Pod Insights The Daily Stoic | Wondery+ You Need An Ethical Will | Lt. Gen. Mark Hertling About this episode Bruce Springsteen once said we can be an ancestor for our children, or a ghost. Father’s Day is a good time to ask which one we’re becoming. In today’s episode, Ryan talks with Lieutenant General Mark Hertling about the lessons we hope our children inherit from us. Mark’s book, If I Don’t Return: A Father’s Wartime Journal https://www.amazon.com/If-Dont-Return-Fathers-Wartime/dp/1966786727/ref=sr_1_1?dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.cWf06defxJS3tqY-oUBOnTQE3C5UfUQIy_6XLNcWP2l48MWrB5DV6P_mH65kQlu1b0qsK9OHyxewQK2t5cpOByk4EeJIO_ycf0EcfDLySaJd26Ym7RNFb9mhBouS2fss4rR05rTHmsld-xPF6tC8D0-fA4Q-XGrAD3jGYOQ523SdD8gox-fC-dkxGBSBSdVdHngZ3xwuVL7vOhO20-WIz5Y06SKY4ztwNnQ6w275DL8.i8Q7mL0zDiuAmfXQodOkEe0qKYqGPGTYeU5_pMKub5s&dib_tag=se&hvadid=777941189407&hvdev=c&hvexpln=67&hvlocphy=9028217&hvnetw=g&hvocijid=11010897847482093853--&hvqmt=e&hvrand=11010897847482093853&hvtargid=kwd-2449014701975&hydadcr=24543_13861554&keywords=if+i+dont+return&mcid=b35eda6e76d83051af493cea8830d771&qid=1781894003&sr=8-1, began as a way to pass down guidance to his sons during a deployment he knew he might not come home from. Ryan and Mark discuss the idea of an ethical will, the responsibility parents have to talk openly about failure, and the importance of teaching children what our own scar tissue has taught us.
Lieutenant General (Ret.) Mark Hertling served 38 years in the U. S. Army, rising from tank platoon leader to commander of U. S. Army Europe and the Seventh Army. His career included combat tours in Desert Storm and Iraq, where he commanded the 1st Armored Division, prepared U. S. and allied forces for deployment, and helped support military transformation across Eastern Europe.
📚 Grab a copy of If I Don't Return: A Father's Wartime Journal by Lieutenant General (Ret.) Mark Hertling https://www.amazon.com/If-Dont-Return-Fathers-Wartime/dp/1966786727/ref=sr_1_1?dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.cWf06defxJS3tqY-oUBOnTQE3C5UfUQIy_6XLNcWP2l48MWrB5DV6P_mH65kQlu1b0qsK9OHyxewQK2t5cpOByk4EeJIO_ycf0EcfDLySaJd26Ym7RNFb9mhBouS2fss4rR05rTHmsld-xPF6tC8D0-fA4Q-XGrAD3jGYOQ523SdD8gox-fC-dkxGBSBSdVdHngZ3xwuVL7vOhO20-WIz5Y06SKY4ztwNnQ6w275DL8.i8Q7mL0zDiuAmfXQodOkEe0qKYqGPGTYeU5_pMKub5s&dib_tag=se&hvadid=777941189407&hvdev=c&hvexpln=67&hvlocphy=9028217&hvnetw=g&hvocijid=11010897847482093853--&hvqmt=e&hvrand=11010897847482093853&hvtargid=kwd-2449014701975&hydadcr=24543_13861554&keywords=if+i+dont+return&mcid=b35eda6e76d83051af493cea8830d771&qid=1781894003&sr=8-1
👉 Follow Mark Hertling on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/mark_hertling/ | https://www.instagram.com/mark_hertling/
🎟️DAILY STOIC LIVE https://www.dailystoiclive.com/| Ryan Holiday is coming to a city near you https://www.dailystoiclive.com/! Grab tickets here https://www.dailystoiclive.com/ | https://www.dailystoiclive.com/
🎙️AD-FREE https://dailystoic.supercast.com/| Support the podcast and go deeper into Stoicism by subscribing toThe Daily Stoic Premium https://dailystoic.supercast.com/ - unlock ad-free listening, early access, and bonus content:https://dailystoic.supercast.com/
🎥 VIDEO EPISODES https://www.youtube.com/@DailyStoic/videos| Watch the video episodes onThe Daily Stoic YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/@DailyStoic/videos:https://www.youtube.com/@DailyStoic/videos
✉️ FREE STOIC WISDOM https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail | Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email athttps://dailystoic.com/dailyemail
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Ryan Holiday? Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key Stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world.
0:14 Ryan Holiday? Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. Today is Father's Day. Yesterday, we did a deep dive into Marcus Aurelius and Antoninus, what Marcus learns from his stepfather. That was a sort of how-to father episode. And then second half of that episode was maybe a little bit what not to do about Tom Junod's complicated relationship with his father when he came on the Daily Stoic Podcast. Today, I am talking to Lieutenant General Mark Hertling. He spent almost 40 years in the US Army, started as a tank platoon leader, became commander of US Army Europe and the 7th Army. He did combat tours in Desert Storm and Iraq. And then he helped support military transformation across Eastern Europe,
0:59 Ryan Holiday? spent many years in uniform, many years deployed, was in combat many times. Thankfully, he came home, but there were many moments, I'm sure, where he didn't know if he would return. And he has this great book called, If I Don't Return: A Father's Wartime Journal, which were the thoughts that he put down on his first deployment when he was told there'd be casualties as high as 50% in his unit. What did he want to leave to his two young sons? Sort of an ethical will. It's a great book. You should definitely read it. And I'm going to bring out a fuller episode later, but he and I wanted to talk about some fatherhood stuff. I think you're really going to like it. It's a palate cleanser after Tom Junod's sort of complicated relationship with his father.
1:43 Ryan Holiday? But you should definitely read Tom Junod's book, In the Days of My Youth: I Was Told What It Means to Be a Man. It's a great book, and so is Mark's book. So two great fatherhood books for today. And it doesn't hurt always to reread Marcus Aurelius's passage on Antoninus either. Happy Father's Day, everyone. Enjoy.
2:10 Ryan Holiday? So you wrote this, this book for your sons, trying to sort of pass these lessons on to them. There, there is this, in the Jewish tradition, there's this idea of an ethical will, right? We write a will that, you know, it says, hey, you get the house, you know, you get the life insurance policy, you know, you get mom's jewelry and dad's jackets. And then you got to decide what to do with all these books that you don't want and all the other stuff. Right. But the, the ethical will of like, hey, here's, here's the character I'm trying to bequeath to you. Here are the values I want you to live by. It strikes me that was the primary reason that you're, you're writing the book. And in the years since, what do you feel like you got right?
2:54 Ryan Holiday? And what do you feel like maybe you would emphasize more now as far as lessons? Let's say people are listening to this on Father's Day.
3:02 Speaker 01 Yeah, well, and that's why it's important on Father's Day because I'm lucky enough. We're lucky, my wife and I are lucky enough to have two great sons with wonderful grandchildren. And what's fascinating to me is when you see your sons or your daughters raise their own family, something changes in you. So what I was bequeathing, to get to your question, is more lessons for them to reflect on. I talk throughout the book about emotions and character and leadership. But the last chapter is repeating something both our boys actually have hung in their house, which is MacArthur's prayer for his son.
3:46 Speaker 01 Build me a son, oh Lord, who is, and then he goes on and describes what he wants his son to be. Well, now we have two sons. That prayer was important to us when they were young and what we were trying to do with them. But now it's important for them. To remember MacArthur's Prayer for their children. And here's what the son or the daughters that you're building and what it takes to to really remind them of what is important in life. It isn't the monetary success or the great job and the parking space outside your building. It's really your character and how you treat other people.
4:28 Ryan Holiday? Yeah, it's interesting, right? If you're reflecting on your kids as they get older, do you want them to be really, really successful, really, really financially secure, really, really powerful? Or do you like them to be great people? And I think everyone intuitively knows the answer to that question. And then you think, but what do I spend the most time talking about or working on? It's like, you know, how are your grades? You know, how are you doing in sports? How are your manners? You know, it's weird. We all know character is the most important thing. And as you said, you know, the Greeks believed that character was destiny. And yet we kind of just assume the character side of things will take care of itself.
5:09 Ryan Holiday? Or that's not, that's not what we measure and work on day to day.
5:14 Speaker 01 Right. And I often have a debate with my MDA students. Is leadership born or is it developed?
5:22 Ryan Holiday? Yeah.
5:22 Speaker 01 Is it part of who you are? It's a little bit of both.
5:25 Ryan Holiday? Sure.
5:26 Speaker 01 And, you know, you can build that character by being aware of what it consists of. Here are the elements of character. Here are the elements of presence and intellect and stewardship. And yet I don't think we talk as much about the precision of developing character as we should. You know, we assume it will happen if they're good people. But boy, that's part of the reflection too of what are your values? What are your behavioral patterns? What do you talk about at dinner? And the things that build who you are to be that good person. And that takes as much effort as being a great business person or lawyer or, you know, minister or whatever, right?
6:11 Ryan Holiday? And it does feel like the military tradition is one of the few places left in our society where character is explicitly taught, talked about, you know, evaluated, developed in a way that, you know, the rest of sort of secular society. It isn't. And if anything, you could argue, we're, we're living in a time of sort of like vice development, or, or sort of the sidelining of character because it feels like it's insufficient to get ahead in this sort of crazy upside down world that we're living in.
6:48 Speaker 01 Couldn't say it better. And that's the thing. Are we taking time, again, the reflections of the book?
6:54 Ryan Holiday? Yeah.
6:54 Speaker 01 Are we taking times to analyze our own self, to, to see where we're centered? To find out the things we're doing. And that, that was really one of the purposes of the book was to say, we all need to take that time to reflect, and we don't do it as much as we should.
7:12 Ryan Holiday? Yeah, the Stoics talked about this idea of putting yourself up for review, you know, sort of at the end of the day, maybe it's two in the morning, like you're, you are on the, on the, on the cover of the book here, and you're going, hey, what did I do well? What could I have done better? You know? And how do I know whether I did well, or if I could have done better if I, if I'm not clear about what I believe and what I'm trying to accomplish, right? Like, what's my north star here? What's my, what is the compass by which I'm evaluating? Did I, did I win an award? Did I make money? Did somebody pat me on the back? Or did I do the right thing? You know, did I live in accordance with those values? And, and that is that inner dialogue that we have to be having, and then we have to teach our, our children how to have. We can't just expect them to have it.
7:56 Speaker 01 Yeah, you know, it's, it's interesting. My publisher, when he first read the book and said, yeah, I want to publish this. He said, you know, this isn't like most leadership books. He says, most leadership books are people saying how great they were and how they succeeded and everything. He says, he says, you have more scar tissue than you have successes in this book. And that's the first time I've heard anybody say that. And I said, yeah. And it was kind of picking the scabs as I went through to give advice to our sons. Don't do what I'm doing here, you know, take a look at your friendships, make good choices. And it is, going back to your question from earlier, it is an attempt to teach character and the elements thereof versus just proclaim what I have.
8:40 Speaker 01 Cause I've had more failures than I've had successes.
8:44 Ryan Holiday? Yeah, and the ability to be honest with yourself about what those failures are, and to put them up for review is how ideally you don't, you don't repeat them. And then you're giving your children a leg up by not forcing them to start from scratch. Right? Like ideally, the battles that you fight literally and figuratively, your children can pick up where you left off. They don't have to do them the exact same way. You can't spare your children everything and there's no book or set of ideas that are going to teach them everything they need to know. But they shouldn't have to learn everything by trial and error.
9:21 Speaker 01 Right, but they're still going to have the scar tissue.
9:23 Ryan Holiday? Yeah.
9:23 Speaker 01 Even if, even if they take your advice, all people make mistakes. So, you know, it's just, oh, okay. Dad told me that I should do this versus that, and I didn't do that. So, okay, I've got, I've got a little scratch on myself now. Yeah.
9:38 Ryan Holiday? Well, and that speeds up the process. Like even if you make all the same mistakes that your parents made or that, that you tried to prevent them from making, the fact that, that you as a parent were honest about your own struggles with them and what you learned makes the pattern recognition faster. Right? Like, like they, they say in, in recovery, like you're only as sick as your secrets. Right? And, and when, when we, when we hold things close and we don't articulate what we've gone through, what we did wrong, where we could have done better, what, what we're forcing our kids to do is go through the world under the impression that they're the only one in this family tree that's had this problem or this temptation or gone down, you know, made this mistake. Even with innocuous stuff in my family, I'm like, wait, like,
10:23 Ryan Holiday? this has been a thing that we've dealt with for generations, but just nobody brought it up? Like, I could have gotten to this solution faster if shame hadn't been hiding what happened.
10:34 Speaker 01 Yeah, it's, it's the old expression, if you want a new approach, read an old book.
10:38 Ryan Holiday? Yes, yes.
10:40 Speaker 01 Right?
10:41 Ryan Holiday? Yeah, it's foolish to think you can spare your children from everything you ever went through. But if you can spare them from one thing that you went through, well, then we're making progress. Right? It's not, it's not as much progress as we could. And that is the study of history, how often we make the same mistakes over and over and over again. But the idea is, is we err a little bit less each time. And that's what propels us forward.
11:04 Speaker 01 Yeah, it was interesting in a conversation with our son who typed it up for me. He said, boy, this is really going to be a great legacy for the family. And I said, hey, Scott, I said, here's the deal. I said, when I started this thing, it was partially a legacy. But now I don't want our grandkids saying, boy, that grandpa Hertling was just such a smart guy. And he gave us all this advice. If that's what comes out of this, it's, it's a failure. What I want them thinking about is when they read the different sections and the, and the journal entries and the reflections to say, hmm, I ought to take that on. I ought to try that, you know? And, and maybe that enlightens them a little bit.
11:49 Speaker 01 Not so much that I was a wise old man before I died, but boy, oh, boy, he passed along some gems for us to think about.
11:57 Ryan Holiday? Well, and, and recognizing parts of yourself in that ancestor, good and bad. Oh, I, I have this and that's the tradition that I want to continue. And, uh, and this is the, this is the part of the, the family legacy that stops with me. Right? Like I'm, I'm wearing a Bruce Springsteen shirt. He has this great line about, you know, we can be an ancestor for our kids or a ghost. Right? And you, and I think, I think in a way we're both those things for our kids. There's, there's the parts of us and our history and our genetics and whatever that can haunt our family and, and subsequent generations. And then there's the, the good parts that they get to carry forward, that they benefit from, that guide them.
12:41 Ryan Holiday? And, and I think that's what I think we get when we have a good sense of, of general history, but also our, our family history, the good and the bad.
12:50 Speaker 01 I gotta tell you, I love that quote. I'm going to steal that one. That is classic. That is great.
12:54 Ryan Holiday? I think that's a great Father's Day message for everyone.
Previous What Our Fathers Teach Us, For Better Or Worse | Tom Junod Next You Have To Be Both These Things | The Long Way Around Page updated September 29, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
