Our nation keeps losing high-profile warrior-heroes. Others remain and for as long as we’re involved in conflicts, we’ll produce more of them.

We said goodbye recently to Sen. Daniel Inouye of Hawaii, a Medal of Honor recipient and World War II veteran. Before that we bid farewell to former Sen. George McGovern, a decorated bomber pilot and fellow WW II vet. Of course, we’re losing many of our Greatest Generation combatants daily as age takes its toll among them.

And now it’s retired Army Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf who’s left us. Stormin’ Norman served two combat tours in the Vietnam War, led the American invasion of Grenada in 1983 to free captive U.S. medical students and then, most famously, led the allied assault in early 1991 on Kuwait to free that nation from its Iraqi occupiers.

Schwarzkopf was a larger-than-life figure. He was a man’s man who stood tall during those now-legendary press briefings, where he gave detailed accounts of the progress of the military campaign to boot Saddam Hussein’s forces out of Kuwait.

One of the obituaries I’ve read in the past few hours noted some criticism of the general’s strategy during the Persian Gulf War. It said some armchair generals back home – including those in Congress – had criticized Schwarzkopf for not pressing the fight further, for not capturing Baghdad and getting rid of Hussein when he had the chance.

The criticism was idiotic.

The Pentagon had clear orders from the commander in chief, President George H.W. Bush: Kick the Iraqis out of Kuwait … period. The president, using his immense diplomatic skill, had secured a United Nations mandate to support that effort. The mandate drew the line at liberating Kuwait. President Bush wasn’t going to violate the UN edict and he instructed his field commander, Stormin’ Norman, accordingly.

And as Schwarzkopf and others noted at the time, taking the fight to Baghdad would have cost many more American casualties – as the nation would learn when it invaded Iraq in March 2003 ostensibly to rid the Middle East of Hussein’s “weapons of mass destruction,” which we would learn to our profound shame did not exist.

Gen. Schwarzkopf served his country with honor and valor. He now can rest in peace.