During my two years, nine months in uniform, in which capacity I carried a camera for the Army, I took lots of pictures at various headquarters and had a reasonable amount of contact (nothing chatty, to be sure) with a couple of brigadier generals. One of them was promoted to major general (two stars), in charge of the 1st Signal Brigade in Vietnam, while I was his de facto staff photographer.

Essentially this fellow -- Thomas Matthew Rienzi, if you're curious -- was in charge of a telephone company in the midst of a war zone. He struck me as a highly capable executive and leader. Still, as military brass go, he was relatively low on the totem pole.

I once was sent to take a picture of the Army's commanding officer in Vietnam, a lieutenant general (three stars), as he gave somebody a medal. That's the only time I can recall having been in the presence of a figure of such lofty rank. The sole four-star general with the U.S. forces over there was the commander of the entire operation (Creighton Abrams during my year). Never laid eyes on him, and in fact never saw a four-star officer in person at any point, anywhere.

This is all by way of suggesting that, if my experience is any guide, people who rise to the topmost rung in the modern armed forces are rare birds indeed. Not only are there few of them, but they have to compete vigorously with highly qualified rivals for promotion. They are treated like the biggest of big shots. Can their status as princes of the military realm lead to egos the size of boxcars and bruise the similarly humongous egos of other potentates forced to share their particular corner of the universe? It's an occupational hazard, one would expect.

We are moved to ruminate in this vein by the sudden emergence of Wesley Clark as what seems to be a viable contender for the Democratic nomination to take on President Bush.

Many are the rhetorical knives that have been unsheathed by those who would like to see the former Army superstar falter. And what a tangle of rationales and motives, so far as we can identify them.

Some people even bridle at the conventional, and accurate, description of Clark as "retired" from his service as a full, four-star general. They hearken back to the awkward circumstances of his departure from the active ranks, when he was relieved as supreme NATO commander earlier than he had expected or wanted.

It happens that a principal player in that episode was Edgecombe County's Henry Hugh Shelton, the Army general, also now retired, who was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the time. Shelton and the secretary of defense under whom he served, William Cohen, decided that Clark needed to go .

Explanations for Clark's 1999 removal are murky. Perhaps what they boil down to was a perception that Clark, who had been in charge of the successful NATO operation in Kosovo, had gotten too big for his britches.

No commander should be immune from control from the top, either by his uniformed superiors or the military's civilian overseers. All sorts of factors are fair game for evaluation -- judgment, leadership, courage, coolness under pressure. Indeed, the military practices accountability as an art form.

Any of those factors, and others, would have been fair game in the decision to remove Clark from his post. Still, when asked at a forum in California for his opinion about Clark as a presidential candidate, Shelton committed what would seem to be a cardinal blunder. He faulted Clark on "integrity and character" grounds -- but has declined ever since, so it's reported, to elaborate or explain.

This leaves Clark vulnerable to all kinds of speculation and insinuation, twisting in the wind for critics of all stripes to peck away at. The sporting thing for Shelton to do, after letting fly with comments so incendiary, would be to clarify what has led him to take such a dim view of his former colleague, so that Clark can try to muster a suitable response. Or else Shelton ought to climb back off the limb on which he now finds himself.

Maybe Shelton has a perspective on Clark that those scrutinizing his candidacy need to hear. But unless he's willing to share it in more detail, what some of those Democratic primary voters are likely to find especially compelling about Clark is his critique of the Bush team's venture in Iraq.

"Victory requires backward planning, beginning with a definition of postwar success and then determining both the nature of the operations required and the necessary forces," Clark writes in the Oct. 23 issue of The New York Review of Books (his article is entitled "Iraq: What Went Wrong").

"Here the administration's focus and determination on winning the war in military terms undermined the prospects for success once the country was occupied." The implicit message is that Clark both understands the mistakes that have been made and knows how to avoid them. On that score, will the other candidates have any choice but to stand and salute?

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