I will just leave it this way. All right. I dont consider myself a journalist. Nobody else would consider myself a journalist. I began to take on the life of being an interviewer even know i have a day job of running a private equity firm. How do you define leadership . What is it that makes somebody tick . General, thank you very much for coming. General petraeus pleasure, thanks, great to be with you. You served our country for quite david a while. now you are in something you might consider a higher calling of mankind, private equity. [laughter] how do you compare being in the military to being in private equity. General petraeus i am not sure i would root greek i would agree wholeheartedly with that although i feel privileged to to be in the private equity business and also in academia. I think it is pretty hard to top the extraordinary privileges serving ones country in uniform, particularly if you are leading our soldiers, marines come in combat. David you are famous for staying in shape. He told me you already exercised an hour and a half this morning. I do an hour and a half a year. General petraeus we can talk. David you are living in new york right now. When you are in new york, you run around central park . How hard is that . General petraeus 6. 2 miles. David do people recognize you . General petraeus not if you are running. If you wear sunglasses and a hat you can generally run unimpeded and unrecognized if you are wearing a hat. Folks are kind to me walking the streets. Can i just ask though if the veterans in the audience would please stand up so that we can recognize you and thank you for what you have done to our country while you were in uniform. David veterans . [applause] general petraeus david, i have often said that those who served in the post9 11 generation, all of whom are volunteers and raised their right hand and took an oath likely knowing they , would be asked to deploy to a combat zone. I have often described them as americas new greatest generation. Something tom brokaw shouted ears after he heard our soldiers in iraq in the first year in mosul. You saw all that they were doing, myriad tasks from combat to helping rebuild cities that had been damaged during the war. All of these different tasks. He said, you know that world war , ii crowd was the greatest generation. Sure that the men and women we have seen today is americas new greatest generation. I very much believe in that. David lets talk about how you came into the military. Your father was a dutch sea captain and met your mother, from brooklyn, and they met at a Church Service . General petraeus yes. David he later stayed here during world war ii and commanded a marine shift. General petraeus during the war he sailed with u. S. Merchant marine. I think it was in when the nazis 1939 overran holland, they could not back to rotterdam. David you grew up in new york city . General petraeus about 50 miles north of here. About seven miles north of west point. I could actually run home from west point, to and from. David when you were growing up, what was your nickname growing up . Peaches. Etraeus i was in a Little League game in an announcer could not pronounce it. He said it peaches, and it stuck. It followed me all through my time at west point. There was a girl in the laundry who had been a High School Friend of mine, doing that is a doing that as a summer job. She would send me notes, and the laundry you would send once a week to someone in class and opened up and it said dear peaches, so it jumped to west point. David how did you get appointed to west point . You seem like you are qualified and a good athlete. Somebody had to call a member of congress to get you in. General petraeus you just make an application, right to your congressman and the congressman rights you in. It is a competitive process. David suppose you hadnt gotten in, where would you have gone to college if you had not done it . General petraeus colgate. David you ever thought about how your life would be different . General petraeus at the end of two years and west point, we had this pic spectacular summer where i was in alaska, mountain climbing, glaciers, rivers, so forth. First in a Training Course as an and then with an actual unit. This is our summer training and then i went down to los angeles and a friend of mine who lived in the hills over there overlooking los angeles had such an extraordinary experience i decided should i really go back to west point for the remaining years or should i enjoy more of this . In the end, i went back, obviously. David at west point, did you play on the soccer team . General petraeus i was on the soccer team and a skier. David when you graduated, did you decide you wanted to make the military your career . General petraeus i just wasnt sure. What was interesting was of all things at west point i was in the premed program. I love that particular body of academic inquiry. I think it was also that it was the highest academic peak to scale. It was sort of known as the toughest and all the sudden i found myself in the senior year with an actual slot in the program and i realized at that time i was an absolutely certain i wanted to be a doctor, i just wanted to kind of climb that mountain so i picked infantry instead. I had a wonderful, wonderful experience. David you got married a few weeks after you graduated to the daughter of the commandant of west point. General petraeus superintendent is the overarching guy. Threestar general. It was a strange blind date i must say, when i found out. David but it wasnt nerveracking dating the superintendents daughter . Was in that kind of complicated . General petraeus we tried to do it clandestinely for a while and i took a lot of flak over that. There is a potential particular generals marched they play at parades and one of my classmates we were a little way away from the crowd and one of my classmates would sing my soninlaw, my soninlaw. So i took a little flak. David you graduated and went into the infantry, working your way up, and there were two incidents that occurred where you almost lost your life. Not in combat. General petraeus there was a pretty aggressive live fire exercise, live grenades, supporting machinegun fire and all the rest of that. We were following, in fact general keaton, the one star general and the vice chief of staff of the army fourstar was with me when we were walking behind the soldiers. One of them knocked out a bunker, spun out, tripped, fell down, and we think as he did he probably squeezed because you tense up when you are about to take a blow and a m16 round went through my chest. A inly it went over the petraeus rather than the a in army. The medics start working on you and initially, shock set in. They get an iv running, aircraft in, pick me up, held my hand the general keane held my hand the whole way. They took me to the hospital. In fact, it had nicked an artery but not severed it. If it severed it, you would be that he would bleed out and you are finished very quickly. It is one of the times when someone turned to me and the doctor said this is really going to hurt and he took a scalpel and cut an x in my side right down my lives ribs shoved a , plastic tube and my lung to try and get that out. Trying to get suction and get the fluid out and that is what saved my life. I was put back in a helicopter and flown back to vanderbilt medical center. Of all people, they called in the surgeon on call that day was dr. Bill frist and he came in later the majority leader of the senate and some people were jokingly said yeah trias was dying to meet bill frist raeus was dying to meet bill frist, and so you did. David and you did 50 pushups, 100 pushups to show them that you could get out of the hospital earlier . General petraeus thats the only time i stopped at [laughter] 50. David ive never gotten to 50. General petraeus i wanted to get out of there. Things were fine, there was no reason to keep hanging around. I was doing laps around the hospital. I put all my tubes in a wheelchair and push them around. I think it was driving them crazy. David the other incident was you were skydiving and your parachute didnt quite work and you broke your pelvis. What is that like . General petraeus that was actually worse in terms of pain because it fractured front and rear. Your body is literally in two parts. Anything that touches i wrote an ambulance rode an ambulance, and every crack in the street, not just a bump, was agony. David did you ever skydive after that . General petraeus i was told by the army, general keane, in fact, who was then a fourstar who said no more skydiving and i said, ok, you give me a Division Command and i will quit skydiving. David so they gave you a command. General petraeus and i was very privileged. David and you had never had anyone who were killed directly under you working in combat. General petraeus it was a chilling experience. I remember the call and it takes the wind out of you. David david you had a number of important jobs in the military, but then the decision was made by president bush to invade iraq and you became a commander there and you went over there as the first part of the military going into that. That went into that. It was supposed to be relatively quick. When did you realize this wasnt going to be as easy as we had thought . General petraeus first of all, in a matter of weeks we did actually topple the regime, although there was stiffer fighting along the way in various points and certainly was predicted by a variety of different folks tired to the invasion, which was that the iraqi units were going to surrender and come over to our side and help us establish order did not prove out. There was tough fighting along the way and i had this nagging sense early on, probably certainly in the first week, once the dust storm blew through and i had rick atkinson, a Washington Post reporter ride in the back of my rbn i remember turning to him at one point and asking him, tell me how this ends, because i am not sure this is going to according to script. The idea of toppling saddam and his sons and some henchmen and then every one will stay in place and build a political negotiation and we will hand it over to them, obviously proved. David do you think it would have been different if we had not decided to get rid of the entire saddam army . Gen. Petraeus these were huge general petraeus these were huge mistakes. We had a question on the Operation Center wall when i was a Division Commander and it asked will this Operation Take more bad guys off the street than it creates by misconduct . The same is true of policies. Firing in the military without telling them what their purpose was, which means you are taking tens of thousands of people, and there is no reconciliation process agreed. You have just created tens of thousands of people whose incentive is to oppose the new iraq rather than support that. David and you led the effort to get control of mosul. General petraeus we were in baghdad, which is where we were told we would end up and all the sudden we got this emergency order to get up to mosul, it is out of control, there was a small unit and there had been 17 civilians killed responding to a riot. Within about 36 hours, we did one of the biggest air assaults in history. 250 helicopters or so. Blanketedimmediately the city with our soldiers, literally pushed right into the city, calm the down, stop the looting and the rest of that and gradually took control of that and then we actually had an interim government out there within two weeks of arriving. David early on in the war it was thought that shock and all was all that would be shock and awe was all that would be necessary. General petraeus that didnt completely succeed. I think it did impose a little folksut there were some certainly fighting and we had casualties and lost heavy equipment. David when president bush decided to invade iraq, part of it was the theory that they had weapons of mass destruction. That came from the cia and other places. When you became the head of the cia, did you ever dig into it . General petraeus i didnt dig into that as much as i dug into other issues such as the enhanced interrogation use of enhanced interrogation techniques, something which i am personally opposed for two reasons. I think it is wrong. I think it is beyond, what you will, the International Law and geneva convention. Number two is i do not think it is as effective as proponents believe it is. Jim mattis said give me a beer and a cigarette and i will get more information than by waterboarding him. Its not quite that simple, but simply, it would be that you want to become the detainees best friend in detention than the interrogator does. The commander who oversaw the holding of more detainees in iraq than at any other time. 27,000. We have some experience with what works and treating them humanely while still eliciting information from them is the way to go about it and the most in afghanistan before. David you never before had people working directly that were killed in combat. What was it like to have command of people who were dying . General petraeus it is a chilling experience actually. I remember the radio call when our first soldier was killed and it takes the wind out of you. I remember hearing a sister unit, the Third Infantry Division which really spearheaded the fight along with the Marine Division up in baghdad on the ground with tanks , i remember the radio call. I was monitoring their net because we were fighting together and hearing that they had had a couple of heavy vehicles blown up. It is chilling. David you were there for how long before you were sent back to the states . General petraeus it was about a yearlong deployment and i was back for a couple of months and asked to go back over quickly for an assessment for few weeks iraqie command of the Security Force effort. I reported back to secretary rumsfeld and he said great report, now go back and change out of your division and do what you recommended we do. David have you thought that if you hadnt written such a good report you wouldnt have been sent back . General petraeus secretary rumsfeld had an interesting way of giving rewards. Was 15 and a half months and the final week or so he was literally patting me on the back. I thought, this is really nice of him and he said, you know, on the way home, i want you to come through afghanistan. I said, thats not exactly the direct line between two points here, but we did an assessment over there on the way home actually. David president obama calls you into the oval office and says i would like you to give up Central Command and go back and be a military commander in afghanistan. What did you think about that . General petraeus if the president calls on you and asks you to do something, you do it. David you didnt say let me think about it, give me a few minutes . You dont do that. General petraeus no. David you finished your second tour of duty in iraq and went back to the United States. General petraeus and then we had six months in leavenworth, it is really quite an extraordinary command. We really revamped the whole process of preparing units, leaders tond their go to iraq and afghanistan. We did the counterinsurgency field manual which is the intellectual foundation for that. David you wrote a very good report you oversaw the , counterinsurgency manual, it was so good that people said maybe this person should be in charge of the counterinsurgency efforts. You are asked by president bush to go back and lead the surge. When he said, i would like to go lead the surge and you said i have already served two tours of duty in iraq and i dont want to need to go back a third time . General petraeus you said it would be a privilege to do that and its the same thing i said president obama sent me down a a few years later. With no pleasantries and no one else in the room except the photographer he said i am asking you as your commander in chief to go to afghanistan, take command of the International Security assistance force. I think the only answer at a time like that can be yes. David i didnt understand at the time, how many troops did we have in iraq at that time . General petraeus we had about that weres. Soldiers there, marines, coalition had some tens of thousands of additional and then we added about 25,000 to additional 30,000 forces during the surge. I would just point out and i am sure there are some surge veterans in here that would validate this, the surge that matter the most was not the surge of forces, but the surgeon surge in ideas. It was the change in strategy, complete change. It was a 180 degrees shift from consolidating on big bases in getting out of the faces of the iraqi people to going back to living in the neighborhoods because that is the only way you can secure them. Realizing that you cannot kill or capture your way out of industrialstrength insurgency. You have to reconcile with as many as you can from handing off to iraqi escalating level of sources that couldnt handle the escalating level of violence after the bombing in february of 2006 to actually taking back over. We created 77 additional locations just in the baghdad divisional area of responsibility alone during the course of the surge. David so we had about 140,000 american troops. We sent over an additional 25,000 to 30000 and that was enough given the techniques you used to bring it to a stable position, relatively speaking. General petraeus it dramatically reduced violence. It was reduced by some 80 85 during the course of a 18 month period. David after 18 months you came back . General petraeus i came back about 19. 5 months after that and went back to central. David u. S. Central command is in charge of military operations in the middle east. General petraeus it is the countries from egypt in the west to pakistan in the east, kazakhstan in the north and yemen and the pirate infested waters off salon somali to the south. We were very proud to have 90 of the worlds problems at the time. David after you have this command, somebody gets to rise up to be the chairman of the Army Joint Chiefs of staff. You were kind of rising up, and then one day, president obama calls you into the oval office and says i would like you to give up the Central Command and go back to be a military commander in afghanistan. What you think about that . General petraeus if the president calls and asks you to do something david you didnt , i think you did it. David you didnt say let me think about it, give me a few minutes . General petraeus no, the only answer to a question like that can be yes. I will say that in that case and actually prior, it was actually secretary gates was the one who called me. I was actually on leave, it was the last time