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Monument and back, Petraeus progressively increased the pace until the talk turned to heavy breathing and we reached a six-minute-per-mile pace. It was a signature Petraeus move. I think I passed the test, but I didn’t bother to transcribe the interview. I later learned that, at the time, he was nearing the end of eight and a half weeks of radiation treatments for prostate cancer.
    I intended for my dissertation to trace the key themes—education, experience and the role of key mentors—of Petraeus’s intellectual development and to examine these principles in action over his career. But when President Obama put him in charge of the war in Afghanistan in the summer of 2010, I decided to meld my research with an on-the-ground account of his command in Kabul—his last military command, as it turned out. He would again become the face of a highly unpopular war, with a surge of 33,000 U.S. troops deploying. When his command was announced, Lieutenant General David Rodriguez, the operational commander in Afghanistan and the architect of the war plan, told his staff, “Now we’re going to win.” But the war was at a critical juncture, and many observers both inside and outside the U.S. military weren’t so sure.
    Petraeus had a year to make the gains in Afghanistan that the president would need in order to begin his promised drawdown of forces in July 2011. Every minute counted. He commanded from his fourteen-hundred-person headquarters in Kabul and traveled frequently throughout Afghanistan visiting the more than 150,000 soldiers from forty-nine nations, of which 100,000 were from the United States. By the fall he seemed to hit his stride. But every day in Afghanistan was hard, and no one was certain how it would end.
    This was the story I would report across several months in Afghanistan, observing Petraeus and his team, embedding with combat units, and interviewing dozens of senior officials, officers, soldiers and Afghans. I spent time with infantry, artillery, Special Operations Forces and other military and civilian elements. I reported from the headquarters of the International Security Assistance Force in Kabul, the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan, and the U.S. Embassy. I flew by helicopter to the sandy desert of Helmand Province, the jagged mountains of the Hindu Kush in eastern Afghanistan and Kandahar’s lush Arghandab River Valley. I broke bread with Afghan ministers, businessmen and barefoot villagers. I ate MREs and T-rations in the field with our soldiers, some of whom were my former peers or West Point classmates. I traveled with retired general Jack Keane on a theater-wide assessment in February, and I covered Petraeus’s trips back to Washington for his testimony on the war before Congress, his drawdown discussions with the White House, his confirmation hearing to become director of the CIA and his last week in Kabul. Throughout, I had numerous interviews and innumerable e-mail exchanges with Petraeus and his inner circle.
    Beyond the strategic focus on Petraeus, his intellectual journey and his larger initiatives, this book also chronicles the year of war at the tactical level through the eyes of three battalion commanders in the 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault)—the same division Petraeus had led during the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Lieutenant Colonel David Flynn commanded a repurposed artillery battalion, the “Top Guns,” in the Arghandab River Valley, the Taliban’s home terrain. Lieutenant Colonel J. B. Vowell led his No Slack battalion on large-scale air assaults into the mountains of Kunar Province, in eastern Afghanistan. And Lieutenant Colonel David Fivecoat, my West Point company mate and Petraeus’s aide in Bosnia and during the invasion of Iraq, directed operations in Taliban-infested Ghazni Province in south-central Afghanistan. Finally, the experience of Major Fernando Lujan, a Special Forces officer and specially