Few warriors have marched so quickly into American mythology as Stormin’ Norman Schwarzkopf. In an age strapped for military role models, he emerged from the gulf war as an unambiguous hero, a glowering mountain of a man blending brains, bravery and compassion. His down-to-earth manner and moral authority stood in pointed contrast to the frosty imperiousness of Gen. William Westmoreland or the self-righteous equivocation of Lt. Col. Oliver North. By orchestrating victory in the gulf, he freed Americans from the painful legacy of Vietnam and gave the military a luster it hasn’t enjoyed since World War II. And he accomplished this task with an amazingly low number of allied casualties, while inflicting precise, mortal blows on his enemy.
Schwarzkopf, 56, came across as a fascinating bundle of contradictions. “The Bear” was part teddy, part grizzly, chewing out persistent reporters one moment and consoling a terrified grunt the next. “Every waking and sleeping moment, my nightmare is the fact that I will give an order that will cause countless numbers of human beings to lose their lives,” he said. He was an earthy American general, Vince Lombardi in Army greens. Yet he was comfortable donning a traditional dishdasha robe and sipping tea with Kuwaiti hosts. Thick-necked and moon-faced, he looked like an avuncular butcher, but behind the brawn was a scholar who spoke fluent French and German; he could talk knowledgeably of military history from the conquests of Alexander to the Arab campaigns documented in T.E. Lawrence’s “Seven Pillars of Wisdom.”
Like Lawrence, the threads of Schwarzkopf’s life seem to have led inevitably toward a showdown in the Arabian desert. His father showed him the joys of military life and the Middle East. A West Point graduate who headed the New Jersey state police, Herbert Schwarzkopf was dispatched to Iran by the U.S. Army in 1946 to train that country’s police. (Seven years later, he helped engineer the coup that restored the shah; ironically, the event led ultimately to the Shiite revolution and the emergence of Iraq as a heavily armed counterbalance to Iran.) Twelve-year-old Norman joined him, and the experience would spark a lifelong fascination with the Arab world.
But the jungle, not the desert, shaped Schwarzkopf’s military philosophy. He served two tours in Vietnam, in 1964-65 and 1969-70; he returned home the second time in a body cast after a crawl through a minefield during which several men from his Sixth Infantry Brigade were killed. Stateside, he was stunned by hisses of “baby killer” and his sister Sally’s support for the peace movement. “I “hate’ what Vietnam has done to our country! I “hate’ what Vietnam has done to our Army,” he told C.D.B. Bryan, author of “Friendly Fire,” in 1971. Schwarzkopf began to doubt the morality of his calling. “I was tempted to just bail out and go build myself a cabin in the wilderness,” he told Bryan later. Instead, he remained in the Army, convinced that wars must be fought with clear objectives, massive force and enough speed to prevent the waning of popular support.
In the Persian Gulf, Schwarzkopf enjoyed the authority to conduct that kind of combat. He turned the early stages of the fighting to Air Force Lt. Gen. Charles HOrner, waiting patiently while Air Force pilots obliterated Saddam’s troops, weapons and command-and-control network. Then he ordered a ground assault, secure in the knowledge that the Iraqi forces were poor fighters: at the battle of Khafji, Saddam’s top-gun Fifth Division had surrendered en masse after a brief exchange of fire. “The Khafji attack was probably the time when…I began to really think: we are going to kick this guy’s tail,” he told “Newsweek.’ “The artillery couldn’t put it together worth a darn…this was a lousy outfit.” Four weeks after Khafji, he put the entire Iraqi Army to rout.
What can Stormin’ Norman accomplish next? Literary agents are in hot pursuit, and Pentagon gossip touts him as a successor to Gen. Carl Vuono as Army chief of staff or supreme commander of NATO forces in Europe. There has even been talk about Schwarzkopf one day running for president, although it’s difficult to imagine the cantankerous, shoot-from-the-lip general enduring the handlers and packagers endemic to late-20th-century U.S. politics. Still, Schwarzkopf has repeatedly demonstrated a shrewd grasp of the media, a talent which has played no small role in endearing him to the public. In mid-March, he took a triumphant tour of Kuwait City and, as cameras rolled, filled a vial with sand. It was a souvenir for his children, he said, from the beaches he had helped free.
