Transcript
Brett McKay:
Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the AoM Podcast. When Mark Hertling learned he was deploying for Operation Desert Storm, he decided to start a journal. Back then, Mark was an army major and cavalry officer with two young sons. His unit would be out in front of the main force, and during an intelligence briefing, he was told it could suffer casualties as high as 50%. Mark realized there’s a real chance he might not come home, so he began writing down what he was experiencing along with the lessons about life, leadership, and character that he wanted his boys to know if he wasn’t there to teach them himself. Mark did come home and he went on to serve 38 years in the Army, including as an assistant division commander in Baghdad, and later commanded the first armored division in Iraq during the 2007-2008 surge before finishing his career as a commander of US Army Europe.
Decades later, that wartime journal became the basis for his new book, If I Don’t Return. Today on the show, retired three-star general Mark Hertling and I talk about the reflections it contains on making everyday count, planning for friction, marriage and friendship, handwritten notes, casual profanity, the moral weight of war, and what it means to build a man. After the show is over, check out our show notes at aom.is/return.
All right, General Mark Hertling, welcome to the show.
Mark Hertling:
Thank you. It’s great to be with you.
Brett McKay:
So you got a book out called If I Don’t Return, and this book is based on a journal that you started while you were a major in the army cavalry during Operation Desert Storm, and it was a journal for your sons. So why did you start this journal during Operation Desert Storm for your boys?
Mark Hertling:
Well, now that that’s over 40 years ago that it happened, it’s interesting because one of the things that not many people know is that we were told that we would be deploying via television. I got a call in Germany. We were all stationed in Germany at the time and our unit was, and got a call saying, “Hey, watch TV tonight. The Secretary of Defense is going to be on giving a message.” And we didn’t know what the message was. We knew that there had been forces in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. The 82nd Airborne had deployed over there in their quick reaction force, but they had been there since August and we didn’t know what this announcement was about. Well, we tuned in and Secretary Cheney and General Powell were on and they said that they were going to send the seventh corps of the United States Army, which was based in Germany at the time after the Cold War still, and they were going to send them to Saudi Arabia to reinforce the 82nd Airborne Division and to continue to persuade Saddam Hussein to pull out of Kuwait.
That shocked, as you can imagine, all of us that were listening. So there was a flurry of phone calls that night between the squadron commander, a lieutenant colonel, and myself. I was the operations officer as what they call the S3 in a cavalry squadron. We were immediately told that we would go the next morning to get an intelligence brief on what was happening. We went to the division headquarters the next morning, and during the intelligence brief, there was not a whole lot of information in terms of what we were going to do or what people anticipated would happen. But they did know that if there was any kind of offensive operation that our cavalry squadron, which the mission of the cavalry is to be out front of the fighters and use our eyes and ears to find the enemy and then turn them over to the armored battalions and the infantry battalions and the artillery.
So we knew we would be out front. And the division intelligence officer said because 11CAV is going to be out front, they’re probably going to suffer up to 50% casualties. And that was stated openly in the meeting. So other staff sections could do things like the personnel officer could say, okay, we’ve got to reinforce them with more people and the logistics officers would start their planning to provide more logistics to us. But it shocked all of us in the cab, as you can imagine. We went back to our headquarters and I started thinking, holy smokes, I’ve never seen war before, unlike this current generation. This was the first time I was going to go into a real fight as opposed to just a training exercise. And I started thinking about what that meant not just for me, but for our families. And we had two young sons.
Our oldest son was 10, name is Todd. The youngest son was Scott. He was seven at the time. My thought was if I’m one of those 50% that suffer a casualty and perhaps even die, who is going to help my wife raise those kids? Not only is she going to be a widow, but there are going to be two young boys who don’t have a role model. I decided at that point to start writing a journal when I got to the desert and just tell them about life before a war and then life during a war and life after the war if I was lucky enough to survive. And that’s how it all started. That’s a very long story, Brett.
Brett McKay:
So you did return, right? So you wrote this journal thinking like, okay, I might not make it.
Mark Hertling:
Yeah, that’s the spoiler alert to the book. I did return.
Brett McKay:
Yeah, right. So what happened to the journal until now when you published it?
Mark Hertling:
Well, our two boys, when I returned, it was eight months later. It wasn’t a couple years, I wasn’t dead. And they were still their same ages of 10 and seven. So they were not interested in reading the musings of their father or the deep thoughts of their dad while he was away. They just wanted to play ball and play with their Legos with me and stuff like that. So I kind of threw the journal into a foot locker. Now, both of our sons and one of our daughters-in-law became soldiers later on, and they knew about the book. I think both of them had read it as they got older, but I didn’t think either one of them had really paid a whole lot of attention to it. It was just something in my past until Christmas morning of 2024. And what happened was our youngest son and his boys were visiting us on Christmas in that timeframe.
And after we had the big debacle of a normal Christmas of opening presents and being half asleep because our grandsons woke up too early and those kind of things, he came up to me with a box when everybody else was done. And he said, “Dad, this one’s just for you.” I opened it up and what it was is he had taken the journal and turned it into a Word document. He had typed it up, which in and of itself was a difficult task because my handwriting is terrible. And he got a large percentage of it exactly right. There were some words that he couldn’t decipher, but he had turned this into a manuscript and inserted pictures that he had found that were not iPhone photos. They were old Polaroids and pictures from people with throwaway cameras that provided photographs during the operation. And he put them all in a context of a manuscript.
But then what he said after I thumbed through it and got very emotional and all the sights and smells and sounds of the desert started coming back, he said, “Dad, my brother and I knew what you were trying to do. You were trying to prepare us in case you didn’t come home. And now you have five grandsons. So you’ve got to continue your journey from 1991 to today because you stayed in the army, you did a whole lot more things, you went to war a couple of more times, and you have a lot more knowledge about the things you wrote about in the book. So take those subjects and expand them for your grandchildren.”
Brett McKay:
And that’s what you did with this book.
Mark Hertling:
And that’s what I did. And truthfully, Brett, I think when he gave it to me and asked me to do that, he knows what kind of guy I am. I’m a huge procrastinator and he likely thought I wasn’t going to do it, but I did and I surprised him six months later and sent it to him. And he was impressed by it and thought it was very emotional and that we should publish it as opposed to just leaving it for the family.
Brett McKay:
Yeah. I love this book because as you said, you basically, it’s a journal of your whole entire time in Operation Desert Storm. And so you’re telling your kids the day-to-day of what’s going on, but as you said throughout, you’re weaving in these lessons that you want to impart to them. And it reminded me, have you seen that Michael Keaton film, My Life?
Mark Hertling:
Yes.
Brett McKay:
Yeah. Right. So for those who aren’t familiar, it says 1993 Michael Keaton film. Every time I watch it, I just bawl my eyes out, but he plays this guy who gets diagnosed with kidney cancer, but then his wife’s pregnant. And so he decides, “Well, I’m not going to make it for my son, so I got to create all these videos on how to tie a tie and how to deal with girls.” This project reminded me of that film.
Mark Hertling:
Yeah. But I tell you, I think it struck me as I was writing it that it was more than that. It was also a history of not just our family, but also of our army, the wars we were fighting in, our country to a degree, the lessons that I had learned about leadership from just experiencing it to studying it and then later teaching it, the other kinds of jobs that I had in my life that applied things I had learned in the military like healthcare and being an analyst for a cable TV station and working with others in a hospital. So it was an evolution of not just thoughts about that war, which came so early in my life and which could have affected our family significantly, but it was really a compilation of growth and lessons that you can teach. That’s the thing that I thought was really amazing because.
And first of all, you talk about the Michael Keaton film. I get teared up every time I watch it as well. And Brett, I will tell you in writing this book, there were incredible moments of emotional breakdowns, not just from the remembrances of some of the tragedies and the chaos that were part of that initial combat tour, but also bringing back some of the memories and the chaos of other tours in combat, but also just life events as well and realizing how I wish I had reflected more and thought about life in a different way and really compiled things. That’s one of the lessons I’m trying to teach. I teach at a business school to MBA students, and that’s one of the things I’m asking them to do is to keep a journal and to look back on it and to see how your growth is occurring and how you are developing as a human being.
And it shouldn’t just be in terms of promotions or successes, it should be in understanding who you are as a human being.
Brett McKay:
Alright, so let’s dig into some of your journal entries. And like I said, what I love about this book is that you made entries on everything from day-to-day stuff, like what are MREs, these are meals ready to eat, but they’re also deeper stuff. And one of the first entries in that deeper category is on friendship. And you said in it that friendship would be a recurring theme in the journal. Why start with friendship in a journal for your boys?
Mark Hertling:
Well, because I personally believe that’s one of the more important life benefits is having a friend. And again, I’m going back to my MBA and healthcare roots, knowing that there are even research studies out there that say people who have good friends and who recognize the importance of friendship live a longer and healthier life, which is interesting. There was a Harvard study on that, that was a longitudinal hundred year study that really showed the value of relationships and friendships, but also to perhaps tell them don’t get too disappointed in your friends if they do something that upsets you, because you can find friendship sometimes means understanding other people’s foibles and forgiving them for that. So all the things that I wrote about friendship as a, I guess I was 33 or 34 years old when I wrote the original journal, were all the musings of a relatively young man who wasn’t even in middle age at that point.
And what I found as life went on, when I did the reflections on the journal entries in the book, it really showed the importance and the value of something like friendship.
Brett McKay:
In that chapter, you talk about the difference between an acquaintance and a friend. What do you think makes a friend a friend? What separates a friend from an acquaintance?
Mark Hertling:
It’s someone who will see you at your worst and at your best and accept you for both and that you do the same for them. It’s someone who doesn’t have to ask to be there when you need help. They just show up.
Brett McKay:
One of your entries was short and you basically just said, “Not much happened today, typical day.” But the reflections about this entry 30 years later when you were writing this book, they actually went really deep and it was one of my favorite chapters. Basically the point you’re trying to make is the typical days are often the most important days in our lives. Why is that? And why did you want to share a typical day with your sons?
Mark Hertling:
Yeah, it was to show them that don’t waste anything. Don’t waste a day when you think you have nothing going on. I mean, today is a perfect example for me. I was looking forward to this phone call and this podcast with you at two o’clock, and I literally had a blank calendar for the first time in two weeks. And then suddenly all hell started turning loose this morning where I started getting calls from people and people wanted to link up and everything. And it turned into my wife, I just talked to my wife on the phone because she’s with our grandkids right now and she said, “What have you been doing today? You had an off day.” And I said, “No, not so much.” And I started outlining the list and it just goes to show that whenever you think nothing is happening, there’s always something happening.
There’s always someone going through joy, great joy, which I had today with a friend who had a baby, great trouble. Our daughter-in-law’s father is sick right now and she’s going through a bad time worried about him, but all of those things compound something that might otherwise be a simple day if you just kind of pull your head up and look around you and see what’s happening.
Brett McKay:
Yeah. I like that. Make every day count.
Mark Hertling:
That in fact is my favorite chapter, the make every day count, make it matter. And don’t count the days, make every day count, right?
Brett McKay:
Do you have any practices that you do to make every day count?
Mark Hertling:
I do. I have a box on my desk, the make it matter box actually it’s called because that’s what’s engraved on the top of it. A couple of us have it. My boss and my best friend, General Dempsey, Marty Dempsey retired. General Mike Sciaparotti retired. The three of us have this box and it has pictures of all the individuals who served with us in Iraq or Afghanistan who were killed in action. And every day, my first thing in the morning when I come down from the bedroom, I go to that box and pick two or three cards out. And these were young men and women who were killed in action over two decades ago in some cases, and yet they remain forever young in that box. And I just reflect on them on a daily basis. And the intent is to make their life matter, to make sure that they’re not forgotten, that they gave their life for our country, they gave their life for what we asked them to give their life for.
So I think it’s important to remember them. And that’s one of the routines of my daily basis on my daily calendar. The other one is always exercising in one way or another. The other one is praying and the other one is trying to make a new friend every day.
Brett McKay:
Those are great. Yeah, the make it matter, that reminds me of Saving Private Ryan, right? Earn it.
Mark Hertling:
Earn it. Exactly right.
Brett McKay:
And those practices that you have of exercising, praying, making a friend, you do those every day consistently, you’re going to have a pretty good life and it’ll set you up for when things really do hit the fan. You’ll have sort of the wherewithal to take care of it.
Mark Hertling:
Yeah. If I can share one other thing, which my wife and I have just started to do, we’re in kind of a neat neighborhood. We’ve got all kinds of diversity here, young people, old people, people with kids and college students and all that other stuff. And there’s this one house that we saw when we first moved here that has a little chalkboard out front and it’s a single mom that lives there. And every day she writes on the chalkboard some kind of saying to perk people up. I mean, there’s always a happy thought in this chalkboard. So about two weeks ago, we started doing the same thing. We bought a chalkboard and my wife is responsible every day for writing something on that, that as people walk by the house, they see it and it puts either a smile on their face or it causes them to reflect a little bit about what kind of day they’re having.
She hasn’t been home for the last three days because as I said, she’s been with our grandkids in DC. And I refuse to write on that because that’s her task. But it was funny because yesterday one of our neighbors came up and said, Hey, what’s the deal? Where’s the chalkboard out front? And I had to tell her, and they were trying to persuade me to do it and I refused to take that task on. That’s my wife’s task and she’s going to continue to do that.
Brett McKay:
So speaking of your wife, in your journal, you talk about things like why you married her and what sort of things to look for in a spouse. So what sort of dating and marriage advice did you give your boys in this century?
Mark Hertling:
Oh gosh. Well, as young men, I guess, this is probably going to sound sexist, but as young men, lust usually drives the experience. And I think what I tried to say to a 10-year-old and a seven-year-old, I didn’t use the term lust, but I think I said look for things other than physical attraction. Look for friendship. I mean, I went back to the chapter on friendship. Look for someone who you will support and who will support you in all conditions. Look at someone who doesn’t look at a marriage as something fifty fifty, but is actually 80 / 20, and it depends on the day who gets the 80 and who gets the 20, but also just someone that you can relate to and that you love having conversation with. And my wife and I have been married now 51 years and we still have a daily happy hour on the front porch with our chalkboard and we talk about the date and it’s always a surprise.
Brett McKay:
Yeah. Something that Nietzsche said that I think a lot about is that marriage is a long conversation and I found that to be true in my own marriage. So you wrote this original entry in 1991, so you were married, what, maybe 10 years at that point?
Mark Hertling:
15 years.
Brett McKay:
15 years. So now 50 years, what else have you learned about marriage since you wrote that entry?
Mark Hertling:
Oh, to always, this is going to sound sexist too, to always let her be right. No, that’s not true. But to understand the communication more than anything else, open communication is probably the most important part of marriage. You have to tell the other person what you’re feeling. You can’t hold back. There can’t be any guardrails in terms of expressing your feelings, your emotions, your thoughts. And if there’s any young couples listening to this podcast, and I’m sure there will be, and if you have young children, find a way to renew your date nights. Date night has become sort of a trite expression, and we feel that the date night is so important to young parents, especially, or young married people, is we started giving $100 a month to both our son and their wives and saying, “Hey, this is for you to get away from your kids and just go out and have a date. And we’re not going to give you next month’s installment until you tell us what you use this month for so you don’t use it on a bill that you have to pay or something like that. It is to sustain the relationship between the two of you because we think that’s important.”
Brett McKay:
Yeah, that’s really cool.
So you had an entry where you go into some detail about the plans of attack for admission to your son, as much as you could, some of this stuff is confidential, and you even drew some diagrams for them. What were you hoping to convey to your boys with this entry?
Mark Hertling:
Well, the book goes from preparing for war to actually conducting the war, the combat. And I think I was trying to portray to them how challenging it was that combat is not as simple as a lot of people think it is. It’s a mirror of challenges for individuals. It’s controlled chaos. And while we didn’t have video games back during Desert Storm, well, I guess we did. It was the beginning of, I guess, the Pac-Man era in 1991. There wasn’t the kind of video games we have now where things are sanitized and it’s easy, and if you die, you’ll just turn the game back on and come back to life. That’s what I was trying to portray, that when a nation decides to go to war, it better be very important. And people that ask soldiers to go to war better understand the implications of that combat operations and how things might not always go as planned.
That’s sort of what I was trying to portray, but also there was a lot of emphasis on what we were doing to train and prepare because it just doesn’t happen. I think a lot of Americans believe there’s a magical equation that says, okay, we’re going to send our people to war and everything’s going to go just right. And they don’t consider the amount of preparation that military forces have to have. So I wanted them to understand that too, that it is a difficult profession with a lot of challenges. They shouldn’t just take it for granted what we were doing.
Brett McKay:
And then also what I took from that chapter as well, that entry, was just about the importance of planning just in general. And one of the things I appreciate about reading military memoirs or accounts from military history is just how much planning goes into something like that. Something like D-Day or something like Operation Desert Storm. Planning is just such a big part of military culture.
Mark Hertling:
I do a drill with my MBA students because we talk about strategy, business strategy in the course. And what I do is I show them the message that Eisenhower received from Marshall to start planning the D-Day operations. And the message is a very simple one paragraph message. It was a telegraph that he received and it basically said, “You are to enter the continent of Europe and defeat the Nazi war machine.” That was his mission. And he didn’t come back to Marshall and said, “How many people are you giving me? Do you want me to go in through France or Southern France or the caucuses? Do you want me to have a lot of airplanes? You want me to do an airborne assault?” He planned all that and it took him months to do it. And even at the very end as the more recent movie, if you haven’t seen it, Pressure points out, all of those plans were about to go awry because there was a storm system coming in and he had to make some hard calls.
Yeah, the military does an awful lot of planning, not just for what they think they’re going to do, but something they call branches and sequels for things that they plan to do that might go wrong and how do you recover from it and mitigate risk and do something else instead. It’s a difficult life and that’s why there are so many schools for those in the military to not only learn about leadership, but also learn how to conduct operations in the right way.
Brett McKay:
There’s that quote from Eisenhower. I think it’s something like, “Plans are useless, but planning is everything.” How have you used those planning principles in your career after the military?
Mark Hertling:
Oh my gosh. One of my jobs when I was a brand new one-star general, it was the first time I ever went to the Pentagon, first and last time I ever went to the Pentagon for a job. And I was on the joint staff as the chief of war plans. I arrived there in August of 2001, and it was supposed to be a sleepy little job, basically maintaining our contingency plans and doing transformation of the force and doing exercises. And as you can imagine from the date I just gave you in August 2001, things changed dramatically within the first four weeks I was there where war plans became very important. The requirements for understanding contingencies and taking the assumptions that you make before having to do an operation and continuing to question those assumptions to see if they’re correct or not are vitally important for success.
And you also have to have a feel for what might happen, and you war game that out before you conduct an operation. So that’s the importance of planning. And when you don’t do it right, in my old profession of the military, people die.
Brett McKay:
So planning, it’s not just thinking about here’s the thing that we’re going to do if everything goes according to the assumptions we have, but also thinking about the contingencies is an important part of planning, stuff that could go wrong.
Mark Hertling:
Exactly.
Brett McKay:
Well, speaking of strategy, you also talk about the military thinker Car von Klauswitz to your boys. They’re 10 and seven. So for those who are familiar with Klauswitz, who was he and what ideas were you trying to convey to your boys from him?
Mark Hertling:
Well, Carl Van Klauswitz was a Prussian colonel who wrote about Napoleon and he wrote a book called On War. It was written in the 1800s and it was considered at the time, and it’s still considered at the time because it is a lot of combat theory as the preeminent approach to what you need to consider between politics and war, conducting defense, offense, how intelligence is fleeting in warfare and how you can’t depend on any kind of intelligence you get without proving it, the personalities of people and how they play. I mean, there’s a million different subjects that are in this couple of hundred page book. And I guess the reason I was talking about it, to be honest with you, is I had attended in 1988 a course that had just started at the Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, and it was a one-year course called the School of Advanced Military Studies.
And what they did at that course is they took a group of 48 individuals, all majors, and gave them an additional year of staff work doing nothing but dissecting history, theory, military theories and operations, as well as conducting exercises in a war gaming approach. So Klaus Witz was the centerpiece of this one-year course. And I had just graduated in 1988, I guess it was, before I went to Europe and became a planner at the division headquarters. And it was right before I went down to become the Cowboy Squadron S3. So that’s the long history of it. But what was important, the group of those who had gone to Sam’s were considered by many to be the masters of what happened in Desert Storm and why it was such a great operation. And in fact, the New York Times called this group of planners Jedi Knights after the movie at the time.
And it was a revolution in military affairs because these planners basically went back to the book and took some lessons and applied them to modern warfare, and it contributed to an extremely successful operation called Desert Storm. There’s an expression that we were taught the first day of that class in 1987 when I started was, “If you want a new idea, you got to read an old book.” And we read a book a day for an entire year and then talked about it the next day in class.
Brett McKay:
Yeah. I love On War. Even as a civilian, I think there’s a lot people can get from it. I mean, one of the ideas that I got from him that I still think about a lot is this idea of friction. He said this, “Everything in war is very simple, but the simplest thing is difficult. The difficulties accumulate and end by producing the kind of friction that is inconceivable unless one has experienced war.” So he just basically goes on talking about, “Yeah, you have this plan and it looks really easy, but then there’s all this stuff you didn’t think about that just starts mucking things up like, okay, the supplies didn’t get here. Well, why didn’t supplies get here? Well, this thing happened down the chain.” And I’m sure people who weren’t in the military, just civilians, they’ve experienced that. It’s like, “I got this project I want to do at my house. Why is it so hard to get this thing done? Why am I going back to Home Depot over and over again to get this thing done?”
Mark Hertling:
That’s my life, by the way, right there. But yeah, that’s a great quote, by the way. And we spent a couple of days addressing that quote. There are a couple of books on various battles, one called the Battle of Duffers Drift, which is about the Bore wars I recall in Africa. But there was another one written about even our training center in California. It was called the Battle of Hill 871 or 781 or something like that. And it talked about how no matter how many times you trained in this specific battle, even if one thing in each different battle went wrong, it would cause you to lose the battle. And it was a dynamic that friction description that Klauswitz uses, what we talked about as we were describing that in our class way back in 1988 was putting a grain of sand in a cog and how it can screw up.
And that’s what friction really is, how it can screw up the machinery. And if you pour a whole bag of sand in that, which are the accumulated faults of various soldiers doing something wrong on the battlefield, it will really cause your machine to stop. And that’s what Klauswitz describes as friction.
Brett McKay:
And his solution was you just have to account for it. You can’t plan for everything to be frictionless.
Mark Hertling:
Right. You have to put more grease in the machine or clean it out every once in a while or maybe make a list before you go to Home Depot to try and do that household repair, right?
Brett McKay:
So you had some entries about more concrete things and one of those was just about handwritten notes.
Mark Hertling:
That one became more important as the years went on because it was all about receiving letters and how important those were to the soldiers when, and none of your young listeners are going to understand this, when something called mail call happened at the squadron operation center. That’s when the big bag of mail came in and soldiers names were read off because they received a letter from their loved ones or something. And that was probably the most important day of the week when you got mail. Well, now you get text messages and emails and DMs, direct messaging, but those don’t last. And what I’ve told my MBA students, what I’ve told my soldiers is if you want something to last, write it down on a piece of paper. And that has become, I believe, a lost art. It is something that someone can hold onto. If it has a little perfume or aftershave on it, you can smell it and it brings back memories, which really drive the thought process.
It is something you could hold onto in a desk drawer. My mother-in-law died a few years ago and when we were cleaning out her apartment, we found two boxes of letters under her bed from her husband in World War II, and they were in sequential order. And I’m sure that she was either reading those or thinking about those, but those were the only things under her bed and one of the few things left in her apartment. You don’t get that when you write an email or a text message. You can’t keep that or hold onto it. And even in business, if you’re in business somewhere and your boss puts a note on your desk, says, “Boy, you really did a great job in that project the other day, and I was really proud of the way you handled our competitors on that,” you’ll find those people tacking that up to their wall.
You can’t do that with an email or a text message.
Brett McKay:
Do you still write handwritten notes?
Mark Hertling:
Every single day. Yes, I do. In fact, my buddy, General Marty Dempsey, who I mentioned before, when he was chairman of the Joint Chiefs, he and I feel the same way about this. And he told me a story one time I did not know. And he said that every day when he was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff back in the 2012, 2014 timeframe, he would write a note a day to an arbitrary service member. And what he would have would be the sergeants, majors, or the senior enlisted advisor of each one of the services in the Pentagon would come to his office on a daily basis with a story about a soldier, if it was the army, in their force or a Marine who had done something unique or an airman. And he would sit down and write a one page note on Joint Chiefs of Staff Stationary and give it to the senior enlisted guy and say, “Get this to the guy.”
And he was telling me a story about one time it went out to this kid, the sailor on a submarine, and it took it about two months to get the letter to him, but he finally got it and he opened it up and he read this note saying, “Congratulations, you’ve done a good job on such and such.” And he turned to his chief, his NCO, and said, “Who the hell is this Marty Dempsey guy that just wrote me a letter?” I mean, he didn’t know he was in his chain of command, but he had just gotten a letter from the top guy in the military and he realized how important getting that letter was. But he did that the entire time he was the chairman of the Joint Chiefs.
Brett McKay:
That’s a good habit. So if you’re a leader in any organization, take some time to write some handwritten notes.
Mark Hertling:
Yep, exactly.
Brett McKay:
And handwritten thank you notes. I think we got to keep that going for sure. We make our kids after if they get something from their aunt or uncle, you got to write a handwritten thank you note.
Mark Hertling:
Yep, exactly.
Brett McKay:
Got to do it. And you also have a chapter, and this is another fun one, about not swearing, telling your boys don’t swear. What made you think to put that in? Was there a story behind that?
Mark Hertling:
I mean, when you get around a bunch of soldiers, your language goes down pretty quickly. I mean, every other word is an F-bomb and you kind of get into that habit. And I was just listening one day, I was in the squadron operations center and there were a bunch of soldiers talking around and of course every other word was the F-bomb. And I was using it too, and I realized that I had deteriorated in my language ability as well. So I just decided that, I think it was Mark Twain, I’m not sure if this is true, who made a distinction between profanity and obscenity and that sometimes profanity is the right thing to use, but it’s never good to use an obscenity, I think. The quote goes something like that. And I just thought about that. So I tried to dial back my language because it wasn’t professional as one of the senior guys in the squadron, and I wanted other people to make sure that I was using the right kind of talk in terms of precision approaches versus just dropping F-bombs.
So I just thought I’d pass that along because it was the thought of the day to my two boys.
Brett McKay:
Yeah. I do think not swearing kind of sets you apart these days because it’s become so common. I mean, I’m surprised even in the past, I don’t want to say 15 years, how frequently I’ll just be out in public and I’ll hear the F word just randomly.
Mark Hertling:
Well I was at a ball game. My wife and I went to Toronto to see a ball game a couple of weeks ago. And there was a family with a couple of young girls sitting in front of us and right next to us were two guys enjoying the ball game, but every other word was the F-bomb. And finally I leaned over to them and I said, “Hey, there’s two young kids sitting right in front of you. They’re hearing everything you say. Can you tone it down a little bit?” And they looked at me like I was crazy. And so it didn’t have the effect that I wanted it to. And I was just an old man screaming at clouds to them, but I don’t know how it affected the two young girls that were sitting in front of us, but I’m sure they heard it because these two guys were loud and it’s just not the right thing to do.
Brett McKay:
Probably the weightiest entry in the book talks about when you killed a guy, an Iraqi soldier, but you didn’t initially write about that event directly in your journal. What did you originally write in your journal about that day and how did that entry evolve when you revisited it decades later?
Mark Hertling:
Well, the original entry had to do with us searching bunkers where Iraqi soldiers had lived. And this was a couple of days after the war was over. And we were just given a mission to go out and search this wide area that had bunkers, underground bunkers every 50 feet or so. And it was obviously some kind of unit area where infantry soldiers had lived. We had been searching them for a couple of hours and we started getting a little bit complacent because there was nobody in them. I walked into one of them and I went from very bright sunlight down into this dirt bunker and there was a soldier, an Iraqi soldier in it. And as I went in, I surprised him obviously, and he surprised me because he started to stand up and he brought his rifle to bear on me. And I had my pistol drawn as we were searching the bunkers and I fired first because I didn’t have to aim.
I just fired it at him and killed him. When he dropped and he was immediately dead because I fired a couple shots, his helmet came off and it rolled toward me. And we were only like five or six feet apart when I shot him. And when the helmet rolled toward me, it had in it what a lot of soldiers put in inside their helmet liner is a picture of their family. And he had a picture of himself and his wife and two young girls.
That created a significant moral injury for me and that event changed my life. But I didn’t write about what happened in the initial journal entry. I just wrote that we had found an Iraqi soldier in a bunker and I didn’t give the details of what had happened after we found him. So when I wrote the later reflection, when I wrote the book, I fessed up. I started the reflection by saying something like, “I lied to you when I wrote this journal entry and here’s what really happened.” I did that because I was 35 years older and so were our kids and both of our sons were also soldiers with multiple deployments into Iraq and they had experienced the same kind of moral injury that I described in that approach. And they suffer not post-traumatic stress disorder, but everyone that experiences something like that will have some kind of post-traumatic stress and they both did.
And our daughter-in-law as well, one of our daughters-in-law was a soldier. And I thought it was important to tell the rest of the story because it took me a couple of years to get over that. And it took my wife finally suggesting that I go see a counselor, a psychiatrist to talk about it because she was noticing changes in me as a result of the dreams I was having and the reflections and the flashbacks that I was having about that event. And it really came down also later on to when our two boys became soldiers and the first time they deployed to combat right after they graduated from college, they didn’t have the long lead time that I had. The biggest fear my wife’s had was the potential loss of innocence that both of them would experience. And we talked a lot about that back in 2002 when our oldest son first deployed and then in 2005 when our youngest son did.
And I thought that would be an important piece to write about in the book for other people who don’t understand the moral injuries that all soldiers have in one form or another when they go to war.
Brett McKay:
Yeah. You end the journal talking about a prayer that’s attributed to Douglas MacArthur called Build Me a Son, Oh Lord. And you use it as a springboard to talk to your boys about what it means to be a man. Do you have that prayer handy?
Mark Hertling:
I do. I’ll have to find it real quick, but I don’t have it on a wall plaque like both the sons do. Here, hold on just a second. Let me get the book. Okay. I now have it.
Brett McKay:
All right. Can you read that prayer for us?
Mark Hertling:
Yeah. It starts off, and I’ll get emotional when I’m reading it because it reminds me of the sons we have.
But it starts off, “Build me a son, oh Lord, who will be strong enough to know when he is weak and brave enough to face himself when he is afraid. One who will be proud and unvending in honest defeat and humble and gentle in victory. Build me a son whose wishes will not take the place of deeds, a son who will know thee and know that to know himself is the deed and a foundation of all knowledge. Lead him, I pray, not in the path of ease and comfort, but under the stress and spur of difficulties and challenges. Here, let him learn to stand up in the store. Here, let him learn compassion for those who fail. Build me a son whose heart will be clear, whose goal will be high, a son who will master himself before he seeks to master other men, one who will reach into the future yet never forget the past.
And after all these things are his, I add and pray enough of a sense of humor so that he may always be serious yet, never take himself too seriously. Give him humility so that he may always remember the simplicity of true greatness, the open mind of true wisdom and the meekness of true strength. Then I, his father will dare to whisper, I have not lived in vain.”
That is the prayer.
Brett McKay:
It’s so powerful and I know it means a lot to you because this is coming from a general of the army and he’s thinking about this for his boys and you’re thinking about this for your boys. I mean, for the dads who are listening, what do you think are the lessons we can take from this prayer on building men?
Mark Hertling:
In reading that and every time we go to visit our sons, each one of them as a gift from my wife have that on their wall because our oldest son has three boys, our youngest son has two, so they’re going through the same thing. But what I have noticed and every time I read it since seeing it first on their wall is it is the antithesis of what we’re seeing in the growth of young men. Today, it’s all about swagger and it’s all about hubris, but MacArthur asks for humility and understanding and reflection and action. The line of where he says, “Build me a son whose wishes will not take the place of deeds.” It’s ensuring that as an individual you become an action figure as opposed to someone who just talks. And it also is interesting from a father’s perspective because the line about I pray lead him not in the path of ease and comfort, but under stress and the spur of difficulties and challenges.
Difficulties and challenges and sometimes failures when you’re trying something new is what develops your character more than successes. And there have been even times when my wife and I have watched our boys grown up and said, “We’re going to let them fail at this. We’re going to maintain a safety net for them, but we’re going to let them see what failure is like and to work their way through it.” Those are important things when you’re raising children. It is interesting to me that as you read that, there are so many things that jump out that seem to be the antithesis of who we are today as people, not just young people by the way either. I’m not slamming the next generation for sure. It is all people. We seem to have replaced humility with hubris and character with success and money. And I think as we look at the various divides we have in our country, MacArthur’s prayer might be an approach to helping people get back on the right track.
Brett McKay:
Well, Mark, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book?
Mark Hertling:
Well, I would highly recommend if you’re interested in getting the book to order it from Ballast Books, B-A-L-L-A-S-T, you can go to ballastbooks.com and if you order it from them, it’s the same price as any other place, but it comes as a signed copy and it gets there faster too, believe it or not. It gets there faster than Amazon because I’ve tried it. You can get it on Amazon. A lot of libraries are asking for it now because there’s been a lot of talk about it. It just won an award as a gold book for the Nonfiction Authors Association, which made me very happy because it might get more visibility. And I think the lessons, as you pointed out, were good for you and I hope they are for other people as well. But those are the places you can get it. You can get it audiobook, you can get it in Kindle version, or you can get it hard copy or paperback.
Brett McKay:
Fantastic. Mark Hertling, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.
Mark Hertling:
Thank you, Brett. It truly was a pleasure talking with you. Thank you.
Brett McKay:
My guest today was General Mark Kurtling. He’s the author of the book, If I Don’t Return. It’s available on amazon.com and you can get signed copies at ballastbooks.com. Until next time, this is Brett McKay reminding you to not only listen to the podcast, but to put what you’ve heard into action.
