Review by Bill Doughty
Most career Sailors and military veterans know this phrase: “Proper prior planning prevents piss-poor performance.” The “seven Ps” is a distant cousin of “measure twice and cut once.”
And ongoing planning is more important than just having a plan.
That’s the perspective of Lt. General Mark Hertling, U.S. Army (Retired), author of “If I Don’t Return: A Father’s Wartime Journal” (Ballast Books, 2026).
In planning to deal with his own angst about heading into combat in 1990, Hertling started a journal to his sons, writings he hoped would help them know him even if he were no longer in their lives. In his journal he shares observations, beliefs, lessons, and hopes for his young sons.
“Like so many soldiers, I once hoped I was fighting so that my sons would never have to.”
He expresses that sentiment in the journal several times.
“That hope, noble as it was back then, proved naive. My sons did go to war. Multiple times. Always in Iraq, save two of those tours for our oldest son, Todd. So did one of our daughters-in-law. And for all practical purposes, while they didn't deploy, my wife and the spouse of our other son went to war too. All of them did so with honor, courage, humility, selfless service, and empathy for both their own soldiers and their enemies. Even knowing that, I offer this same hope once again—this time so that our grandchildren, and others who read this book, find that same grace with this wish:
“May you never face combat. But if you do, or if life ever tests you — whether in war, in family, in leadership, or in moments when character, integrity, values, and personal courage matter most — I hope you'll find strength in these pages. Strength in values. In character. In purpose. In love. In the stories and thoughts of this old soldier who wrote some random thoughts down for his family –– now also for you.”
Throughout this memoir/journal he praises his family, friends, and selfless soldiers he’s known throughout an illustrious career. He has special praise for key senior leaders he worked for as well as command sergeants major who worked for him, SNCO leaders “whose wisdom, loyalty, and fierce dedication helped shape my view of true leadership. They weren't just senior enlisted advisors. They were battle buddies, they were partners in command –– they were friends I could count on, without question,” Hertling writes.
“Many of these military friendships were forged in combat. And that matters. War, in all its chaos and clarity, forces you to strip away the unimportant and rely on the person beside you. You see people not for their rank but for their soul. That crucible of shared danger and absolute dependence creates a bond that outlasts distance, time, and even silence. These are life-bonds-brotherhoods and sisterhoods born of trust under fire. They are evergreen.
But most people, thankfully, won't need war to discover those kinds of relationships. They find true and trusted friends in the combat of daily life. The crucible doesn't have to be courage shown in combat.
Sometimes it's just the courage to give of yourself to others-truthfully and with candor-trusting someone else with your thoughts, sharing the parts of your heart that you can only share with a friend.”
He offers gifts of advice throughout the book.
For example…
- It’s OK to cry. “Here’s the deal: Emotion is the full spectrum of what it means to be alive –– and to love others more than yourself.”
- “Self-awareness and empathy aren’t soft skills, they’re core skills.”
- “Be a friend to all by being yourself –– no false airs.”
- “Leadership, like war, is a cumulative endeavor. You don't arrive on the battlefield—or at any new job—with a blank slate. You bring everything with you—the training, the scars, the questions you asked and the ones you were too afraid to. And if you're lucky, you bring the wisdom earned through experience and some of the scar tissue you've endured.”
- Hertling asserts, “Leadership is love in public. It is the steady choice to put people and purpose ahead of ego. It is the discipline of humility and the courage of beliefs. It is the willingness to widen the circle of responsibility until it includes not only ‘your’ people but the ones you once called ‘other.’”
- On what it means to be a man, Hertling writes, “A real man proves his masculinity by being considerate, protective, concerned, and confident –– and by demonstrating it.” [Core values > Testosterone tests.]
- A military career usually affords many moves, including often to foreign cultures, which is a gift in itself: an opportunity to experience diversity in life. “Differences are not threats to be judged –– they are windows into the should of different and unique people.”
- Hertling observes, “Humans are astonishingly diverse yet fundamentally similar.” He notes that Shalom and Salaam mean the same thing: “Peace be unto you.”
- He quotes Mark Twain with this advice: “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness.” Travel, Hertling says helps you “begin to appreciate, nuance, complexity, and the truth that your way is not the only way.”
“Looking back across the arc of my tours, as well as the continuous wars we fought at the beginning of the twenty-first century, I'm struck by how much changed—in me, in our army, and in our families. And how much good leadership and caring for each other mattered. Desert Storm taught me how to fight. The time in Baghdad taught me how much I didn't know. The surge taught me how to lead through complexity—how to integrate force with purpose, how to trust partners, how to adapt daily to the terrain of war and the human terrain of recovery. Those conflicts also taught military families a lot. It was the most challenging thing in my life and in the lives of most of the soldiers and family members I know. And it remains the most defining for all of us. All this taught me something about trust about purpose and about the quiet burden of leadership. But I also learned a lot about resilience and the power of families.”
Good leaders never dismiss the concerns of military families for their service members.
Hertling riffs briefly on President George Washington’s “Rules of Civility and Decent Behavior in Company and Conversation,” seeing the same humor along with some still-timely truths in George’s advice just as we saw in an earlier Navy Reads post.
Included in his sometimes random thoughts are extended discourses on MREs (Meals Ready to Eat) and music appreciation: He loves the Eagles but New Kids on the Block … not so much.
On the serious side, he reflects on the importance of ongoing planning instead of relying just on a plan [some advice that seems very pertinent to whatever “planning” went into the Iran War.]
“What I've learned, and what I hope shows in this reflection, is something even more profound: Sometimes the plans don't matter— but the planning always does.
There's a story I like that captures this lesson. In the early 1960s, President John F. Kennedy suspected the Soviets were preparing some type of provocation in Berlin. Concerned but unsure of what was coming, he asked the Pentagon to develop a series of potential responses, what the military calls an action-reaction-counteraction series of drills.
When those potential action-reaction-counteraction plans were complete and briefed to the President, Kennedy—aware of his own limitations as a junior naval officer during WWII –– asked the planners to brief someone with deeper experience in strategic decision-making: former President Dwight D. Eisenhower.
So, the planners went to Gettysburg.
In Ike's quiet farmhouse near a battlefield where another kind of crisis had once played out during the Civil War, these senior officers briefed Eisenhower on their assumptions and options. They laid out potential Soviet scenarios: an armored push through the Fulda Gap, economic pressure, nuclear signaling, political propaganda campaigns.
At the end of the briefing, one of the officers asked, ‘Mr. President, based on what we've told you, what do you think the Soviets are going to do?’ Eisenhower, the Supreme Allied Commander who’d planned D-Day and led Allied forces in WWII, and who had been the president for eight years, paused. Then, he reportedly replied succinctly, ‘I don't really know what they're going to do. But remember—your plans mean nothing, but your planning means everything.’
One of the plans the Pentagon officers hadn't considered was that the Soviets would build a wall around Berlin.”
EiOn the need for planning instead of reliance on intelligence and plans, Hertling writes, “(Clausewitz) said that the smart Soldier does not put any faith in the intelligence by staff officers about the progress of the battle because most times it’s just flat wrong!”
Yesterday, Hertling wrote for the Bulwark in response to President Trump’s threat expressed to a FOX News reporter, “If Oman gets in the way, we'll bomb the shit out of them,” Trump said.
Hertling’s essay of August 18, 2026 is titled, “Who Would Want to Be Friends with America Now,” written in the wake of Trump’s threat to Oman, his directive to cancel Ulchi Freedom Shield exercises with South Korea, his embrace of North Korea’s dictator, and his tariffs against key allies (not to mention his threats to invade Greenland, take over Canada and make the Strait of Hormuz "new American territory").
In part, Hertling writes this about Trump’s vulgar threat to Oman: "The president is threatening to bomb a country that for nearly half a century has quietly provided the United States with military access, logistical support, diplomatic assistance, and something increasingly rare in the Middle East: the ability to communicate with friends as well as enemies. For decades, Oman hasn’t been in the way, it has often been the way.
Hertling warns about a president’s power to destroy alliances. “That destruction rarely occurs with a formal announcement. More often, trust corrodes incrementally. An exercise is canceled. An ally is publicly berated. An adversary is praised. A partner wonders whether Washington will respond to help during a crisis. Another begins looking elsewhere for security or diplomatic support. And America loses a partner, an ally, or a friend.”
Questions:
- Will Congress or the 25th Amendment stop Trump from losing allies and friends?
- Why did Donald Trump say recently that families are not concerned about their Sailors welfare?
- Why did he say the USS Lincoln’s Carrier Strike Group 3 (CSG-3) deployment was “not nearly long enough”?
- Why does Secretary Pete Hegseth say the Navy can remain near the Hormuz Strait “indefinitely”?
- Did Trump and Hegseth plan for destruction of logistics basing in the region?
- Why is Trump praising North Korea’s leader –– a dictator who is helping Russia against Ukraine, who supports Iran, and who once called Trump a “dotard”?
Most importantly, What trust is there in the quality of Trump’s “proper prior planning”?
Black-and-white photo above: Former President Dwight Eisenhower (right) meets with Republican leaders at his farm at Gettysburg. Future president Gerald Ford (a Navy World War II Veteran), who was then the Minority Leader in the House of Representatives, sits far left. (Eisenhower National Historic Site)
