(3 of 4)
At West Point, the young plebe was known variously as Norm, Schwarzie, Bear and, in recognition of his notorious temper, Stormin' Norman. Nobody ever called him Herb; Norm's father, who detested the name Herbert, refused to inflict it on his son but gave him the H.
Looking back on the West Point years, Norm's old friends still marvel at his single-minded ambition. "He saw himself as a successor to Alexander the Great, and we didn't laugh when he said it," recalls retired General Leroy Suddath, another former roommate. "Norm's favorite battle was Cannae," says Suddath, in which Hannibal in 216 crushed the forces of Rome. "It was the first real war of annihilation, the kind Norman wanted to fight." He desperately wanted to lead his country's forces into a major battle. "We'd talk about these things in the wee hours, and Norman would predict not only that he would lead a major American army into combat, but that it would be a battle decisive to the nation."
Suddath claims that Schwarzkopf, with a reported I.Q. of 170, could easily have graduated first in his class of 480, instead of 43rd, "but he did a lot of other things except study." He wrestled and played a bit of tennis and football. He sang tenor and conducted the chapel choir and loved listening to what Suddath calls the "uplifting" martial music of Wagner and Tchaikovsky's cannonading 1812 Overture -- "the sort that makes you feel on top of the world."
After graduating in 1956, Schwarzkopf took on various Army assignments and later served two tours in Vietnam, first as a paratrooper advising Vietnamese airborne troops, then as commander of an infantry battalion. Twice he was wounded in action; three times he won a Silver Star. On one occasion, he tiptoed into a minefield to rescue a wounded soldier; it scared him to death, he told a reporter later. Says his sister Sally: "He went off to Vietnam as the heroic captain. He came back having lost his youth."
What he gained was the conviction that the Vietnam debacle resulted from a failure of public and political support for the military. Bitterly, he determined that the U.S. should never again engage in a limited war with ill- defined aims.
He has no such reservations about the gulf war; he wants only to win it fast and suffer the fewest casualties possible. Apart from that, Schwarzkopf is concerned that his long hours in the Riyadh war room prevent him from visiting his troops as often as he would like. When he does venture out, he is always accompanied by four military bodyguards in civilian clothes and armed with AR- 15 rifles. On a recent tour, Schwarzkopf gazed across the Saudi border into Kuwait and declared that it was the most peaceful moment he had had in weeks. Then it was the general speaking: surveying the vast expanse of desert, he pronounced it perfect for tank warfare.