“It was crazy, man, when we got the air support in and we were shooting at tanks, trying to hit their view box, but we didn’t get up and personal until they were all destroyed,” he says.
Shelton’s unit was reinforced in the rear by platoons of LAV-ATs, similar to LAV-25s, but with mounted TOW antitank missiles as their primary weapons instead of 25 mm chain guns. These could actually take out the Iraqi tanks once they were in range. At one point during the fighting Shelton heard an explosion from behind. At first, he and others thought that the Iraqi forces may have penetrated their lines and were now firing behind them. What had actually happened was that one of the reinforcing LAV-ATs spotted what they thought was an Iraqi tank within the American lines and requested permission to fire their TOW missile. The missile cleared its tube and found its target with a tremendous explosion. But the TOW hadn’t hit an Iraqi tank. It hit another American LAV-AT a few hundred meters ahead of them. The missile penetrated the rear hatch of the LAV designated “Green Two,” detonating its supply of more than a dozen missiles stored in the rear. Eyewitnesses say it erupted into a tremendous fireball, instantly killing all four crewmembers, including Green Two’s commander, Corporal Ismael Cotto. Cotto, twenty-seven, was a smart Puerto Rican kid from the South Bronx who had defied the odds of his poor neighborhood by not only graduating from high school but also attending college for three years, before fulfilling his dream of enlisting in the Marines. Shelton knew him from their time being deployed together.
The mistakes and confusion of that early engagement only seemed to get worse. A few hours into the fight, coalition forces began receiving air support from American A-10 Thunderbolts.[17] But the planes had difficulty locating Iraqi tanks within the lines and began dropping flares over the battleground to provide illumination. One of the flares landed near an American LAV-25, Red Two. After-action reports indicate that the Red Two’s vehicle commander attempted to identify himself as a “friendly,” but that didn’t prevent one of the A-10s from firing an AGM-65 air-to-ground missile, which destroyed the LAV and killed all of its crew with the exception of the driver, who was ejected from the vehicle. An after-battle investigation by the Marines suggested that a malfunctioning missile, rather than human error, caused the incident. Regardless, the end result was that seven more Marines were dead at the hands of their own forces, including Shelton’s friend Lance Corporal Thomas Jenkins.[18] Together, the incidents resulted in eleven of the first American deaths in the Gulf ground war—all of them from inaptly named “friendly fire.”
It wouldn’t be until daybreak, after the initial fighting ended, that Shelton would learn of what happened to Jenkins and Cotto, that his friends had been killed not at the hands of the Iraqis but rather by their own troops. But American commanders didn’t have time to deconstruct the mistakes that led to the killing of their own men. During that first battle, the Iraqis had captured and occupied the border town of al-Khafji. What the Iraqi troops didn’t realize, however, was that a handful of recon Marines were still hiding inside some of the buildings when the town was captured. These Marines would stay in their hiding spots, undiscovered, and would later help coordinate a counterattack from within, by directing A-10s to strike against Iraqi tanks around al-Khafji.
Shelton’s forces helped support the counterattack the next day, providing fire support for advancing Saudi and Qatari troops, who were part of the American-led coalition brought together to oust the Iraqis after their invasion and occupation of Kuwait. But when Shelton’s 25 mm chain gun jammed, his platoon leader ordered Shelton’s vehicle to pull back and assist the company gunnery sergeant Leroy Ford in the rear. Shelton says that’s when he saw the images that he would never be able to clear from his mind.
“When I got off the vehicle I asked Gunny Ford, ‘What do you need?’ He had his back against the gate of the Humvee. I looked to the left and the poncho had flown off the bodies with a gust of wind, and that’s when I went into shock. Jenkins was lying there completely burnt. His body was completely charred. All I could see were the whites of his teeth. I knew it was him because the gunny had already labeled… he had a tag on his boots. I also noticed that it was their vehicle. Right then I got into a state of shock, I couldn’t speak, I couldn’t talk, this was a blow that was more real than I could ever imagine. I fell to my knees, I looked at him [Gunny Ford] to help me with my feelings. Nothing.”
Nearly twenty years later Shelton is still overcome with the imagery, just as vivid and real as if he were looking at it now. After he tells me the story, he begins weeping, inconsolably, into the phone. I begin to realize what a risk I’ve been taking in asking these soldiers and Marines to take me back to their most difficult moments, to relive their most painful memories of war. While I might be able to get them to take me there, I wonder, while listening to Shelton’s grief, if sharing their war stories might have the unintended consequence of making things worse.
“It could’ve been the confusion, or the rage, but I kept shouting they were dead and ‘I don’t want to do this shit anymore.’ I was angry and confused. I thought [the platoon leader] had set me up to see the bodies,” says Shelton, sobbing.
“But when I was walking back to my vehicle, he’s actually trying to calm me down, trying to get me to refocus. It was in a gentle way. Still, I didn’t want them touching me, I didn’t want them around me. Because they didn’t see what I saw,” he says insistently. “They couldn’t tell me that it was going to be all right, because there wasn’t anything anyone could say. They couldn’t tell me anything that would fix what I had experienced. I just wanted to be left the fuck alone. I was shocked. I was in shock, man. I remember getting back on the vehicle after I saw them on the desert floor. I looked at my gunner and the lieutenant was on radio; I hadn’t responded for five to thirty minutes. He kept calling me on the radio and I couldn’t speak. I’m looking at my gunner and he says to me, ‘Can you please say something to him please?’ Finally, I say over the radio, ‘They’re dead, they’re dead, they’re all dead!’”
Shelton pauses and after what seems like several minutes, he continues. “At first there was silence,” Shelton says, “then you hear back over the radio, ‘Calm down, Blue 2 [Shelton’s radio call sign], calm down.’ I could tell my gunner was afraid. But I didn’t want it, I didn’t want to hear what he had to say. We never even talked about it for the whole time. It hurt too damn much. I didn’t feel a sense of fear of running away, just rage. The initial shock of death, it was more than rage. I never want to feel that way again. It was animalistic. I never want to feel that way again. You get angry and want to kill. The rage is just incredible. Then we got back into the fight. We were just firing at everything. God, man, I never knew who they were [the Iraqi soldiers]. I didn’t know who they were—who the fuck are these people?
“After the fighting was done I was so exhausted. It was like something was gone in me. It was like part of something was gone. This was my world; there was nothing else. After that battle everything was pretty foggy. I stopped praying; I grew up in a Christian environment, but I didn’t believe it anymore. Human flesh melting on steel? Someone’s not listening. I did a lot of raids after that. I volunteered for everything. Anger drove a lot of that for me. I wanted to find something to do. I didn’t care after that first battle. It was a relief for me. I didn’t feel sad about it, bad about it, I was just really pissed off. The only way you’re going to go home is to do this job.”
It took two days to drive the Iraqis out of al-Khafji and Shelton’s light armored infantry battalion was ordered to cross the border into Kuwait. After the fierce initial fighting and the loss of the eleven Marines, it was a circumspect moment for the unit.
“It was two A.M., February 1991, before we crossed into Kuwait,” says Shelton. “We had already burned most of our letters [so they wouldn’t fall into enemy hands]. But I kept some and a picture of my son, Tyrone. At dawn when it’s supposed to get sunny and you look across the horizon and it’s completely black, they [Iraqis] set the oil fields on fire.”
To shield their movements as well as to create chaos in the wake of their retreat, Iraqi forces set fire to as many as six hundred oil wells as they began pulling out of Kuwait and back to Iraq. The images of the plumes were so thick they could be seen from space. To Shelton, the orange flames dancing over a vast, flat desert with black smoke turning day into night created an apocalyptic landscape, both bleak and surreal. As his vehicle moved into Kuwait through a pathway cleared of mines, the engine malfunctioned and the vehicle came to a halt.
“I’m watching people go off into the horizon. I get up on top of the vehicle. I took off my flak jacket and my helmet. I wanted to get shot. There were incoming rounds and I just wanted to get hit.” But no one obliged him. He put his helmet and body armor back on as his LAV was towed behind the lines to be repaired.
“We weren’t engaging in any of the fighting while they were repairing our vehicle. But because of the fires the Iraqis set, it was raining oil. We were covered in it. It was part of our world. It’s just pouring on us. It felt like rain, but it was actually oil; you couldn’t fight it.”
After the LAV was fixed Shelton and his crew headed into Kuwait. “We caught up with company at Kuwaiti Airport and a scud missile lands next to us,” says Shelton. “It was earthshaking, body shaking. Here’s the thing that pissed everyone off, not just me: We were supposed to clear and secure Kuwaiti airport. We get to the airport and some Marines raise the American flag at the airport and have the Kuwaitis put up their flag too. It was a photo op
