Gen. Petraeus

Yesterday, General David Petraeus turned over command of Iraq to his deputy General Ray Odierno. Petreaus is now taking over CENTCOM, which is a great thing for our country. He will now be in charge of all of the Middle East as well as Afghanistan and Pakistan. The leadership that he brought to Iraq at its darkest hours was remarkable. He is a once-in-a-lifetime leader.

Retired Lt. Col. Ralph Peters wrote today,

In the 19 months of the Petraeus era, Iraq evolved from a bloody landscape sliding toward civil war to a land of hope. Urban combat and a literal reign of terror have been replaced by the spreading rule of law, a blossoming economy, LA-quality traffic jams – and the political squabbling that accompanies democracy.

As Petraeus is always the first to note, much remains to be done and much could still go wrong. But every single trend line has turned positive. Al Qaeda’s grip has been broken. (It can still set off bombs, but can no longer set itself up as a champion of Sunni Muslims.) Our troops are coming home at a steady pace. And (dare one say it?) we’re winning.

That last point’s a sore one. Scrupulously avoiding any statement or action that played politics, Petraeus nonetheless changed the terms of our presidential election.

David Ignatius on 20 months in Iraq,

Petraeus did something astonishing here. It wasn’t simply managing the “surge” of U.S. troops, whose precise effects military historians will be debating for years. It was that he restored confidence and purpose for a military that had begun to think, deep down, that this war was unwinnable and unsustainable.

I’m reading Bob Woodward’s new book The War Within. In it, he tells an amazing story about David Petraeus that I had never heard before.

One Saturday morning in September 1991, Petraeus and (Jack) Keane were standing together watching an infantry squad practice assaulting a bunker with live grenades and ammunition. A soldier tripped and fell about 40 yards away and accidentally squeezed the trigger on his rifle. The M-16 round tore trough the “A” over the name tag on the right side of Petraeus’s chest and left a golf ball sized exit wound in his back. If it had hit above the “A” in the “U.S. Army” on his left side, he likely would have died on the spot.

“Dave, you’ve been shot, Keane said as he leaned over his downed colleague. “You know what we’re going to do here. First of all, you’re going to make it, all right?” He kept talking to Petraeus, trying to keep him from slipping into shock. “I want you to stay focused,” he said, clutching the lieutenant colonel’s hand, aware that Petraeus was growing weaker.

“I’m gonna be okay, I’ll stay with it,” he said.

In the local emergency room, a trauma expert shoved a chest tube into Petraeus-an excruciating procedure that makes grown men scream and jolt off the table. Petraeus never moved and let out only a low grunt. “That is the toughest soldier I’ve ever laid my hands on,” the doctor told Keane.

A medivac helicopter flew Petraeus with Keane by his side, 60 miles to Vanderbilt Medical Center in Nashville. Keane had called ahead and requested the best thoracic surgeon available. When they landed on the roof of the hospital, Keane saw a man waiting for them dressed in golf clothes.

“I’m Bill Frist,” said the man who would become majority leader of the U.S. Senate a decade later. “I’m the chief of thoracic surgery here.”

I guess we were lucky to have him in more ways than one.