Clark campaign touts service record

In an effort to counteract public jabs from military critics, Wesley K. Clark's presidential campaign has released a stack of commendations and awards the retired Army general received over his 38-year military career.

The 180 glowing pages range from medals Clark received as an infantryman in Vietnam to evaluations he earned as he rose through the military ranks. But the bulk of them come from before Clark was NATO's supreme allied commander for Europe, when he clashed with Pentagon brass over the waging of the Kosovo campaign.

Clark was relieved of that command four months earlier than planned to make way for a replacement who was favored by Pentagon leaders. A week before Clark entered the Democratic primary hunt, H. Hugh Shelton, a retired general who was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the time, made a public issue of Clark's departure. "I will tell you the reason he came out of Europe early had to do with integrity and character issues," Shelton said.

The documents the Clark campaign sent to reporters this week present a different perspective from Clark's army superiors. Clark, who finished first in his class at West Point, has earned high marks for leadership, and praise for his skill at expressing himself.

In May 1969, when Clark was a company commander of the 82d Airborne Division in Fort Riley, Kan., his battalion commander made note of "the high esteem the men of Company A have for him." In 1977, after Clark had served as an operations officer in Germany, his battalion commander wrote that he was "the most brilliant and gifted leader I've known. Promote now. Give him command now."

"He is an absolute superstar among a crowd of great colonels," one evaluator wrote in 1985, when Clark worked at the National Training Center in Fort Irwin, Calif. "He can do it all -- think, write, speak, motivate, and lead," another superior wrote in 1986.

In Kosovo, though, Clark's approach rubbed Pentagon leaders the wrong way. At one point during the war, Defense Secretary William S. Cohen asked Shelton to tell Clark to "get his [expletive] face off the television."

Michael Kranish of the Globe staff contributed to this story.