Special Forces: A Guided Tour of U.S. Army Special Forces

by Tom Clancy

  So building an Army career required you to come back into the “conventional” side of the force. Then, once you had done that, it was tough to get back to an SOF assignment. So literally, after I came back from that experience at Fort Jackson, I was selected early for major, and that almost terminated my ability to jump back and forth. This was because I went off from there to do my troop duty as a major—four years in the 25th Division. Then I came back to work on a staff in the personnel business, and was selected for battalion command, again on the conventional side. So once my career started moving, it was almost like there was not much influence I could have. They select you for command and assign you to a specific unit, so you don’t have a “say-so” in the process. So I was just very fortunate that I ended up in the great units that I did.

  Later on, when I was a Brigadier [General], and they asked me which division I wanted to go to, my top two choices [divisions] were both in Europe, both heavy [armored and mechanized]. Where did they send me? Back out to the 101st Airborne (Air Assault) at Fort Campbell, Kentucky [a “light” division, which usually got to where it was going in helicopters].

  The good news is that being on the “light” side, I’ve been with the forces that have been in the “action.” Desert Storm being the one exception that gave the “heavy” forces a good shot at combat. But all the rest of the operations, from Panama to Somalia to whatever, focused predominately on the “light” side.

  Tom Clancy: During the command phase of your career you seem to have spent much of your time in units of the XVIII Airborne Corps. Units like the 10th Mountain, 82nd Airborne, 101st Airborne (Air Assault), etc. Was this by design or just the luck of the draw?

  General Shelton: From the time that I entered the military service and attended the Airborne and Ranger schools, I was always drawn toward units that could move rapidly, fight decisively, and had a lot of esprit and charisma. I guess I’ve liked units that basically could come at the enemy from where he might least suspect it. I believe it was Benjamin Franklin who said, “Where is the country that can protect itself against 10,000 men descending from the skies?” So I had a natural propensity to seek out and desire to serve in Airborne, Ranger, and Special Forces types of units.

  At the same time I recognized the need to be well rounded, to have a good, solid infantry background, which included not only light units and Airborne and Special Forces, but also time with mechanized forces. So if you ask any officer in the Army what would be their ideal assignment, it would probably be to one of these elite units. However, that doesn’t mean you don’t need experiences in other types as well.

  As luck would have it, by virtue of my experience and my previous assignments, I tended after my early days to be steered in that direction by the Army’s institutional assignment processes. But I do think that the missions, the experiences, and the association in these units really allowed me to be with some of the very finest soldiers to ever wear an Army uniform, and of course those are wonderful memories that I will have forever.

  Like every other U.S. Army officer in the 1970s, Hugh Shelton endured the lean years following Vietnam. These were hard times for the Army. It had to endure not only a drying up of money and the transition to an all-volunteer force, but severe cultural, social, and morale challenges. No group within the Army suffered more than the young officers who were rising to command their first battalions and brigades, and trying to hold their units together in the face of all that.

  Tom Clancy: You were part of that generation of senior officers who had to deal with the trauma of the post-Vietnam era in the Army. What are your memories of what the Army was like in the late 1970s?

  General Shelton: It was an abysmal experience, to be frank. It came partly from the impact of the post-Vietnam attitude toward the military, and the fact that a lot of good people got disgusted and decided to hang it up and leave the service. Combined with that was the now acknowledged mistake in recruiting personnel who were not physically and mentally qualified. It was bad! A lot of the people who were brought in during those days were given a “choice” of going to jail for criminal convictions or going into the armed forces. I had a lot of those [individuals] as a battalion commander.

  At the same time all that was going on, [unit] strengths were declining rapidly into what was called the “Hollow Army.” I know what the Hollow Army was all about. As a battalion commander, I actually briefed a Major General division commander about going to just one platoon per [infantry] company, which normally has three or four per.

  In particular, we had a problem with our NCOs. A lot of our NCOs in those days had been left over from Vietnam. During that time, we had promoted them very rapidly, and they were at grades that were much higher that they should have been, without the real underpinnings of [professional] education and an understanding of what their [job] responsibilities entailed. It was so bad that as a battalion commander in the 1979 to 1981 timeframe, I seriously considered leaving the service.

  That’s where we were. The drug problem was tremendous, even in line outfits, though to a lesser degree than support units. They kept us busier and in the field, which held that back a little bit.

  Tom Clancy: When did you begin to see things get better?

  General Shelton: I came back from my battalion command tour, and became the G- 3 [Operations Officer] of the 9th Light Infantry division. I then went to the War College, got selected for colonel and programmed to go to the 82nd Airborne Division for [brigade] command. In those years after 1982, when I left the West Coast and moved to Fort Bragg, you literally could see the Army turning around. So by the 1983-1984 timeframe, there was a noticeable improvement starting to take place. By the time I left Fort Bragg [in 1985] and went up to Fort Drum as the 10th Mountain Division Chief of Staff, you could really see the Army turning around. Of course, the new Non-Commissioned Officer education system had kicked in at the same time, and you were starting to see really top-notch, fine young men who are continuing to serve us today. You were seeing a real difference!

  The end of the 1980s and the Cold War saw General Shelton rising to the top levels of leadership in the U.S. Army. By 1990, he was a Brigadier General and Assistant Division Commander of the famed 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault) at Fort Campbell, Kentucky. When Iraq invaded Kuwait in August of that year, his division commander was away on leave, and it fell on Hugh Shelton to get the Screaming Eagles ready to move to the Saudi desert and eventual combat in Operation Desert Storm.

  Tom Clancy: You were assistant division commander of the 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault) during Desert Storm and Desert Shield. Can you tell us about your experiences there and your impression of the division’s actions during the war?

  General Shelton: I was the assistant to Major General Bennie Peay, the division commander. I was his Assistant Division Commander for operations, but also had the (101st) Aviation Brigade under my supervision, which was a nine battalion aviation brigade, with about 350 to 400 helicopters.

  What jumps out at me in that period of time was that we trained hard back at Fort Campbell, and we had our “eyes on the ball” in terms of our deployed goals. So when I went to the 101st, we had a lot of emphasis on deployment training, and “how to get out of Dodge” in a hurry.

  All that came in handy when General Peay, for the first time in about a year, had gone on leave. General Ed Burba [the commander of FORSCOM—U.S. Forces Command at Fort McPherson, Georgia] called me on August 3rd, 1990, while General Peay was gone, and said, “Are you ready to go?” And I said, “We’re ready to go!” He came back and said, “Well, I sure hope so, because it looks like you’re going!” When I asked if he meant the whole outfit [the entire division], he said to me, “The whole outfit!” General Burba then asked, “Is there anything you need?” And I told him that CH-47 pilots were still in short supply, and we had put that in our readiness reports at the time. He said he would fix that, and I told him then that we would start moving.16

  We started moving in
a hurry, and I went on the first plane, a C-5 Galaxy, with the six Apache helicopters. I still remember that when we got to Dhahran and got off the plane and walked away, I thought I was still in the jetwash of the engines. It was about five P.M. in the afternoon when I got there, and the heat was up to about 137° to 140°F there on the tarmac. It was unbelievable!

  I immediately began coordinating with XVIII Airborne Corps to find out where we would go, so I could start making arrangements for the division to receive the flow [of units and equipment] that was supposed to come in right behind us. I soon came to find out that they were going to put us at King Fahd Airbase. So I ran out the next day to look at what was available there.

  Meanwhile, the SOF [units] had been flown out of Riyadh the day before by General Schwarzkopf. He had told Colonel Jesse Johnson [his SOF component commander] that the Saudis were concerned about the American presence, with so many [personnel] in Riyadh, and had asked him to move out. So the SOF guys had leapfrogged out to this airfield, and now I’ve got to go in and coordinate it. My real concern was that there was no place to put anybody [from the 101st], except in the middle of the desert. I knew the troops would die coming into that. So I immediately set out to try to get tents put up so that at least they could get out of the sun. That turned out to be a real challenge, and wrung me out, no question about it! I’m telling you that the August/September timeframe [in the Persian Gulf] is absolutely incredible weatherwise!

  Tom Clancy: You said that you had around 400 helicopters to move over to Saudi Arabia. How did you eventually get them there?

  General Shelton: We had to break them down, load them onto ships, then unload them on the other end and put them back together. It would have been nice if the Navy could have loaned us an aircraft carrier to do the job, but “jointness” was not quite as developed then as it was a few years later in Haiti.

  We did get them to do it later during Uphold Democracy [in Haiti, 1994], but that wasn’t easy either. Those Rangers embarked on the America [CV-66] just about put the ship out of business with all the chow they were consuming! We figured that they ate about three times the rate that the sailors were eating. They were spending all day down on the lower decks doing PT trying to stay in shape.

  Tom Clancy: When the war [Desert Storm] actually started in 1991, did things go about the way you expected?

  General Shelton: I was initially the senior guy for the 101st Airborne Division up front inside of Saudi Arabia, near the Iraqi border with the assault command post. Of course we were ready to prevent Saddam from being able to roll south out of Kuwait and down into Saudi Arabia and catch the units there off guard.

  The 101st was a really great outfit! After we had gotten everyone in and settled down, I took the forward command post of the 101st up north about a hundred miles along the Tapline Road [which roughly paralleled the Kuwait/Iraq/ Saudi border]. We had one brigade that stayed forward. I kept AH-64 Apaches and other aviation assets up there, so that if the Iraqis had decided to come south, we would be the covering force. The 101st would take them on initially and hold them where they were until the rest of the force [JTF] could start deploying or get ready to reinforce. I stayed up there for almost six months until we kicked off the ground campaign.

  The good news was that we trained hard, and Brigadier General Keith Huber [later the SOUTHCOM J-3] was my major in charge of the command post. He and I put together a training program, and we exercised it. We would launch at night, and assume that the Iraqis were attacking, and see how fast we could get our command post back to where it would be more survivable, set up again, and got a real battle or team drill down. We had made the team so sharp that when the war kicked off, I told General Peay that the forward CP should be the one to move forward. We would control the 101st’s one hundred—mile leap into Iraq [as part of XVIII Airborne Corps’ rush on the western flanks of VII Corps’ armored attack into the Republican Guards], and then bring the “big” [division-level] CP forward at some future time.

  As it worked out, the forward CP functioned so well that he decided that we should continue to fight the war with it.

  Even before the ground war started, our AH-64 Apache helicopters had captured a couple of [Iraqi] infantry battalions. Our biggest concern was how do you accept the surrender if you’re up in an aircraft? We had to fly some people out there just to do that job.

  Then the first day, we ran into another battalion right on the planned perimeter of our Forward Operating Base [FOB Cobra].17-18 So immediately we came under fire, and the Apaches returned fire. We had sent recon teams up there the night before to look over the area so we would not hit a real “hot” spot, but they had not detected this one. We started getting another battalion ready to go against one of the flanks, but it turned out to be unnecessary because the Iraqis surrendered.

  One of my most memorable experiences occurred with the 101st on the third day after the war began. I was flying over to a site that was going to be one of our advanced command posts, and it required me to basically do a flight in a lateral manner across the front lines, east toward Basra. In doing that I flew over and followed the armored forces [VII Corps] that were moving north. There were about two hundred rooster tails of sand and dust coming up from the desert. As far as you could see there were rooster tails. This was the sand that the armored vehicles kick up as they move forward.

  Coming behind them was a big five- or ten-ton supply truck, and it had the biggest flag—I believe it was a garrison flag—but the biggest flag I think I’ve ever seen that was stuck up on a long, tall pole on the truck. Of course, as he was driving forward at thirty or forty miles an hour trying to keep up with the tanks, this flag was sticking straight out to the rear. I’ll never forget looking at that. I thought to myself, “Saddam, I hope you know what you’ve asked for, because here comes the United States Army at its best!”

  Of course a day later the decision was made to stop. I felt then as I feel now that it was the right decision—even though Saddam has continued in power and has continued to cause a headache for America and the rest of the world. By that time it was no longer a real fight. Iraqi soldiers were dying needlessly. The leadership had been pulled out of the units, and for the most part, Saddam had decided that he would allow the battalions to surrender. This was because the privates out front would either be killed or surrender anyway. So he had pulled the majority of his leadership back to Baghdad obviously to try to save them or to preserve them for another day. To continue the killing was not something we felt good about, and I thought we made the right decision on day four to stop.

  Tom Clancy: Thanks to its early emphasis on air mobile operations the 101st had a hand in a number of special operations missions such as Task Force Normandy.18 Tell us, if you can, about your work on these operations and how your own Special Forces experience helped you in understanding and supporting their execution.

  General Shelton: As I indicated earlier, we had spent a lot of time at Fort Campbell training in air assault techniques, developing tactical techniques and procedures to survive in combat as an air mobile or air assault outfit. And so the missions that we were asked to do then tied right in with what we had trained to do. In essence, we carried them out as we had trained for them back at Fort Campbell.

  Of course, Task Force Normandy was a special request from the Air Force to take out the forward-looking [low frequency] radars [in southern Iraq]. This would provide the Air Force with even greater capabilities to get into Iraq before hitting the surface-to-air missile engagement zone near Baghdad. As is pretty much public knowledge by now, that was a highly successful operation, and it really showed the value of those Apaches. [Air Force] SOF helicopters [MH-53 Pave Lows], because of their great navigational capabilities actually led the Apaches in. This was because they had GPS, whereas we were still using Doppler [AHARS] systems on the Apaches.

  The MH-53s flew to a designated point. When they crossed over the border, they threw out a bunch of chemlites to mark the checkpoint, an
d that was the signal to punch right in onto the targets. The ability of our Apaches to go deep and to carry out the air attacks as part of Operation Normandy was something we felt very comfortable with and were well-prepared to do.

  We [the 101st] also put in our own recon teams, along with those from the 3rd and 5th SF Groups. The thing that jumped out most of all, though, was that we trained hard to do this. We made a concerted effort back at Fort Campbell to really make our long-range reconnaissance assets work, and to do it the same way that I had learned to do it in Project Delta back in Vietnam. The way we had put them in and taken them out back then had been very successful. Without a doubt, my prior SOF experience made me a better recon planner in conventional operations. The good news was that by using those techniques, we put our five teams in, and none of them were detected (though we wound up having to take out some teams). Still, all in all, it worked well.

  After the 101st returned from the Persian Gulf, Hugh Shelton was promoted to major general and given command of a division.

  Tom Clancy: After you left the 101st, you got to command the 82nd Airborne Division. What kind of a thrill is it to command that unit?

  General Shelton: Well, once you have served there one time, and you see the great quality of the people, particularly the NCOs, you realize that they are tremendous Americans. Everyone—the sergeant majors, junior NCOs, etc.—are as good as anywhere in the Army, maybe even as good as the ones in the SOF community. To go back and command is the dream of a lifetime for anybody who’s familiar with the 82nd.