(MCT) — Retired Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf, who presided over the swift and devastating 1991 military assault on Iraq that transformed the Middle East and reminded America what it was like to win a war, died Thursday of complications from pneumonia. He was 78.

The former four-star general, whose burly image towering in camouflage fatigues above his troops came to define both Operation Desert Storm and the nation’s renewed sense of military pride, had been living in relatively quiet retirement in Tampa, Fla., eschewing the political battles that continued to broil over a part of the world he had left as a conqueror.