It Doesn’t Take a Hero

In 1988 the Army handed H. Norman Schwarzkopf a command most officers considered a backwater. U.S. Central Command sat at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, its war plans looked unrealistic, and nobody expected it to fight anything soon. Two years later it was running the largest American military deployment since Vietnam. It Doesn’t Take a Hero is Schwarzkopf’s account of the road to that moment, written with Peter Petre and published by Bantam Books in 1992. It became a New York Times bestseller.

What is It Doesn’t Take a Hero about?

All of it, from childhood on.

Schwarzkopf writes about his father, a general who organized the New Jersey State Police, and about the strain his mother’s drinking put on the family. He covers West Point, his two tours in Vietnam, his wounds and the day he crossed a minefield to reach an injured soldier. He’s also candid about how close he came to leaving the Army after Vietnam. A reader expecting a victory lap gets a much fuller portrait of the man than that, including the doubts and the family troubles a more guarded author might have left out.

The Gulf War chapters cover the scramble to move troops and supplies to Saudi Arabia in 1990, the logistics problems on the ground and his frustration with officials in Washington who wanted a faster, harder war.

Reviewers noted that the battle itself takes fewer pages than the career leading up to it. That’s a fair reading of what the book cares about.

Who was H. Norman Schwarzkopf?

He graduated from West Point in 1956 and earned three Silver Stars in Vietnam.

He served two tours there. On the first he advised the South Vietnamese Airborne Division. On the second, from December 1969, he commanded the 1st Battalion, 6th Infantry, and came home with two Purple Hearts to go with the Silver Stars.

He commanded the 24th Infantry Division, served as deputy commander for the 1983 Grenada operation and took over Central Command in November 1988. After Desert Storm he retired in August 1991 and settled in Tampa, where he lived until his death in 2012.

Retirement was busy. He worked for a time as a military commentator for NBC, raised money for children’s charities, spoke publicly about prostate cancer and sat on the board of the Nature Conservancy. He’s buried at West Point.

How did readers react to It Doesn’t Take a Hero?

They bought it. The book was on the bestseller lists within months, and the Christian Science Monitor’s reviewer that November credited Schwarzkopf for how candidly he wrote about his own life.

Not everyone was pleased. Some Saudi officials publicly disputed parts of his account of the war, and his criticism of officials in Washington drew attention of its own. A memoir published a year after a war will always land in the middle of arguments about it, and this one did.

What would a ghostwriter take from It Doesn’t Take a Hero?

The family chapters. A general’s memoir is expected to be about the war, and plenty of them are about nothing else. Schwarzkopf put his father, his mother’s drinking, his own wounds and his doubts about staying in uniform on the page, and those chapters are the reason the war chapters land. By the time the reader reaches Riyadh, they know the man giving the orders.

When I interview a retired officer, the stories they’d prefer to skip are usually the ones the book needs. The career is the spine. The life around it is what makes a stranger care.

Why does It Doesn’t Take a Hero belong on this shelf?

It’s the Tampa book on a Tampa shelf. Schwarzkopf ran his war from MacDill and came home to the same city.

It also shows how a famous commander handles collaboration. Petre was a Fortune editor who later worked on books with Alan Greenspan and Arnold Schwarzenegger. His name sits on the cover next to the general’s, and the book still reads like Schwarzkopf talking. Anyone who wonders whether working with a writer will cost them their voice should read a few chapters.

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