Jerry Boykin & Lynn Vincent by Never Surrender Page B

not need as many lieutenants there as we did when you were in Infantry Officer’s Basic. What you need to do is get yourself back to Fort Hood and enjoy your time as a platoon leader.”
    I wasn’t ready to give up. “Is there
any
way you can find a slot for me in Vietnam?”
    Major Major looked at me as though a large rock occupied the spot where my brain should’ve been. “No,” he said with what sounded like his last grain of patience. “We don’t have any requirements for platoon leaders right now.” His last sentence came out as though a period followed every word.
    “Well,” I said, “I just want you to know that I’d really like to go before this war is over.”
    Now, a company commander or a division officer in the field might have appreciated my eagerness to go into combat. Major Major did not. He looked at me in the exact same way a complaint department clerk might at 4:59 on a Friday afternoon. “Well, I’ll make a note here that you’re a volunteer for Vietnam,” he said, now clearly bored and ready to move on, “and that if
any
platoon leader spots open up, we’ll send
you
.”
    Which was a polite way of saying, “Get out of my office.”

3
    I KEPT PUSHING FOR ORDERS TO THE WAR. And in the first week of February 1972, I got what I thought was the big phone call from personnel. But once again, I was disappointed: “We’re giving you orders to Pusan, Korea,” a personnel officer told me. “You’re going to be an aide de camp.”
    An aide de camp
! I thought.
I must have really pissed off Major Major
.
    Nobody
wants
to be an aide de camp. Your first vision of it is that you’re nothing more than some general’s errand boy. As it turned out, I got a tremendous education, an exposure to the strategic level of Army operations I would never have gotten in a troop unit. My first boss was Brigadier General Jack McWhorter, a quartermaster officer and West Point grad from Mercedes, Texas. I worked for him only from March until June, but during that time, I was a back bencher during quite a number of high-level meetings on U.S. policy and strategy for the Korean peninsula.
    Still, I did my share of grunt work. After McWhorter left, the new guy came: General Lloyd Faul of Sunset, Louisiana, a Cajun Catholic who loved cigars, had five kids and an infernal dog named Snoopy.
    Faul first called me ahead of his arrival in Pusan. “Lieutenant Boykin, I wanted to let you know I’ll be on the two o’clock flight into Osan with my wife, my kids, and my dog.”
    “Yes, sir. I’ll be there,” I said. “Looking forward to meeting you and your family.”
    “We’d like you to bring someone with you to transport the family,” he said. “You transport the dog.”
    Now
this
is some high-class work
, I thought. On the phone, I said, “No problem, sir. Glad to.”
    Lieutenant Choi Jung Yul worked as my Korea counterpart and an interpreter for the American generals. A college graduate, he spoke fluent English and was a very serious soldier. We spent hours discussing Korean culture and he helped me learn his language. The day General Faul flew in, Yul and I climbed into a Suburban and drove up to Osan to collect the new American boss and his entourage.
    “Lieutenant Boykin, you take Snoopy to the quarantine,” General Faul said after Yul and I had taken care of his luggage, his family, and his billeting.
    Now you have to understand that I was used to hounds, pointers, and setters of various kinds—hunting dogs that knew how to track, retrieve, and generally do what they were told. Snoopy, by contrast, was quite possibly the dumbest animal I had ever met. Part Dalmatian, part something else, he gazed stupidly at me through the caged door of his transport kennel. Still, I wondered if I saw a devilish gleam in his eye.
    All pets brought across the ocean had to be quarantined for thirty days. So all the Fauls crowded around the kennel to love on Snoopy before I took him away. That was when the general issued