(AP)
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Retired Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf, who commanded the US-led international coalition that drove Saddam Hussein's forces out of Kuwait in 1991, has died at age 78 in Tampa, Fla. The president he served under at the time, George HW Bush, who remains in the ICU of a Houston hospital, released a statement saying that "Barbara and I mourn the loss of a true American patriot and one of the great military leaders of his generation."
Schwarzkopf, a much-decorated combat soldier in Vietnam, was known popularly as "Stormin' Norman" for a notoriously explosive temper. He became widely known during the military campaign in Kuwait through his televised news briefings. Schwarzkopf lived in retirement in Tampa, where he had served in his last military assignment as commander-in-chief of US Central Command, the headquarters responsible for US military and security concerns in nearly 20 countries from the eastern Mediterranean and Africa to Pakistan. At the peak of his postwar national celebrity, Schwarzkopf—a self-proclaimed political independent—rejected suggestions that he run for office, and remained far more private than other generals.
