"If I Don't Return": Lessons from a Father, a Soldier, a Statesman

Thank you for being here with us today. And for those of you in the audience that are not really familiar with military ranks, General Hertling is a three star retired three star lieutenant general, way above my rank of sergeant E5 when I was in the service. But I think the General would agree with me. These days it's not so much about rank as it is leadership. In fact, we have a former major who said of the now Department of War, it's hard for me to remember that I still say Department of Defense.

Well, I do. I do too. Because that's what the Congress still calls it, I think.

Yeah, exactly, exactly. But they're changing all of the signage, all of the stationaries now being changed to the Department of War. I want to know, General, why you decided on a military career.

Yeah, Michael, thanks for that question. It's a good one to understand what happened to me, but I grew up in a low income family in St. Louis, Missouri and didn't have enough money to go to college. And I had a great guidance counselor who one day suggested I apply to West Point. And this was in 1971, you know, that time period. You were in the service during that time and the Vietnam War was occurring, so. So there weren't that many people that wanted to go anywhere near the army, much less West Point during that period. But I got an appointment, went off on the 1st of July, 1971 to New York. It was the first time I ever left the city of St. Louis, the first time I was on an airplane. And since then, I'm proud to say I've been to 123 different countries and had the opportunity to meet privates and sergeants and colonels and presidents and kings and queens. And it's been a great career. But what was interesting is didn't know what to expect when I went off to the military Academy. First day was quite a shocker. But after that, got into the groove and was thinking that when I graduated I would spend five years in the military as part of the commitment from West Point and get out. But I had so much fun, was surrounded by great people and had great expectations in terms of missions and challenges that I decided to stay around for another 38 years. And when I left, it was the Army. I was thinking of making it a career after 38 years, but the army said they needed me to leave. So I went off and started doing some other things.

Well, it's a storied career, but let me ask you this. I'm assuming you needed a recommendation from a member of Congress back then. Is that true?

That's true. And it was Senator Stuart Symington from Missouri who gave me my nomination for the appointment later on, and I was lucky to be accepted from the senator's standpoint.

It's also interesting that you went in 1971 at a time when our nation was very much divided. The Vietnam War literally tore our nation apart. And it was very difficult time for soldiers coming home from Vietnam not to be greeted by bands and whistles, but, frankly, to be, in some cases, spit upon.

Yet you went in the army around that time.

Yeah, And I'll shock you even further by saying that I didn't even have a high draft number. And you remember back in those days, you were drafted. It wasn't a professional force. And, you know, it's funny you should mention this, Michael, because I was just talking to a good friend of mine, Tom Nichols, this morning about that period, because both of us were serving during that time, and he said, you know, we talk about a divided nation in the 70s. It was the Vietnam War, massive drug use, a lot of race riots, and the army was not in good shape. And yet, you know, everyone was saying it was a bad institution. But 10 years later, it grew into one of the most trusted and capable effective forces in the world because of some really good people that provided leadership and changed the doctrine and the training and the leader development and the acquisition of equipment. And the people changed with the creation of the volunteer force.

You, of course, served overseas. You had a number of tours overseas. Which of those tours do you remember most, either favorably or unfavorably?

I won't answer that question. All of them. I'll be honest with you. Every single assignment I had, I thought, taught me a lot. My wife and I both love living in Germany. We spent 12 years assigned to Germany. I spent a little over three years in combat in the Middle east, in Iraq, on three different occasions, Spent some time in Korea, moved all over the United States. So during our 38 years in the military, my wife and I moved 24 times back and forth to Germany multiple times, and almost several states in the Union. Virginia, Kentucky, Indiana, West Point, New York. I taught there for a while. So from a kid growing up in a place in Missouri where I never left the city, being able to move all over and have all kinds of adventure, it was a hard career, to be sure, but it also gave me a view of the world, which was just phenomenal.

Now, of course, you, during your military career, got a lot of recognition, awards and medals, but 24 times. Don't you think that your wife deserves some of those medals?

She deserves all the medals. And I talk about her. I think, you know a lot in the book because she was probably the best move I ever made. You know, we're overlooking the city of New York and Manhattan, and our first date for both of us was a blind date. My roommate at West Point fixed me up with her. He was from Long island, she was from Long Island. She was working in the city at the time. And we got tickets to a Broadway play because I fell in love with Broadway while I was a cadet. And when she found out I was a West Point cadet that she had been fixed up with, she said, oh, I'm not sure I want to go out with an army guy. This was in 1974.

her friend Mike, who fixed me up, said, well, we've got tickets for Broadway. And she said, oh, okay, well, it can't be all that bad. So we went off to a Broadway show and it was love at first sight for me, not so much for her.

Well, I enlisted and I was inducted at Fort Hamilton. There you go, New York City. And my dad, who was in World War II, served here in New York City after he returned from Europe. So I have a history of a military family. Not as storied as your history, but you have written a book I want to talk to you about. If I Don't return. A Father's Wartime Journal. Now that's a little bit of a morbid title. Why did you decide to write the book and why that title?

Well, it was a title suggested to me by our youngest son. And the book came about Michael. I went off to desert. I was a Young Major in 1990 and 1991, and I was assigned to a cavalry squadron, which, you know, is a unit that goes out front of a division and tries to find the enemy and do some things. And we were in Europe and we were in Germany and the wall had just come down and we thought there was a great peace dividend about to occur. But unfortunately, at the time Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. And In November of 1990, we were told to listen to Armed Forces Network radio, and we were told that we were going to deploy to Saudi Arabia to protect the kingdom from further advances by Saddam Hussein and his army. That army at the time. I'm sorry, I'm making a short story long, but it describes how the book came about. At the time, Saddam Hussein's army was the fourth largest in the world. They had just fought an eight year war with Iran. He had used chemical weapons against his own citizens, the Kurds. And the day after we were told we were going to deploy, we got an intelligence briefing from our S2, who, you know is the intelligence officer in a unit. And he said the cavalry was going to be out front in a potential attack and we would suffer probably 50% casualties. Well, that struck quite a few of us as being sort of important. And my wife And I had two young sons. They were 7 and 10 at the time. And I immediately started thinking not just about the unit, but what would happen if I didn't come home. And my wife was a widow, and our boys were. Our two young boys didn't have a father to grow up with. So I started. And you're going to recognize this. I'm going to pull it out of my desk drawer. I started writing in a journal. This is an old army records book. You probably recognize that. And inside, you can see I wrote a journal entry every day, talking to our two sons about things that I thought they should find important in life. Their character, leadership, finding a mate, emotions, friendships. I mean, pick a subject both sublime and ridiculous. I would also talk about the meals we were eating and what the forward base looked like where we were and the different moves we were making and the training we were doing. And I was leaving that for them in case I didn't come home. Well, I did come home. Here's a spoiler alert. I did return about six or seven months later, and our boys were, at that point, 8 and 11 years old, and they didn't want to hear the musings of their father, who had just returned to war. So I took that record book and threw it into a footlocker. A couple of years ago, back in 2023, our youngest son, who's now a combat veteran of three different tours, and our oldest son, who's a veteran of five different overseas tours and is still in the Army. Our youngest son took it out, asked my wife where the journal was. I didn't know that he was doing this. And what he did was he typed it up into a manuscript. And here's what it looks like now. He gave it to me on Christmas morning, 2024, after he had typed it up. And I was obviously emotional when he handed it to me. And I started thumbing through the pages, and all the sights and sounds and smells of the desert started coming back, and I got emotional. And he said, dad, he said, my brother. And I realized what you were doing. You were trying to prepare us to be good men. And he says, but now you have five grandchildren and you have to prepare them the same way. So take those lessons from 1991 and expand them through the rest of your career and tell us what happened. Tell your grandsons what happened in the next 35 years. So that's how that journal and that manuscript became this book. And the title was one he suggested. In fact, you can see it on this manuscript he gave me, and it says if I don't return, that he put on there, not me. So that's how the title came about and the book came about, you know,

and it's important for people to understand and to recognize the sacrifice that service folks make, whether it's Army, Marines, Navy, Coast Guard. It really is a difficult profession. It's a rewarding profession in many, many different respects, particularly if you're a patriot. And when I went in and enlisted, I was. Didn't have to, but I felt the call to patriotism. I was just reading the other day a survey about Generation Z, and It said that 38% of Generation Z do not believe that patriotism is important and that 28% of Generation Z believe that violence is okay to achieve political change. For old troopers like us, that's a pretty shocking, disturbing, distressing set of facts.

Yeah, it is a little bit distressing. There's quite a few surveys going out about Generation Z and now Generation A. The follow on to them about why they believe some of the things they do and why they fuel the way they do about certain things. And I think it has to do primarily with a lack of connection

an understanding of the environment we live in. And if anyone's ever gone to combat, they realize that violence should always be a last resort, that asking young men and women to take up arms against someone else should be a last resort, that there should be peaceable means of solving your problems. But unfortunately, in our world, that doesn't always happen. So you need a security force. You need individuals who put country above self to help defend those who need defending, and systems and institutions that need defending. I think there may be a potential for teaching our newest generations that. But I think we have to help them understand the requirements for leadership and character, political science, engagements between nations, understanding of other cultures. And that's. Those are some of the things that I learned coming out of the city of St. Louis when I had a chance to see the world and understand how other people live and what they do. And the requirement sometimes to take up arms to defend our own ideas and ideology.

You know, I think I Admire that answer. It's a very good answer. Until you have been overseas and I've been to 114 countries, and I've lived in Europe, I've lived in the Middle East, I've lived in Asia. Until you see and understand and absorb other cultures, look at the history of other countries, sometimes it's tough to appreciate what you have. But we're living right now, General, in a time of significant uncertainty. And you mentioned that you have five grandchildren. What worries you the most about them and their future?

Yeah, my wife and I were just talking about that last night in our little happy hour that we always have. And because we have two of those grandsons coming to visit us on Friday and stay with us for a couple of days, the biggest concern I have. It's actually, Michael, a range of things. They're facing complexities we did not face. The social media, the Internet, the challenges of safety, and the kind of influences that malign forces have on them. The inability to just have freedom around a neighborhood. I mean, you and I grew up where I'm sure it was the same for you as it was for me, where, you know, on a summer day after school was out, you were outside, you were playing. Your parents probably told you, don't come home until the lights come on on the street, and you would normally take a bologna sandwich and a carton of milk with you to sustain yourself all

day long and drink from a garden hose.

Exactly those kind of things. And it seems like such a simple life. And unfortunately, our kids are faced with. Our grandkids are faced with a lot of threats right now that sometimes we don't allow them that same kind of freedom. They're also faced with being engrossed in a tablet as opposed to looking around the world and learning new things. But there are counters to that. And what you just said, I mean, it was interesting to me. I teach now at a local college. I teach in a business school, an MBA course. And my most recent MBA students went on a immersion trip to Italy for 10 days. And about seven of the 15 of them had never been overseas before. They'd never been outside the country. And they saw what you and I were just talking about. The culture of Italy, the culture of families coming together at dinner time and, you know, multiple generations living in the same household. And instead of wolfing down your food when you're having you sit around a table and talk to one another for a long time, and they all came back saying, boy, Italy was great. That's wonderful. I want to start living My life like that. You can if you want to. And you should, you know, take time to smell the roses. Right.

Interesting. And indeed two weeks ago I was in Washington D.C. i sit on the board of directors of the U.S. chamber of Commerce and we had a very special ceremony inducting about 250 young people into the armed services. And the Secretary of War attended that ceremony. And I looked at these young people, young men, young women from every different walk of life and I said to myself, these folks have also been exposed to social media. They all had iPhones or some sort. Right. I was wondering what makes the difference here?

Yeah, what makes the difference? I'm going to answer that in a unique way. I'll tell you a quick story and I'm sorry for talking so long about these things, but I mentioned I'm class of 75 from West Point. So last year, that was 50 years ago. So we celebrated not only our 50th anniversary, our 50th reunion, but the Military Academy also has an affiliation program. So we are affiliated. Our class is affiliated with the 50th year class, which was the class of 2025. So for four years we were with them and we mentored them and we spoke with them and engaged with them and attended dinners with them. And it was just an unbelievable opportunity. And that's what gives me faith. As much as there are complexities affecting our Generation Z, I watch this class being taught and trained in an environment where individual self analysis and improvement and team dynamics and giving yourself to an institution which in this case was the army and the nation, produces a group of individuals who really know what it's all about. I happen to be fairly well connected with the class president, a young woman by the name of Katherine LaRue who is now a second lieutenant. And she asked me to commission her on graduation day. So I went up there, put my blue uniform on, it still fit, thank God. And. And she was inducted with the oath of office and she went off to be a Rhodes Scholar. So I have a great deal of confidence in the next generation if they are trained and taught the right things about leadership and character and values and ethos. Because I think it's a wonderful generation. They're probably a whole lot smarter than both of us were when we were their age, but they also have a whole lot more challenges.

Well, you served with a number of great leaders. What are some of the attributes that makes a great leader, particularly in the military context?

Yeah, I did spend time with a bunch of great ones, famous ones too. In some cases, Dave Petraeus was my boss in Iraq. Marty Dempsey, who was the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, was my best friend. And in fact, we lived in a duplex together as captains and that's where we met and we've been best friends ever since. General Fred Franks, who was the commander of forces in Iraq during Desert Storm, an amputee as a four star general. And their attributes are such that, number one, they exhibit a great character. They have determined their values and they live by their values. And when they have to make hard calls, they rely on their values to guide them so they're not a windsock going back and forth. They have determined what they believe and what they really have confidence in. And they use those values to make decisions like respect for others and integrity and honor and those sorts of things. But I also saw Michael, I mean, instead of just naming the generals, I'll name a couple of sergeants. I had a couple of sergeants that I worked very closely with, sergeants majors as well. Dave Davenport and Roger Blackwood were my senior sergeants majors when I was serving in higher command. A young como sergeant, E5 by the name of Andrew Smith, who taught me perseverance and growth. So you can learn not only from those above you, but those below you that exhibit the great traits of leadership which are character, a presence, a seeking of knowledge on a daily basis, the ability to train other people to do what's right, the communication techniques and how they take action when they really need to take action.

Are there different national security challenges in today's environment than those that you face coming through the military?

Absolutely. And part of what I describe in my book, as I go from Desert Storm, which was a conventional battle, tank on tank, soldiers, uniformed soldiers against uniformed soldiers, to my next tour, which was in Iraq in 2003, when we invaded that country, the dynamics of a conventional fight that evolved into a complex counterinsurgency, which was very difficult. And then going back as a division commander in 2007 to Iraq, where it was evolving from a counterinsurgency to a counterterrorism fight, where we had to really focus as much attention on the society that we were trying to help build itself after being, after having Saddam Hussein for a dictator for 30 years and grow the economics and the political factors. And as a soldier, I know how to. I know how to be a tank commander and I know how to lead other soldiers. But in that last fight, I was commanding, if you will, managing leading members of the State Department USAID intelligence community, working side by side with Allies working side by side with the Marine Corps and with Joint Special Operations Command. So as you race through the ranks and experience the evolution of warfare, you see yourself adapting to different challenges. And now, of course, I've been retired for 10 years and I've watched the evolution of warfare with the capability of drones, asymmetric attacks. I mean, today was a day that the president signed the MoU with Iran, or I guess that's Friday. But you saw Iran use economic warfare against the United States while we were still relying on military power. They were using an asymmetric approach of economic power and closing the strait. So, yeah, it takes someone to be very adaptable to contribute to the security of the nation today.

It certainly has changed. And we haven't even addressed the topic

of cyber, cyber space warfare, cyber warfare, artificial intelligence, and how that's changing. I mean, the first time I heard the term artificial intelligence was in 2007 was when the Special Operations Command were using it as a method to weed through a massive amount of intelligence that they were receiving from terrorist cells to really use that artificial intelligence capacity to find targets. And you know, you have to now combine computer generated intelligence with the smarts in the heart of the individual. And I think our business communities and even our national security apparatus are at the forefront of that.

It's interesting, I have mixed emotions about Iran after my military career. I stayed in government for a while and I was with the State Department and this dates me, but I was on the last commercial flight out of Tehran when the revolution overthrew the government there, which a lot of people applauded at the time because of the dictatorship that was in place and the very poor record of human rights in Iran. But I'm afraid that we got something worse than we anticipated. And here we are so many years later back in Iran trying to deal with the same sort of mentality that I saw taking over the country way back then.

Right, right. And I think it gets back to the conversation we were having before about culture and history. I mean, this is a country that has a 3,000 plus year history. Their culture is very different than ours. How we address the challenges. And I mean, in two of the tours I had in Iraq in 2003 and four, and then later, excuse me, in 2007 and eight, I was my area of operation, our area of operation was on the border of Iran and there were malign influences coming across the border, planting IEDs, especially a special one called an explosive form penetrator, which was deadly in terms of killing and injuring a lot of our soldiers, but they were trying to influence that part of the world. And I think early on, we didn't have a whole lot of understanding of what they were trying to do. So this immersion in other cultures and understanding where other nations are coming from is an important requirement of anybody that's in the national security space.

My concern is that we not leave Iran stronger than it was prior to this recent conflict. And what I mean by that is I'm not talking necessarily about military capability, which clearly has been diminished somewhat, but I'm talking about this is a population and a regime that is very, very proud, and they are looking at this settlement, we don't have all the details yet, as a victory. And if indeed it does mean that it's a victory to them, they may come back stronger and meaner than ever. And when I say meaner than ever, they still believe that there should be death to America and death to Western

culture and death to Israel, which is

their death to Israel. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And it's a very good point, but I also think that then goes back to. As national security professionals, their requirement is to continue to develop new approaches and not just try and solve a new problem with old techniques. So if indeed Iran does come out either actually being stronger or perceiving themselves to be stronger, the question is, how do we deal with that? And it doesn't always require military power, although that certainly is an arrow we have in our quiver. But the United States has, as I was taught in the war colleges, has four elements of power, of national power. There's military, economics, information, and diplomacy. If the military is effective, but it doesn't reach our desired end states, how are we using the other elements of national power to reach what we're trying to achieve in terms of our strategic objectives?

I think you're referring to soft power.

Well, if you want to call it diplomacy and information soft power, I'm okay with that. But if you're looking at economics, that can be pretty hard power. And I think what we just saw is by Iran using the Strait of Hormuz as a weapon, they used economic power as a pretty hard power in the global supply chain.

Well, it's interesting because you were talking about the diversity when you were leading having under your command State Department, aid, intelligence, and so on and so forth. AID is an organization that no longer exists, but we set up in part to export, if you will, American charity, American ideals, American culture. And that was part of what I describe as soft power. Sure, we don't have that anymore.

And I Personally think that's a big mistake. Because I will tell you that as part of my campaign plan, when I was a division commander, the soft power, if you will, of both the State Department provincial reconstruction teams and the USAID teams that were in our area, as well as some of the intelligence teams from various agencies with three letters, they contributed significantly to my achieving the objectives we were trying to achieve. It's interesting, I was telling someone the other day that didn't know anything about the military about targeting meetings. And when you say targeting meetings, you think, okay, you're going to have a meeting about what targets are you going to hit? How do you decide what you're going to hit? Detect where it is and then deliver a munition against that target so you destroy it? Well, that's the military approach. But what I'll tell you is we would have combined targeting meetings in my task force headquarters where we not only looked at what we were killing, but who we were shaking hands with and how we had generated power from that. So we literally had a Every Friday we decided, who are we killing and who are we making friends with in order to achieve our objectives to bring Iraq at the time in 2008, to a new history. And I think we were very successful in doing that. And, yeah, you could certainly call it soft power, but it depends on what the strategy of the United States government is.

I'm going to throw a little bit of a curveball at you because I want to talk about, rather than military and national security, I do want to talk a little bit about education today and the, of course, AI and the impact it's having on the country, the workforce, not only in our country, throughout the world, and the fact that there's questions being raised about the return on investment of higher education. And what would you tell your grandchildren about college if one of them got to the age, I don't know what ages they're at, and said, granddad, I'd love to go to school and study social science, or I'd love to go to school and study liberal arts. And I know it's going to cost 80,000 or $90,000 a year, depending on the school I'm going to. What would your advice be?

Well, I'm a firm believer in leadership. Leaders learn and grow every day. And how you execute that learning and growing is based on what you're trying to achieve. If you're looking to be a history professor or a businessman, a CEO someday, a businesswoman or a soldier, you have to literally learn and grow every single Day you have to do things that scare you to generate some courage to address the challenges that you face. So whether it's a, like you said, a $90,000 university education or a $20,000 community college, or joining the army or the Navy or the Marines and saying I want more experience before I find the maturity to go off and basically study things, that's an individual choice. But I really think that when you look at leadership, and God knows we need more leaders in the world, I believe what I was taught in the army is that leadership has a three legged stool. One leg of that stool is what you learn in the schoolhouse. Another leg is what you learn through experience, and the third leg is what you learn through self study. But all three legs keep you balanced. And in everyone's life, I believe there's time for each one of them. It may depend on what you do first versus what you do last.

I talk to a lot of corporate executives and we that do hirings and we look favorably on folks coming out of the service. And a lot of people think it's only because, well, they're reliable, well trained, exposed to different environments. But one of the reasons we don't talk about something you learn in the military that sometimes you don't take away from higher education, something called critical thinking, the ability to cut through a lot of information, and we all know how much information is out there today to try to determine what's real and what's not real.

Yeah, no, exactly. It's interesting if I can tell you a story, Michael. I was asked a couple of years ago after, well, you talk about learning and growing. I had three master's degrees, all gained through my time in the military, where the army kept sending me to school and I had matriculated to the private sector, I guess you could say. I was working for a hospital system. And I wrote a book about a leadership program I put together for doctors. The book is called Growing Physician Leaders. I went over to talk about it at a local MBA program and the dean of the MBA program talked me into coming back and getting my doctorate. I was 63 years old, older than all the other students, obviously, and older than all the professors in this business school. And I spent two years getting an executive doctorate of Business Administration. And when I was going into the course, this particular school, the Crummer School of Business, assigns both a professor and a student as your mentors. My student mentor was a young woman named Rhonda Bartlett, who is in New York City working for a hospital system there. I said, hey, Rhonda, I'm 65 years old. I said, what am I? I've been all around the world. I've led big organizations. I kind of know how to do budgets and marketing and all those kind of things that the business world talks about. But I did it in the Army. I said, what am I going to learn from this program? And she gave me one of the best pieces of advice I ever heard. She said, mark, you're going to learn just how much you don't know. And she was spot on. I finished the program. A new dean came in, and he was looking to change the entire MBA program because he had just come from the private sector, working for a major corporation in the C suite. And he said that business schools do a great job in teaching the processes and systems of business, but they don't spend a whole lot of time teaching leadership and values and character and ethics. And he said, here at Crummer, we're going to start doing that. So one of the professors who I had in class said, hey, you ought to talk to Hertling, see if he can do this. So they asked me to come back and become a professor of practice in leadership and strategy. I designed a bunch of different courses on foundations of leadership and foundations of strategy. And then I talked my dean into allowing me to do an elective, which everybody in the MBA program now signs up for. And it was a Gettysburg staff ride. And you know what a staff ride is from the Army? It's where you go to a different battlefield and you kind of talk about what happened there during the battle. So I took these 15 MBA students up to Gettysburg, assigned each one of them a Northern or a Southern general. And then the intent was not to make them battlefield historians or Civil War historians. The intent was to show them leadership in crises and how battlefield experiences can be transcribed into the business community because they address things like communication difficulties, toxic leadership. Where does the leader go on the battlefield or in the corporation to make systems work? How do organizations perform? How do you build? I mean, I could name all the things. We talked about using a real live battlefield for a critical thinking exercise. And all of the students basically said it was a near religious experience to really drive home the concepts of leadership in a crisis.

You speak about Gettysburg, and that reminds me, we're celebrating the 205th year anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It's an incredible opportunity to celebrate what's right about this country. What would you change going forward about this country?

I don't think I would change anything in the Declaration. I think my biggest concern is going back to what we aspire to be. And what we aspire to be is quite beautiful. We were talking before you said you were at Fort Hamilton there in New York City. I think Alexander Hamilton and John Adams and Madison and Jefferson and all the rest of them had some great ideas and they painted a picture, even during a time of slavery in the country, of what we should aspire to be as a nation. And I think, again, talking about values, we've had 250 years of, of great documents, not only the Declaration, but the Constitution and many of the treaties and formulations that we've had, but also great speeches by people like Lincoln, the Gettysburg Address, Martin Luther King, Kennedy, Reagan. I mean, they've all talked and tried to reinforce our values. And I think right now, one of the things that are causing, one of the things that is causing division in our country is we are not paying enough attention to who we aspire to be. So I Hope during this 250 year anniversary we take a look at some of those documents, maybe review some of those speeches of what great Americans said and see what we can learn about ourselves to take us forward in the next 250 years in a better aspirational path. Amen.

And I hope that we can do that in a more civilized fashion. The one thing that has really frankly been very frustrating to me is the lack of civility, both in words and deeds in our country today. And I'm struggling to figure out how it happened, you know, and it infects every part of society, whether it's a sporting event. So when I was a kid, I played a lot of anything with a ball, I played. And if my dad couldn't attend a game, a baseball game, that night at dinner, he wouldn't ask me if we won. He'd asked me if we had fun. Did you have a good time playing? Our society has become so competitive in every level of society. It's not about fairness, it's about winning in all aspects of society. And if you're not on the same side, the other side seems to be an enemy. And I just find that so unfortunate.

Yeah. And I'd add to that one thing too. Another thing to add to that is the hubris that's involved that I think a guy named Aristotle said we should address issues from the standpoint of logos, ethos and pathos, logic, reason and passion. It seems like we have way too much passion, way too much hubris, a little bit too much swagger and not enough humility and not enough taking the time to listen to others points of view. Even if you don't agree with them, you might be able to learn something or learn something at least about them. All of that is an important part of character. And again, goes back to who we should aspire to be, because I think one of those documents we were talking about just now talked about the dignity of man and respect for all other humans. And those are the things we ought to go back to.

I agree with you 100%. And I want to thank you very much for being with us today.

Michael. This was just an absolutely provocative and energizing conversation. And I thank you for asking me to come on board.

"If I Don't Return": Lessons from a Father, a Soldier, a Statesman

About This Episode

More Episodes

"You Can Win the War on Crime and Lose the War on Confidence" | John Miller on NYC, the Guthrie Kidnaping & Epstein

Inside the Threat: John Miller on Bin Laden, ISIS, and the Iran Crisis