CRISIS IN THE CARIBBEAN : Top U.S. General in Haiti Called Steady, Unflappable

FT. BRAGG, N.C. —  When young Hugh Shelton came home for Christmas during his senior year at North Carolina State University, his mother, Patsy, recalled with amusement how he had everything planned, down to the chrome on the car.

“I’ll graduate and get my (Army) commission,” he told her. “Then I’m going to buy a new Chevrolet sports car and I’m going to get married. Then I’m going into the service.”

By the next September, Shelton--who always buys Corvettes--had done everything he planned, just as he had all through high school and before that all through the 4-H Club.

In the 31 years since, his penchant for organization has continued to serve Henry Hugh Shelton, the 52-year-old Army lieutenant general who is in charge of American forces in Haiti.

Shelton has a quiet self-assurance and a serious but easy-going manner that draws people, according to friends and family.

His friends’ assessment was echoed by Lt. Gen. Thomas W. Kelly, who was Shelton’s boss at the Joint Chiefs of Staff’s operations directorate. He described Shelton as “steady and unflappable”--a military leader who counts more on precise analysis and quiet persuasion than on bold strokes and bad temper.

“He doesn’t get rattled,” Kelly said. “He always worked for difficult people like me, and I couldn’t find his breaking point.”

That unflappability, Kelly added, could be tested to its limit by a mission that lies in the military nether world between peace and war.

But Shelton has a light touch with diplomats and politicians. “He’s a fellow who will never forget to be polite,” Kelly said. “Hugh can handle the State Department types.”

Earlier this week, Shelton, in the lone public comment he gave before arriving in Haiti, talked about the “delicate balance” for American forces in Haiti. “The Haitian people are not our enemy, yet the Haitian armed forces and police have capabilities that we have to defend against,” he said.

The former North Carolina farm boy has become one of the Army’s rising stars, a veteran of Vietnam, the Persian Gulf, the Pentagon and the fabled 82nd Airborne, the elite paratrooper group trained to go--with force, if necessary--into countries where the enemy controls the land.

Shelton, who rose to the command of some of the Army’s most elite units at a young age, “represents the next generation of Army leadership,” Kelly said.

In his current post, Shelton is commanding general of the 18th Airborne Corps, the nation’s rapid-deployment specialists, and of their home base of Ft. Bragg in North Carolina, one of the largest military bases in the world. The troops from the 18th, including the 10th Mountain Division light infantry and the 82nd Airborne Division paratroopers, are expected to provide the bulk of American troops in Haiti.

On his way up the Army ranks, the man who set out to work in textile manufacturing has passed by many a West Point graduate. Shelton grew up in Edgecome County near a tiny community called Speed, the oldest of four children, the son of a farmer father and teacher mother.

He helped grow tobacco, corn, soybeans and cotton on his father’s farms during the summers. His first accomplishments, his mother Sarah (Patsy) Shelton said, came from his intense involvement in the 4-H clubs. “He was always a leader. You could always see it,” she said.

Rangy at 6-feet-4 and 215 pounds, he played high school basketball and went on to North Carolina State, like his father and three uncles, where he took Reserve Officers Training Corps courses. He liked them so well, his family remembers, he decided to continue with ROTC for all four of his college years.

After college, he married his high school sweetheart, Carolyn L. Johnson, at the Speed Baptist Church.

Then, as he had told his mother he would do, he entered the Army. After his initial two-year hitch ended, he took a job with Riegel Textile Corp. near Greenville, S.C. But after a month of civilian life, he told his wife he missed the Army, the closeness of people, the quality of the noncommissioned officers and the camaraderie.

After re-entering the Army more than a year later, he began the first of two Vietnam tours. In the first tour in 1964, he conducted long-range reconnaissance work as part of the special forces, earning a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart after stepping into a booby-trap that drove a poison-tipped stake into his leg.

Shelton told an interviewer three years ago that in his opinion the U.S. attempt to wage the Vietnam War with “minimum force . . . almost a gentleman’s war” was a mistake. The United States “did not use the appropriate amount of force.”

Old friends such as Jack P. Jordan, a college buddy, describe Shelton as “sort of laid back, as most of us small-town boys are.”

“He acts that way until something serious happens,” said Shelton’s mother.

Times staff writer Melissa Healy contributed to this report.