Interesting diarist by Bill Frist on the day he performed surgery on the general:

“Dr. Frist, we have a Life Flight helicopter coming in from Ft. Campbell with a gunshot wound to the chest. A chest tube has been placed, but there’s continued hemorrhaging.” That meant get to the hospital . . . surgery would likely be necessary. I rushed to Vanderbilt Hospital to be in the trauma unit before the helicopter arrived in the event we had to go straight to surgery. After quickly evaluating the soldier (who I learned had been accidentally shot in a training exercise), we went straight to the operating room to perform the thoracotomy and stop the hemorrhaging from the lung. Gen. Petraeus – in his usual good humor – today describes the wound as “damage done by the M16 round that went right through my right chest — happily over the ‘A’ in PETRAEUS rather than over the ‘A’ in U.S. ARMY (as the latter is over my heart).” Gunshot wounds to the chest are not at all uncommon at a busy trauma unit like Vanderbilt, but I knew this patient was a little different when he said so quickly, “If we’ve got a problem that needs to be fixed, let’s get on with it!” Little did I know that same attitude would be at play in the world arena 16 years later. The straightforward decisiveness and call for action with results – traits we see from Gen. Petraeus so often today – reared their head in those few moments of conversation we had before I began to operate.