also came home from his tours in Vietnam with the
feeling that the American government was not serious
about winning the war in Vietnam, and that the U.S.
news media—particularly television—were portraying
the American soldiers in Vietnam not as heroes but as
brutes who were committing war crimes on a daily basis.
These feelings led Schwarzkopf to later handle his com-
mand of the Persian Gulf War in a very different way to
ensure more favorable news coverage.
Following his return from Vietnam in 1970,
Schwarzkopf was given a series of postings, starting with
command of the 172nd Light Infantry Brigade at Fort
Greeley, Arkansas. Eventually he became assistant divi-
sion commander of the 8th Infantry Mechanized Di-
vision in Germany, part of the U.S. Army in Europe
(USAEUR). In 1983, he was sent to Fort Stewart, Geor-
gia, where he was given command of the 24th Infantry
Mechanized Division with the rank of major general.
In October 1983, a revolution on the small Carib-
bean island nation of Grenada had culminated with the
overthrow of the Marxist and pro-Cuban government
of Maurice Bishop; the new government was even more
radical. President Ronald Reagan dispatched American
forces to the island to save several hundred American
medical students studying on the island; at the same
time, Reagan wanted to end the Cuban-inspired revolu-
tion on the island. Schwarzkopf served as the deputy
commander of the American invasion of Grenada,
which ended with the termination of the pro-Cuban re-
gime and the installation of a pro-American democracy.
In 1988, he was named to the chairmanship of the U.S.
Central Command (USCENTCOM), a strategic plan-
ning headquarters in Florida. Two years later, he became
a worldwide celebrity.
On 2 August 1990, Iraqi troops invaded the Mid-
dle Eastern country of Kuwait, crushing its small army.
The Iraqi forces threatened the main Saudi Arabian oil
fields to the south, a major oil supply source for the
Western world. President George H. W. Bush, in the
second year of his presidency, was faced with a serious
public threat, and he immediately swung into action,
securing a coalition of nations that demanded Iraq with-
draw immediately from Kuwait. Iraqi president Saddam
Hussein, a dictator known for funding terrorism in the
Middle East, refused, claiming that Kuwait was a “lost”
part of Iraq and declaring the invasion legal. Bush called
upon Schwarzkopf, as head of USCENTCOM, to plan
the deployment of American and other forces and then
a campaign strategy to eject Iraqi forces from Kuwait.
Operation Desert Shield, as it was called, had two goals:
to plan up for an invasion of Kuwait if Iraq did not
withdraw, and to “shield” the Saudi oil fields if the Iraqis
intended to take those as well. Numerous war strategists
believed that Schwarzkopf would employ a direct hit on
the Iraqi troops from Saudi Arabia in the south. This
appeared to be confirmed when the coalition nations as-
sembled an army of some 750,000 American, British,
European, and Arab troops in Saudi Arabia in a period
of only four months. Further strategy appeared to in-
clude an invasion of Kuwait from the Persian Gulf to
the east.
On 16 January 1991, after months of warnings
General H. Norman Schwarzkopf that an attack was imminent, President Bush autho-
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