Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf, Academy Class of 1991, Full Interview

the troops the people you lead uh the duty that you're performing i mean you you you know believe me nobody stays in the military to get rich okay nobody stays in the military um uh for and makes the success of it i think unless they are really uh called to do so someone once said you know you can divide you can divide man's work into a calling like a priest a profession like a doctor um uh a job or i mean a career where you go from step to step to step moving up a ladder of progression or just a job where you walk in every day and sort of punch a ticket i find the military is someplace between the calling and the profession you know it's something you're identified with you have a title like a doctor has a title and everybody calls you that and and yet you also have to have this inner drive of service you know west point gave us a creed to live by duty on our country and not everybody that graduates from west point of course lives by that creed for their entire life but i have i mean it just became a way of life for me the soldier was lying on the ground screaming and and i was afraid that he was going to uh set off more mines or worse yet he had a badly broken leg and i was afraid that he was going to cut the artery in his leg and die so i had to go over there and settle him down and uh and there was nobody else to do it so i had to walk through the minefield to do it it uh believe me it wasn't a heroic act at that time it was it was it was something that somebody had to do and i was the guy that was you know i was the man in charge so i was the one that had but i did you know heroism is in the is in the eyes of the beholders it's like beauty nobody nobody says on the battlefield well i think i will now be a hero and go do a heroic act you don't do that it's it's people doing their job that's what they're doing they're doing their job and and somebody else sees them says wow boy look at that isn't that heroic but but the people who are doing it don't think at the time that they're being heroes they don't think after the fact they're being heroes they just say i'm doing my job anybody who says they're not afraid in war is either a liar or they're crazy okay and there's nothing wrong with fear i mean fear is good fear will keep you alive in war fear keep you alive in business okay nothing wrong with being afraid at all and and and everybody should understand that and fear tends to cause you to focus it tends to cause your adrenaline to run it tends to cause you to do things that you you know perhaps to see things in much much sharper perspective at that instant what is bad is when you you you allow that fear to turn into panic and you allow that fear to petrify you to the point that you cannot perform your whatever duty you have to do that's the thing that's wrong with fear but there's nothing wrong with being afraid and true courage true courage is not not being afraid true courage is being afraid and going ahead and doing your job anyhow that's what courage is people need to understand what leadership is all about leadership is is not managing an organization organizations are made up of leadership is motivating people leadership is about people so yes you got to be competent there's no question about the fact you have to have confidence to be a leader but you also have to have character good leaders are men of confidence and character and many times character is more important than the confidence side of the house so i tell people that the secret to to modern leadership is two rules rule 13 when placed in command take charge the leader is the person who's willing to take the responsibility now there's a lot of other people out there that want to do the job but they don't want to they don't want to get hung with a loss when it happens so as a leader you have to be willing to take the responsibility you have to be willing to take charge so rule 13 says when placed in command take charge it's my schwarzkopf's rule system okay that's what it says but then rule 14 comes into play which is very important because rule 14 says okay i got it when placed in command i take charge but what do i do the answer is rule 14 do what's right do what's right because see we all know all of us know basically when placed in those circumstances what the moral what the ethical what the correct thing to do is we all know it so the true modern leader of today is the one that's number one willing to take charge and willing to do what's right that's the secret of leadership do you ever try to make a speech about a subject you didn't believe in lousy speech i can't make it i can't make a good speech about something i don't believe in i've tried and it's it's wooden it comes out it's not me uh you know you got to believe in what you're doing if you don't believe in what you're doing you're not going to do it well you truly have to believe in it you have to believe that you're doing what's right and and i don't think i could go to war i mean i don't think ultimately i could serve my country if i thought we were doing something wrong you know i think i would get out i would leave so you don't have to stay you have an alternative it's not like the german generals who tried to justify what they did at the nuremberg trials by saying i was only doing my duty that's not right because you have higher duties you have higher duties you have uh you know you have a duty to your to your moral code whatever it might be so uh so you got to do what's right oh there's a lot of gut instinct that comes into everything you do as a leader it's leadership is an art it is not a science it cannot be reduced down to a piece of paper and a bunch of very simple mechanic uh mechanical equations should apply to it and plop out out the end drops the answer and you just go out do that that's not what it's about so much of it is gut feeling uh some of it's risk-taking uh uh you don't take risks with your troops lives though i mean it's you've got to have your priorities established you've got to know what you believe in um you have to be well trained you have to have confidence in yourself you have to have confidence in your training i mean nothing you get nothing for nothing you know it really is uh uh you know you've got it's hard work but uh but you've got to work hard so that when that time comes when you've got to make the tough decision you're also able to make the decision because nothing is nothing is more debilitating to an organization than the leader who won't make a decision i mean the the the whole organization just stops and waits and nothing happens because the leader will make a decision and that's that's that's that can paralyze an organization so you see rule 13 again when placed in command you must take charge you got to make a decision somebody once said you know give me my choice between what was it you're giving my choice between talent and luck i'll take luck every single time and and i believe that you know i can think i can think of so many times in my career where i i came to to forks in the road okay and and i was convinced that i should have gone down this fork and instead i went down a different fork and in hindsight you look back and realized if you'd ever gone down that fork that you thought you should have gone down you wouldn't be where you were today so luck is very important sure it is first of all it was a piecemeal commitment you know we dribbled our troops in one of the principles you learned from studying military history is is if you're going to go to war you know you don't you don't piecemeal your troops in because then they get chewed up and spit out in piecemeal but it was a piecemeal commitment we dribbled our troops in for years and years it was always the light at the end of the thumbnail give us a hundred thousand more and and that sort of thing and the light never came uh secondly we didn't use our full moon military power uh we were fighting with one hand tied behind our back we had this ridiculous situation where the enemy was across the border and they could attack across the border and and do anything they wanted to to you but when you prevailed and went to chase them you had to stop at the border you know ali ali and free i'm on the other side of the border you can't chase me i mean that's a crazy way to go about finding a war we didn't project the power that we had uh there's some people that say that our objectives were not clear i don't know about that but i would i certainly feel in hindsight that our our war termination criteria were never clear to any of us so so all of that was the wrong way to go about fighting a war when the first time i came home from the war i was i was confused because i had been so intensely involved in this thing called award i came back the united states and it was like it wasn't going on it's 1966. and the only the only families were involved in the war were people who had loved ones over there and nobody else seemed to much even know or care that the war was going on uh when i came back in 1970 it was different because now we were being blamed for the war you know the military who were just doing their duty draftees i mean kids that had been drafted in the military and sent to war when they came back home were being blamed by the american people for the war that's intolerable i mean that's terrible and uh but but a maturation process what came about in the american people because in the gulf war you didn't run into that i think they finally recognized that hey the members of the armed services over there are people just doing their duty they're doing their duty because their country asked them to they're not the ones that caused the war itself um and we got letters over there from people who would say look i may not agree with the with the decisions that put you there but by golly now that you're there i'm supporting you you've got my support and then of course when i got home i've run into i can't tell you how many thousands of vietnam veterans that have come over and threw their arms around me and just say thank you general for you know you made it all right you've vindicated us uh you know it's amazing but but somehow so many of them feel like that they won in the gulf war and so that's good stuff it's good stuff many of the parades the victory parades that were held included the vietnam veterans in my remarks before congress i very specifically mentioned the vietnam veterans and said we were proud to be joining their ranks because i wanted to make sure that that they got the credit for what they had done too somebody once said you learn more from negative leadership and you do positive leadership i believe that i believe that very much so i was bound and determined that we weren't going to repeat some of the mistakes we'd made in vietnam i was bound to determine that if we were going to go to war we're going to get it over with we're going to use our full military might and i and i would say to you i'm very proud and very happy that our that you know that our country that our administration that the president on down the secretary of defense allowed us to do it that way it's the right war is never the right thing to do but if you have to fight a war there is a right way to fight the war and that's the way that will minimize your casualties save the lives of the people that are out there fighting get it over with as fast as you can i had long since resolved the moral question in my mind i did it after vietnam i did it when i had a choice to either get out of the military or stay in when i arrived at 20 years i could have retired in 20 years and i decided to stay in so i had i had resolved the moral dilemma in my mind although i will say that you know when we were about to go into grenada the question flashes across your mind grenada what are we doing here and are we getting are we getting involved in another vietnam are we getting involved in another war that the american people are not going to support but the gulf was the same thing let me tell you what the young troops over there were not afraid of the enemy what they were afraid of is they were going to get involved in another war the american people weren't going to support that's what they were afraid of i've never underestimated the strength of the united states army but but grenada certainly brought that point home to me very very clearly because in this case everybody just poo-pooed away the enemy and said they weren't going to fight in grenada and they did and of course you know that's best-case planning and and all of us learn to do worst-case planning so that's not the way to plan it i'd been the commander-in-chief of central command for two almost two years when the war broke out and my my responsibilities were for to uh to conduct any military operations that took place basically in the horn of africa the middle east and southwest asia um so you know you could call it a lucky guess maybe but uh but i had studied the area and and and we had come to the conclusion that that the worst case scenario that we would have to face would be iraq i mean iraq had the fourth largest army in the world at that time they they had just won major victories uh against the iranians they had modern military equipment and so when you looked around the area and said you know who is the worst enemy that you'd have to fight over there it was iraq and and so um and we said well what's the worst thing they could do and that would be sweeping down you know and deciding to take over all the oil fields and and uh and so we we decided that if that's the worst case scenario then make sure that we plan to handle the worst-case scenario we can handle any lesser lesser scenarios that might come up so so you might say we were made a lucky guess and we were right the deception tactics of desert storm were the ones that i think compare favorably uh in the battle of el alamein which was the turning point in north africa in world war ii and is considered one of the three decisive battles of world war ii uh the british used deception tactics to make the germans think that they were going to attack where they weren't and that's the parallel between desert storm and and world war ii battle not the tactic itself although i can i can name you know gracious there's any number of of campaigns where in fact you know the the major portion of the enemy was fixed by one force here while another force went around and hit them like that and that's sort of what you know sort of a classic classic maneuver if you can get away with it if you've got the forces to do it my job is to have doubts my job is to find think of everything that could possibly go wrong and then try and fix it and so and let's face it i knew that i was going to be ordering thousands and thousands and thousands of men and women into battle and and if i didn't have it right i could be responsible for the deaths of thousands and thousands people that's sort of a heavy burden to carry so you don't carry that burden lightly you don't care that say oh ho-hum so what no if you ever you know to my mind if you have any sort of a conscience at all you have doubts but you you work your way through those doubts you work it in such a way that you're quite sure that you've done everything you can possibly come you do so that the outcome was a favorable one i had studied the iraqis in great detail in their battles against the iranians and so i i knew what their strengths and weaknesses were i also knew the forces i had under my command and i knew what their strengths and weaknesses were and so what i did was i adopted a campaign plan that capitalized on using our strengths against their weaknesses and avoided their strengths and avoided our weaknesses and that's a pretty good strategy for any kind of business you're in you know i mean it's let me give you a good example i knew that our air force is much better than theirs so i devised a strategy that relied heavily on us conducting an aggressive air campaign because i knew we could take their air out i knew that they routinely fought during the daytime and resupplied at night but we fight better at night than we do in the daytime so i knew i could take the night away from the enemy and totally disrupt the way they normally resupply themselves and put them in a position where eventually they were going to run out of supplies and they're going to run out of ammunition everything else because we just took the night away from so that's very that's what it was it's it's an analysis of your enemy to learn their strengths and weaknesses and you know your strengths and weaknesses and then you just use your strengths against their weaknesses we put together a campaign plan specifically to make sure that by the time we launched a ground campaign the iraqis could not respond that's what happened i mean the campaign plan was aimed at at absolutely destroying insofar as possible the iraqis ability to wage war so that today a lot of people are saying oh gee the iraqis really weren't there that's ridiculous sure the iraqis were there the iraqis were there on the 17th of january when we started the air campaign now whether the rockies were there on the 24th of february when we launched the ground campaign or not is irrelevant okay and they probably a lot of more we knew there had been mass desertions at that time we we knew that their units were under strength we knew that we inflicted great casualties on their tanks and their auditory pieces why because that's what we're going after i mean we were we were deliberately trying to eliminate those things that we knew would hurt us on the battlefield one of my criteria was to reduce the strength of the front line forces that we'd originally run into to below 50 we generally classify a unit that's below 70 percent as combat ineffective so below 50 it's totally ineffective and so so it's a result the campaign plan turned out exactly like we had planned it okay it was a campaign plan that had been very carefully constructed to try and make sure that when we finally had to send our ground forces against his ground forces who outnumbered us originally that we would prevail let's face it we had tried over and over and over again to bring about a peaceful solution secretary general united nations went to baghdad because that's where the only only that's the only place the peaceful solution was going to come from everybody else wanted a peaceful solution the former secretary general united nations went to baghdad countless diplomats from east west north south from the from the then communist bloc all went to baghdad because that's where the peaceful solution had to come from and it was apparent uh anybody who heard that that uh terrible terrible news conference after secretary baker met with tariq aziz in geneva where he came out and gave that pessimistic report and said i'll let the iraqis speak for themselves and then terrikaze came out spoke for 45 minutes didn't even mention the word kuwait i mean the country had been blotted off the map as far as the iraqis were concerned and that was irrevocable so so nothing else was going to change after that and uh when you looked at other things like the effects of the weather uh some people say we should let the sanctions run a little bit longer that's very nice to say if you're sitting in the comfort of your living room the united states of america what if you were somebody who was in kuwait and you were seeing your children tortured and your wives raped and and the terrible things that were going on to the people in kuwait was it okay to wait for them so yeah these things are very very relative to who you are and where you are so considering uh you know these troops that were sitting out in the desert sand i mean it may have been fine for everybody else to say we ought to wait you know let the sanctions work but but what about did we really want to go through another summer with our troops sitting out there in the middle of the the absolutely oppressive heat of the desert and just sit there you know suffering was that all right well their morale was going down down down so so when i we put it all together there was no question about the fact that that was a time to go and get it over with just get it done we had done everything else we possibly could to do it peacefully we were able to take the night away from the enemy and that's probably one of the major ones we had but you got to remember our armed forces have been training for years and years and years to fight outnumbered and win we thought we were going to be fighting fighting against a military the soviet union that had many many more tanks than we did many many more armored personnel carriers many many of our aircraft so you have a military out there that's very very well trained to do the job that needed to be done and so it's a combination of the technology yes but it's also the training of the military it's a very very good military as a unified commander i really answered directly to the secretary of defense and in this case i really worked directly for the president uh colin powell was the person that passed to me the directives of the president united states but but as a unified commander you really have tremendous autonomy you're almost working for yourself you know people tell you what to do they don't tell you how to do it and then you go off and do it but colin and i were good friends talk to each other on the phone every single day i kept him informed of everything that i planned to do uh in most cases when when an order was to be given he'd call me up and say what do you want to do and i'd say this is what i want to do and then then that's the order that would come back down again so we had a very good relationship as i say talk to each other every single day and what was what was really terrific about colin is he probably has more access to the white house than any uh general officer since george marshall in world war ii marshall was was really the person that roosevelt looked to uh for all of his military advice i think the president did the same thing with colin and and and you could get decisions very very quickly because colin did have this direct access to the white house and that helped us tremendously in our in our work i would say he let you do what you wanted so long as he knew what you're doing was right i don't think i could have done the wrong thing i think if i had proposed some you know things that were stupid or things that were you know would lead to to thousands and thousands of casualties or something that was immoral and i think of course i wouldn't be able to do it but no the president was very presidential the president did exactly what a president does he he told you what to do gave us our orders and then he stayed informed all along the way and in great detail as to what it was we were doing but he did not interfere and decide he was going to play general and that's that's uh very important during the vietnam war targets that were going to be bombed by the air force in north vietnam were being selected by politicians back in washington that's crazy it's crazy if you're going to bomb upon if you're going to bomb a target or targets it should be targets that fit in with the overall campaign plan you do it for a reason and it should be good sound military reasons is why you're doing it not just something that's arbitrarily selected back in washington dc nobody controlled the press over there at all that's a that's an argument that is that uh is argued in all of the wrong wrong arenas it is not a problem of the military versus the media don't forget the people in your military take their oath to support and defend the constitution united states that's who we take our oath to and most the people i know of in the military are constitutionalists from the word go and that's all the constitution to include the first amendment you have a management problem it's a management problem that is growing by leaps and bounds both numerically and technologically let me give you an example the average number of reporters you had in vietnam at any given time was 50. during the tet offensive the most important battle probably fought during vietnam you had 80 reporters in country i can assure you all of them were not out with the troops because those of us were in cities like saigon saw plenty of them back there and the gulf you had 2060. secondly okay in vietnam when somebody saw a battle it was generally reported it would end up on television perhaps 36 hours later and the gulf people could report things they instantaneously out over international airwaves via satellite and that was being piped directly into the enemy headquarters so you had people who were reporting things that aided the enemy that helped them okay that helped them and so there had to be some guidelines put out that said look these are things you don't report but despite that these guidelines were were violated not intentionally not intentionally they were violated by reporters that were looking to get a scoop they wanted to get their their story in first so the so the the dilemma with the press okay in any future wars are going to be fought is how do you control how is it you control these very very large numbers of the press that you're going to have over there who have instant access to the airwaves and your enemy's going to be monitoring those airways how do you make sure that the press does not provide information that somehow can come back and kill one of the people that you're responsible for that's the dilemma nobody did anything in the gulf because they didn't like the press nobody did anything in the gulf because they were trying to control the news story our only concern the only reason why any restrictions were placed at all was to make absolutely sure that number one you didn't have you know 2060 people sort of you know running around inside your unit when you were trying to get ready to plan a military operation that you're trying to keep a secret and number two uh a concern for making sure that information didn't go to our enemy we knew saddam was saying watch television in his nscp i mean we we knew that before the war ever started we knew that this war was the most extensively covered war in the history of warfare and that there was access so so that's why i i bristle at the word controlled it sounds like there was some preconceived plot somehow against the media matter of fact we were charged with that some people said that there were special courses that had been given at the war college and that's how schwarzkopf knew how to deal with the media that's that's poppycock i never took any courses like that are there other people that charge that that at the beginning of the war there was a secret meeting held in the basement of the pentagon where we decided how the press was going to be manipulated and controlled that's absolutely not true never happened what we were doing is just using our common sense and and our objective primarily was to make absolutely sure that the enemy didn't get his hands on information that would aid and abet him and eventually cost the lives of our forces that's all it was probably the one that i remember more than anything else is on the second day of the ground war when when one of my corps commanders called me up gary luck and to give me a report and i said how you doing he said sir we accomplished all of our objectives yesterday we this was about 10 o'clock in the morning we've already accomplished all of our objectives today we're way beyond what we should have accomplished and and we have captured over 1300 of the enemy then he kind of stopped and i said okay gary now give me the bad news you know meeting a casual account he said we have one wounded inaction it was only then that you know you began to realize it but another another moment i can remember when we sent that initial wave of of uh aircraft into iraq we expected much higher casualties and and my air force commander chuck corner kept calling me back saying sir they've all come back they've all come back they're all coming back i mean that was another just you know it's it's one of those the recognition that that you weren't taking these casualties that you expected that they were much lower than that that's those are the two moments i'll probably remember more than any others my father uh graduated west point 1917 went to world war one uh became a captain in world war one when the war was over went back to el paso texas where he was down guarding the border between the united states and mexico in the cavalry his father became a in a wheelchair from arthritis to formless and in those days a captain in the army didn't make any money at all and my dad was an only child so he became the sole support of his parents so he had to leave the military he went back to new jersey and it just happened to be at a time when new jersey had decided that they were going to form a state police and they were looking for the first superintendent who would organize and lead the new jersey state police uh i won't go into all the details but it was a it became a big political struggle and my dad in those days army officers didn't vote i mean it was the commander-in-chief is the commander-in-chief and therefore it wasn't right to vote for a political party so every officers didn't vote at all and and when my dad came back and applied for the job they said what are your credentials i'm a west point graduate i have this experience in the military and i'm a good organizer this sort of thing they said what are your politics and he said i don't have any i've never voted an election in my life long story short he became a very very young age i think he was 27 or 26 at the time he organized and formed the first the new jersey state police and was our first superintendent and remain in that job for 15 years about this time he got fired because my dad was very much involved in lindbergh kidnapping case which was a very controversial case and has been ever since then and he also a political governor came in that he he had been an enemy of for quite some time and this governor did not renew my dad's charter so after 15 years leading state police they said thank you very much we no longer need your services about that time the things were heating up in europe and my dad had been active in the national guard so when the national guard got mobilized for world war ii my dad was mobilized with them and so he returned to the army on full-time duty and made a long story short he finally retired from the army in 1957 as a major general so he had two careers he had his career as a policeman and his career in the military too my dad was a man of great honor he was a charismatic leader he was one of these people that could tell a story and just had you hanging on the edge of your chair but always you know always get a great audience around him because he was so good at weaving a tail and and i loved him dearly and i think the fact that i i didn't have him at home for four years as a young man made me almost worship this person who was not there who i do so desperately wanted to be there as my father so that when i was re you know reunited with him you know i really almost worshiped the ground he walked on i think that my both of my parents decided it was time the family be reunited so we went to iran to be reunited as a family but then the school system in iran was terrible my both of my sisters were one of them was a senior in high school and the other was a sophomore in high school and junior high school i'm sorry and they didn't have a decent school system in tehran so after one year of living in tehran my parents came to the very wise conclusion that our education was suffering so they shipped it out to switzerland so we all went to school in switzerland for a year then my dad was reassigned to germany i went to germany and went to frankfurt high school for a year then heidelberg for a year and then ended up in rome so these wonderful formative teenage years i spent the whole time abroad in one country after another i could speak french fluently because in switzerland you know i arrived in switzerland and did not speak i had one year of french and hadn't done very well and they put me in a room where my roommate was french and didn't want to speak english sat me at a table with nine other people that spoke nothing but french i mean if you wanted to eat you'd better learn how to say please pass the bread in french and that's a wonderful way to learn language when you're young and your mind is is is so flexible i was absolutely fluent in french within six months when i was a younger student i was one of these students that was forever getting these comments on as a report card that said he he is not working to his potential he can do much better than what he is doing uh i went overseas and overseas i was more interested in learning by seeing and feeling and and hearing and experiencing and that sort of thing and amazingly enough i came back to the united states and was a straight a student from their own house i mean it just it something clicked somewhere along the way and i graduated valedictorian of my class in high school and i was top 10 of my class at west point without very much work and got a master's degree from and guided missile engineering from usc uh again some something turned on and i i was never a bookworm i was never i was always interested more in being well-rounded more well-rounded and you know rather than being viewed as as perhaps an egghead he played football was on the track team ended up messing around with wrestling and and uh played soccer in switzerland we i was in switzerland i was on the championship team of western switzerland the junior championship team of western switzerland was a fullback so i did you know i played tennis a lot of tennis when i was a young man and learned how to play so i mean i was but again i wasn't i wasn't all-american caliber uh at the time it's only when i became general that people look back and said obviously he was an all-american football player but it wasn't true i mean i was i just i was a good athlete i was a very good high school athlete and i but i was not certainly not a very good college athlete of course world war ii had a tremendous impact on me uh it's something that that not many people younger than me in the country today remember but but at that time the entire world was at war it was a battle between good and evil and it was a world war it wasn't a geographically limited war so everyone was involved the whole country was involved and there were fundraisers and and you know but there was rationing and and there were alerts and you know you had to go through air raid uh drills and this sort of thing uh that certainly had a major impact upon my life as a young man and particularly a young boy particularly since my dad was gone i mean to me this all translated into my father being in some kind of danger next to that there's no question about the fact that the the teenage years that i spent abroad had a tremendous impact upon my entire life from that time forth i mean i learned i learned i got to know people of so many different uh nationalities of so many different cultures of so many different uh ethnic backgrounds and and uh and in in meeting all of these people of of so many different different makeups was a wonderful education for me it taught me it taught me that there's more than one way to look at a problem and they all may be right you say so so it gave me a certain tolerance i guess or or not even a tolerance maybe tolerance isn't isn't the right word because tolerance implies that there's intolerance to before it and it's not that but it just gave me an appreciation for people uh you know judge them judge them uh as you find them never prejudge anybody based upon any of those things and sometimes people are prejudged and that's that's lived with me for the rest of my life and it gave me the ability to be flexible to get along with people of all different nationalities oh no i read a lot you know i i was you know the whole lassie series uh jack london you know was one of my favorite people but then i also read the iliad and the odyssey i was fascinated by the you know by early mythology and i read the odyssey several different times you know i read when i was a you know a young man i i read uh das capital by karl marx only because you know communism was sort of this thing that was looming on the horizon so i wanted to learn something about it um but i wouldn't say any one particular book i i just liked i enjoyed reading i i it was fun to read and and uh and i remember we didn't have television those days so either either listen to the radio you picked up a good book uh that was the way you you learned you know it's funny people have asked me that over and over again there was no one i mean no one teacher i always wish i could say oh yes i remember miss murphy or something like that you know but i can't uh there was no one i can think of several that helped me along the way at you know it just the right time they were there to nudge me in the right direction to get me perhaps to do something at the time i hadn't considered doing and you know it opened up new horizons but there wasn't just one particular person at all probably you know if you want to look for one particular person it was my mom and dad they were the they were the teachers that really you know that taught me a great deal the challenge and the sense of service perhaps a sense of service more than a challenge you know that you're serving something beyond yourself you know that you're never going to get rich in the military that's not that you derive the reward from the service itself you derive the reward from the fact that you're that you are dedicating your life to serving your country uh the troops troops sometimes make it all worthwhile i mean they really do it's great to be with them someone once said when it when it quits getting fun you ought to you ought to get out and i say you know whoever said that's never been a leader of troops because i think a lot of times we want any fun at all but it's a series of emotional peaks and valleys and what you hope is that you have more peaks than you do valleys and you do and so it's the it's the combination of the fact that you're serving something beyond yourself and the challenge of leadership when you're leading huge numbers of people you know all of that kind of together is why you stay with it i think it comes from west point and my father my father was a truly selfless public servant both in in his military career and in his police career um he believed very strongly in the motto of west point duty on our country i learned uh the motto of west point i learned the principles of duty and honor and country at west point and duty was one of the most powerful you know robert e lee said duty is a sublimist concept of them all and and it is this sense of duty that uh that drives you sometimes it's a sense of duty that keeps you going sometimes when things get very very rough you know it's it's this attitude well hey somebody's got to do it and if you don't who will he lived to see me graduate from west point and i can honestly say that that was probably the proudest day of his life i think but he died shortly thereafter so he never saw you know never saw his son really go go beyond the rank of lieutenant when i graduated i could have gone into any branch of the service i wanted to i've got to tell you my father was appalled that i won the infantry i'm absolutely appalled but i picked the inventory i think he thought i was going to pick the corps of engineers or or you know go into the air air force high tech or something like those days when you graduate west point there was no air force academy so 20 of the class could go in the air force so they wanted to and when i picked the infantry i tell you what he just he never did really understand that i did not come into the army to be a lieutenant or a captain or a major i always thought i was going to be a general at least i intended to be a general you know it's if i started pumping gas i would want to be the ceo of shell oil okay uh so i my i always aimed high my sights were always set very high i always dreamed i don't really recall although i do remember in the history of military art which is which is a course that i loved at west point where you studied old bibles and everything else i admired fellows like alexander the great you know and julius caesar and napoleon uh not everything about them certainly because a lot of them they had some very bad characteristics also but i admired their accomplishments and robert e lee and you know ulysses s grant and right on up the line and it's funny it's funny you almost admired the the uh the more ancient ones more than the modern ones because the ancient ones you knew not much about except their accomplishments hannibal you know of course coming across the alps with his elephants and defeating the romans and and the most famous battle of all for the battle of canai that anybody who's ever studied military history knows this battle of annihilation where when it was over they piled the jewelry up alone from the romans that had been slain and it was mountains of jewelry any general who's worth his salt cares very much for his troops very much restricted any general who's worth his salt knows that war is not a nintendo game war is not something that's fought by robots he knows that that war is fought you know and and and by by soldiers by people that liberty is bought by the blood of soldiers and people and and the sacrifices of of these people so um i don't know of many generals that are warmongers i there may have been in the past but in the modern generals that i know are just the opposite i mean they will they will go to to extreme steps to avoid war because they know just how bad it is let's face it there's not a general out there today who didn't live through vietnam didn't go through the vietnam experience uh in my case i happened to go through vietnam experience twice and also grenada and and so we know the horrors of war and and i think that probably you will find that uh that we are a greater pacifist than most people you would meet on the other hand as i say you have this sense of duty and when the when the time comes when you must go to war i think we also understand the way to get it over as quickly is to do it as quickly as possible uh to bring all of your power to bear and get the darn thing over and that's another way you save lives i mean if war isn't everyone you're gonna have to fight it then the smart way to fight it is to use everything you have get it over with don't let it get long and drawn out that's why we lost 50 000 57 000 people in vietnam because that war just dragged on and on and on and piecemeal commitments and fighting under all sorts of restrictions and that sort of thing that's not the way to fight a war i had been in graduate school getting a master's degree to go back to be an instructor in engineering mechanics at west point and i got back to west point but the vietnam war was really more and more army officers were being sent over there at that time mostly to be advisors to the vietnamese i was an infantryman i was not an instructor i had graduated in west point to be an infantryman and i really felt that that's where i belong so i volunteered to go to vietnam and as luck would have it i got to go that time i had a terrific experience over there very rewarding very very self-fulfilling and probably one of the most self-fulfilling experiences i've ever had because there was there was no gain in it for me at all i mean i was making tremendous sacrifice for no personal gain and that that somehow is can be one of the most self-fulfilling experiences you ever have i went back to west point to finish my teaching career and went to fort leavenworth and had gotten married in the meantime but the war was still going on and i knew that i had learned a great deal on my first tour and i felt that perhaps because i had learned so much that i could save some lives by going back the second time so i volunteered to go back second time and spent a year over there again we were stretching out beyond the the limits of our artillery so we'd moved our tory forward because one of the things that gave us an advantage over the enemy is we didn't have artillery to support us and we never wanted to go outside the extreme range of the arturi and one night while they were finding the artillery it just fell short and came in and killed some people in my unit which is something that does not make you very happy to begin with i mean it's a terrible thing when it happens and it's twice as difficult to explain to the troops and three times as difficult to explain to the families of the troops and uh and that was the incident there was one young man that was killed an outstanding young man and his parents never really could reconcile themselves to what had happened they were quite convinced that that there was some kind of a cover-up uh you know we had uh we had uh casualties in this war from our own fire and now we we see the same thing all over again the agony in the family this war it's even tougher because there were so few casualties to begin with that anyone who lost a loved one kind of feels cheated because so few people were lost why did it have to be my son or my husband or my father and you certainly understand that and then when they find out subsequently that they were killed by by the fire of their own or their own side that makes it doubly hard to live with it's a tragic tragic situation if you lead men in battle i don't care whether you're a sergeant or a second lieutenant or a four-star general they're your people they're your troops uh men and women i should say they're your troops so so the loss of every single person that's ever been under my command in battle has always hurt i mean even though our losses were so few in the gulf war we still suffered losses and i still agree for every one of them i wish we hadn't lost anybody if you believe something you should believe it passionately to be a good leader i think you have to lead passionately and i'm a passionate person i i feel very very strongly about things i'm an emotional person and and and therefore you know the tragedy of losing losing young men and women's lives is is tough enough to swallow and then to find out that it was preventable is even tougher the area we were in happened to be the same area that milei 4 was in and the terrible mili incident and and i was always convinced on my own mind that the great unanswered question was what the role of the battalion commander had been during that time his sons have been killed so there was no way you can answer that but incidents like that are preventable so any time we would have a mine incident and we had an awful lot of them when we first moved into the area because of a very heavily mined area and my troops weren't weren't mine wise they weren't they didn't have the moxie at that time that they they later on became you know the word street street smart well they were mind smart after a while but when we first got there every time you know somebody hit a mine i would always fly in if i was in the area in my helicopter land right there on the ground you know put the casualty on the helicopter because that got him back to the hospital about a half an hour quicker than they would ordinarily but the other reason why was to go around just talk to the troops because the mines are insidious sort of a thing they they happen if you you know if you're out and you shoot at the enemy and he shoots back at you and you take some casualties they're not acceptable but they're but you do understand that at least it was an exchange that caused it to happen when you're walking along also the mind goes boom and you see one of your friends killed or lose a leg or something like that and there's nobody to get even with i mean there's no way to retaliate that tends to fester inside and so so i would go in to try and understand all that well in this one case we against we'd had a mine casually and i flew in and and uh used my helicopter to medevac them and i was on the ground and then of course we had another mine casually and we were right in the middle of a minefield and i had to do something about it and that's that's what that was all about the whole world told us right don't forget there were 40 different countries involved in that coalition in one way or another and we had we got letters from all over the world we started getting a hundred tons of mail a day when we first got over there by the time the holidays rolled around we were getting 400 tons of mail a day and almost 100 of that mail was was positive saying you're doing the right thing i started honing those skills when i was a young young man in europe and and i can't i i know how to work with with people of all nations and all all beliefs but don't forget something else we all had a common goal see we all knew exactly what it was we wanted to do and that was get iraq out of kuwait so therefore it was easy to get people to focus on that on on on the gold and when things came up that sort of were not were not part of the goal you said hey let's put that aside that really you know that's that may be a problem but it's not a problem we have to deal with right now what we need to do is keep stay focused on the goal oh i had a lot of time to prepare for this for sure i mean you know let's face it you know the the sort of the gauntlet was thrown down on the 2nd of august and and and we didn't attack until the 17th of january so that gave me a long time to you know it would have been easier if it had been a little bit closer to home you know we're about as far away from home as we could possibly be and therefore you know building up the necessary supplies and equipment getting the troops over there wasn't the easiest thing in the world i could give you some very very good arguments why it's in the best interest of the united states and the entire rest of the world for saddam hussein still be there from a strategic standpoint now from a purely emotional personal emotional standpoint sure i'd love it you know if he weren't there but but he's irrelevant and one of the if if you were to ask me one of the few mistakes we made in this war it was to so personalize the war in the form of a guy named saddam hussein okay that now some people are looking at saying well gee we really didn't win because saddam hussein is still alive that's not true at all i mean it was a great victory because we did accomplish not only our military objectives but our strategic objectives and what's more important today right now we have the greatest opportunity for peace in the middle east we've had in my lifetime my entire lifetime i mean talks are ongoing right now between the israelis and the arabs and the palestinians you've just seen an incredible outcome in an election in israel that's going to affect the peace process and the peace process is ongoing and all of that is a direct result of the outcome of the gulf war it's a direct result of the fact that that iraq is no longer a player over there they become irrelevant in the politics of the middle east and that's important to the world character competence selfless service caring about people caring about people i mean i mean really caring about people i've known a lot of leaders that said oh boy i really care about my troops and they didn't give a damn when i really got right down to it but but as i say uh all of those things i think uh go into the to the equation of a leader uh i said earlier you know passionately caring about your cause whatever it might be i think that any leader needs an ego i mean if you're not if you're not confident in yourself how can you expect anybody else to have confidence so i think any leader has to have confidence in themselves but but it's got to be i think you know one of the most important things about a great leader is this thing called selfless service that i mentioned earlier in that you're not doing it for yourself you're not doing it to stroke your ego you're doing in spite of yourself well you don't have a private life anymore that's that's the bad news um the good news is that you know you have you have a wonderful wonderful uh group of grateful americans out there that come to you every single day every single hour every single minute and tell you that and and so you know we've all come we've talked about this as a family we've come to a recognition that our lives have changed forever and and but we've also come to the recognition that's for all the right reasons you know when you're when you've just signed the 800th autograph and and 801 comes up and you've got bad writer's cramp you just remind yourself that it's because people feel good about their country they feel good about themselves they feel good about their armed forces and when they see you you've reminded them that and that's why they come to you and then you sign number 801 and go on you don't say no to them you you say yes to them because it's for all the right reasons it's one of the terrible things about this country that the minute the minute people become public figures there's there's members of the press who do everything they can to start destroying them to tear them down i've never quite understood why uh you never understand why and some of the things many of the things that have been said about me are just blatantly untrue i mean they're they are many some of the stories in the gulf were manufactured uh by by members of the press and and they wouldn't let go of them even when they even when it was proven to them that the story was untrue they continued to spread it around anyhow only because they refused to admit that they might be wrong so uh i think it's too bad that that happens in this country because it keeps an awful lot of good people from serving this country that otherwise would serve this country but it goes with the territory and you you can't the important thing is you can't let it get to you i mean you just you've got to you know you stay focused on the doughnut instead of the whole i honestly could care less what the press says about me uh it's important to me what the american people think about me and the american people come up and tell me over and over again how they feel about me and if you stay focused on that and i would also tell you what's very important to me most of all is what my family thinks about me and my family knows knows me for what i am and who i am and and that's all it counts and and thank god my kids think i'm a pretty good dad and and that really you know as long as they believe that that's good enough for me i don't need anything else i've got a daughter who's 21 another daughter who's 20 and and excuse me a daughter yeah who's 21 and 20 and then a son who just turned 15. uh he has not exhibited any interest in the military and that's okay one of the things i say to young people is is dare to be yourself i want them to dare to be what they want to be i don't want to build a box and force them into a mold and and make them uh do something because it will bring them fame or fortune i want them to do something because it'll make them happy i think that that sons of notorious generals don't stand a chance everything that they do well and get credit for everybody says oh well of course the only reason why they're getting credit is because they're old man schwarzkopf and then the minute they stub their toe everybody says well boy gee they sure can't feel their dad's footsteps so i mean you know that puts a terrible burden on on a younger person and i just uh as i say i want my sons and daughters to be what they want to be i'm my strong my own strongest critic i probably judge myself stronger than anybody else judge me you know i uh you know i i really am my own strongest critic i'm my own strongest um uh mid-course correctioner okay i you know say okay wait a minute schwarzkopf move over here to do that you know i i'm i'm much tougher on myself than than almost anybody else i know i am much tougher on myself than anybody i know consistently people think they're right all the time scare the living daylights out of me they really do uh uh you know we we all ought to recognize that none of us are infallible we're all capable of making mistakes and and we all make mistakes and uh and that's okay because you're human what's important is you learn from them okay what's important to learn from those mistakes i give a lecture and it goes like this to leaders i say how many of you people learn something about how to do your present job by screwing it up the first time okay so you say my goodness you know how can you then possibly say no mistakes of this outfit how can you not allow yourself mistakes you're not giving yourself a freedom to fail because i don't believe in the word failure you're giving yourself the latitude to learn i've learned i've learned most things i know how to do well probably by screwing it up the first time the gulf war was a typical indication of what's happening in the world today you are not going to see major armies confronting each other along the battle line like you did in world war one like you did in world war ii like we did in the confrontation between nato and the warsaw pact what you're going to see is regional conflicts regional strifes which which tend to get bigger and bigger and suddenly spill over their their boundaries and in fact impact the rest of the world and the rest of the world gets drawn into them that's the sort of thing you're seeing today in yugoslavia sort of thing you're seeing in in in the soviet union the former soviet union and that's what we have to guard against we have to my answer to that is get involved in it while it's still peaceful before it turns into a war because you don't want to get dragged into these kind of conflicts but let's face it when we got involved in the gulf and the tanker war when we got involved in the gulf war that we just it's essentially a regional conflict that got too big and affected the rest of the world the rest of the world was dragged in i don't think it's going to change a lot no more so than the future of this entire country is going to change i mean listen this entire country since the end of world war ii has been been our foreign policy has been dominated by what you know confronting communism throughout the world our military strategy has been fighting the soviet union our business strategy has been very much dominated by this thing now this is gone so the the central focus the way of doing business in our government in our world and our military is is going to be refocused and that's going to change should change a lot of things but you got to remember the fundamental mission of the armed forces are going to stay exactly the same and that's to defend the country that's what their job is and and and and we shouldn't get so euphoric that we decide to do away with the armed forces i can tell you one thing when i graduated from west point 1956 if anybody had come to me and said general where do you expect a lieutenant and said lieutenant where do you expect to fight your wars i doubt very seriously if i would have said oh it's very clear i'm going to fight in vietnam grenada and iraq of course not and say so there's a message there and that's we don't know where the next war is going to be and we can't just discount and say nothing's going to happen therefore we ought to do away with the military well i think the first thing about serving in the military is you're serving you're serving something other than yourself and that's very important i think you get a great sense of satisfaction uh when you serve something about you know better than yourself uh and that's number one number two it's an exciting career i mean i've traveled all over the world lived all over the world learned many many things so i've enjoyed it from the excitement of world travel and the adventures that i've had i've had all sorts of wonderful adventures and i've met some wonderful people and i'm associated with great people and people that have been very very close to me in the past and will be for the rest of my life i met in the military i saw that all that i've enjoyed my i enjoyed my military career my family enjoyed my military career women are very much a part of the military they're very much part of the gulf uh and and they are uh they already are integrated in the armed forces to a great extent the big conflict now is over the role of women in combat this is another one of these questions that's being argued in the wrong arena it's being argued in the arena of equal rights and that's not the arena it should be argued it should be argued in the arena of national defense and what's best for the defense of this country um i i talk about the problem this way i say listen take an armed forces that has a unit of 1 000 infantrymen these are the folks that fight with bayonets and roll around in the mud in the in the trenches okay now oppose them with an organization of 1 000 people 50 of whom are female is that really in the best interest of that second country to send that organization against an organization of 1 000 men with knives to fight in the trenches i don't think there's anybody in the world that would agree that that makes sense some might so what i'm saying is the decisions that need to be made in this realm our decisions would say we must do what's in the best interest of this nation for the defense of this nation at the same time we must do everything we can to make sure that women in the military have the same opportunity that men in the military have to get ahead and but it's got to be a balanced approach and not one that just blindly says 50 of the entire military must be female for no other reason than because 50 must be female that's not the way to handle the problem having said all of that i got to tell you what the women in the gulf did a magnificent job they had it much tougher than the men because of the cultural sensitivities and yet they handled it with ease and they did an absolutely fantastic job and i am very much in favor of women in the military i happen to be one of those people that's in favor of women in the cockpit i have no problem with women in in in flying a fighter plane i mean if we got them if they're going to fly medevac helicopters you know and in the heat of battle why can't they fly an apache helicopter so now i would tell you that that's not shared by you know many many of my friends in the military but i happen to be one of those people that's in favor of women in the cockpit the armed forces you know dealt with race before the entire rest of this country did today in the armed forces racism and prejudices has essentially been eliminated all you have to do is go out and look at the number of black soldiers you have in the military who are there because they feel that they have a far better opportunity for advancement in the military than they do anyplace else their proportion is much greater than you find any place else colin powell the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff happens to be the highest ranking man the entire us military happens to be a black soldier i don't even i don't even look at soldiers as being black white red yellow green purple or pink and most of my friends don't but i'll tell you one thing if we ever run into anybody who does we get rid of them we don't tolerate intolerance in the military so the uh and and i don't know anybody who who really there are a few people who don't agree with that none of them by the way happen to be in the military or know very much about it they just keep talking about it for their own purposes but i got to tell you what that that we we just don't tolerate prejudice in the military at all and i'll tell you what another thing uh we we have been going after after sexual harassment in the military long before the savanna world even discovered what the term was we came to grips with this many years ago when we started bringing more and more women in the military and found out that they were in fact being harassed and we have been dealing with that for quite some time in the military in a much stronger way than i think our civilian contemporaries have drug problems almost eliminating the military i'll tell you why it's thing called random urinalysis random testing we have a unique situation in the military now where where people want to be there it's an all-volunteer force by the way that's one of the interesting things about the gulf war is the fact that 100 of all the people there volunteered either volunteered to be in the active force the national guard of the reserves but everybody wants to be in the military there today and they don't want to be kicked out and we've made it very clear that we conduct random testing and that if a person comes up positive on random testing they're kicked out of the military just that simple we don't tolerate drugs in the military today so we have cleaned it up and and you know and all the uh the information we have all the surveys we have and everything else show that we have we know that we're a lot cleaner in the military than we ever have been looking back on by the way the same thing happens to apply to alcohol the same thing happens to apply to alcohol it used to be that you know we would uh you know drunkenness and duis and things like this were tolerated they're not tolerated anymore if you want if you want to get in trouble in your military career just come up with one dui just one dui and it's considered a very very serious offense and grounds for elimination it's not a perfect world when i graduated west point i saw things very much in in shades of black and white and i've come to understand that uh and i and i also was uh i demanded a great deal of myself then as a young man and shades of black and white i mean you have to had to do everything right you couldn't do anything wrong and and that's not what life's all about and uh you know and uh but i guess the thing i've probably learned more than anything else is is self-fulfillment is is the most important thing of all being happy with what you do feeling good about what you're doing is probably the great secret to life you don't measure a person's success by what they take out of life you measure a person's success by what they leave behind so you know you can have all the money in the world you can have all the power in the world you could have all the prestige in the world none of that's important what's important is what you do with it when you have it that's what that's what's important and that's what leadership is sort of all about trust yourself life's worth living life is worth living and life should be lived okay uh there's more good out there than there is evil man is basically good mankind is basically good i guess 30 years now you'd say person kind i don't know but what i'm saying is is people are good people are great enjoy them and enjoy your life and and you know and and again it's the point i would make to any young people it's what i talk about my children i want people should dare to be themselves don't be something because somebody else tells you that's what you should be don't be a brain surgeon okay if you want to be an artist you'll never make any money as an artist you can make a fortune as a brain surgeon but don't be a brain surgeon to make money if you want to be a brain surgeon because you're really interested in saving people's lives that's a reason to be a brain surgeon but but but most of all be yourself dare to be yourself take your god-given talent and use it the way you feel you should use it don't let anybody steer you down the path of this way you'll get more money this way you get more prestige this way you'll get more success because i've just seen i've seen so many people in my lifetime who burn out they get all of these things that they originally strive for and then they're written anything else you know so what do i do now okay because the one thing they don't have you say is is it's not here it's not in their heart they don't have self-fulfillment they don't feel good about themselves they don't feel satisfied because they measure their lives in terms of the next promotion or the next award or the next pay raise or whatever it is one of these days all that's over with the most fulfilling times i've had were times when when i was doing my duty with no personal gain towards myself i mean i got nothing from it and yet i got everything from it that's the point i got nothing tangible from it but i got everything from it man does not get to write his own epitaph but if i were to write mine it would say the following he loved his family and he loved his troops and they loved him period you

Channel: Academy of Achievement

Views: 82,029

Keywords:

Id: IDQKoM4hG0I

Length: 73min 53sec (4433 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 11 2016