This is the story of a man who is equal part's fearless warrior and strategic thinker.

Four years into America's war in Iraq,

congressional leaders were pushing to get us out. Iraq was a disaster

careening toward a catastrophe, but President George W Bush decided to plow ahead. He would

increase spending for the war and add 20,000 troops to the

fight. He would assign a new commander to lead the operation, a commander he believed

had the best chance of devising a new strategy to turn the war around and save Iraq from descending into an inferno.

That commander was David Petraeus. You know there's only one

surge in my military generation's lifetime and I was privileged to be the one

to command it and then to command the height of the operation in Afghanistan.

I have been lucky in many respects and there's no denying that.

Luck and timing do matter in life.

But I also believe that luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity

and I truly tried throughout my life to be prepared for what might ultimately come.

The successes General Petraeus had in Iraq and Afghanistan made him the most admired military leader in the

United States in a generation.

He was a soldier scholar, a national hero with big ideas.

But the truth is big ideas don't hit you on the head like Newton's apple fully formed

if you sit under the right tree.

Rather you get hit by the little kernel of an idea, a seed, and you have to slap it into existence.

It's like building a figure with clay, and it has to be inclusive, I think.

None of us is smarter than all of us together. And you want as many contributing to it as possible for a

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