When David Petraeus commanded an infantry battalion in Kentucky in 1991, one of his soldiers slipped during a live-fire exercise, accidentally fired his M-16 and shot Petraeus in the chest.
Witnesses were sure the lieutenant colonel, then 39, was a dead man. But he was airlifted to a hospital and operated on for five hours by surgeon Bill Frist, the future US senator. Within days, Petraeus convinced the hospital to release him by doing 50 push-ups.
That’s the kind of strength — physical, mental and emotional — that made Petraeus the general that Washington trusts most of all.
Petraeus, the son of a Dutch sea captain and American mother, was born in upstate Cornwall-on-Hudson on Nov. 7, 1952. He earned honors at West Point and married the daughter of the academy’s superintendent two months after graduation in 1974. He and his wife, Holly, have two children.
After serving at various Army posts in the United States, he taught international relations at West Point and added a Ph.D. from Princeton, with a dissertation on the lessons of the Vietnam War.
He served abroad in Haiti, as chief of operations for UN forces, as well as in Bosnia and Kuwait.
But he didn’t see combat until the Iraq war in 2003, when he led the 101st Airborne in ferocious battles to the south of Baghdad. After the capital’s fall, he was promoted to lieutenant general and put in charge of training the post-Saddam Hussein Iraqi army. He earned his fourth star when he was promoted to general in 2007.
President George W. Bush gave him his toughest assignments — commanding all US troops in Iraq in 2007 during the “surge,” and then in 2008 taking over the entire US Central Command, which is responsible for all the troubled real estate from Kenya to Kazakhstan.