Seth Moulton graduated from Harvard College with a degree in physics in 2001, and gave the undergraduate address at commencement. He did two tours in Iraq as a Marine platoon commander, in the invasion and in the 2004 Battle of Najaf, and also worked with the independent Iraqi media. In 2005 he served as a liaison to senior Iraqi military and political leaders south of Baghdad for General Petraeus. After leaving active duty in 2006, he was accepted into a joint degree program at Harvard’s Business and Kennedy Schools, and then returned to Iraq in 2007 to serve again as a Special Assistant to General Petraeus, doing counter-insurgency advising through the summer of 2008.  In the summer of 2009, he was embedded with Marines in Helmand Province, Afghanistan, as a reporter for Dan Rather.