Fact check: Gen. David Petraeus did not author viral essay on serving in the military

McKenzie Sadeghi, USA TODAY
·4 min read
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The claim: Gen. David Petraeus wrote an essay on the decreasing number of people in the U.S. willing to serve in the military

A viral post circulating on Facebook claims to be an essay authored by former CIA director and retired Gen. David Petraeus on the sacrifices and burdens of choosing to serve in the military.

The lengthy text post from September, which has recently resurfaced, claims Petraeus wrote that only 0.45% of the American population has served in the global war on terror and "over time, fewer and fewer people have shouldered more and more of the burden and it is only getting worse."

"The only people who have sacrificed are the veterans and their families. The volunteers. The people who swore an oath to defend this nation. You stand there, deployment after deployment and fight on," the post continues. "You've lost relationships, spent years of your lives in extreme conditions, years apart from kids you'll never get back, and beaten your body in a way that even professional athletes don't understand."

The text ends with Petraeus' name at the bottom of the essay and his purported graduate year of 1974 at the United States Military Academy at West Point.

USA TODAY reached out to the Facebook user for comment.

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Petraeus is not the author

While it's true Petraeus graduated from West Point in 1974, he is not the author of the viral text.

In 2012, Snopes found that versions of the essay were circulating online crediting it to someone named Nick instead of David, and discovered that the post was actually authored by former Army infantry officer Nick Palmisciano, who is now the founder and president of Ranger Up.

"I wrote this essay below, not General David Petraeus, 'A Marine in Iraq,' General Schwarzkopf, any of the wounded warriors it's been attributed to, or anyone else," Palmisciano wrote on Ranger Up.

Palmisciano goes on to explain that he wrote the essay after having a discussion with his chief operating officer and posted it to Ranger Up. Shortly after, it was reposted to the U.S. Army's Facebook page.

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Essay has been previously misattributed

While Palmisciano is correctly attributed in the U.S. Army's Facebook post, he said in the weeks following he began to receive spam letters and incorrect blog posts of people attributing the essay to various people.

"There is an almost universal belief that General Petreaus wrote this," Palmisciano wrote. "I’ve received many emails about how we 'should post it.'”

An editor's note at the top of the essay reads, "Ranger Up’s CEO Nick Palmisciano wrote this article back in August of 2012. A lot has changed in the last five years, and given the current turmoil in our country we thought it was time to dust this piece off and help our fellow veterans remember what it means to be part of the .45%."

Palmisciano also confirmed to Check Your Fact in September that he published the essay on Ranger Up in 2009 and republished it again in 2012 after it started circulating with attribution to Petraeus.

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Our rating: False

The claim that Gen. David Petraeus was the author behind an essay describing the sacrifices of serving in the military is FALSE, based on our research. The text was originally written by Nick Palmisciano and posted online in 2012 on his website Ranger Up. The essay has been misattributed to different people throughout the years.

Our fact-check sources:

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This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Fact check: Gen. David Petraeus did not write viral essay on service