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Aug. 1, 2022 - Doug Collins Podcast
43:08
From Iran to Somalia: A discussion with LTG Jerry Boykin
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You want to listen to a podcast?
By who?
Georgia GOP Congressman Doug Collins.
How is it?
The greatest thing I have ever heard in my whole life.
I could not believe my ears.
In this house, wherever the rules are disregarded, chaos and mob rule.
It has been said today, where is bravery?
I'll tell you where bravery is found and courage is found.
It's found in this minority who has lived through the last year of nothing but rules being broken, people being put down, questions not being answered, and this majority say, be damned with anything else.
We're going to impeach and do whatever we want to do.
Why?
Because we won an election.
I guarantee you, one day you'll be back in the minority and it ain't gonna be that fun.
Hey everybody, it's Doug Collins.
Welcome back to the Doug Collins Podcast.
Today, I'm excited about our guest.
It is going to be just a fun time talking to a retired Lieutenant General, Jerry Boykin.
Jerry has become a good friend of mine over the years.
When I was in Congress, he was a stalwart when it came to religious liberties, talking about the military, and just talking about the values in our country.
And he's just become a dear friend.
And I've watched him and listened to him.
And many of you probably have seen him with his role that he is in now.
He has a long background.
One of the things I wanted to do today was get him in here.
Let's talk about his, you know, 30 plus years history in the military and the army.
And then, you know, in how that actually translated what we're seeing today, whether it be in the recruitment issues, whether it be in the morale issues, whether it be just this general sense in our military that is struggling a little bit right now.
But, gentlemen, it's glad to have you with us today.
Doug, it's so good to be with you and good to see you again.
That's good.
Well, we just shared a stage just recently at a conference, and at that point in conference, we also had a good time taking on a good friend of both of us, Mike Berry, whose Mike's also been on this podcast before.
As you lovingly refer to him as our little Marine.
But he's our brand.
He is a good one.
He is a good one.
Well, General, let's start this off a little bit for folks who may not know you, and I know that may be hard to believe for a lot of folks, but some may not.
How did you, when you first went in, you were growing up and you went into the military and you've been in...
You were in a long time.
You were 30-something years.
You came in right at the end of Vietnam, or is Vietnam still going on?
Where were you at in that process?
Yeah, I came in in December of 1970, and Vietnam was still going on.
As a matter of fact, I eventually wound up spending about three months there in Vietnam in 1972, all the way up to the ceasefire in 73, and then I came home.
So you saw the ending there and saw some of that fallout, and I'm sure that brought back a lot of issues we'll get to later with this Afghanistan issue that we just saw in this past year or so.
It was just a very frustration.
Yeah, it was.
It was not a good time for the military in general, but certainly for the Army.
And the reason was that we had a lot of conscripts in the military.
This was a An army that was made up mostly of people that had been drafted, and they did not want to be in the military, and they didn't want to be in Vietnam.
And as a result of that, the army had a lot of drug problems, racial problems, and different types of problems, family espousal abuse, family problems.
And so I came in in that period, and it was not what I expected, but I I also realized very early that we had a lot of work to do and I think over the years, with good leadership, we turned that all around.
I agree.
Well, you know, you've always been, and very much your testimony is a person of faith.
Do you believe in how God's providence brought you into the Army?
Because you volunteered for the Army, correct?
I absolutely did.
I went through the ROTC program at Virginia Tech, and I graduated and came right in the Army.
There you go.
The Hokie in you there, I see it.
Well, coming into it, you know, once you got in, you had a few years of assignments coming in, and then you went and got involved with what was at that point a new concept, and that became known as what we know as Delta Force.
Explain a little bit about how you got involved in that and some of the, just if you could over the years, just some of the areas that you served in, things that people might be interested in, how that all sort of got started with the Delta Force concept.
Yeah, 1970, actually 1977, November 19th, 1977 was the official activation date of the Delta Force.
And what brought about the creation of the Delta Force was a series of hostage takings, many of which were high profile to include the Entebbe raid when the Israelis went into Uganda and rescued their citizens there that were being many of which were high profile to include the Entebbe raid when the
And then you had GSG-9, the German counterterror unit that went into Mogadishu, Somalia, and rescued a Lufthansa plane load of German citizens.
And that was occurring.
And you had the Munich massacre.
So Jimmy Carter really asked a tough question.
Do we have a capability to do that?
And the answer was, well, no, we really don't.
That's not what our military is focused on.
And he said, well, I want a capability.
So in 1978, we started putting Delta Force together.
I was lucky to be one of the original officers there in the Delta Force.
And the rest is history, you might say.
But look, my first mission...
After Vietnam, of course, was going into Tehran, Iran, and trying to rescue 52 Americans that were being held by the followers of the Ayatollah Khomeini.
And then I went into Grenada, which was the little Caribbean island where the Russians and the Cubans were building airfields.
And I got shot pretty bad there.
I got hit with a.50 caliber there.
And then I went into Panama during the Just Cause to bring down Manuel Noriega, and I actually put the cuffs on him.
And then I went into Mogadishu, Somalia during the Black Hawk Down event.
I commanded The Delta troops there in Mogadishu.
And that was a very, very difficult time for me.
It shook my faith.
It shook my confidence.
But as in all things, I ultimately overcame it because I do put my trust in God.
Amen.
I'd like to sort of tie two events together, and you sort of highlighted one of the first real big, I guess, Delta mission that we could discuss, and as you brought up, was this issue in Iran during that time.
It didn't end like everybody thought it would.
In fact, it ended up in very much a missed optima failure, as the mission goes, but we grew out of that.
Taking a step further to what you just said about Mogadishu, which was about 12 to 13 years apart, Um, what was going on?
I mean, how did you overcome what happened in, in a random and the first, you know, first take of, you know, really what was looking at and then how it progressed to what you saw happening in Mogadishu?
Yeah.
Um, That's an interesting question because I will tell you that when I came out of Iran, I felt like I was carrying the weight of the world.
You know, we had failed.
We had failed our country.
We had failed those 52 people that were held there as hostages.
And I got to tell you, we all, all of us, we carried a tremendous burden.
But then we Several years later, we were able to look back and say, but what happened as a result of that?
You know what happened as a result of that?
Jimmy Carter was not re-elected, and Ronald Reagan was.
And Ronald Reagan began a ramp-up of the military with increasing the budget, giving them the priority, and letting the commanders do their jobs.
And it brought about a total modernization of our military.
And, more importantly, it brought about The U.S. Special Operations Command.
Because up to that point, there was no Special Operations Command.
But in Tampa, they took what was at that time the Readiness Command and turned it into the Special Operations Command.
And I think you know, Doug, as a military man yourself, we have a special operations capability that is equal to none.
I mean, no one is equal to it, is what I'm saying.
Exactly.
It has no peers.
So that was the good news.
That is it.
Let me take off of that for a minute.
We'll continue in your career for a second, but I want to take off of that because I think it's so important for listeners to this podcast that so many times we take failure and personalize it, and there's a part of personalization of failure that should then cause you to say, how do I get better?
You made the point there that, you know, we saw a presidential change, we saw the military get better.
From a personal standpoint as a soldier, and then as also as someone who inspires people, talk if you would for a second about how you take a failure and learn from it and make it better instead of how we see so many people take failure and just sort of hold on to it for so long.
Yeah, right.
Well, if all you can do is hang your head and go around pondering the failure, Then you're not going to do yourself any good, but you're certainly not going to do the people that are around you any good, or you're not going to do the nation any good.
What you've got to do is you've got to do an analysis of what happened.
And you got to say, what were their mistakes that I made?
Were there decisions that I made that were not the right ones?
And then what else happened?
You got to go through an analysis of that.
And then at the end of the day, you come back and say, what would I do different?
And then if you can identify things that you would have done different, whether they would have been the key to success or not, then you start the process of getting over it and saying, I'm just waiting for the next opportunity because I'm going to get it right the next time.
But in most cases, especially when you're in the military, it's not just you.
It is a whole chain of command that has to be held accountable for these things.
Well, exactly.
And I think you even take that into private, you know, and those who are not in the military.
So many times we forget that, you know, if we can come and take our mistakes, we own up from our mistakes, or we try, you know, and to correct them, we find out where we need to.
It not only affects us, but it affects those around us, whether it's in business, whether it's in our family and others, because then they also see it's okay It's not okay to intentionally fail, but it's okay to learn from the mistakes that we make.
Yeah, and a very important thing there that you're saying is leaders have to be willing to underwrite certain failures.
Now, I mean, there is a limit to that, but leaders, you develop people by giving them the freedom to fail.
Now, that becomes very serious when you're talking about people's lives.
But if you think about it, if you've got the freedom to fail, you know that you will do the very best that you can.
But if you fail, the one who tasked you with that mission is going to stand with you.
So long as you did not violate ethics or morals or the law, Then you've got to be able to have the freedom to fail.
Well, in failing, it's actually, I mean, I go by the motto that many times when I was in Congress and others, I wanted our younger staffers, our interns to try stuff.
Sometimes they're going to fail.
We knew it, but there were leadership in place to say, okay, We're not going to let this be permanent.
We're going to let it be a growing opportunity.
And that's what leadership, I appreciate you saying that so much, but it's so true.
Leaders out there, you've got to give your permission for your people to try.
They're going to fail sometimes, but if they're not trying, they'll never fail.
And there's no progress in that as we go forward.
Let's move to Mogadishu again, back to Somalia, which was very popularized in culture through Mark Bowden's book, The Black Hawk Down.
It became a movie.
For people out there, and again, folks, there's some younger folks who probably only associate you or only associate what you just said to that movie.
How was your, you know, because I'm sure you've seen it, what's the correlation to your role that they've now seen popularized in American culture?
Yeah.
The movie is actually very accurate, and there are some small things in there that if you weren't there, you wouldn't realize just how those things came about.
A good example is when When they had one of the actors there that was covered in rubble, he was just...
And all you could see was his eye.
Well, that really happened.
That really happened.
And that was one man that got covered.
They shot an RPG on one side of a wall, and he was on the other side of the wall.
And it just covered him up, and his three teammates were there.
And all they saw was a couple of feet.
And they started pulling those feet out, trying to get him out.
And one of them was saying, oh, they've killed Jason.
They've blown him in half.
And they pulled him, and he was about 6'5", and they kept pulling until they pulled him out, and they said, man, we thought you were dead.
And he said, what happened?
So that was actually a real thing that happened.
But there were some others, too, that...
We're, you know, less humorous than that.
But there were some things.
So it was not an inaccurate...
The characters in there, the roles and all were a little bit different than what was...
I was actually the one...
That was played by Sam Shepard in terms of what my role was there.
But it was pretty accurate.
I mean, it really was.
And one of the things that I'm glad that they emphasized was we put two men in, Randy Shugart and Gary Gordon.
After the first Black Hawk had been shot down, a second one was shot down 15 minutes later.
And Gary Gordon and Randy Shugart were Delta Force snipers.
And they pleaded, three times they pleaded for us to put them in.
They wanted me to put them in so they could get the people out of the second crash there.
But I had nobody to support them with.
It was just two guys against all the Somalis in that part of town.
But ultimately they said, sir, you got to put us in.
We're the only chance those guys have.
So we put them in and obviously they got killed, but they saved the crew.
And only one of them ultimately survived and came back to tell us the story about what Shugart and Gordon had done.
But they're an example.
Of what our military is all about.
It's fighting for the man on your right and left.
That's why I'm so stressed by what I see happening to our military today.
Because unity.
Unity.
A brotherhood.
A camaraderie.
And a single purpose.
Working together.
And those guys willingly sacrifice their lives for their buddies.
And...
We've got to get back to that, but this administration has us on a path to destroying that unity that's essential on the battlefield.
We see that.
A couple of quick questions on that, and then I want to follow up on what you just said.
Interestingly enough, for those of us who've watched the movie, did you ever understand why the movie would put General Garrison making those calls as opposed to you in that situation?
Well, yes.
When Bowden actually started with a book, he worked up in Philadelphia and he was writing a weekly column about this whole thing.
And that was the foundation for the book.
And I knew where he was getting his information.
He was getting a lot of classified information.
And I was actually quite unhappy with it.
So he called me and I said, first of all, keep my name out of your book.
And secondly, don't call me again.
And as a result of that, I think he realized that I was serious about it.
I had my JAG officer call him too.
I understand.
Curious, just a question here, and I hear your heart and I hear your concern here.
And you saw this, for those who may have watched the movie, but when you just described it, they actually called and begged to get down there, knowing that it was probably a suicide mission.
Yeah.
What went through your mind, and you talked about the Brotherhood, you talked about, because you knew these men.
Okay, this was not like two strangers that you would have never met before.
You knew them, you would probably band back at the base with them, you saw them, you know.
What was it like and what was going through your mind when you gave that final okay for them to sit down and those two to go in?
Yeah, I must tell you, it was one of the hardest decisions that I've ever made.
And there was another incident there that was probably equal to that, but that was the hardest decision I'd made as a commander, as a military guy.
But I said, you know, First of all, they've asked three times to go in there.
They know the situation on the ground far better than I do because I'm not watching what they're watching.
I'm not seeing what they're seeing.
Secondly, I said, this is what we're about.
This is what the Delta Force is about.
We leave no man behind.
And they believe that it is their responsibility now to make sure that those four guys in that helicopter are not left behind.
And I said, I said a prayer.
And I said, put them in.
And just as soon as I did that, I thought, they're not coming out.
They're not coming out.
But God bless them.
And that was it.
But I was hoping they were coming out, but realistically, I didn't think they would.
Well, and understanding, you know, and all that happened there and looking at that, you know, mission that was, you know, sort of, you know, supposed to be a short in and out turned into a much longer, you know, ordeal that has now become, you know, really stilled in many people's minds is that act of what our military is actually, who our military actually is, that bravery that they're willing to go in, whether it was the Rangers, the Delta combination, the Army coming in.
It really inspired a lot of people out of that.
Curious question after that.
After that happened, because it was not very long after that Clinton decided to pull everybody out, was that a sense of frustration among the Delta and Rangers that were there that because of this incident, there was a feeling that the administration had lost faith and they were pulling out and that it was an unfinished mission?
Or what was your thoughts about that?
No, that was very much the case, Doug.
Every man that was on the ground there was just angry.
I mean, just an anger that was building towards the President of the United States and the decision to suddenly pull out.
And by the way, they actually put, the guy we were after was a guy named Muhammad Fari Adid.
He was the head of the Habakkuk clan.
And he was actually given, not given, but they sent an airplane, a U.S. military Air Force plane, in there to pick him up and take him to some location in Europe for a meeting.
To negotiate some kind of settlement in there.
And that, I'm telling you, what that did to us was giving that guy an airplane to fly to a meeting.
That was really kind of almost a breaking point for a lot of us.
But again...
At the end of the day, you've got to be able to get through those things.
You've got to be able to sort it out in your own mind and heart.
And we did our job.
We did it well.
In fact, we succeeded.
We went in there to capture about 15 people, and we wound up capturing over 20. And that's what we were after.
We did it.
And we killed, according to the Red Cross, we killed and wounded about 1,100 Somalis.
The problem was we lost Americans, and Bill Clinton was not in the frame of mind to be able to accept that.
He needed somebody to blame.
I understand.
Moving forward, coming out of that, you're getting well into your career now.
You take a move out of that.
Right after that, you moved from Delta and into more of a staff role.
That's when you became general officer.
How did that move?
Because I know you as a man of action.
I mean, you're just a gregarious guy.
You love big.
You talk.
You're there.
You want to be in action.
That's what brought you to the force to start with.
When you started moving toward the more administrative roles, how did that, for someone like you, how did that make, was that difficult?
Was that almost a more difficult challenge?
Oh, yeah.
I mean, it always is, especially when you're sent from being on the front lines with the Delta Force up to the Pentagon.
You know, that's like being thrown off the San Francisco Bridge or something.
But you know what?
What was good about that was I actually was only on the staff there for a little while, and I got sent over to the CIA. So I spent a couple of years at CIA running covert actions there at the CIA. And so it kind of put me back in the fight, so to speak.
And that was a great assignment.
And I got to tell you, don't ever say anything bad about CIA around me because they have some of the finest professionals in the government.
And then when I came back for my second tour at the Pentagon, I wound up going over to the Balkans, running a task force there to capture war criminals.
Remember after the Dayton Accords, there had been an agreement that all of the war and factions would turn in the people that were identified as war criminals, but they didn't do it.
So I was running a task force out of Sarajevo That was capturing war criminals.
And that was a great assignment.
I mean, I really enjoyed that.
And then I left that job after about a year and came back to take over all the Green Berets.
But I got to tell you, I just kept getting put back into those positions where I could feel like I was still part of the game, you know.
Well, and I think that's an interesting part.
Was there, because a lot has been said and sort of has been hidden a little bit, the Balkans, that was a very difficult time, especially in that area, wasn't it?
Especially with the cruelty and other things that we've seen, you know, coming out of that, especially from the war criminal perspective.
Compared to what you saw in Africa to the Balkans, was it, it was evil just evil or what did you see with that?
Yeah, evil's evil.
I will tell you that I saw some bad stuff in Mogadishu, and it was women mutilating bodies, and that was pretty bad.
And the women are the ones who do it.
But that said, it was the same thing in the Balkans.
I mean, it was like there was a demonic presence there almost.
And yes, we captured a guy named Goran Jelicic, and he called himself the Serb Adolf.
And he would go to one of the holding facilities where they were holding prisoners and he'd get a Muslim prisoner, take him out, have somebody hold him over the Drina River and he would castrate him to start with and then he would shoot him in the head and let his blood drain into the Drina River.
And him and his wife, as a matter of fact, would We're both doing that.
And I think that was so disgusting to me that somebody could actually enjoy doing that kind of thing.
You know, these people are no threat to you anymore.
They've been captured.
They're being held in a facility.
So I saw that stuff and I thought, you know, you don't know the depravity of man until you actually see it up close and personal.
Exactly.
One of the things you just said just a moment ago, and I believe this as well, because I believe there is a spiritual battle.
There's the forces that we have in Scripture.
It's a demonic presence.
You can feel it.
You got in trouble for actually saying that, I think, about it.
And people didn't like it because you were stating reality.
But I'll share an experience, and I wondered if it's sort of like yours, what you saw in the Balkans as well.
When I was in Iraq, we were stationed at Balad, which was just north of about 60 miles north, 50 miles north of Baghdad.
And it was where the Saddam Hussein had his Air Force Academy, how it was, but it's where his sons, Uday and Kusei, they would actually, their torture chambers were there, some of those.
And in the hospital, where we developed the hospital at the base at Malad, in the basement was where those torture chambers was, with the rapes, the murders.
And I remember going down there, I worked night shift, and I remember we could go down there.
On top was a new hospital where people's lives were being saved, and on the bottom was those caverns, those little rooms and stuff.
And I can remember going into those rooms, and it was just a chill.
It was just, you could still sort of feel it.
Is that...
For me, that was that sort of demonic kind of presence.
That's sort of what you were feeling with this, wasn't it?
You know, and I don't want to get hyper-spiritual, but you know, the Bible tells us that when we are in a relationship with Jesus Christ and He's the Lord of our lives, that the Holy Spirit abides in us.
Well, when you're in the presence of the demonic evil spirit, your spirit is restless.
The Holy Spirit within you is restless.
Now, I know a lot of people hear me say that and say, that confirms that he is absolutely a kook.
But no, go back and read your Bible, read the Word, and you feel the presence of evil.
That's why I tell people, when I got off the airplane in Mogadishu on the airfield there, I felt the presence of evil.
It was an evil place.
And we need to recognize that there is good and evil.
One is a result of Satan's antics, and the other one is a gift from God, the good.
It's on this earth as a gift from God.
And all things that are good derive from the kingdom of God.
So we have to understand that there is a spiritual battle going on.
And I will tell you that when you look at some of the atrocities that are committed in these places like Mogadishu and the Balkans and Balad, It can't be described as anything but evil, and you need to understand that because you can't fight it with carnal weapons.
You fight it in the spirit.
Well, and that's what's coming along in seeing this battle.
Moving along into your Family Research Council, you've been there for several years with Tony Perkins and the rest of the folks there, and you're speaking a lot of around the country.
We spoke about this recently, and you brought it up early in our conversation, and that is The concern about the brotherhood, the morale, the sister, the truce, men and women who are in the different military branches, and the concern that there is today that You know, it's breaking down.
We're seeing this in the recruitment issue, and we've spoken about this as well.
From your military experience, and you brought up an interesting part because there's been, and I actually talked to several, when I was in Congress, there were several retired personnel generals who came by and said, you know, we're destined to go back to a draft.
And you had talked about the problems, you know, with conscription coming out of Vietnam.
Where are we?
I mean, we understand the problems with, you know, morale, vaccine, you know, people are not in shape, those kind of things.
Where do you see the shape of our force in the next few years, and how do we get it to where it needs to be?
Yeah, this is a two-edged sword, and thanks.
That's a very good question, because Our military is in rapid decline, and the recruiting is a reflection of what's happening in our military.
I mean, the military, the Army alone is going to give up 10,000 to 12,000 billets this year that they just can't fill, and they've only recruited up about 40% of their goal this year, and then the other services are having exactly the same problem.
But you know what's a worse statistic than that is that of the surveyed That took place by the Heritage Foundation, only 9% of the young men and women that are in the age bracket to be able to come into the military, only 9% want to serve in the military.
Now, I grew up on John Wayne.
I mean, I grew up on...
Hey, men were men.
Men wanted to test themselves.
We could hardly wait to get our opportunity to wear the uniform and to serve the country.
And that is not the case anymore.
And that, as far as I'm concerned, is a huge problem in this country, which probably drives us towards ultimately having to go back to a draft.
Because our adversaries are not getting weaker, they're getting stronger.
And they're testing us.
And the question is, are we ready to meet those challenges?
We have some good people in our military, but our leadership is questionable.
Well, and I think that's one of the interesting things.
I mean, when you said John Wayne, I can think of my dad, you know, growing up with my dad, and, you know, we were seeing the war movies in World War II, John Wayne, the Green Beret.
I bet you could probably sing the Green Beret song right now.
Every verse.
Every verse of it.
Every verse.
I love it.
I love it.
Because it was something that you, you know, it wasn't, you know, sort of an aspirational.
This is something that you want to go test.
Interesting you said this, and I wanted your thoughts on it.
I remember growing up and...
A few years younger, but growing up in this, especially starting in the 80s, and I would say about the 80s, our recruiting was about adventure.
It was about going places.
Navy was all over the world.
The Marines, of course, again, the Marines are really good at video.
They're inspirational.
The Army, be all you can be, go places, Air Force, fly high, aim high.
It was all about being More, you know, that adventure.
And what I see now in some of our recruiting, you know, it seems like that there's a discussion in our country about, well, just come and serve.
It'll be good.
It'll be happy.
Sort of like the, I hate to make this, but the private Benjamin kind of analogy from the late 70s.
Oh, we'll have a, you know, a condo and we'll go do things.
Is that a problem?
It's a huge problem.
You know, why do you serve?
Why do you serve?
You should.
What we want is we want people that want to serve because they want to take their place in the history of America.
They want to make an investment in this nation.
And they want to be with others of a like mind.
Hopefully, that's why people come in the military.
But now if you look at, 9% want to be in the military.
And you say, how could that be?
You know how it is?
It's because our public school system.
It has denigrated America to the point that these people know nothing about our history because history has been taken out of the public school curriculum for the most part, American history.
And all they've been told about our founding fathers is they were old white slave owners.
And they do not recognize the Judeo-Christian base upon which America was founded.
And those guys, those 56 guys, they did not agree on theology.
Some of them might agree, but generally speaking, they didn't agree on theology.
But they all believed in a sovereign God.
They all believed in Jesus Christ.
And people call Thomas Jefferson a deist and Benjamin Franklin.
Well, go back and look at the history.
And read David Barton's book, The Jefferson Lies, and what you'll find out is this generation that doesn't want to be in the military has been pumped so full of lies about Thomas Jefferson and who he was.
And by the way, he did not father Sally Hemings' son, Thomas.
And that was proven through DNA tests.
And that's on record, and you can read that in David's book.
But the record has never been corrected because we still have people that believe that he fathers Sally Hemings' son, Thomas.
That's not true.
Well, one of the things we're having right now is this issue, and it's coming out loudly right now in Virginia with the states of both Jefferson and Madison.
The history being turned more toward this woke history than it is just the actual, literal history of what happened, and that's the problem.
John, I know we're getting close to the end here, but I want to get from your part of perspective.
There is problem.
We see there's problems, but there's always been issues.
I was just reading, you know, some of the speeches, and we're going to probably talk about them here on the podcast of inaugural speeches and space speeches of Kennedy, others.
You go back in time, Democrat, Republican always had an American exceptionalism perspective.
It was that we were a country That we may have different opinion on someone with governance, but America was the country of our birth.
It was a country of our origin.
If you came here and became American, it was something that you would be proud of.
How do we take this moment of concern when we're low in our military, the military folks who are there are some of the best in the world, the men and women are the best in the world, still fighting on short-handed, short notice, doing what they need to do, but it can't last in that capacity for a long time.
How do we overcome this in the next 10 to 15 years to meet the challenges we're going to have to meet?
First of all, we go to the ballot box.
And it's not just for the Commander in Chief, which is the President of the United States according to Article 2. We do need a Commander in Chief that respects our military, but more importantly understands the mission of our military and is willing to support that mission.
This administration is not.
Secondly, we get out and take action.
We take action with school boards to where we can get history back into the curriculum there and we can breed a generation of people that understand the sacrifices have been made.
And then the last thing is, as far as I am concerned, we find people or we ourselves get out and run for offices, starting with the school board.
School board may be today the most important elected office.
But we also need to get men and women in the Congress, especially those that we can get on the Armed Services Committees, to start turning this around.
People that understand our military, people that are willing to support our military, and give them the opportunity to restore what we've lost in terms of military ethos and the military readiness.
Exactly.
Two things here quickly, and then we're wrapping up here.
But you just hit something I can't say in a way.
When I was in the military, when I was in Congress, being in the military, we were in the very small minority of members who had either served or previously serving.
It used to be back in the 60s, 70s, you had had 60, 70 percent or more actually had served in some capacity.
Now that number, I've heard it as low as 15 to 20 percent, depending on how you look at it.
In fact, our Armed Services Committee in the House right now is chaired by someone who's never served, who's never, you know, they're overseeing, and I get the civilian oversight.
For those of you who want to yell and call on the Doug Collins podcast, but there needs to be some understanding, at least in my mind, that gives more where our Armed Services Committee doesn't have that.
Are you saying also that maybe members of the military, former members, retired members, or even active if they're in reserves, that's something that's missing in Congress right now?
There's no question about that.
And I think you and I talked a little bit about this out in, where were we?
Utah.
But yes, what I think, there are a couple of organizations right now.
There's one called Veterans for Congress, and then I forget the name of the other one, but there are a couple of organizations that are promoting veterans.
They're helping them get into a race, they're helping them organize a campaign, and they're putting money into their campaigns and all.
And I think we don't need all veterans in the military.
That's wrong.
But we do need more than we have, and we need it for the very reasons that you and I are talking about here.
You need somebody that understands what it takes to have a ready military.
You know, our enemies are not going to give us warning.
They're not going to give us warning.
We've got to think in terms of it's too late after the fight starts.
It's too late to try and build a robust, ready military.
That was one of the principles of special operations.
It's too late to build a robust force after the war starts.
We need to recognize how important being ready and not having to do what we've done in World War I and World War II and Vietnam and repeatedly.
We need to have a ready military that is fully equipped, fully trained, but the most important thing is They have the right people who have worked together and built a cohesion that will be the equalizer on that battlefield.
And that's what the Russians don't have, and that's why the Russians are getting their backsides kicked all over the battlefield.
And the only thing they have is they just have huge numbers of people and big artillery.
But they do not have what the Ukrainians have, and that is cohesion and purpose.
And that's why the Ukrainians have been so successful against it.
Exactly.
Well, General Morgan, thanks for being here.
I don't want this to be the last time.
I want to come back in and discuss some foundational principles.
I think we sort of teased some of your coming into the military.
I think some of the other issues that I know you're working on with Family Research Council and you and I speaking across the country, we run into each other.
But the insights you gave into some of the history that you've been witness to really, I think, makes a dynamic effect.
I'm hopeful on the listeners of the Doug Collins Podcast that you'll, you know, for those of you listening, go to the DougCollinsPodcast.com.
You can send me an email.
If you have a comment for General Boykin, I'll make sure he sees it.
Thanks for what you do.
But also thinking that you take not only the physical, mental aspect, but combine it with the spiritual aspect, General.
And I think that is so missing today that it's not an either-or proposition.
God made us His whole.
And I appreciate you so much actually confessing that.
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