In 2000, his parachute failed.
In 2000, Petraeus suffered his second major injury, when, during a civilian skydiving jump, his parachute collapsed at low altitude due to a hook turn, resulting in a hard landing that broke his pelvis.
Source: Wikipedia.
The American Conservative blog has a snide, snarky post on their “Post Right” blog by Jack Ross arguing Joe Scarborough — not Gen. David Petraeus — is the better and more probable candidate of the two. If you recall, a recent Politico article featured both as potential 2012 candidates.
Ross argues that Petraeus was once favored by neo-cons, but no longer,
[T]hey also talk up the tragic David Petraeus, not even as a sop to the neocons, who are totally over him, but to one-foot-in-the-graver Bob Dole.
To substantiate his point that the “tragic” Petraeus was a candidate favored by the neocons, Ross links to an old American Conservative article, “Sycophant Savior,” that looks rather shabby in retrospect.
Essentially, Andrew Bacevich argues in “Sycophant Savior” that not only was the situation in Iraq (in October 2007) not improving, but that Petraeus had squandered a major chance to build on any political momentum there was at the time to ask for more troops, who could have successfully pacified Iraq.
We know now that Petraeus largely did pacify Iraq. We know now that Petraeus is the Ben Bernanke of the Iraq war — the perfect man for the job who was able to rely on his unique training to turn the situation around. It’s not that Petraeus turned Iraq into a glistening modern liberal democracy — that was always a pipe dream. But he took his counterinsurgency training — which he literally wrote the book for — and dramatically decreased sectarian violence in that country.