and you have to position yourself for a photo op! We go through all this shit and this is what this is all about, to make this good for the camera.”
After returning to the U.S. following the war in the Gulf, Shelton remained in the Marines for a full twenty- year career, but while he had job security within the Marine Corps, little else in his life was stable. The loss of the men in his unit and the image of Jenkins’s charred body have stayed with him to this day. He started drinking and taking drugs after his return, but he also began an even darker and more destructive relationship that would last the next thirteen years, one that provided some evidence of the secret trauma that began long before he was ever sent to war.
“I started doing it in 1994, cutting myself with knives around the stomach,” Shelton says. “You don’t want nobody seeing it but it transferred the pain. I used kitchen knives, steak knives, a few times a month. My stomach, arms and legs are pretty scarred up. Some of them needed stitches. The hair on my legs hides some of them, but otherwise they’re very noticeable. I wear my pain. I had to put my pain somewhere. It helped to keep me here, the internal pain.”
Shelton also took some of his anger and confusion out on his wife. After he shoved her during an argument the Marines sent him to anger management classes. Despite his personal issues he asked for one of the most demanding leadership positions in the corps, drill instructor. Part of the screening process required him to see a psychologist.
“He asked me if I was okay and I said, ‘I’m good to go,’ but I wouldn’t look him in the eye. He knew something was wrong,” says Shelton. They approved him anyway.
So while he was preparing others to go to war, he waged another one on himself, drinking and cutting and watching everything slowly unravel. His ten-year marriage fell apart, with his wife taking their three children away, back to her home in New Jersey. When the Marines sent him to Kosovo he was jailed twice for threatening fellow Marines and they shipped him back to the States for a mental health evaluation. He got married a second time, which also ended in divorce. His life and career hung in the balance. He was besieged by both post-traumatic stress from his war experiences and the verbal and sexual abuse he says he suffered as a child at the hands of a female member of his extended family. It’s a charge, he says, that his family refuses to believe and has kept Shelton estranged from them for years.
While this shattering of his sense of self may have begun before he ever set foot on the battlefield, his time in the Gulf hindered any ability he might’ve had left to contain it. Whether from childhood abuse or war, Shelton had lost the thread of his own story, unable to tell it, because he was unable to comprehend it. This is typical, according to psychiatrist Dr. Jonathan Shay. In
Shelton’s “contaminated identity” was finally recognized by mental health professionals when he was nine months shy of retirement. VA doctors diagnosed him with depression and post-traumatic stress disorder. He was put on a cocktail of antidepressants and other drugs. The only option left, he believed, was to fight for a medical disability retirement package and stay out of trouble until it went through.
Today, more than two decades after his Gulf War experiences, Shelton says he’s 90 percent unemployable, living on his meager Marine disability and retirement pay. And because of the allegations of abuse he’s made against a member of his family, he remains an outsider, never speaking to them even though they live in the same town. He’s given up all of the drugs, prescription and otherwise, but often wanders the streets at night with little to keep him company but his scars and his dog, Rosco. He tries not to think about the war at all.
“I spend a lot of time trying to avoid it,” says Shelton. “But the physical feeling, the impact and the sounds of rounds being fired are still there. I stay home. I don’t go anywhere. It’s in the body, man, it’s physical sensations. I don’t think no one can ever be prepared, no one can ever be prepared unless you’re insane already.”
Shelton feels his past has turned him into a hollow man, one without purpose or peace. But he hasn’t given up the search to find them both again. He’s immersed himself in different veterans’ therapy programs in the effort to understand and rewrite his own personal narrative in a way that restores its meaning. One program is called Combat Paper (www.combatpaper.org), in which service members make paper out of their shredded uniforms and then use that paper to create drawings, paintings or sculptures. He’s also tried his hand at writing, joining a group called Warrior Writers.
This is a piece he published on the Warrior Writers website (www.warriorwriters.org):
I’m a demon in my own life. I’m that darkness that falls on my own day, eating at my own thoughts. Destroying my own core. I’m too far for you to reach your hand out to help me because I’ve already given up. I am not what I show you nor what you think. I am something else. When you close your eyes you will see me, when you walk alone I am behind you, when you hear a whisper, you have heard me but I know you will not find me. What makes you think you can look for me if you know not what I am? I hear voices in my head, I hear laughter at me, I know I have failed in life and I am a tool that has been molded and slowly spiraling day by day until I am sucked in that darker place of no return only to suffer more.
While his observations, like this one, are loaded with pessimism and despair, they are at the very least, according to mental health experts, an effort at sharing the burden of his experiences and, by doing so, continuing the work of finding a better, more hopeful ending.
After the completion of this book, Shelton wrote me a short letter about getting a chance to spend time with his children, after not seeing them for years. Despite its brevity, it seemed to indicate some small glimmer of progress… and maybe even hope: “Hi Kevin, I had my sons for the first time in over 7 years. I hope you are doing well and I can not thank you enough for hearing my story. It provided a huge weight off my shoulders.”
Intermission: The Greatest Veneration
Like so many others in the frequently beatified Greatest Generation, my father never told me about his experiences during World War II.[19] He served in the South Pacific, a young ensign who ferried Marines on flat-bottomed landing crafts to mop-up operations on the islands at the end of the war. He never told me about his time on a destroyer off the coast of Korea either.
All I knew was that he had been part of the Navy V-12 program started in 1943, designed to do two things: first, to meet the officer needs of a rapidly expanding wartime Navy and Marine Corps, and second, to keep American colleges and universities from collapsing due to dwindling enrollment as college-age men were either drafted or volunteered for service. One hundred thousand men selected for the program enrolled in public and private colleges across the country with the federal government paying tuition. They were fast-tracked through three terms over the course of a full year, followed by midshipmen’s school for those joining the Navy or boot camp and officer candidate school for men choosing the Marines. Successful graduates were made Navy ensigns or Marine second lieutenants and then sent to fill the gaps overseas. My father was one of them. After completing the program he left his small Great Lakes hometown of Geneva, Ohio, to command sailors in the South Pacific. He was nineteen years old and had barely traveled outside Ohio, let alone the country. I knew he was proud of getting through the V-12 program, which, with its accelerated instruction, put a lot of pressure on its candidates, resulting in a high washout rate. But while he briefly told me about what he had to go through to get into the Navy, he never told me about his experiences once he was in the service as an officer during the war. At the time, I thought it was selfish that someone could be a part of the fabled Greatest Generation but still be unwilling to part with even the
