Someone once said, you know, you can divide man's work into a calling like a priest, a profession,

like a doctor, a career where you go from step to step to step moving up a ladder 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 yet you also have to have this inner drive of service.

General Norman Schwartzkov's service to the United States and to the men and women who served under him

was legendary.

Most people hadn't heard of him before Operation Desert Storm, now also known as the first Gulf War. And soon after that, he retired from the military. But during the early 1990s, General Schwartzkoff was America's most revered war hero.

He not only vanquished Saddam Hussein's revolutionary guard who had invaded Kuwait, he also managed to vanquish a malaise that had hung over the United States

since the Vietnam War.

As Commander-in-Chief, I can report to you our armed forces fought with honor and valor and as president I can

report to the nation aggression is, the war is over.

With a lightning fast and thunderous win,

the American military was back in the eyes and the hearts of its people.

This episode features an interview with Norman Schwartzkop from 1992,

a year after his victory in Kuwait. I think of it as a time capsule from a brief

era of triumph and hope about the Middle East, but it's also the story of one man and the lessons he learned along the way to

earning four stars across his shoulder.

West Point gave us a creed to live by, duty on our country. And not everybody who 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.

This is what it takes a podcast about passion, vision, and perseverance from the Academy of Achievement.

I'm Alice Winkler.

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