WEST POINT, NY, Feb 28, (AP): Former US Secretary of State Colin Powell has ushered his late friend Norman Schwarzkopf back to the US Military Academy at West Point.

At a service for Schwarzkopf on Thursday, Powell said simply: “Norman Schwarzkopf, Class of ‘56, has come home.”

His family and friends joined Kuwaiti officials, US dignitaries, gray clad cadets and a detail of New Jersey state troopers, a nod to his father, who founded that police agency.

Schwarzkopf commanded the US-led international coalition that drove Saddam Hussein’s forces out of Kuwait in 1991. He was 78 when he died in Tampa on Dec 27 of complications from pneumonia.

Schwarzkopf graduated from West Point in 1956 and later served two tours in Vietnam, first as an adviser to South Vietnamese paratroops and later as a battalion commander in the US Army’s Americal Division. While many disillusioned career officers left the military after the war, Schwarzkopf stayed to helped usher in institutional reforms. He was named commander in chief of US Central Command at Tampa’s MacDill Air Force Base in 1988.

The general’s “Stormin’ Norman” nickname became popular in the lead-up to Operation Desert Storm, the six-week aerial campaign that climaxed with a massive ground offensive Feb 24-28, 1991. Iraqis were routed from Kuwait in 100 hours before US officials called a halt.

Schwarzkopf spent his retirement years in Tampa. While he campaigned for President George W. Bush in 2000, Schwarzkopf maintained a low profile in the public debate over the second Gulf War against Iraq.

Schwarzkopf will be buried near his father, Col H. Norman Schwarzkopf, the founder and commander of the New Jersey State Police. The academy cemetery also holds the remains of such notable military figures as Gen William Westmoreland, Lt Col George Custer and 1st Lt Laura Walker, who became the first female graduate killed in action when she died in 2005 in Afghanistan.