When Bill Frist Saved General Petraeus

Most people know that General David Petraeus is our military commander in Iraq. He might not have survived a 1991 training accident had it not been for a talented heart surgeon named Bill Frist - the same Bill Frist that served as Senate Majority Leader until he left office early this year. The story is on Frist's blog:

I received a number of e-mails this morning asking for more information about Lois Romano’s piece in today’s Washington Post subtitled “Petraeus’s Lifesaver,” which describes emergency surgery I performed on Gen. David Petraeus (now leading our military’s operations in Iraq) for an M16 gunshot wound through his chest.

Three years ago I was standing with Gen. Petraeus on a hot, dusty compound in Iraq where he was leading exercises training young Iraqi soldiers. After observing the young recruits carry out their exercises, he gathered them around as he shared what happened on that fateful day in 1991.

Saturday, September 21, 1991, at “high noon,” as Gen. Petraeus recalls. Karyn and I were with Harrison at a sporting event when I got the trauma call.

“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).”

Small world. The rest of the story is here.