Generally speaking: Former JCS chairman Shelton recounts ‘never dull’ career - Entertainment, Books - Navy Times

Generally speaking: Former JCS chairman Shelton recounts ‘never dull’ career

Hugh Shelton jumps from airplanes, up the officer ranks, into commands, and in and out of 23 homes during 47 years of service.

The details are in the memoirs of the earnest 6-foot-5 farm boy from Speed, N.C., who starts his Army career in mandatory ROTC while a textiles major at North Carolina State University, works hard, loves PT, and ends up being chairman of the Joint Chiefs in the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations.

“Life was never dull,” Shelton writes.

Reading about all of it, however, can be. Some readers might enjoy the generalities (“a great time was had by all” at a family event), but the guts of the book and the gist of the general are in his blunt assessments of colleagues:

• President Clinton is “a brilliant individual with a keen understanding of the big picture yet could very quickly zero in and identify the weakest link in war plans.”

• In Vietnam, a lieutenant is “the sorriest son-of-a-bitch I have ever known”; 20 years later at the Pentagon, Shelton sees the now-lieutenant colonel “rounding out a lackluster career as another anonymous pencil-pusher in some tiny cubicle.”

• Harry Truman’s philosophy was on a plaque saying “The buck stops here.”

“I often thought that [Defense Secretary] Donald Rumsfeld should have said, ‘Don’t tell me, I already know.’”

• Gen. Peter Pace, the first Marine to chair the Joint Chiefs, has “a reputation for being a team player and an officer who was inclined to go along with what his boss wanted. That tied in exactly to what [Rumsfeld] wanted.”

• At Camp David on Sept. 15, 2001, “President Bush pulled me aside and asked, ‘What am I missing here, Hugh?’

“‘You’ve got it exactly right, Mr. President,’ I told him. ‘I have neither seen nor heard anything from either the CIA or the FBI that indicates any linkage whatsoever [between the 9/11 bombings and] Iraq. Stand firm, because it will destroy us in the eyes of the Arab World if we go after Iraq under the guise of Saddam somehow being tied to this.’

But “the President seemed to have made his decision. ‘We’re going to get that guy [Saddam], but we’re going to get him at a time and place of our own choosing.’”

Shelton’s story is chronological except for brief, personal passages about his falling from a tree in 2002 and subsequent therapy at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. His recovery from being paralyzed from the neck down is testament to the staff’s expertise and to Shelton’s strength.

Almost four decades before the backyard accident, stalwart Shelton is on patrol when “a punji stake ripped into my left calf muscle, bounced off the shin bone and exited the other side of my leg.

“Still, my job was to provide leadership and motivation ... I snatched out my heavy bladed K-bar knife, which I kept razor sharp and carried on my web belt, and hacked off the stake at the ground end. I then pulled the rest of the stake out of my leg and continued up the hill.”