eamm18

In January 1991, Norman Schwarzkopf knew the exact number of body bags the Pentagon had ordered in anticipation of the coming ground campaign. He was 56 years old, and he had been handed a responsibility no American commander had carried since the Second World War: more than half a million soldiers from 34 nations, arrayed across the Arabian desert, waiting to be pointed at one of the most battle hardened armies on the planet. Saddam Husseins forces had spent eight years fighting Iran. They had fortified every approach into Kuwait with mines, trenches, and pre aimed artillery, all built on a single assumption: that when the Americans arrived, they would come straight through the front door. Schwarzkopf had no intention of using the front door. He had learned something during two tours in Vietnam that desk generals never quite grasp. He had been decorated three times with the Silver Star for gallantry under direct fire. The most famous of those moments came in May 1970, when he received word that soldiers under his command had stumbled into a minefield. He flew in by helicopter and found the men trapped, with a wounded soldier lying on the ground screaming and a very real danger that the mans panic would cause him to set off another mine. Schwarzkopf crawled across the minefield to the wounded soldier, pinning him down safely so another man could splint his shattered leg. Believe me, it wasnt a heroic act, he said later. It was something that somebody had to do, and I was the man in charge. Because of experiences like that, he knew, in a way that cannot be taught in a classroom, exactly what he was about to ask his soldiers to do. For six weeks before a single ground soldier moved, coalition aircraft worked methodically. They struck command centers, severed supply lines, silenced communication networks, and systematically blinded the Iraqi military, all while Iraqi generals watched the Kuwaiti border and waited for the frontal assault they were certain was coming. It was not coming. Instead, two hundred thousand soldiers and thousands of armored vehicles moved west, deep into the open desert. They moved at night, in total electronic silence, far away from cameras and away from every position the Iraqi army had spent months preparing to defend. All the while, the Iraqi generals kept their eyes fixed on the coast. When the ground war finally began on February 24, 1991, coalition forces were already hundreds of miles to the west. They swept through open terrain no one had bothered to defend, drove deep into Iraq, pivoted east, and struck the Republican Guard from behind. Every escape route was already closed. The ground war lasted just 100 hours. One of the largest armies in the world collapsed in a mere four days of combat. Kuwait was liberated, and coalition casualties were a tiny fraction of the numbers that had been feared. The Left Hook, Schwarzkopfs famous flanking maneuver, is still studied at war colleges today, and military historians still marvel at its elegance. Six months later, the offers poured in: Senate seats, presidential conversations, corporate boards, and television contracts. The full machinery of American celebrity was pointed directly at the man who had just won the most precisely executed military campaign in a generation. Yet, he retired in August 1991, moved to Tampa, Florida, and went fishing. He wrote just one memoir, It Doesnt Take a Hero, published in 1992, and gave a small number of speeches. He did not spend the following decades reminding the world of what he had achieved. He had led, he had brought his people home, and the job was finished. Norman Schwarzkopf died on December 27, 2012, in Tampa, Florida, at the age of 78, from complications of pneumonia. Veterans mourned him, and military historians wrote long assessments of his career. His ashes were buried at the West Point Cemetery alongside those of his father, another general, also named H. Norman Schwarzkopf, who had famously directed the investigation of the Lindbergh baby kidnapping in the 1930s. The operational records of Operation Desert Storm are preserved in military archives. His name is on all of them, quietly and permanently, because a record like his doesnt require his presence to stand.