General Norman Schwarzkopf, author of "It Doesn't Take A Hero," buried in your book is the following sentence: "Almost every general in Desert Shield...

You were there twice; once as an adviser to the South Vietnamese in 1965?

Back then again in . . .?

As a battalion commander.

Go back to your first trip there, 1964-65. How did you get there?

What was your rank?

The first time you got into battle?

How many Americans were there when you first went in '65?

You write in your book about "the most heroic act I've ever seen," and you'll have to help me with the pronunciations. It was Lt. Earl S. Van Eiwegian....

What did he do?

There was a high ridge between us and Pleiku. There was an air base there, and as the story was told to me, Van Eiwegian was sitting in a bar, and people...

Was he moving South Vietnamese out?

I know you went there twice, and this may have been on your second visit, but you talk about how you heard people refer to the South Vietnamese as gooks...

Why?

That's what they were fighting for. It wasn't to support a "corrupt regime" in Saigon that they were fighting. That's not what these people were there...

Yes. Amazing man. Absolutely one of the best combat leaders I have ever seen anywhere and certainly the most intuitive I've ever seen. He was almost...

No, I have not. He went on to be a four-star general. As a matter of fact, he commanded the Fourth Corps, which was the Mekong Delta area of Vietnam,...

Wounded the first trip on Valentine's Day. We called it jokingly after the fact -- it's sort of a sick joke -- but we called it the St. Valentine's...

I said, "Has someone cleared that tree line over there?" "Yes, somebody has cleared that tree line." Well, we got up here, looking at that village,...

That was my second tour over there when I was a battalion commander. We were in a terrible area called the Batangan Peninsula, just north of Quang Ngai...

I honestly remember walking. Each step I would take I'd be checking the ground first, and I'd put my foot down and my knees -- you know, you hear about...

When you read the book, though, in the next couple of lines you say that three guys said, "Major, we'll never forget what you did for the brother."

You told that story and left it to the end on purpose because . . .?

One of the troops I wanted to check on was this kid to see that he was doing all right. I walked out, and there were three black soldiers there who...

Yes, I did. Bratton lives in the local area here, out in Maryland. But when I went into the hospital to have spinal surgery . . .

This was 1971. 1969 and '70 was when I was over there. In 1971, a year later, I went into Walter Reed to have spinal surgery. I went into Ward No. 1...

That's right, yes. The first time I met him he was just an unknown reporter at the time. He came in, he heard about this battle that was going on, he...

I've heard you talk about the difference in the numbers of press people in Vietnam vs. in Desert Storm. What did you learn, and other colleagues of...

After the . . .

There was no way to protect anybody if we'd introduced the press and that sort of thing, and so Adm. Metcalf, the task force commander, made a decision,...

No, not quite that. I would tell you, frankly, because of some of the experiences I had, towards the end of the Vietnam War I wouldn't let the press...

Let me ask you about that story about ARAMCO and the dancing girls.

So the Saudis were quite nervous about cultural problems that could occur. One of the first things I was hit with when I got over there is, "You're...

Yes. He said, "I've got to talk to you right away. The king is furious! You brought dancing girls into the community." So I immediately called my staff,...

You didn't have CNN to see in Saudi?

This was in November or October?

Of course, what they were showing is from the thighs down of these girls who were apparently doing the bumps and grinds or something like that, and,...

Peter Petre is an editor with Fortune magazine who wrote "Father, Son and Company" with Tom Watson, the former CEO of IBM. Peter had been through the...

Where did Peter hang out?

Did the Pentagon have review?

But the best thing I had, the most important thing I had was this: In any other war I've ever fought, most of the instructions are sent by message back...

Well, they're mine. They're my private property.

I'm probably going to donate them to the Library of Congress, donate them to the National War College archives, Army War College archives or something...

I've got them all sitting at home.

Yes. I'm going to put it all in one package. A lot of people have come to me for my papers. I'm going to tell you something -- five years ago I didn't...

You start off your book by saying you wanted to copy the U. S. Grant memoirs, a two-volume set. Then you say that yours turned out to be a lot more...

Why did you like him?

When was he a soldier?

Somebody in the White House said to him, "Well, you know Grant's just nothing but a drunk," and Lincoln said, "Well, find out what brand of whiskey...

I don't know whether all of them did.

To be honest with you, I'd heard about it back in the States. I'd heard about what a wonderful series it was, and the first time I started watching...

To me it took on almost a real-life dimension. When they were reading the words of Sherman, when they were reading the words of Grant, when they were...

Yes. Not directly, but it certainly attuned my brain to once again the horrors of war, once again the fact that this is a human life that you're dealing...

That was before I went to my first tour of Vietnam. I had volunteered to go to Vietnam. It was an advisory effort. It wasn't leading U.S. combat troops....

Obviously that was tongue-in-cheek, but there was an element that was, I felt, pressuring from the very first day for us to take precipitous action...

Yes. Because they had seen this Civil War series where McClellan sits outside the gates of Richmond with a vastly superior force and still won't attack...

I don't know, and honestly I mean it. Everybody comes after me and says, "Name names." Do you know why I don't know the names? Because Colin Powell...

Yes. Some civilians within the White House around the president, people in the National Security Council. I don't know if they're back-bench aides that...

I think it was your daughter that said to you on the phone in the middle of all this, "Norman Schwarzkopf, if you die I'll never speak to you again."

What was that story? A lot of this book is behind the scenes, your personal relationship with your family while this thing is going on.

See, by this time we'd heard all the stuff about chemical missiles, and we didn't know if they were going to fire chemical missiles on Riyadh and we...

Is there anything that you regret putting in this book now that it's out, that you wish you'd pulled back.

What it's got to show is that it is a tortuous process coming up with the decisions that involve the lives of hundreds of thousands of people. It's...

The South Vietnamese captured this thing, showed it to one of my American advisers and said, "Let me tell you what this says," and my American adviser...

No.

Well, sure it was in the back of my head. It was in the back of my head in Grenada. The one thing I thought about the night before we went in is, my...

Thank you very much. I enjoyed being here.