't is because of the man next to you. How do you build that in a man general? Yeah. I've seen men, in fact, two in particular, that received the medals of honor, that literally sacrificed their lives for other men. Randy Schugard and Gary Gordon, two medal of honor winners in Mogadishu. I've seen other men risk their lives for their buddies. The first thing you got to do is you got to build a team. You got to build a, you got to build teamwork within the organization. But those men didn't get up that morning saying today, I'm going to die and I'm going to do it heroically. Yeah. No. They were in either the right place, the right time or the wrong place at the right time, depending on how you look at it. But they didn't, because in their training, they had built a camaraderie that you, I think you only find really at that level in our military. You begin to respect the man on your right and left, regardless of his color or race or education or financial level. You begin to respect him and he becomes your brother because you share hardship. You see, that's why sharing hardship is so important. That's one of the things that we don't allow our children to do now. We don't allow them to share hardship. I write about that in my latest book, called Man to Man. I say, you know, dance, let your children experience hardship because it toughens them. And these men like Gary Gordon and Randy Schugart, they went through a lot of things with those men that they were trying to save. Right. They went through a lot of tough things, not only in training, but they'd been in combat before. And over a period of time, you developed such a bond, such a brotherhood. That you know that that guy that's in trouble right now, if this one is reversed, he'd come to get you. William, to come say Sherman, wrote a letter to you, let's assess Grant in 1864, March of 1864. Right after he had burned Atlanta. And he said to Grant, and I think of this Grant was the top general. Yeah. Sherman was one of the top generals, but he wrote to him and he said, I knew wherever I was that you thought of me and that you would come if I got in a tight spot if you were alive. Wow, think about that. That's the kind of bond that came through for those two guys that came through having fought together previously, having built that bond and being tested by fire. So how do you build that? You train them hard, you let them experience hardship. And over time, that bond because they begin to depend on each other and they know that when the lad is flying, when they're really in combat, that they're gonna have to depend on each other. And then most of them have grown up with something called the Ranger Creed. And the fifth stanza of the Ranger Creed reads, never shall I leave a fallen comrade to fall into the hands of the enemy. You know, we fought 18 hours in a local tissue over dead bodies. That's where most people were realized. We could have gotten out of the city, but we had the bodies of two men trapped inside the wreckage of a helicopter, and nobody was going to leave them. Until we got them out of the helicopter, nobody was gonna leave. We took more casualties. That is a bond that develops through men that have been battle tested and have endured hardship together. Yeah, they've learned to respect each other. Jesus said, he said that I no longer call you slaves, but I call you friends. Yeah. And the shift that happened with the coming of Christ is that the intimacy, the brotherhood, if you will, that's come out of that. I think of Jesus and Lazarus, who were such close friends. In fact, General, I usually tell men I say, Jesus and Lazarus were such close friends that he didn't make Lazarus a disciple, because he needed somebody to hang out with. He needed to be able to say, hey, you should have seen Peter the other day. It was unbelievable. Yeah. Out of the boat, you know, he needed somebody to talk to, he needed a brother. And I believe that that's one of the biggest things, modern psychology into people who research these things, tell us that the average man in America, and of course we're being listened to all over the world, but I would say it's most likely the same, having traveled 84 countries and you've traveled the world. It says the average man today has 1.7 friends. And my joke is that everybody knows the 0.7 guy. He's the one who doesn't show up when you have to move. Yeah. But I think that's a huge change in our culture. And I think the loss of brotherhood is partly where we're at and why you wrote man to man. Well, there's a chapter in man to man. And here it is. So everybody sees it if they can see us online. Otherwise, if they're hearing us, it's called man to man. There's a chapter from Fidelis's up publishing. From Fidelis publishing. If there's a chapter called man as a battle buddy. Think about it. Man as a battle buddy, it's a military concept. That's the guy who's got your six. And by the way, you got his six. You're watching for him and he's watching for you. Your battle buddies. Well, the Bible says in Proverbs, as iron sharpens iron. So one man sharpens nothing though. Tuesday night of this week. Dr. Stu Weber and I. Stu Weber wrote the best book for men that was ever written for 20 years he was with promise keepers and he wrote a book called Tender Warriors. Tender Warriors, yep. It had an incredible impact on my life. He's an old green beret from Vietnam, but the two of us got on a call with a bunch of men from all across the country. And we did a presentation on the battle buddy. What is a battle buddy? This is what you're talking about. You're talking about this brotherhood. But your battle buddy is not just another friend. It's a man friend. And I emphasize with a big M a man friend. He's a man. He's not one of these guys that's confused about his gender or his identity. He's a man. And he understands what a man is supposed to be. But he's the guy that you can, you've built this relationship over time. This didn't happen overnight. Right. He's the guy you go to when you said, man, I'm struggling. Man, I'm afraid. Man, I'm really worried about what's going to happen next. I lost my job. And I don't know what to do next. And he's the guy that's going to not only encourage you and give you good wise counsel, but he's the one that's going to say, I'll be praying, man. I really will. And you know that he will. You know that he's going to pray. Yeah. And you're going to do exactly the same thing for him when the situation is reversed. It's hard to find that battle buddy. But once you find him, it's worth more than gold and silver when you've got that battle buddy, but that's a relationship that is built over time. My battle buddy is Stu Weber. He's my, and he lives on the West Coast and I live on the East Coast. But let me tell you, we spend a lot of time together. Yeah. It may be on the phone, or it may be an elk camp up in the mountains of Idaho fishing on one of the rivers in Oregon, but we spend quality time together and we make the best of that. And a man especially today, and this is what we're living through right now, we need a battle buddy. We need that guy that we can call our battle buddy. Yeah, we do. Yeah, we need somebody we can call and somebody who calls us. This is one of the things I've been saying over and over general is there's somebody you know right now who needs a text. There's somebody you know right now who needs a phone call. And you're the guy who's been called by God because it's on your heart. You've been called by God. So step up, have the courage, make the call, do this stuff. Because first Corinthians 16, 13 says this, says beyond guard, stand firm in the faith, be courageous, be strong. That's new living translation. And now he says act like a man. Yes. So and that's what David told his son right before he died, didn't he? Well, I told him he told him to be a man and one of the last things he told Solomon is he said, hey, that guy, Jehuda, that messed me over. He said, go kill him. He's not going to outlive me. Yeah, I like that part too. I think it's like, it's like, do not let that guy live longer than I do. Man, you know, David, you know, speak of tender warrior. I mean, David, I love this guy, man, this guy could, you know, this guy could kill a bunch of guys and then write poetry about it. Yeah, and play a harp. And I don't think it was a harp genre. I think I tend to think it's more of a Jimmy Hendrix. I kind of think of it. I'm a bluegrass in it, but. Maybe a little country, okay, just for you. So, but, but that's it. So what, what makes a man? You talk about man to man and you wrote this book and writing a book for those of us who have written, we know what it takes. Most people have wanted to write a book. But to take the time to pain the effort, you know, it's like, it's Sam Chan calls it giving blood. But you spent this time and effort to write man to man. And part of it was the response to what you saw in masculinity in our current culture. And then to be able to describe here's what a real man is. What is a real man? When you talk about a man, man, what do you mean by that? Well, I divide this new book, Man to Man, into really five things that a man is required to be. And, and we do conferences built around these five things. We have different speakers on each of these five things. Man is a provider. Financial provision is obvious, but a man also provides identity. Yeah. And a man provides direction. Remember 24th chapter of Joshua? When the man Joshua preached his own epitaph and got up and said, choose you this day, which God, you're going to serve and he went on to say, but ask for me in my house. He was providing direction. We will serve the Lord. He said, he was talking about generations to come. We will serve the Lord. He was providing direction. Yeah. He provides all of those things. Man provides leadership. Man provides a presence. Look at all the absentee fathers today. Yeah. Look at the households that are following the part of the families that are disintegrating because men are not providing a presence with that family. And, and one of the guys that speaks on this that our conferences is Bishop Larry Jackson, who was also with Promise Keepers for 20 years out of Charlotte. And he does such a magnificent job of covering this topic. So man is a provider. Man is also an instructor. Mm-hmm. And that means that a man bears the burden of knowing what's going on in the world that lives in and knowing the Bible. Yeah. He's got to be on a Bible reading program. He's got to know the Word of God. And he's got to be able to look at issues and apply a biblical worldview to these issues. That's one of your first comments when we started talking a few moments ago was being in the Word. Being the Word. And that's what provides our true North and our true foundation. That's right. So if you don't know the Word, you can't look at marriage, for example, and give a biblical understanding, a biblical worldview, or immigration, or taxes, or the right to life. You can't, unless you understand what the Word says. So you're the instructor in your home and in your community, even in your church. And you've got to know the Word and have a biblical worldview. And George Barna with Barna Research says less than 9% of the American population of 330 million people. Less than 9% have a biblical worldview. And that is because we are biblically illiterate. So you can't be an instructor if you don't know the Word of God. And you don't know what's going on in the world around. You don't know what the third thing is, a man is a defender. Now, not only do we defend our families, but we defend the things that we hold dear. Look, I took a note to the Constitution of the United States. The important defend that Constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic. But that's not the only thing. I have a responsibility to defend those values that I hold dear. That means that I have an obligation because I'm pro-life. I'm not pro-choice. I'm pro-life. I have an obligation to defend the unborn, the defenseless. The defenseless, yeah? Yeah, because we kill 60 million babies in the womb. So I have, this is one of my values. I have to defend that. So I can't just sit on the sideline and be critical. I have to do something. I have to speak out about it. I have to vote for candidates to support my values. Right. I have to do all I can. And so I am a defender in terms of defending the things that I hold dear, but here's the other thing. We have developed an attitude in this country that we see something that is wrong that's happening right now. That that's not in my business. Well, yeah, it is your business if a woman's being abused. If a child is being abused, even if it's a parent, and they are abusing that child, and I know that I'm stepping on right up on the line now, but especially with a woman. A man is abusing a woman. You cannot walk by that and say, that's not in my business. Right. You better step in and do something. And I tell the story and man to man of one day I was going down Interstate 95, and there was a man on the side of the road beating this woman. I thought he was going to kill her. And I stopped and jumped out and grabbed my 45 caliber Kimber and ran down the side of the highway and it don't know. Maybe the only thing that all these people going down the highway are going to remember is this white man jacking around in a 45 caliber pistol running towards a black man with a gun in his hand. By the time I got to, he realized when he saw that pistol, that things were not going to end well, and he let her go. But the point of it was, I decided I could stand before a judge. But what I could not do was stand before God and say, I passed. I passed right by. No. When you put me there, the vendor that you called men to be. A man is also a battle buddy. We've already talked about that. Yeah. See, that's the issue with Gideon. Gideon had this great start. And we all talk about Gideon, this great young man of faith. But in the 30th verse of chapter 8 of Judges, it says that Gideon had 70 sons. And in verse 33, it says that the day Gideon died, he lost his kingdom. It says that the day died after over 50 years of prosperity. It says the day he died, it says immediately Israel turned back to bail. And the issue from me, general, about manhood and men and identity that a father provides is that not one of Gideon's sons stood up and said, no, you can kill me, you can take me out, but this is not who I am. This is not what my father gave us. And Gideon's failure was that he didn't disciple 70 sons, not one of them stood up. And Gideon's failure, he lost his kingdom because he didn't disciple his sons. Now, think about the book of Joshua in the book of Judges. In the very first chapter of Judges, it says that Joshua, when Joshua was dead, there was no leader. Now, think about the fact that for 40 years, Joshua walked in the footsteps of Moses. He was ready to cross that river. But he didn't do the same thing for the next leader in the Jewish plans and the Jewish tribes. Right. He didn't choose his old replacement and mentor him with the time that God had allowed him there. So that was a failure on Joshua's part. He's my favorite character in the Bible, but it was a failure on his part. Not to mentor the next guy that was going to take the mental of leadership among the Israeli tribes. That's why that's why Fatherlessness is such a curse in our day and age. You know, the LA Times just did a report on Monday of the week that you and I are talking. And they said that in places of poverty, over 30% poverty, where there's over 30% poverty, the death rate from COVID-19 is 300% higher than those places that don't have poverty. Sure. Now, we know that Fatherlessness is the leading indicator of poverty in every culture in the world. And Fatherlessness is the result of the immaturity of men. So the immaturity of men is actually killing people at a three, at a three times rate. Yeah. So when you're talking about these things, you're talking about the book, Man to Man, which I hope everybody gets and reads and then uses it to mentor somebody else. We're talking about these things. We're not talking about a kumbaya. Hey, you know, gather around, do a little Bible study, go grab a coffee. This is life and death and it's a future of our nation, the future of every nation on the face of the earth. And it's the legacy of men who proclaim the name of Jesus Christ. That if we don't suck it up, pull up our little, you know, poor me and the, and the, maybe it's a little too hot in the building this week. And all that kind of stuff, we get sidetracked on. And the distractions of porn and all the other self-medicating things. So easily, Paul said, distract us. If we don't have the courage to just pull it up general, you know, we lose the next generation. We're only one generation away from total anarchy. Yeah. That's why I appreciate so much a man with your stature. You've got awards and decorations, 36 years serving the United States and the military, serving with the station, three-star general, all the things you've done. But you're willing to lay your name and everything else on the line to call men to a place of biblical masculinity. So I thank God for you, sir. Well, thank you very much. And this is a deep passion because I'm at the Famer Resource Council. We can show you from the research that we have done that in any community in America, if you want good high school graduation rates, low crime rates, a good economy and good personal health, the single most important thing you need is the intact family. In your community, that's all our research shows it to some mother, a father, and child, mother, father, and child. Well, you know, the secular writer William Farrell, who out of Stanford, who used to be the attorney for the National Organization for Women in New York, wrote a book called The War on Boys, the Boy Crisis, and in the middle of that book came out two years ago, he says, this is a secular writer, he used to be the advocate for NOW. He said the same thing, general. He said a mother and a father in a family is the healthiest thing for a boy. It doesn't get much clearer than that. General, thank you for your time. I'm fascinated by this. I want to recommend not only man to man, but I also want to recommend your book, Never Surrender. If you want to hear about intrigue, it starts in Washington DC in chapter one, and then Rumsfeld, and then you're working with a man who I greatly admire George W. Bush, who's a neighbor, and was in our home, actually, when he was a governor. And I have a great admiration for him and enjoyed our times together. I had a letter from him, general, you know, that he signed and stuff. And after he became president, my wife says, where's that letter? I said, I don't know. It was down below a bunch of, you know how you do. He was, he's just a guy. He's a baseball guy. He's an oil man and a president and a great man of God. But I want to thank you, general, for your dedication to this. I want to thank you for being there with Tony Perkins, Family Research Council, for all the people from Dr. Dobson and others who helped make that thing happen. And what you're doing now for your service to our country, not only in the military, but I would say right now with FRC on the front lines of the culture battles. So we pray that every place you put your feet will be holy ground. And everything you put your hands to will prosper. And the Lord will keep you and your wife and family and your grandchildren. Deep within the grip of his favor in the days to come. And may you have many, many years of great influence. Thank you, sir, for your time. Amen. Thank you. And it's great being with you here. God bless you, man. God bless you. You've just experienced Brave Man with Paul Lewis Cole. Paul is president of the Christian men's network. Connect with Paul at cmn.man or write to him at Paul at cmn.man.