Edited for brevity
Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist was at Fort Campbell Tuesday to meet with commanding general Maj. Gen. David H. Petraeus and personally thank him -- and the 101st Airborne Division -- for a job well done in Iraq. The division was responsible for about 5,000 projects while they were deployed. The division officially returned home Saturday, even though about 3,000 soldiers are still in Kuwait. They are scheduled to come back to Fort Campbell through March.
But Tuesday’s meeting wasn’t the first for the senator and the general. The two have a long-standing history that started 12 years ago, when Frist saved Petraeus’ life. In 1991, Petraeus was shot with an M-16 rifle round in the left side of his chest during a training accident at Fort Campbell, where he was a battalion commander with the 187th Infantry Regiment. Frist, then a heart surgeon at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, operated on a badly bleeding Petraeus to remove the bullet. The two Princeton University graduates have since remained friends and have spoken to each other or written e-mails regularly while Petraeus was deployed to the Middle East. At different times, the two attended the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton, and in October 2002 they ran the Army 10-miler together in Washington. Petraeus quickly disappeared in the crowd ahead of Frist and ran about a 7-minute mile, despite a parachute accident that had fractured his pelvis several years ago. |