AMEN!
David Petraeus: Profile of the New Iraq Commander
The son of a Dutch sea captain who took refuge in New York during World War II, Petraeus grew up in Cornwall on Hudson, a few miles outside the gates of the U.S. Military Academy, which he entered as a new cadet in July 1970. “A striver to the max, Dave was always ‘going for it’ in sports, academics, leadership, and even his social life,” the West Point yearbook noted in 1974. A month after graduation, he married Holly Knowlton, the daughter of the academy superintendent. They have two grown children.
As a young lieutenant, Petraeus entered an Army battered by defeat in Vietnam and badly frayed by drugs, lack of discipline and the American public’s diminished esteem for the military. Accolades and achievements followed as he moved from post to post. Petraeus received all three prizes awarded in his class at Ranger School, perhaps the Army’s toughest physical and psychological challenge, and he later won the George C. Marshall award as the top graduate in the Army Command and General Staff College class of 1983.
His intensity, cutting intellect and competitiveness have rubbed some officers the wrong way. Muttered jibes about “King David” have been heard around his command post. He remains obsessive about what he calls “the P.T. culture” — physical training — and has been known to challenge soldiers half his age to various athletic competitions. “If anyone beats him in the shorter runs, four miles or so, he takes them out for 10 miles and smokes them,” a staff officer observed several years ago. At 5-foot-9 and 155 pounds, Petraeus evokes George Bernard Shaw’s description of the British general Bernard L. Montgomery: “an intensely compacted hank of wire.”
Twice, accidents almost ended his career, or even his life. In 1991, as a battalion commander at Fort Campbell, Ky., he was shot in the chest with an M-16 rifle when a soldier tripped during a training exercise. Rushed into surgery at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, he underwent five hours of surgery by Bill Frist, who a decade later became Senate majority leader. While skydiving in 2000, Petraeus survived the abrupt collapse of his parachute 60 feet up. His shattered pelvis was reassembled with a plate and long screws.
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