Word: shelton
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Shelton has not shied away from tactics that implicitly criticize Pentagon routine. While many Chairmen have been tankers, pilots and ship drivers--and were eager to embrace whatever new weapon came along--Shelton, as commander of the famed 82nd Airborne in 1993, raised eyebrows by scrapping the division's fleet of high-powered AH-64 Apache helicopter gunships in favor of more reliable but modest OH-58 Kiowas. Shelton's career went into high gear in Haiti in 1994, when he cut short the U.S. invasion, turned back the bombers and transformed himself from warrior to a diplomat, ousting Raoul...
...didn't know each other well; they first met when Shelton sought then Senator Cohen's vote for the Special Ops post last year. But they hit it off immediately. "They're both low key and soft spoken," says a top Cohen aide. "Shelton is a man of few words, and the Secretary knows they count...
Cohen is famously high-minded, a writer of poetry and fiction, and the general has his courtly side as well. Shelton, 55, grew up on a farm near the North Carolina hamlet of Speed (pop. 100), where he met his wife Carolyn in the fifth grade; their home life is said to be "rock solid...
...Shelton's career began in the jungles of Vietnam, leading Green Beret incursions into enemy territory. While there, he earned a Bronze Star and, after stepping on a manure-covered bamboo spike, a Purple Heart--the kind of wound that won Colin Powell the same medal in the same war. But unlike Powell, who spent much of his career in Washington's power corridors, Shelton has scant capital experience...
...that time, Shelton had moved into his job as Special Ops commander, the fruit of Senator Cohen's 1986 push to take all the military's commandos and put them under a single boss to reduce interservice wrangling. The move succeeded. Now, by putting this unconventional warrior in charge of all four branches, Cohen may be signaling that the retooling of the military can finally begin in earnest...