Schwarzkopf’s Decisions Take Emotional Toll : Command: The man who directs allied forces describes the effects of the ‘agonizingly difficult’ choices he faces.

When Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf’s day ends, his emotions don’t.

“I get enough sleep, but I don’t get enough rest because I wake up 15, 20, 25 times in the middle of the night, and my brain is just in turmoil over some of these agonizingly difficult decisions that I have to make,” said the four-star general who commands more than 550,000 allied troops involved in the war against Iraq.

“Every waking and sleeping moment, my nightmare is the fact that I will give an order that will cause countless numbers of human beings to lose their lives. I don’t want my troops to die. I don’t want my troops to be maimed.

“It’s an intensely personal, emotional thing for me,” added Schwarzkopf, 56, who showed few physical signs of the mental strain other than darkened circles under his eyes. “Any decision you have to make that involves the loss of human life is nothing you do lightly. I agonize over it.”

Schwarzkopf, in a wide-ranging interview with several journalists Monday, described in passionate detail some of the deep emotions that he said are influencing his wartime decision-making.

“It’s awful lonely at the top,” he said. “Go back and look at the (Public Broadcasting System’s) Civil War series. Abe Lincoln said he had nobody to turn to but God.”

Those emotions, Schwarzkopf said, are among the forces that determine when and if the allies will launch a ground war.

“It’s not purely a question of accomplishing the mission,” Schwarzkopf said. “But it’s a question of accomplishing the mission with a minimum loss of human life and within an effective time period.”

Among the many topics he dealt with in the interview was Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s personal reaction to the war. Schwarzkopf said the U.S. military has received a variety of unconfirmed reports on that subject.

“At one time he was totally out of control. They had to call in doctors and give him tranquilizers,” Schwarzkopf said one report alleged. “Other people have told us how serenely calm he is at the present time. Others have noted that he has taken to pulling out his pistol and shooting people.”

Even if Hussein is showing the strain of war, Schwarzkopf said, “I don’t think we’re close to breaking Saddam’s will. I don’t think he’s breakable.”

That is not the case with the Iraqi military, according to Schwarzkopf: “I certainly think we have the capability of breaking the will of his military, and I think we’re making great progress in that direction.”

The general also said: “Saddam Hussein is not a military man. He thought of this war in tactical terms; he never thought of it in strategic terms. All of a sudden he’s finding he’s taking a terrible licking strategically, and he has no capability to react to that.”

Another topic of the interview was the issue of friendly fire, which military investigators say may have caused as many as eight Marine deaths in the last week.

“We haven’t fought this kind of war in a very, very long time,” he said. “We’ll have more mistakes made in the very early stages. We have allowed the expectation that we’re so precise in the way we do business that this sort of thing can never happen; that’s just not true. This is not a surgical business.”

The general had harsh words for civilian military analysts and retired colleagues critiquing the war in the news media: “The analysts write about war as if it’s a ballet . . . like it’s choreographed ahead of time, and when the orchestra strikes up and starts playing, everyone goes out there and plays a set piece.

“What I always say to those folks is, ‘Yes, it’s choreographed, and what happens is the orchestra starts playing and some son of a bitch climbs out of the orchestra pit with a bayonet and starts chasing you around the stage.’ And the choreography goes right out the window.”