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"FacebookPinterest\n\nprecisely ten days before he finally gets to leave Iraq\u2014\"ten days out,\" as the military types put it, ten more days as the man in charge of a war he didn't start but was somehow supposed to fix\u2014General David Petraeus rises, like always, before the sun comes up over Baghdad. It's a bloody hot morning in September, and it's a Saturday, but that doesn't mean much, because when you're David Petraeus, the days are all the same: You work eighteen-plus hours, seven days a week, you pretend it's not 130 degrees out, you put your fatigues on, and you go run the war.\n\nBut first he has to rise. And take in his surroundings. For the past twenty months, he's lived (with his army of security guards) in one of Saddam's weird old palaces. With Saddam's weird old furniture. (The plastic chandeliers, the tacky pink chintz, the everything\u2014down to the toilet-paper holders\u2014trimmed in gold paint.) Most of Saddam's palaces have been repurposed by the U.S. military, but the over-the-top tchotchkes remain. And Petraeus's crib is no exception. His is the one on the lake, the one Saddam supposedly built \"in honor\" of his mother, and it looks it. It's hard to imagine a guy like Petraeus\u2014whose closet is filled with identical, perfectly pressed camouflage outfits\u2014waking up every day to all this pink and gold stuff. But he finds it amusing. \"Yeah,\" says Petraeus, chuckling. \"With all that Louie Farouk.\" (Louie Farouk: It's a play on Louis Vuitton, a little joke that Petraeus cribbed from the underlings.) He even kind of likes the plastic chandeliers. \"I come from Cornwall on Hudson, New York,\" he says. \"We think this is pretty awesome stuff! I mean, you couldn't buy this in a flea market, I don't think.\"\n\nIn any event, on this particular morning, he still manages to be out the palace door at the ungodly hour of five, when the only light in the sky is from bombs\u2014i.e., incoming mortars\u2014bursting in air. He likes to get in his 5.6-mile run when the temperature is only 100 degrees, instead of the 120-plus that comes later in the day. And he likes to drag people with him, too, mess with them a little. Hey, kid, think you can outrun a 56-year-old general One of the many things you hear about David Petraeus\u2014or \"P4\" (for Petraeus Four-Star), as the lowly troops call him-\u2014is that few souls have ever been able to keep up with him on his run. And for good reason: He clocks six-and-a-half-minute miles, and he has no pity.\n\nThe only thing worse than getting dragged out for a run is having P4 ask you to do push-ups with him. He'll point at some poor slob on his way to the cafeteria or something and, without warning, order him to drop and do a hundred! With the general. Basically, if you are one of the chosen ones, you are screwed. P4 can do a hundred push-ups per minute. \"I've personally only ever seen one person beat him in push-ups,\" says Colonel Steve Boylan, P4's communications man, who travels with him everywhere, hands him his earplugs, speaks for him when necessary, but is a pretty decent guy. \"It was a sergeant first class out on one of the battlefield circulations.\" Hot out that day \"Not bad,\" Colonel Steve says. \"About 125 degrees.\"\n\nToday, after his run, Petraeus will be heading out on his final battlefield circulation as Commanding General of the war in Iraq. What this means, briefly: We will spend ten hours crammed into Ospreys, Black Hawks, and armored vehicles, which will fling us to various parts of Iraq, where we'll trek across long stretches of desert so Petraeus can do his thing. He loves these battlefield circulations. He takes great pleasure in surprise-attacking his troops. Likes to check in on them, buck them up, see how the progress is going, ask them questions (\"What have you learned\") and thank them for their service to the country (\"And tell your wife I said thank you, too\"). He will also meet with an assortment of Iraqis\u2014sheiks, mayors, border guards\u2014mostly to assure them that he will still care, even when he's gone. A few will look like they're going to cry, shaking his hand for the last time. (\"He's like family,\" an Iraqi general will tell me.) He'll head out to remote installations, eat spaghetti and meatballs with Marines in a desert tent, sip tea with an Iraqi mayor as men with machine guns guard the door, and wander over to the Syrian border to check out the new X-ray machine.\n\nAnd he will do all this without so much as a flak jacket. There is perhaps no riper target on earth than a four-star general in Iraq, but Petraeus often insists on the no-flak-jacket thing. It drives his security guys nuts. This morning at his daily Battle\n\nUpdate Assessment with several dozen U.S. and Iraqi leaders, he repeated his favorite mantra: \"The best way to protect the people is to live with the people.\" And you can't really live with the people if you're walking around in a Kevlar vest, now can you His aides relented, of course.\n\nA great many people have come around to Petraeus's way of thinking. \"He had a vision,\" says Sergeant Major Marvin Hill, one of P4's closest colleagues. He knew when he got here, says Hill, that the only way to win this war was to \"live among the people.\" That was his genius. As impolitic as the idea of nation building was at the time, Petraeus was able to change the attitudes\u2014not only in Iraq, but back in Washington. He was always part general, part politician. And he knew in his gut that his strategy would work. \"Because you can't kill 'em all,\" says Hill. \"You can't shoot your way out, you can't kill your way out, of an insurgency. You just can't. You have to find other kinds of ammunition, and it's not always a bullet.\"\n\nIt is still early morning when our first mode of transport\u2014a V-22 Osprey, that freaky, $65 million blue bird that takes off and lands like a helicopter but flies like a plane\u2014is finally ready to take off. Everyone\u2014his aides, a few bodyguards, the pilots, the gunner who hangs off the edge of the wide-open end of the aircraft with his .30-caliber machine gun\u2014is harnessed in, helmets on, waiting for him. He crosses the tarmac, breezes in, gives a little wave, and takes a seat between the pilots up front, lest he miss anything on the flyover. And then we're up, rather abruptly, and the general is strapped in and smiling. He keeps smiling as the Osprey hits 320 miles an hour and he gazes out the cockpit windows over the roiling mess he was sent here to fix. If the engine noise weren't earth-shattering and we didn't all have orange sponges in our ears, we might ask him why he's smiling. But it's almost unnecessary. When you're with Petraeus, you have this weird feeling that everything is Just Fine and Dandy, even in a war. He has that effect on you.\n\nLate one afternoon, a few days before the battlefield circulation, P4 opens the door to his office in the Green Zone, extends a hand, flashes a big smile, and invites me in. \"I'm doin' great!\" he says. \"How are you Come in! We want you to sit right over here.\" (\"We\" would be him and Colonel Steve.) He's pointing to a black couch. There's nothing fancy in his office, nothing gilded, nothing showy\u2014he doesn't even have the obligatory Wall of Awards and Photographs of Me with Famous People. The most prominent things in the room are three computer screens on his desk (he likes to multitask)\u2026and a huge jar of pretzels.\n\n\"Is that a good Italian name\" he wants to know, as he leads me to the couch.\n\nIt is a good Italian name, I say.\n\n\"Yeah,\" he says, pulling up a chair. \"Are you a northeasterner by any chance\"\n\nI tell him no, my parents were from southern Italy. Naples.\n\n\"But where in the United States\"\n\nAh. Well, that would be Scranton, Pennsylvania. Sir. \u00A0\n\n\"Scranton, Pennsylvania!__\" he says, clearly amused.\n\nHome of Joe Biden, I say.\n\n\"Oh,\" says Petraeus. (It is not an exuberant Oh.)\n\n\"That's off the record!\" pipes up Colonel Steve.\n\nOh is off the record\n\nPetraeus laughs. And promptly changes the subject. (P4, of course, abides by the code: no politics, not even during chitchat. He says he hasn't voted in more than six years, since becoming a two-star.) \"Want any coffee How's your jet lag\"\n\nHe is sitting in his chair now, legs crossed, looking tempted to put his right boot on the coffee table but thinking better of it. In person he's smaller than you'd think (officially ve feet nine), but like most great men, he acts tall. And the physique, even in the baggy camouflage: Let's just say it would be impressive even if you didn't know he'd shattered his pelvis (in a skydiving accident, when his parachute didn't work) or been shot in the chest (when a soldier in his command accidentally tripped and his rifle discharged). Talk about shit happening.\n\nOn his lap is a little clipboard holding a sheet of paper with my name on top.\n\nYou got talking points for me\n\n\"I do!\" says Petraeus, who never stops looking you in the eye. \"Here, see What they do is, they put their hand on my back and they make my lips work.\" He chuckles. \"That's why you can talk to Steve later and it's just like talking to me!\" Steve nods. Petraeus reaches over and pours me a coffee.\n\nTo be honest, I was a little worried when I walked in here that we'd end up doing another one of Petraeus's \"exit interviews.\" Not that they're not fascinating, not that he doesn't have interesting things to say, but we got it already: The surge has mostly worked, he'll never declare victory, he'll leave the timetable stuff to the next president, he's excited about his new job as head of CentCom, he can't wait to get cracking in Afghanistan, etc.\n\nHe laughs when I bring up the exit interviews. \"You could probably do them at this point,\" he says.\n\nLet's just talk about you, then, I say. You know, personally.\n\n\"Okay!\" he says.\n\nOkay\n\n\"Sure. What's your sign\"\n\nDid General Petraeus just ask me what my sign is Like an idiot, I tell him. Is he really into astrology\n\nHe laughs, hard. \"I don't even know what mine is,\" he says. \"I'm only funning you.\"\n\nColonel Steve pipes up. \"That's how the whole surge worked. It was astrology!\"\n\n\"It's late in the day here, you know\" says Petraeus.\n\nFor the next couple of hours, he puts the clipboard down and tries to explain how David Petraeus, who as a kid was known as Peaches\u2014seriously, he was that sweet\u2014turned out to be the right man at the right time in the wrong war.\n\nHe starts by talking about his father, Sixtus Petraeus, who passed away six months ago at the age of 92. Petraeus couldn't even leave Iraq to bury him. (As he puts it, \"Our soldiers make all the same sacrifices.\") Sixtus was a Dutch sea captain who came to the U.S. at the start of World War II, \"when Holland was overrun. He was at sea, and they couldn't go back to Rotterdam, so they went to New York.\" He was \"a stubborn, independent Dutchman\" who was both extraordinarily proud of his only son and a strict disciplinarian who pushed him to the limit. \"I was raised by the kind of father who if his son could do twenty pull-ups, he wanted you to do twenty-one. There were, you know, no excuses. I mean, there was a phrase he actually used: 'Results, boy.' \"\n\nSixtus settled in the town of Cornwall on Hudson, where David was born and raised\u2014five miles from West Point. It seemed that everyone he came in contact with as a kid\u2014his math teacher, his soccer coach, even his Sunday-school teacher\u2014was either active-duty or retired military. He was in awe of these men and their calling, \"the standards, the traditions, the\u2026all of it,\" he says. It was no surprise that he went to West Point, though his mother, a gentle soul who \"was very much into literature and books\" and would take her son on yearly pilgrimages to Walden Pond in Massachusetts, \"to put yet another stone on Thoreau's home site,\" would have preferred that he \"go study poetry or something like that.\"\n\nHe was at West Point through the end of the Vietnam War, '70 to '74, which was, he admits, \"sort of a cloistered existence. I mean, we followed what was going on. We got The New York Times every morning. But it was certainly not like being on a civilian campus. I mean, obviously, West Point was not the scene of demonstrations.\"\n\nDo you feel you missed out on anything\n\n\"Well, we tried to make up for it on occasion.\" He laughs. \"You know, we all bought sports cars\"\u2014somehow, that's not what I meant\u2014\"and, you know, did wild things at various times.\"\n\nPerhaps the \"wildest\" thing was when he ended up dating the daughter of the superintendent (who also happened to be a three-star, soon to be four-star general named William Knowlton) of West Point. Or \"the Supe's daughter,\" as she was known. Knowlton was a man you didn't want to mess with. \"There were two types of cadets at West Point,\" P4 says. \"The majority would cross the street if they saw her coming, because nobody wants to be accused of trying to date the boss's daughter. And then there was another subset of cadets who'd fall all over themselves to date the boss's daughter.\"\n\nAnd where were you on the continuum\n\n\"I was, uh\u2026surprised.\"\n\nThe first date happened through a fix-up\u2014by an officer's wife who liked to hook up young, handsome cadets. Petraeus got a call one day asking if he'd be willing to \"escort\" a young lady to the next West Point football game. Long story short, this young lady was the Supe's daughter.\n\nP4 remembers picking Holly Knowlton up at the side door of her parents' house and being gobsmacked\u2014\"All she had to do was just snap her fingers\"\u2014but he kept his cool. \"I thought she was very pretty and a very nice girl. But she's still the Supe's daughter.\" That didn't stop him, however, from taking her out for a couple pops after the game.\n\nYou took the Supe's daughter to bars\n\n\"Taverns,\" Petraeus corrects me. \"We were going to take her back and drop her off.\" Right. He laughs. I glance over at Colonel Steve, who has a dumbstruck look on his face. Like, what's with all the touchy-feely stuff I'm expecting him to interrupt any minute now, try to steer the conversation back to the surge, but he just smiles. Tightly. The boss is clearly relishing the telling of this story, which ends with them \"beating our way back\" to West Point before curfew and Petraeus thinking, Well, gosh, maybe I might want to see her again.\n\nAnd\n\n\"We tried to keep it under the radar, because of course all my buddies were sort of razzing me a little bit.\"\n\nHe got more than razzed a little bit, actually. A few of his fellow classmates and rivals sniped then\u2014as they have ever since\u2014that his courtship of Holly Knowlton was just the first example of his relentless ambition, part of the perfect arc traced by the calculating golden boy from West Point, who'd go on to Princeton (for a Ph.D. in international relations) and Georgetown (for a military fellowship) and basically had P4 written all over him at an early age. (The sniping also includes the petty gripe that none of his injuries were suffered in combat.) But Petraeus is not the least bit fazed by criticism. Results, boy.\n\nBy all accounts, Holly is his rock. When I asked people whose counsel he seeks first, especially in times of trouble, the answer was Holly. She \"gets it,\" they told me. Being both the daughter and the wife of a four-star is, not to put too fine a point on it, a solitary life. There have been years, literally years, that have gone by where P4 was lucky to see his wife once every sixteen months. You pretty much miss everything, particularly with your kids. \"You know, you never get those years back, obviously,\" he says. \"She is\u2014you know the recruiting slogan 'Army Strong' Well, she's Army Strong.\"\n\nThey have two children: a 25-year-old daughter, Anne, who recently moved to Europe to teach English, and a younger son, Stephen, a senior at MIT who called up his father one day two years ago to say he was joining ROTC. P4 always thought his son would be some big engineer in Silicon Valley. He was studying computer engineering and Chinese at MIT\u2026and now wanted to jump out of airplanes \"I said, 'Call your mother,' \" Petraeus sighs. \"I'm very, very proud, but this truly was\u2026a surprise.\" He worries about the pressure on the kid, he says, \"starting off life in uniform with a couple of extra rocks in his rucksack. Petraeus is not a common name.\"\n\nHis friends say one of P4's proudest moments was when he got to see his son \"get his wings,\" a ceremony that happened to coincide with his returning to the States to give his highly charged testimony (remember \"General Betray Us\") before Congress in September '07. Three days before, his son was going to be making his \"fifth jump\" in Fort Benning, Georgia, \"which is what you do to earn your wings. I was very tempted to jump with him.\" He laughs. \"But I had a slight moment of maturity.\" With his testimony before Congress looming, \"I thought, This is probably not a time to throw caution to the wind.\" At his son's ceremony, he got to pin his father-in-law's wings on Stephen's chest, and he told his friends he almost broke down. \"That was very special,\" he says, getting a little misty.\n\nAt this point, my tape recorder shuts off.\n\n\"Your tape clipped,\" says Colonel Steve.\n\nPetraeus looks down on my ancient excuse for a tape recorder. He has a stunned expression. \"We've got to get her into the digital age!\" he says to Steve.\n\nI sheepishly try to explain. Well, see, I'm a technological idiot, and I didn't want to try any new gadgets out on you, and\u2026\n\n\"Scranton, Pennsylvania!\" says P4.\n\nI do have this other one in my bag.\u2026\n\n\"Well, that's good,\" he says. \"You're getting there.\" An encouraging thumbs-up. \"It's a brave new world!\"\n\nTape rolling again, we return to his son. Petraeus realizes that Stephen could be in Iraq soon, and of course, he's acutely aware of what that means. I had been told by many of his colleagues that Petraeus goes out of his way to attend the memorial ceremonies for fallen soldiers, after the body has been sent back home and all that is left are the devastating symbols: as he describes them, \"the rifle upside down with the Kevlar and the boots, and the dog tags hanging from the rifle, and we salute it.\u2026\" They say he has an unusual ability to temper stoicism with compassion. \"Occasionally, I mean, you just flat have emotions, and there is a point at which you can't hide them,\" he says. \"Sometimes people say, 'Do you get hardened to casualties' And the answer is, You do not. You do not. At least, I do not. You never...\" It's hard to explain how moving these ceremonies are, says Petraeus.\n\n\"I'll show you something,\" he says. \"Steve, tee it up.\" He wants to show me a little movie that was made by his soldiers during his first hellish year in Iraq, 2003, when he was head of the 101st Airborne in Mosul. It's a slickly produced highlight reel, Petraeus's Greatest Hits.\n\nSteve tees it up.\n\n\"Let's sit over here,\" says Petraeus, moving closer for a better view of the screen. It starts with blasting music.\n\nIs this\u2026\"In the Air Tonight\"\n\n\"I like Phil Collins,\" says Petraeus.\n\nA testosterone-heavy voice on the tape intones \"RENDEZVOUS WITH DESSSS-TINY\u2026\" but Petraeus begins his own narration for me. \"Okay, this is the deployment,\" he says. \"We went over with, you know, eighteen, twenty thousand soldiers, 5,000 vehicles, 250 helicopters, thousands of containers.\u2026 That's me [doing push-ups].\u2026 Here we're in the camps out in the desert, getting ready to go.\u2026 That was a little incoming rocket attack.\u2026\"\n\nP4 doesn't want me to miss a second of this. The man is pumped. He's got his pointer out. \"Here we go into the desert!\u2026 This is another air assault, I think the city of Karbala, which is another holy city. We liberated the two holiest cities in Shia Islam, actually.\u2026 These are Iraqi ammunition caches that we kept finding everywhere. We found one in every single school in Najaf. Hundreds of them\u2026\"\n\nYou look so\u2026young.\n\n\"Yeah, I feel like it was 1,000 years ago.\u2026 Isn't that a nice haircut My wife loved that haircut. It's the Bert-and-Ernie look.\u2026 Okay, this is the election, the first election in Iraq. Those are the ballot bos.\u2026 This is a big water-pumping station. I flipped the switch to get that going again.\u2026 Oh! This is when we killed Uday and Qusay!\" On the screen, a close-up shot of the actual bombing of the house Saddam's sons were in. \"Watch! Look at that!\"\n\nWow, I say. That's the actual shots\n\n\"That's it!\" he says. He's so excited, I think he may be bouncing a little bit.\n\nThen the Phil Collins stops and taps starts playing. The mood changes. This is what he wanted to show me. Petraeus is on-screen now, delivering a eulogy for a fallen commander at one of those battlefield memorials. \"How we deal with adversity defines who we are and what we're made of,\" he is saying. \"We want to find meaning and purpose in such a loss,\" he is saying. \"Above all, we want to answer the question: What good will come from this\"\n\nThe picture fades out, but taps keeps playing. He's silent for a while, and then he speaks. \"Our soldiers,\" he says. \"You can see 'em. They've been through a war.\" His voice breaks.\n\nColonel Steve pops the disc out, and P4 returns to his straight-backed chair.\n\nSo, how do you deal with the loss\n\n\"You don't.\" A pause. \"I mean, how do people get through any loss You put your head down and drive on.\u2026\"\n\nEarlier he had told me that his darkest moment in Iraq was the night two helicopters crashed over Mosul, killing seventeen of his men. Picking through that wreckage was the single most horrific night of his military career, he said. So I wondered what the best moment was. \"There was a day in February,\" he says, \"when we happened to be out walking through a market\" in Baghdad, an area \"where there are micro fault lines between Sunni and Shia,\" where they had had \"horrific violence. You have to remember, at the height of the sectarian violence, there were fifty-five bodies a night turning up on the streets of Baghdad. Just from sectarian violence. This was an area that was heavily damaged by that. One of the areas in which we took tough losses early on.\" But there he was, walking through the market. \"They had gotten the situation under control. Started getting Iraqi forces helping out more and more. They fostered reconciliation between Sunni and Shia. They started getting families coming back. And then markets revived, basic services slowly restored, schools opened. And all of a sudden, you had a pretty decent situation.\u2026 We walked through the market, and we saw a soccer game and watched it for a while. And right in the middle of that, we got a call on the cell phone, from the speaker of the Council of Representatives, their Parliament, and he said, 'We just passed three laws.' Not one, not two, but three!\" He's beaming. \"That was a pretty special moment. That was one of those moments where you feel as if\u2026'This is working.'\n\n\"But,\" he says, crossing his boots, \"we're not doing any declarations\u2014there's no victory dances in the end zone, there's no high-filing going on, the champagne's been pushed to the back of the refrigerator and all that.\u2026 Because again, while there has been very, very significant progress\u2014I mean, when you go from 180 attacks a day to twenty-five attacks a day now\u2014we're still taking losses. There's still too much violence.\" And everything is still, as he likes to put it, \"fragile.\" He uses that word a lot.\n\n\"I'm cautious about the situation now. Has there been significant, substantial progress Absolutely. I mean there is no one, I think, who would say anything but there has been substantial progress. Virtually everything is down by 80 percent. Attacks, civilian casualties, coalition casualties\u2014you name it, it's all much reduced. Having said that, Al Qaeda remains lethal and dangerous. It's an enemy to be respected, not in the sense of respecting its extremism or indiscriminate violence or barbaric activity, but respected as an enemy that does adapt and learn and is resilient.\n\n \"So I say that it is fragile. It is less fragile than when I said that to Congress in April. But it is not self-sustaining. It's not what we call 'irreversible.' \"\n\nI ask him about what was probably his biggest strategic decision: How did he ever convince anyone that building these communities was a better use of energy than fighting and killing\n\n\"Well, I would sort of think it was intuitively obvious. To be truthful\u2026strategic leaders make big decisions at times. And at my level, in the first year and very early on, a huge decision was to say, 'We are going to do nation building.' I know that we as a country didn't think the military should get into nation building and all this. But very early on, we decided in the 101st that we're gonna do it. We're gonna run an election. We need Iraqi partners. We need help carrying this heavy rucksack. And oh, by the way, they know a lot more about how their country is supposed to work than we do. We went from being, you know, warriors to builders. From soldiers to statesmen, I guess.\"\n\nHow will we know when we've won\n\n\"I think what you know is when you're making progress. I'll leave won and victory and that kind of stuff to other people.\"\n\nTwenty-eight minutes after the Osprey takes off, we land\u2014rather abruptly\u2014in the town of Al Qaim, near the Syrian border. Our plane kicks up a stinging sandstorm, and the temperature is 120 degrees. But there's Petraeus, heading across the desert like he's strolling along the beach in Malibu. Throughout the course of his visit, he'll not just play general; he'll play diplomat, trade expert, de facto president, pal.\n\nOur first stop is the POE\u2014the port of entry between Syria and Iraq\u2014where a smattering of soldiers and Iraqi officials await P4's arrival. To get there, we are loaded into a convoy of MRAPs, the new thirty-ton, million-dollar vehicles that look like Humvees but are built to withstand IEDs. As we bounce across the desert in our bulletproof vests, Petraeus, sans Kevlar, is busy yakking with the drivers. Where you from How ya doin' What have you learned \n\nThe crowd waiting for P4 is psyched. Even the guys with guns can't help smiling. I have heard countless times during my week in Iraq\u2014from U.S. soldiers, mind you\u2014that Petraeus is \"a rock star.\" (It wasn't quite that way at first, when he first took charge and told the troops they would now have to be \"nation builders\" and go live with the Iraqi people.) His secretary says soldiers constantly e-mail, often asking for an autograph or a picture. (That Petraeus answers these e-mails is a whole other thing.) There were so many requests that they started staging regular photo ops. At his last session, a few days before the battlefield circulation, he posed for 1,050 photographs. In an hour.\n\nPetraeus strides up to the POE. \"Salaam alaikum,\" he says to a group of Iraqi officials. He's learned a bit of the language, even listens to Arabic music nowadays. He seems to know the name of every local official\u2014and to pronounce it correctly. One of the few times he ever shows a flash of anger, I've been told, is when one of his troops mispronounces the name of an Iraqi city. How can you protect the people\u2014or respect the people\u2014if you can't pronounce Fallujah\n\n\"So, is this where they check your passport\" he says. \"Very nice. How are things in Syria\"\n\n\"It's better in Baghdad,\" says one Iraqi.\n\n\"Better in Baghdad\" says Petraeus. \"Say that louder, I have a journalist with me!\"\n\nNext he moves on to a group of Marines. \"Where did you guys come from How many tours have you had in Iraq Family Wife Kids Any lessons you learned on this tour so far\" One Marine tells him there's been a bit of a problem with Syria. \"There hasn't been quite the revival in trade yet that we expected,\" he says.\n\n\"I'm a little baffled at that,\" says Petraeus. \"It's obviously in the Syrians' interest to do that.\" He thinks for a minute. \"Dig into that one for me. There's a political reason in there somewhere that you can figure out.\" Yes, sir!\n\nP4 then decides that he'd like to walk to the actual border and see things for himself. \"C'mon here, walk with us!\" he says. With the mayor of Al Qaim and the Iraqi director of the POE in tow, he treks right up to the huge billboard of President al-Assad. The Iraqi guards click their heels and salute. He checks out their new X-ray machine. He asks why trade hasn't returned to the levels it was four years ago. Through an interpreter, the guard explains that all kinds of \"bad stuff\" has been going on. \"The Syrians aren't cooperating,\" and, in fact, he just had heart surgery. \"Oh, you did Well, are you feeling better now Feel like you're ten years younger Good.\" So what's going on at the border The guard tells him, \"They want to punish us because we kicked Al Qaeda out.\" \"I'll take this back to Baghdad,\" says Petraeus, \"and make sure the prime minister is aware of it.\" He turns to the mayor of Al Qaim: \"And you need to stop smoking.\"\n\nAs he marches back to his MRAP to head off to his next destination, the mayor asks him to please stay. \"Come inside and have tea,\" he says through his interpreter. \"Oh, I don't think we're doing tea today,\" says Petraeus. \"It's Ramadan. I don't want you to violate Ramadan.\" But the mayor insists. \"They have issues they want to talk to you about,\" says the interpreter. Well, then.\n\nHe enters the mayor's office, a showy affair with the obligatory flower spray on the coffee table and about two dozen ashtrays scattered about. The mayor wants Petraeus to sit in his chair, behind his desk, but Petraeus demurs and sits on the couch.\n\nOne of their concerns, it turns out, is that Al Qaim hasn't gotten its share of $50 million in funds that's supposed to be trickling down to the provinces. Petraeus is on top of this. \"Good, that's an easy one. What else can we do for you\"\n\nWell, they've been trying to meet with some sheik over in Syria about this border-problem thing\u2014you know, the trade issue. \"We went through the diplomatic channels,\" they explain.\n\n\"Call him on the phone!\" says Petraeus.\n\nThe interpreter explains: \"They don't have his phone number.\"\n\n\"Aw, no, no, no, no, no,\" says P4. \"I'm not buyin' that. You can nd his telephone number.\"\n\nThe mayor and the border guy crack up.\n\n\"Tell him General Petraeus ordered you to do it. Blame it on me!\" In fact, he says, \"Why don't you invite him over for an Iftar dinner\"\n\n\"Inshallah,\" says the mayor.\n\n\"Not inshallah. Do it!\" says Petraeus.\n\nTea is served.\n\nThere's more border talk\u2014\"We might as well put the smugglers on the payroll,\" says Petraeus\u2014and then he's asking how their children are, and then it's time to go. The men look crushed, but P4 assures them: He may be gone, but he won't be gone. As a parting gift, he gives each of them one of his coins with the flag of Iraq on it\u2014a ceremonial thing in a fancy box that is quite an honor to receive. The men are still smiling as Petraeus jumps back into his MRAP. \"You sort of have to know these guys,\" he says.\n\nAnd then he is back in the Osprey\u2014\"On to Ramadi!\" he orders the pilots\u2014headed for a meeting in a cement building with the governor of Anbar and Sheik Ahmed, the head of the Awakening movement. \"Even as he was saying good-bye,\" the governor reports afterward, \"he was still continuing to provide support.\" \"He is a man of his word,\" adds the sheik, solemnly.\n\n\"To see these two guys together and happy is really something,\" Petraeus will say later.\n\nIt's almost sunset when P4 boards his last mode of transport\u2014Bird 1, a.k.a. \"Petraeus's bird.\" When he climbs on, he whips out his laptop and puts his reading glasses on. (He has e-mails to answer.) Then we are off the ground. And Petraeus has his feet up on the seat across from him, gazing out the window at his handiwork.\n\n\"Look at that bridge! See that bridge We used to have checkpoints on both sides. See all the fuel trucks See that soccer eld down there\"\n\nWe are flying over Fallujah.\n\n\"This is pretty dramatic,\" he says. \"Look at the street signs! And there's a water-treatment plant. Over there. Everything was damaged here. The battle of 2004, I think, was the bloodiest battle we had in Iraq.\n\n\"Look at that park! Holy moly! Did you see that park It's gorgeous!\n\n\"There's the new hospital. Look at that! Is that gorgeous\n\n\"And solar lighting.\n\n\"Look at this nice fountain right there!\"\n\nNow he tells the pilot to \"spin back around,\" so we can see it all again.\n\nHe wants to stay in the bird. But Colonel Steve reminds him that he has dinner with the British ambassador.\n\n\"See that bridge That bridge was completely blown up by Al Qaeda and rebuilt by the Iraqis. And look\u2026\" He wants to point out the restaurants by the river in Baghdad. He's been to a few, likes to go to the teahouses and get falafel kebobs. \"I can walk right down Main Street with no Kevlar.\"\n\nSuddenly, there's a ery shot across the sky.\n\nDon't worry, he says, \"that's just flares going off. It's not coming at us. This is a water park over here!\"\n\nThe pilot turns hard toward Baghdad. The ambassador is waiting.\n\nShucks, says Petraeus. He was really hoping he could take us to a market. One of his favorite things, he says, is walking through the markets\u2014there were no markets when we were bombing this place\u2014and talk to the people. Oh, and buy bread. \"They have the best bread.\" He's quiet for a moment as the Black Hawk touches down. \"I'm gonna miss that bread.\"\n\nlisa depaulo is a  gq correspondent__."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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