Why are the streets of Paris lined with tress? So occupation forces can march in the shade

RIP, General

I had heard he was actually in line to become the first Fifth Star General since Eisenhower, until he questioned H.W. Bush's thinking about not going into Bahgdad and finishing the job the first time. He retired soon thereafter.

How did he die ? Some school kid shoot him ?

[I]n Vietnam in March 1970, Schwarzkopf was involved in rescuing men of his battalion from a minefield. He had received word that men under his command had encountered a minefield on the notorious Batangan Peninsula, he rushed to the scene in his helicopter, as was his custom while a battalion commander, in order to make his helicopter available. He found several soldiers still trapped in the minefield. Schwarzkopf urged them to retrace their steps slowly. Still, one man tripped a mine and was severely wounded but remained conscious. As the wounded man flailed in agony, the soldiers around him feared that he would set off another mine. Schwarzkopf, also wounded by the explosion, crawled across the minefield to the wounded man and held him down (using a “pinning” technique from his wrestling days at West Point) so another could splint his shattered leg. One soldier stepped away to break a branch from a nearby tree to make the splint. In doing so, he too hit a mine, which killed him and the two men closest to him, and blew an arm and a leg off Schwarzkopf’s artillery liaison officer. Eventually, Schwarzkopf led his surviving men to safety, by ordering the division engineers to mark the locations of the mines with shaving cream. (Some of the mines were of French manufacture and dated back to the Indochina conflict of the 1950s; others were brought by Japanese forces in World War II). Schwarzkopf says in his autobiograpy It Doesn’t Take a Hero that this incident firmly cemented his reputation as an officer who would risk his life for the soldiers under his command.

Schwarzkopf told his men that they might not like some of his strict rules, but it was for their own good. He told them “When you get on that plane to go home, if the last thing you think about me is ‘I hate that son of a bitch’, then that is fine because you’re going home alive.” Lt. General Hal Moore later wrote that it was during his time in Vietnam that Schwarzkopf acquired what later became his infamous temper, while arguing via radio for passing American Hueys to land and pick up his wounded men.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Schwarzkopf,_Jr.

Not to hijack the thread, but Bush the Elder isn't doing too well either.

Awesome. Im going to steel this

SALUTE.

I have been paying attention to that myself. Extraordinary lives both men have lived to say the least

This.

Tragic news.

RIP

I had the opportunity to see him speak at a convention in either '93 or '94. He was an absolutely captivating speaker, but what I remember most was his presence. Some people just give off a feeling of greatness, and he was certainly one of those men.

They lived full lives. lived them to the fullest to. Tragic would have been your son.
Best news of the day was hearing your son is on the mend & on his way home.
That had to be some kind of scary for you both to go through. I pray you never have to go through something like that again with your kid.

Unfortunately the enemy sleeps a little better tonight... RIP General...

Classic name as well.

Actually, this quote is often misattributed to Norman Schwarzkopf, as well as to Donald Rumsfeld and Ross Perot. The real speaker was Jed Babbin, a deputy undersecretary of defense from the first Bush administration.

The full quote is "... you know frankly, going to war without France is like going deer hunting without an accordion. You just leave a lot of useless noisy baggage behind."

Didn't Patton once say something like, "I'd rather have a German division in front of me than a French division behind me."