The Green Berets: The Amazing Story of the U. S. Army's Elite Special Forces Unit
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When asked about the inspection process in Iraq and the possibilities of the United Nations declaring such a process in Libya, which is also under sanctions: “Anyone who believes we could stop a determined country from developing chemical or biological weapons is naive. You can make chemical and biological weapons in a hospital. You can quickly convert a fertilizer plant into making chemical or biological weapons. Iraq,” General Shelton points out, “has failed to produce the records to account for even the chemical and germ capacity they admitted to having on hand to start with.”
If General Shelton is the perfect man for the job of Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in today’s climate of local (but deadly) conflicts erupting around the globe, surely his wife Carolyn is the ideal partner for America’s top military chief. When they were married, she had no idea that she would become a career army wife. She expected Hugh would do two years of active duty and then become a civilian and reserve officer. But once it was apparent that you could take Hugh out of the Army but you couldn’t take the Army out of Hugh, she involved herself in the military life, becoming an integral part of it.
About military marriages, Carolyn observed that as long as the couple love each other, the military is not going to be what breaks them apart. “The military way of life makes you more of a team than any other job you could ever be in.”
When the subject came up of the long separations and not knowing for certain whether a husband will come home alive, Carolyn nodded. “That’s one of the things we deal with.” As the three boys grew up she was often concerned about her husband’s safety during his assignments. But she learned not to show it to her sons so they wouldn’t feel her anxiety.
Then she smiled reminiscently. “It’s all part of what makes the homecoming more precious. Those are wonderful times, and they [civilian wives] don’t have that. He and I have had so many honeymoons because there have been so many separations. I’ll never forget the homecoming after Desert Storm. We were at Fort Campbell, Kentucky.” Then Brigadier General Shelton was the assistant commander of the 101st Airborne Division.
“I went out for every returning planeload of troops, day and night—around the clock. We all stood there waving our flags and tears coming down our faces. It was one of the most fantastic parts of being part of the military ... I mean, you’d stand there and watch a soldier get off the plane and see his new baby that he’d never seen before.”
The homecomings are indeed special and “you tend to block out those times that were more difficult. Vietnam, he was away twice, for a year each time, when those first two children were born.”
Carolyn Shelton has remained apart from the politics attributed to military wives. Indeed she says she has hardly been aware of wives working hard to get their husbands promoted. “I don’t think I ever thought past the next promotion. I never dreamed he would be a general.”
An important part of the agenda of a base commander and his wife is being active in the community. Wherever they went the Sheltons made many close civilian friends. In the six years they were at Fort Bragg, N.C., first as a brigade commander in the 82nd Airborne Division and then as the Division’s commanding general and finally commander of XVIII Corps and Fort Bragg, they became close friends with Fayetteville’s mayor, John Dawkins, and his entire family, especially the mayor’s granddaughter, Jill, who suffered from brain cancer. Happily, Jill has staged a remarkable recovery.
Wistfully Carolyn thinks of the traveling her husband has had to do and all these years she wished she could occasionally accompany him. Military regulations state that even if there is extra space on a plane, the wife of a traveling officer, even a general, cannot travel with him at government expense. Occasionally Carolyn has traveled commercially to meet her husband at his destination.
Now, as wife of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, she accompanies him on many trips and serves as an extra set of eyes and ears especially regarding quality of life issues for service members and their families.
An important function of a commander’s wife is becoming part of the support groups that the wives of the military people form to help wives and families through the crisis of a death. These support groups are an important facet of military life. The wives of soldiers killed in accidents or on missions like those in Desert Storm, Somalia, or other places where the military is sent to intervene, depend on the family support groups to help them pull through the crisis of losing a husband and father.
General Shelton was the commanding general of Fort Bragg when 23 men lost their lives in the plane accident in which an F16 fighter crashed into a transport plane full of paratroopers at the post’s Pope Field. Carolyn led the family support group which for days and even weeks comforted and helped the bereaved families.
There is general agreement throughout the defense establishment in Washington that the military apparatus of the United States, at a time of international upheavals in all parts of the world, each requiring special operations and other capabilities, has at its helm the most capable, admired, experienced team players possible in Carolyn and General Henry Hugh Shelton. The Chairman is facing every threat imaginable. Even Pope John Paul II, in his Easter 1998 address, predicted cataclysmic events for the turn of the millennium. As this new edition of The Green Berets is released America can count itself fortunate to have the right military leader, a green beret all the way, out front in these times.
THE END
Afterword The Lesson of the Wall
From 1962 to the odious scene of the helicopter evacuation of the U.S. Embassy in Saigon, April 1975, Washington preferred to wage a half war against aggression in Southeast Asia rather than to go for an all-out win.
U.S. Army Special Forces, the Green Berets, were at the forefront of the conflict from its earliest days in their Fort Apache camps staked out in the middle of enemy territory. It became a war of individuals fighting the enemy surrounding them. Our troops were forbidden to hit the enemy just across the borders in Cambodia, Laos, and North Vietnam where with impunity they massed for attacks on our camps inside South Vietnam.
What have we learned from the Green Berets and our troops in Vietnam, who struggled to do the job assigned them, yet were hamstrung by politicians, few of whom ever saw a real war up close?
Consider the case of the Secretary of Defense refusing to give Special Forces troops in Somalia the heavy equipment needed to do their job. We would be “sending the wrong message,” he declared. So rather than display excessive force against an African warlord, a team of our Special Forces men were killed in Africa, their bodies publicly desecrated.
And what happened when we forged a rare diplomatic alliance to oppose dictator Saddam Hussein of Iraq after he invaded his neighbor, Kuwait? Our political apparatus aborted the final defeat of this advocate of mass destruction. Now, ten years later, his military rebuilding, his palaces and poison gas restored, we are once again held thrall to Saddam’s whims.
The men whose names are on The Wall, and thousands of others whose lives were destroyed by the Vietnam War, did not make their sacrifices so we would repeat our mistakes and fear “sending the wrong message.” Their families do not want to believe their men died in vain. We must be a decisive nation when we recognize human catastrophes, whether we are dealing with African despots, Balkan dictators, or Chinese human rights violators.
Let us be diplomatic but let us not ignore The Lesson of The Wall.
ROBIN MOORE
Green Beret
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