by Robin Moore
DePorta broke his exuberance with a cautioning frown. “Our first victory was not costly. Do not expect us to be so lucky again. But we needed the victory. It gives us strength for recruiting new guerrillas, new underground, and new auxiliaries.
“Hanoi is now warned. Careful as we’ve been, we must be doubly careful.” The small, brown-skinned commander pursed his lips. “I hope no man here forgets that he volunteered for a mission which still he may not live through.”
“Now we must keep pressure on the Communists. Next thing they know there’ll be A teams around Hanoi and Uncle Ho will be asking for a new peace conference. Only we’ll be talking from strength.
“It’s a new kind of war we fight today, yes? No such thing as win or lose. Just which side has the muscle to make the other side agree when the bargaining starts.”
DePorta winked at Smith. “What are you waiting for? Get onto that sleeping platform while you have a chance. Before you know it we’ll be on the move.”
11
The Consummate Green Beret General Henry Hugh Shelton, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,
It was June of 1997. Surrounded by Green Berets with their indigenous band of bushmen trackers, local tribesmen, and Namibian military, General Henry Hugh Shelton was visiting one of his world-wide Special Operations Forces near Namibia’s northern border with strife-ridden Angola.
Formerly known as South-West Africa, a German and then South African colony, the now independent state of Namibia, strategically located on the dark continent’s west coast and rich in diamonds and minerals, is just one of many outposts of freedom militarily assisted by American SOF.
Called to the telephone at the Country Club Hotel where he was staying in Windhoek, capital of Namibia, General Shelton listened as a Pentagon official asked if he would like to be considered for the job of Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Before the nomination could be made official, the question was posed to him from Washington D.C. to Namibia: could there be anything in his background that might come back to haunt him and embarrass the Defense Department? Any reason why he might hesitate to accept the post?
What a place to be when suddenly and unexpectedly he was offered the highest position in the United States military establishment!
No reason at all, the general was about to respond. Then he remembered an incident early in his career as a Special Forces officer in Vietnam. A mischievous smile crept over his lips. “I do have a second wife,” he confessed.
Before the startled Pentagon official became too distressed, the general explained. In 1967 he had been the team captain of Green Beret Detachment A-104 on the mountainous border of North and South Vietnam with Laos. His 12-man Special Forces team led four companies of Vietnamese troopers and a company of men of the local Montagnard village in fighting the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese regulars infiltrating the area.
The day Hugh was asked to take command of A-104 the team’s former commander had been hauled out in a strait jacket, insane. His executive officer was missing, presumed dead, and the team sergeant was totally disoriented. That was how bad the combat had been.
Captain Shelton was flown into A-104 with a brand new civil affairs and psychological operations officer, a second lieutenant who had only been in Vietnam a few days. It was ten o’clock in the morning and the team sergeant was drunk when they landed. At the same time a patrol returned with the executive officer’s decapitated body. The next day the new A team commander sent the drunk team sergeant back to base, replaced him with the team medic who was a Sergeant First Class, and reorganized the twelve-man A team.
Two days later the civil affairs second lieutenant announced he had to go back because he had combat fatigue. “Combat!?” Hugh exclaimed, “you’ve only been here one full day now.”
“I can’t sleep at night, I’m nervous, I know about symptoms, I’ve got combat fatigue!”
“You’re going to get a lot more fatigued than that before I send you back,” the captain snapped. “I need all the help I can get here.”
As the days passed the civil affairs second lieutenant shaped up. Most important a new executive officer, Captain Jim McLeroy, was shipped in and Captain Shelton transformed the team into a first class fighting unit. A-104 became the scourge of Northern I (Eye) Corps, keeping the Communists off balance and reluctant to infiltrate the south through the team’s sector. The diminutive montagnards were fighting at full capacity, their families happy and well cared for by Special Forces medics. Their chief was highly impressed with Captain Shelton.
The green berets joined in on montagnard social evenings and even managed to drink raw buffalo blood at certain pagan religious ceremonies.
Captain Shelton had been the A team commander for several months and after his second or third buffalo ceremony a young montagnard woman was brought out and seated close to the American commander. A big gourd filled with rice wine generally known as nam pei was placed before the montagnard chief and the Vietnamese district chief and Captain Shelton, who was invited to join them. After they had sipped the nam pei through straws for some time the interpreter came over to Hugh and announced that the montagnard chief wanted to present this young lady, his daughter, to the captain as his wife.
“This is the greatest honor the tribesmen can bestow on you,” the interpreter proudly announced. “You now have a montagnard wife. The chief also wants you to know that this longhouse,” he gestured toward a house Captain Shelton had noticed being built in the back of the village, “belongs to you and your new wife.”
Captain Shelton was appalled but managed to conceal his chagrin, choking on the ‘yard’ brew he had sucked up through the straw. In response to the eagerly watching chief and the shy glances cast at the tall American by his newly bestowed ‘wife’, Hugh explained through the interpreter that he was a devout Christian, that he was married and had two small children back home in America. He said that he recognized the great honor bestowed upon him by the chief and would forever be indebted to him but since Hugh was the “chief” of his men he had to stay with them in their camp.
The montagnard chief seemed to understand, and though the daughter was undoubtedly disappointed at losing the tall handsome American before even getting to know him, she seldom was seen around the village by the Americans again. Yet the captain had indeed been presented with a wife during this tour of duty. Hugh wrote about the incident to his pretty, slender blonde wife, Carolyn. He described the montagnard girl who had red betel nut juice dripping from the comers of her mouth.
Hugh and Carolyn had known each other since she was in the fourth grade and he the fifth. They started dating in high school and were married upon his graduation from college with a second lieutenant’s ROTC commission. After two years’ active duty, then more than a year in civilian life, and now a year back in the army, Hugh and Carolyn were a dedicated military couple with two sons at that time.
The Department of Defense deputy in Washington who had called Hugh in Namibia digested the information with a relieved chuckle. “That was thirty years ago. There was no marriage license involved. And in any case she isn’t going to come back here and testify.”
Nevertheless, had General Shelton neglected to tell the harmless account to the Department of Defense, there might have been a bit of a flap in Washington’s scandal-charged atmosphere before explanations could be offered. A newspaper did locate General Shelton’s long-since retired executive officer at the time, Captain Jim McLeroy, who told the story about the montagnard ‘wife’.
General Shelton has lived by what he calls the Washington Post standard of conduct. “I always said an action ought to not only be legal, it ought to pass the Washington Post test,” he observed. “You should be proud to read about it in The Washington Post without shame.”
The call from DoD to General Shelton out in Windhoek brought back another vivid Vietnam memory. In 1969 Captain Shelton was a company commander in the 173rd Airborne Brigade.
With three platoons spread out o
ver the sector he was covering, the company command element was raked suddenly with fire by infiltrating North Vietnamese regulars. The communications sergeant was wounded and Shelton took over the radio. He tried to call out to his platoons to maneuver to where they could take out the machine-gun that was firing on him. However, Hugh’s first sergeant, located at the 173rd Brigade HQ five miles away, was transmitting on the powerful brigade radio which, with its tall antenna, overpowered the small short-range backpack radios the platoons carried.
Machine-gun fire poured in on Shelton’s position, bullets shredded the trees protecting him and his radio operator lying bleeding beside him. The sergeant back at headquarters was drowning out the small radio communications, blasting the news he had just received from stateside. Captain Shelton was the proud father of a new son named Jeffrey Michael Shelton, nine pounds two ounces.
All the beleaguered company commander could think was he’d never live to see his kid because he couldn’t clear the radio net and call in his platoons to kill the Vietcong that were shooting at him. It seemed an age before the first sergeant ended his transmission and Shelton was able to direct his platoons to zap the machine-gun and rescue the wounded radio man. Shelton frequently told son Jeff how lucky a green beret captain his dad was to be alive after that near disastrous Vietnam experience.
Entering General Shelton’s quarters at Fort Myer overlooking Arlington Cemetery and Washington D.C., one notices the pictures of two Civil War Confederate generals, Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, on the wall. Hugh’s grandmother was brought up in North Carolina just after “the War Between the States” as she insisted on calling the conflict. She would allow no other designation for the hostilities of 1861 to 1865 to be used. She lived to the age of 92 and instilled in young Henry Hugh Shelton the values of integrity, honor, and courage that Robert E. Lee represented.
Hugh (he never liked his first name, Henry) grew up on a farm in Tarboro, North Carolina, and the neighboring town of Speed. His father, a farmer who sold farm machinery, was medically exempt in WWII, although Hugh had two uncles who served in the war. His mother was a schoolteacher who played the piano in the Speed Baptist Church on Sundays. Eighty years old now, she still is there every Sunday. He became active in church affairs since his mother and father instilled very strong values in their son—integrity, discipline and hard work which provided a natural fit with the military career he would later choose.
Hugh Shelton went to North Carolina State University, a land-grant college which required two years of ROTC training. He found that he liked the discipline and camaraderie of the military training and finished the entire four-year course, graduating a reserve second lieutenant in the infantry. He immediately went through Ranger School, the most physically and mentally demanding course in the army. Then, proudly wearing the Ranger tab on his left shoulder, Hugh married Carolyn in the Speed Baptist Church and he began two years of active duty in the infantry as a platoon leader. Thus commenced a lifelong partnership greatly admired by everyone, civilian and military, subordinate and superior, who has been associated with them.
In July of 1965, after being promoted to first lieutenant and having been a platoon leader of the 1st Battalion, 5th Cavalry at Fort Benning, Hugh had completed the mandatory two years of service and decided to give civilian life a try. He had majored in textiles at NC State and had gone through the normal job interviews before graduation from college, accepting a job with Regal Textile Corporation with the proviso that he complete his two years’ active duty before going to work.
And so, as a reserve lieutenant, he started Regal’s nine-month management training program. But after only five months, the executive committee pulled him out of training, made him assistant superintendent of spinning at the mill, and soon offered him another promotion.
What they didn’t know at Regal was that after just a couple of months at the company, Hugh went home one evening and told Carolyn that he had really enjoyed the army. He explained that he missed the camaraderie and the challenges he encountered every day. Even though he was now working for great and wonderful people, he liked the army a lot better than civilian life. Carolyn encouraged him to follow his true inclinations and he applied for a regular army commission.
Hugh hadn’t even thought of his application for months afterwards until he received a telegram from the Department of the Army informing him that he was ordered to Fort Bragg, North Carolina, for the Special Forces Officers Qualification Course en route to something called RVN, which he discovered was Vietnam. That was what he had asked for. The book The Green Berets topped the bestseller list and the stirring “Ballad of the Green Berets” led the music charts in 1966.
Now he had to explain his change of heart to Rip Hardiman, general manager of the largest textile plant in the United States under one roof. “We brought cotton in the back and shipped finished cloth, dyed, printed, everything, out the front,” Shelton reminisced.
Hugh liked Mr. Hardiman. He was a great guy, but they didn’t call him Rip for nothing. There were people at the plant who were terrorized by Mr. Hardiman. Hugh went in to see the boss.
“His office was about twice the size of this one,” Hugh recounted, gesturing around the Pentagon office of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff as he recalled the fateful interview.
Mr. Hardiman wasted no time. “I understand you’re thinking of leaving.”
“Well, Mr. Hardiman,” he replied, “I’ve decided I’m going to make the Army a career.”
“Look, Hugh. I’ll give you $5,000 a year more.”
“It’s not about money. You’re paying me well.”
Finally Hardiman capitulated and promised Hugh a job if he ever decided to return to civilian life.
General Shelton came to the notice of the President and top U.S. military strategists to a great extent as a result of his planning and command of Operation Uphold Democracy. This was the name given to the 1994 Haiti mission designed to remove the military dictatorship of Lt. General Raoul Cedras and to replace him with the democratically-elected President Jean Bertrand Aristide, who had been driven out of Haiti into U.S. exile by the Cedrasled military coup. Haiti was fast becoming a center for sending drugs to the U.S. Its citizens were fleeing oppressive conditions and abject poverty in their own country, and those that survived the leaky, overloaded boat trip to Miami were arriving illegally on Florida shores in large numbers. Something had to be done soon.
In June of 1994, Lieutenant General Henry Hugh Shelton had been the commanding general of the XVIII Airborne Corps at Fort Bragg, N.C., for one year when he was ordered to develop a plan of action to temporarily take over Port-au-Prince, Haiti. Widespread rioting was erupting in that nation’s capital and the lives of American citizens were in jeopardy. The scenario was the same one he had seen nine years before when he was a colonel commanding the 1st Brigade of the 82nd Airborne—when a brigade-size unit was envisioned being deployed to seize Port-au-Prince Airport.
Under Hugh’s guidance his staff prepared a plan that would make use of the capabilities resident in all of the U.S. military—the Marines, green berets, Navy SEALs, naval vessels, and 82nd Airborne. This plan envisioned responding throughout Haiti, not just at Port-au-Prince Airfield, and was sent to Admiral Paul David Miller, commander in chief of Atlantic Command. Miller liked it and briefed the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the Pentagon. By September of 1994, American patience with General Cedras gave out.
Earlier the Haitian general had signed an American-brokered agreement with the democratically-elected President Aristide, on Governors Island, New York, pledging to restore the democracy by May of 1994. Completely reneging on the agreement, Cedras was tightening his grip on Haiti leading to rioting and a breakdown in law and order, and propelling more Haitian immigrants to Florida. U.S. Ambassador William E. Swing and his entire embassy staff were in peril and Gen. Shelton was given the “go ahead” by Admiral Miller to prepare for the invasion.
Originally Shelton had planned to le
ad the 82nd Airborne jump into Port-au-Prince as the other elements of the plan closed in throughout the country. However, Admiral Miller was concerned that Gen. Shelton might be injured in the drop and it was decided that he would take up his post on the Navy command ship, the Mount Whitney. Every phase of the operation was meticulously rehearsed.
General Shelton personally supervised the entire plan working tirelessly with the four branches of America’s military might, giving true meaning to the term joint operation. It was to kick off with a night airborne assault, increasing the risk to the rehearsing American warriors going in.
Further adding to the complications were the disparate contingents of troops from all over Latin America and the Caribbean, making this a truly international operation. Somehow General Shelton put all the pieces together and made them work in preparation for this large-scale operation.
It was fortuitous, as it turned out, that Admiral Miller had asked General Shelton not to lead the 82nd Airborne jump into Haiti. Early on a Sunday morning in September of 1994, Shelton, along with International Task Force 180 Chief of Staff General Frank H. Akers, his operations chief, and a reporter from The Washington Post, Bradley Graham, flew from Fort Bragg to Guantanamo Bay, the U.S. Naval Base on the southern coast of Cuba. There they boarded the command ship Mount Whitney which at 10 A.M. started steaming toward Port-au-Prince in the center of the claw formed by the two tentacles of land fingering out from the northern and southern coasts of Haiti.
At one A.M. the 82nd Airborne was scheduled to jump into the Port-au-Prince airport. USS Mount Whitney had timed its arrival at its destination just as 60 aircraft full of paratroopers would assemble overhead. The first phase of Operation Uphold Democracy was underway.