In high school at Cornwall-on-Hudson, in the late 1960s, they gave David Petraeus the name “Peaches,” because his cheeks were fair and rosy and incapable of sprouting more than a faint aura of soft fuzz, and because he was so resolutely wholesome. Nicknames stick when they capture something essential about a person. “Peaches” would stay with Petraeus through his cadet years at West Point, partly because he never lost that freshness in his appearance, but partly also, one suspects, because the word as slang implies something too fresh and wholesome to be true. It was an early recognition that something about this boy was … well, Petraean.
His father, Sixtus, was not at all like the other dads in Cornwall-on-Hudson, a river town 50 miles north of New York City. He was older than most of them, having fathered David when he was almost 40. His gruff voice, exotic accent, white walrus moustache, and world travels as a merchant-marine captain made him a character to the neighborhood children, who traded stories about him that owed as much to their imaginations as to the truth. One of the general’s childhood friends told me how once, when the Hudson River froze, old Sixtus fired up his V.W. Beetle and wowed everyone in town by driving it boldly across the ice all the way to Bannerman Island—a daring exploit that he said produced deep admiration among himself and his buddies. Petraeus says it never happened—that his father had never driven a car on the river—but that Sixtus had once walked out on the ice to greet the captain of a ship (“captain to captain”) that had gotten stuck in the channel during a cold snap. Some of Petraeus’s other old friends remember Sixtus at his son’s baseball games, high in the bleachers, shouting Dutch-flavored encouragement to his American boy on the pitcher’s mound, calling him “Davey-boy.”
As a boy, Petraeus was more pixie-like than imposing. Small and physically immature for his age all the way through high school, he got up every morning early to deliver the newspaper. He diligently tended to his lessons in school. His old friends remember a boy who kept meticulous notebooks, and who followed instructions. His mother, Miriam Howell Petraeus, was a graduate of Oberlin College and a librarian, and she instilled in her son a lifelong love of reading. At a time when more rebellious teenagers started growing their hair long and dressing with defiant informality, Petraeus was always clean-cut and well groomed. He was not cool. He showed little interest in girls, who remember him as “cute,” in the way girls in the 60s meant the word, which is to say more boyish than manly. He was a very good but not extraordinary student, and a good but not standout athlete. “He was a decent pitcher in Little League,” recalls his old friend Steve Duffy. “He didn’t intimidate anybody, but he got the ball over the plate consistently, which at that level goes pretty far.”
Where Petraeus excelled, of course, was collecting merit badges—affiliations and accomplishments that beefed up his college applications. He was driven. His high-school yearbook shows that he participated in a remarkably long list of activities: team sports (skiing, soccer, and rowing) and clubs for drama, debate, and French. He belonged to the National Honor Society and headed the town’s ecumenical religious youth group.
West Point is about five miles from Cornwall-on-Hudson, and the village was home to many West Point graduates. Some were neighbors and some were his teachers. His Sunday-school teacher was a graduate, as was his soccer coach, who took Petraeus’s high-school team to the county championship—the future general played left wing and was one of the top scorers. The military academy may have also appealed to Petraeus as a way of becoming more like his colorful father, in one sense, and less like him, in another. Sixtus had a heroic, quasi-military story that had ended before David was born, so perhaps that gave the military life some appeal. But West Point would also, in a sense, certify the American-ness of a boy whose cheers from the stands came with a foreign accent. It was also harder to get into than most colleges, with its free tuition and congressional-appointment requirement, so, more than most application processes, it was overtly a competition … enough said.
Petraeus is not given to dwelling on his own life story, and he can no longer remember exactly why he set his sights on the academy. “Growing up with it next door, and with so many graduates, I think you just sort of develop a degree of respect for them, for what the academy stands for, and all the rest of that,” he says. Whatever the reason, in 1970 he entered West Point and discovered a world of constant, formal, head-to-head struggle. He had begun the rest of his life, and, one senses, discovered his own brand of heaven.
“When the cadets start, on the first day of July, the incoming boys all get their heads shaved, and they’re given uniforms, and taught some preliminaries about marching—enough so that by the end of that day their parents can come watch them parade,” says O’Dell. “Many parents hang around to watch, and Miriam and Sixtus did. They were so proud of him. Anyhow, at the end of that first day, with their heads all shaved and all of them wearing the same uniforms and marching the same, it is hard to tell one from the other, which I guess is the point. Well, Miriam spotted one in the line she felt sure was her David, and so she raised her arm and started running along the edge of the formation smiling and waving, trying to get him to look over, and she stepped in a woodchuck hole and went sprawling. She came into the library, where my mother worked, limping and laughing the next day and told us all about it. That’s the kind of lovely person she was, she could get such a laugh going at her own expense! Anyhow, she was mortified. Poor Miriam. She wasn’t concerned at all about herself, she was terrified she had humiliated him.”
It may be the only misstep ever associated with the military career of David Petraeus.
There is a story behind every one of the decorations that adorn his dress uniform. Take that Ranger tab at the top of his left sleeve: Martin “Jay” Joyce was Petraeus’s “Ranger buddy” on the journey to that tab. Today he is a top corporate executive with Procter & Gamble, a man of considerable stature and accomplishment. Like many legends, the one about Petraeus pulling his lagging buddy across the finish line during Ranger training isn’t true, although Joyce admits that in the process of navigating through dark woods one night they may have tied themselves together to keep from getting separated. But as with most legends, inside is a seed of truth, and the seed turns out to be a better story.
Joyce reveres Petraeus. He has one memory in particular of their shared experience that shames him a little, and that has been haunting and inspiring him for nearly four decades.
They were both fresh out of West Point. Joyce had earned both his diploma and commission, while Petraeus, of course, was a “Star Man” and a superstar on every measurable level. Both newly commissioned second lieutenants were accepted into Ranger School, and Joyce was, frankly, daunted. But in what he regards as something akin to divine intervention, he was paired with Petraeus, who was not daunted. Not one bit. In his years at the academy, Peaches had grown up. He had discovered things about himself. He could rapidly master any clearly defined course of study, and he had matured into a superb athlete, not just a decent runner but one with the lungs and legs of a world-class marathoner. Joyce, who was an average athlete at best, has an enduring image of his slender, indefatigable Ranger buddy “75 yards out in front of me, moving and moving and moving, and me struggling to keep up.” Teams who finished an exercise first on a given day or night got bonus points, and, perhaps more critically, got whisked away to barracks for a few extra hours of sleep. If you finished last or fell out, you lost points and lost out on the extra bunk time. In this way, perversely, those lagging grew weaker, while those leading grew stronger. To those struggling, the ones out front appeared to be accelerating away, to be breezing through. Petraeus was breezing.
The ease of his excellence was all the more remarkable when you consider that the pool of talent on an army base is skewed toward physical toughness to begin with. Many young men who enlist do so, in part, because of an impatience or inaptitude for book learning. The military is an option for the rowdiest of young men, the most ambitious of whom are drawn to challenges like Ranger School. College boys are thrown in with the most hard-nosed, hell-bent soldiers in the ranks, and for most it’s an honor just to finish.
Joyce finished, and credits Petraeus for getting him through. The memory that haunts and inspires Joyce stems from one grueling exercise during those nine weeks, a five-mile run in formation, with rifle. It is hard enough to run five miles in formation when you are at your physical limit; doing so with a five-pound weapon cradled in your arms adds considerably to the challenge. On that day, it proved too much for Joyce. He fell further and further behind the formation. Instructors began yelling at him as soon as he failed to keep pace, but after he had fallen far enough back they just wrote him off. The formation, with his friend Dave squarely in place, pulled further and further away. If Joyce fell out completely he would lose more than face. He would lose precious points toward his final score.
After everyone else had given up on him, his Ranger buddy appeared alongside. Petraeus had dropped out of formation and slowed to run alongside his friend, talking to him, cajoling him, urging him to keep on.
“You can do it, Jay!”
“Just stay with me, Jay!’
Joyce was moved by the gesture. He knew the run was relatively easy for his friend. In the legend, Petraeus must drag his buddy; they are required to finish as a team. In reality, Petraeus had no personal stake that day in Joyce’s struggle, beyond simple friendship.
“And he did everything he could to keep me in that run,” says Joyce. “At the end, he was shouting at me, ‘Keep going, Jay!’ ‘You’ve got to finish!’ ‘You can do it!’”
Joyce quit running.
“You know, today I’m in my mid-50s, and I run 15 to 20 miles a week,” he says. “I can’t run at Dave Petraeus’s pace, never could, but I keep at it, and one of the big reasons I do is him. He inspires me. I have a lifelong guilt complex about falling out of that run and disappointing him. Dave is still in my ear every time I run, telling me, ‘You can do it, Jay! Keep on going! Just stay with me!’”
Petraeus’s conquest of Ranger School was just the beginning. At his first real billet, with the 509th Airborne Infantry Battalion, in Vicenza, Italy, his direct supervisor, then Major Keith Nightingale, wrote such a glowing review of his subordinate that he got into trouble. When the official evaluation reached the desk of Nightingale’s commanding officer, an explanation was demanded. The major had predicted, in writing, that Petraeus would one day rise to army chief of staff (the army’s top post). His supervisor told Nightingale, in so many words, that he didn’t know what he was talking about and was unqualified to make such a prediction in an official report. Nightingale wouldn’t budge. The prediction is still there somewhere in the general’s file, buried under a mountain of accolade and promotion.
That mountain is built of triumphs monumental and mundane. Where there was no clear competition for distinction, he found or invented one. In their book The Fourth Star, David Cloud and Greg Jaffe tell how Petraeus, when he was with the 24th Infantry Division at Fort Stewart, Georgia, and after reading that three Rangers had set a new record for running 30 miles from Savannah to the base, recruited other serious runners from his company, “and they blew the Ranger time away, with Petraeus handling the anchor leg.” Company commander Petraeus noticed an infrequently awarded army regulation describing the requirements for earning the Expert Infantry Company streamer for the unit guidon. It required the unit to have 65 percent of its assigned strength earn the Expert Infantryman Badge, awarded to infantrymen who could demonstrate mastery of a dozen soldiering skills, marksmanship, and a hard road march. Though several Ranger companies had earned it in that era, no infantry unit ever had. When Petraeus was done drilling and training his men, just over 65 percent of the company was qualified, and the unit proudly marched behind a new blue streamer flown on their company guidon—an emblem that overnight became a coveted distinction. Over the years, his units won football, basketball (with Petraeus as head coach and the officers as his assistants), cross-country, and Iron Mike championships. To this day, Petraeus grumbles (good-naturedly) about his battalion’s second-place finish in the Fort Campbell chili cook-off. “We had enormous fun,” he says. Indeed, Petraeus stood out to such a degree that he was selected while still a captain to attend the army’s Command & General Staff College, at Fort Leavenworth, a distinction usually accorded only to majors. The youngest and lowest ranked among a thousand officers, he was the top graduate, winning the annual “white-briefcase award.”
Nobody was calling him “Peaches” anymore.
Mark Bowden is a Vanity Fair contributing editor.
