No one could have imagined that one-day Nasution would become an army leader. Compared to his friends, he is small and thin. The only sport he does daily is running because the distance from his house to school is quite far.
Nasution often read heroic and war stories, ultimately giving rise to different ideals from most of his friends then. The only picture his father displayed as a wall decoration was of Mustafa Kemal Pasha, a Turkish leader from the military (Nasution, 1982:11). However, this does not mean that his father expected Nasution to become a soldier. Later, when his parents discovered their son had entered the Dutch military academy, he was considered a lost child (Nasution, 1982:47).