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The Best People with Nicolle Wallace
Lt. Gen. Mark Hertling Knows Leadership… And When It’s Lacking
00:55:04
Lieutenant General Mark Hertling is a leader and a father. He’s seen war firsthand and knows it should always be a last resort.
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- [00:00]
Lieutenant General Mark Hertling
I'm not an astronaut.
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Nicole Wallace
I don't need an astronaut.
- [00:03]
Lieutenant General Mark Hertling
Audiences have spoken. Project Hail Mary is an awe inspiring masterpiece. So I met an alien.
- [00:11]
Commercial/Announcer
If you've fallen out of love with
- [00:13]
Lieutenant General Mark Hertling
going to the movies, this one will bring you back.
- [00:19]
Commercial/Announcer
Ryan gosling in the first must see movie of 2026. Project Hail Mary, rated PG13 may be
- [00:27]
Lieutenant General Mark Hertling
inappropriate for children under 13 only in Peter's Friday Everyone deserves to be connected. That's why T Mobile and US Cellular are joining forces. Switch to T Mobile and save up to 20% versus Verizon by getting built in benefits they leave out. Check the math@t mobile.com switch and now T mobile is in US cellular stores.
- [00:50]
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- [00:52]
Lieutenant General Mark Hertling
cost of optional benefits. Plan features and taxes and fees vary. Savings with three plus lines include third line free via monthly bill credits. Credit stop if you cancel any lines. Qualifying credit required. How do you lead? It's just not a formal position where you live in a special house with a parking spot outside and a bunch of security agents. You know, to truly lead, you have to exhibit character. You have to have emotions that bring you into connecting. I can't lead you unless I know what motivates you. So when you don't have those kinds of intellectual curiosities, I don't understand how someone who's in a formal position can call themselves a leader when their followers are not connecting those dots.
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Nicole Wallace
Hi everyone. Welcome to this week's episode of the Best People podcast. Sometimes the universe conspires to put the perfect person in this chair at the perfect moment. This is one of those weeks. If I Don't Return is not just a book. It's a way to get through the moment in which we're living. A moment in which we're covering a new war in the Middle East. A moment in which we ask every day our leaders are deserving of the people they're leading, including the ones that voted for them. It's also a moment, though, where everyone should understand what it means when a president sends the country to war, takes the country to war, and sends the men and women of our military into battle. It is an honor to have Lieutenant General Mark Ertling here with your new book, if I Don't Return. Thank you so much for being here.
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Lieutenant General Mark Hertling
It's a pleasure and those are very kind words. Nicole. Thank you so much.
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Nicole Wallace
I feel like we get to do a version of the Best People concept every time you're on the TV show. So thank you so much for the extended opportunity to talk to you here,
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Lieutenant General Mark Hertling
I'm a little bit intimidated. You've had some unbelievable people on this podcast.
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Nicole Wallace
Someone asked me what the idea, the concept is behind the best people, and it's this idea that we're fighting to protect our democracy, and these are the people we're fighting alongside. And I never like to thoughtlessly borrow from fighters who've done real fighting for our country, but does that resonate with you?
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Lieutenant General Mark Hertling
It does, it does. But the other thing that I found interesting about listening and viewing your podcast is how many different kinds of people you have, which is, you know, when. When you asked me to do it, it's like, oh, wow, that's pretty cool, because I hadn't seen another military person on here.
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Nicole Wallace
We haven't had one.
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Lieutenant General Mark Hertling
So that. That's just nice the way you're trying to diversify.
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Nicole Wallace
I truly believe that the Trump movement is autocratic in nature. And to go study these moments, the democracy side only prevails when it comes from the more diverse sort of swath of society. And so the idea that artists and scholars and actors and politicians and military leaders are all on the pro democracy side is the piece of it that makes me confident democracy will win.
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Lieutenant General Mark Hertling
Agree, Agree.
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Nicole Wallace
Some strategery in there?
- [03:53]
Lieutenant General Mark Hertling
Yeah, something like that.
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Nicole Wallace
Well, speaking of, the journal is about your deployment, and it starts with a really sobering and sort of gripping concept. Explain.
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Lieutenant General Mark Hertling
Yeah, the book transformed from an original journal that I wrote back in 1990 and 1991, when we were notified through Armed Forces Network and CNN on our little house in Germany that our unit was going to war. And it was the first time we knew that was going to happen when the Defense Director Cheney announced that the entire 7th Corps was going to reinforce the 82nd Airborne in Iraq in 1991. So we scrambled around and did all sorts of things. The night we were told this and the next day, we put together very quickly and attended an intelligence briefing at our division headquarters, the 1st Armored Division. And in that briefing, the statement was made, here's what we think we're going to do. The cavalry squadron, which I was the operations officer for, is going to be out front of the division by about 20 km looking for the Republican Guard. That's going to be your mission. So we anticipate your unit taking about 50% casualties. So we're going to reinforce.
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Nicole Wallace
I read that four times, and I cannot get my brain around that being known to you guys.
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Lieutenant General Mark Hertling
Yeah, it was pretty much the same at that day when they told us. It's like, you've got to be Kidding me. But it made sense at the time. We were going up against Saddam Hussein's army, which was the fourth largest in the world. They had just had an eight year war against Iran. He had used chemical weapons against the Kurds. So when you do that kind of intellig assessment, you come up with those kind of figures. And knowing that we were going to be the eyes and ears of the division as the cavalry squadron, you know, for all of us in the squadron, it was like, holy smokes, this is serious stuff. So when you realize you might lose 50% of the people, you got to consider you're going to be one of those. And when I started thinking about having a coin flip chance of coming home with two sons that were 7 and 10 at the time, you know, my mind started racing. You know, my wife's going to potentially be a widow, my two boys are going to be fatherless, so what can I do to help them if I don't come home? That generated the idea of keeping a journal, which, you know, a lot of soldiers do that. But what I wanted to do was not what I was doing every day, although some of that comes through. But it was teaching them lessons about adulthood, manhood, how they're going to grow up. So every day I picked a different subject, wrote something about it. Some were sublime and some were ridiculous. Then the war started. After we were finished the four day campaign, I wrote more about what we experienced during the war. But then there was that long period after too, where we were still in Iraq, post conflict. And a lot of things were happening there which were the gruesome after effects of combat. We came upon mass graves and torture chambers and all sorts of things that had happened with Saddam's army. Okay, so that's how the original journal came about. I came home. Of course, they were still at that time, 8 and 11 when I arrived back home. And they didn't want to talk about the deep reflections of their old man. So the journal went into a footlocker. And it was a couple of years ago that our youngest son pulled it out, asked my wife where it was. He pulled it out and unbeknownst to me, he typed it up in a Word document and inserted pictures. And then Christmas morning of 2024, when we had all the grandkids in our house, they opened all their presents, they went off to start playing with their toys. And it was just our youngest son and me. And he came up to me with this box and he said, dad, this one's just for you. When I opened it up and started, I'm getting emotional. But when I opened it up and saw the journal, first of all, the gift of love that he had given us, he and his brother, and then started thumbing through it and all the sights and sounds and smells of the desert came back as they do to veterans. He then said, after he let me thumb through it for a minute, he goes, dad. He said, my brother and I understood what you were doing here. He said, you were preparing us in case you didn't come home. I said, that's right. And he's a combat veteran, so is his brother. And he said, well, now you've got to give this gift to somebody else and write what happened in the rest of your life to the grandchildren. And he said, you've been to three more deployments. You've done all sorts of things in the Army. You've gone from being a major to a three star general. You've now had a private life in health care and in media and in journalism and teaching. He said, write about all those things so the grandsons know who you are once you're gone. I don't think he thought I was going to do it truthfully, but I dove into it and my wife sue just loved watching me work on it because I would come out of my small office and there would be days when, you know, I was floored with what I had written in terms of the emotional response to the original journal entry. But it was also extremely cathartic. And there were many times she walked in the office and caught me literally bawling. I mean, not just tears, but reactions to things looking back. And what I gained from it, Nicole, was the fact that we don't do as much reflection on our life as we should. So as an old guy now, it was a great time to reflect and dwell on good things, but also a lot of mistakes that I made. It's a leadership book, but it's more about the world around you and how to be an evolving leader and figure out how to influence other people and do the right things and use your values and your character to get good things happening in the world.
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Nicole Wallace
I mean, I also think it's about how you lead with the truth. Like the thing, I read the part about the 50% casualty six times and read it out loud to everyone in my. I said, how do you. That's crazy. And then I read the part about you writing about. Writing about something that wasn't true, but you are the one that's telling on yourself for not writing the Truth in your first version?
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Lieutenant General Mark Hertling
Yeah, this was a post war event and it's kind of the spoiler in the book. I've had a couple people read the book for edits to see if I got it right. And one of the guys who was there with us, he was an aviator, a good friend of mine, Tupper Hillard. He immediately called me when he got to that chapter and he goes, are you shitting me? Did this really happen? I said, yeah, it did. And nobody knows about it except for sue, my wife. And I didn't tell her until a couple years later. But what had happened is, after the war, we were given a swath of land that we had to clear, which meant we had to go into bunkers and, you know, facilities that had ammunition and stuff like this. So.
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Nicole Wallace
So we were just described that. But you talked about reliving the sights and sounds like, what is that? What is that day? Like, just, can you take us through that?
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Lieutenant General Mark Hertling
Yeah, like that. I mean, we were still riding around and my crew were. We were still riding around in our Bradleys. We were with other people, spread out over a very big. I mean, it wasn't like the war where we were close together and there were underground bunkers. I mean, dugouts. I couldn't even call them bunkers because they weren't reinforced with. With bricks or wood or anything like that. They were just dug out in the middle of this completely flat, as flat as this tabletop desert. And they had a little bit of shelter over the top, but not much that would prevent any kind of artillery round from being thwarted. And it was starting to get hot. I mean, it was probably 100 degrees, I guess. And we were in our gear, just driving around and we would see a bunch of bunkers. So we just go into them and make sure that there was nothing left inside. Well, there was no one there, or so we thought. And, you know, we had probably gone into a dozen or 20 of them before I went in all by myself. My other three crew members for the Bradley were off, you know, each taking a different one. We got. Truthfully, we got a little complacent. And when I walked in, there was a guy inside. And as soon as I came down the side of the bunker to the inside, I was going from bright sunlight into the dark. And when you would go from sunlight into dark, your eyes adjust. So in this one, this guy stood up with his rifle and was getting ready to bring it up to shoot. And I had my pistol drawn and I fired first when the original journal, I didn't tell that, but in the reflections on that journal entry, I came clean and said that I killed the guy. And what happened next was his helmet fell off as he dropped to the ground. And inside of his helmet, like a lot of soldiers have, he had a picture of his family. In fact, I had the same kind of picture in my helmet. And we had been in multiple fights up to that point during the war, but they were all at long range. Bradley can kill an enemy vehicle at 1500-2500 meters. So we were shooting a lot, but never close in. So this was a shock to the system. It would create a moral injury that stayed with me for a long time, and it changed me. When I came home, I was. I don't think it was Post Traumatic stress disorder, but it was certainly post traumatic stress. And the recurring dream of this event continued for a very long time. And finally one day my wife said, we need to get some help. So she, she talked me into going to see somebody. And this was before 9, 11. So for a major at the time, going to see a shrink was probably not a good idea. But I did it on the outside world, and it was very helpful. But I grew up a Catholic and reading St. Augustine and, and the morals of war and those kind of things, this didn't quite fit in with the faith. So that was that particular entry.
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Nicole Wallace
You think about how many young veterans struggled after their tours?
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Lieutenant General Mark Hertling
Well, on that account, I mean, we were in tanks and Bradleys and helicopters. The last two deployments I had, we had young men and women, you know, knocking down doors. As one guy once told me, coffee breath, close to their enemies all the time, shooting at close range, going into dangerous things every single day. And that's what I saw in my next couple of tours, which is when you talk about moral injuries to people, you ask to do something that doesn't fit in with the human psyche. It's a whole lot harder than it appears to people who have not experienced that.
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Nicole Wallace
And there's nothing about combat that a civilian population can understand like you can support. But you really, you don't understand that if you've not been there. It seems that, that those subsequent deployments might make veterans feel even more detached from their family and from their communities. And you said, we don't do a good job reflecting. It feels like we didn't even do a good job sort of explaining that that's what they'd been through.
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Lieutenant General Mark Hertling
Well, you can't. I mean, just like most people don't understand, it's very hard to Explain. I hope that comes out a little bit in the book, an explanation of some of the things our soldiers go through. Because truthfully, I was a young dumb kid from Missouri when I went off to the military academy and I didn't know what I was getting into, just going to West Point in 1971 when the Vietnam war was still raging. But you learn the things that you have to do and you're steeled toward action and you're given experiences that help prepare you. But it's like taking a basketball team that's only been practicing and suddenly putting them up against the Chicago Bulls or the Orlando Mag, saying do your best. And oh, by the way, it's not just a game now. Life and death depends on it. How do you prepare for that? It's. You don't.
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Nicole Wallace
I mean, people self select for that life. What is it about the people who opt in to fight and potentially die for their country?
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Lieutenant General Mark Hertling
Yeah, it's interesting because I, that would be my question. Whenever I went on patrols with soldiers when I was a division commander, when I'd go out to do something called battlefield circulation, which meant just going out and walking around on patrols with guys, I'd be the two star general showing up and, you know, asking a lieutenant, can I go with you? And I'd take my rank off and walk around with his platoon or his, his squad. And when it was all over, you know, after watching them to get a feel for what was going on in their area, when we'd be going back toward the forward operating base, I'd ask the question, so what caused you to join the Army? And the amount of answers that were different that I got were just incredible. So there's, there's no one reason.
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Nicole Wallace
What are some of the answers?
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Lieutenant General Mark Hertling
Well, my grandfather told me I should do it. You know, I was in trouble at school and I didn't want to go on to college, you know, those kind of things. One kid who was a Harvard graduate, interestingly enough, the son of a very famous author, Joe, said, I joined the army because I was working on Wall street during 911 and realized I had to do something. And when he got into the army, I asked him how his mom and dad felt about that because both of them were professors at Harvard. And he said they weren't real happ about that, but they said they were proud of him. So that's one. I have a funny story about a kid that I was riding back and asked a truckload of guys why they joined the army. And everybody started laughing and I had Never had that reaction before. And the driver, who was a sergeant, I was in the shotgun seat of an MRAP armored vehicle. The sergeant said, hey, sir, you gotta ask Green, Private Green while he joined the army. I said, okay. I looked around the back of the truck and I said, okay, which one of you guys is Green? And they're all still laughing. And this hand comes, comes down and you got to understand an mrap. So you've got the driver and the guy in the shotgun seat. You've got a guy standing between you and he's outside on the machine gun, you know, protecting the vehicle. And this hand comes down next to my head and he says, hey, sir, I'm Green. I'm up here at the gun. He said, they're wanting me to tell you what I did before I joined the army. I said, okay, Green, what'd you do? Sir, I was a male model. Everybody cracks up again and, you know, I'm just listening to this and I can't see him. So I don't know. We pull into the fob, he jumps off the truck. He takes his helmet off, his goggles. He had goggles on. His face is caked with dust. Green is one good looking kid. And I said, well, Green, okay, tell me why. I said, you didn't tell me why you joined, you just told me what you did. And he goes, well. He said, I was 19 years old, I was making a lot of money as a model. But I looked in the mirror one day after an all night drunk. And he said, I said to myself, I need to do something more important with my life. And he walked into a recruiting station and signed up. I'm getting emotional thinking about that kid. And so I'm starting to get emotional. I said, okay, I can't cry in front of a group of my soldiers. They'll think I'm a real wuss. And so I said, okay, Green, that's great, but you're running a gun truck in northern Iraq right now. How are you feeling about that decision? And then he came back with something that just floored me. He said, pretty damn good, sir. He said, I'm with my brothers now. He said, I didn't have much of a family. He says, but all these guys are my brothers. He says, I've got a new set of values. He recited the army values. And he says, I'm feeling pretty good about it. This is a good life. He said, I wasn't doing anything for society when I was a model. So you ask why kids join the army? Keep asking because sometimes you get some really weird, weird responses.
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Nicole Wallace
What's it like? I mean, your face changes when you talk about them. What's it like when you lose one of them?
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Lieutenant General Mark Hertling
I lost too many. And the great majority of them were ones I had never met. There was One kid, a 21 year old lieutenant who I knew very well because I'd had dinner with him before the war. He was a West Point classmate of our youngest son. The one that typed up the journal.
- [20:49]
Nicole Wallace
Yeah, call him and blame him for making me cry when this is over.
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Lieutenant General Mark Hertling
And they were doing a history class at Gettysburg and we were in Virginia. I was stationed at the Pentagon at the time. And so Scott, our son, said, hey, why don't you come on up and you know, do the staff ride to Gettysburg with us. So my wife and I drove up after the day was over. Of course, what they really wanted me to do was buy them all dinner, so. Which I did.
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Nicole Wallace
And.
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Lieutenant General Mark Hertling
And I met this kid and I later found he was assigned at a division and he was killed in 2004 during the solder Uprising. What's it like? It's devastating if you don't know him. It's something that will put you under the table if you really know him. And there's so many of them. There are so many of them and they're all so young. So. Yeah. And by the way, it's been 20 years. Well, it's been 15 years since I got out of the army. I still think about him every day.
- [21:46]
Nicole Wallace
Every day.
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Lieutenant General Mark Hertling
Every day.
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Nicole Wallace
We'll pause right here for a moment. Much more with Lieutenant General Mark Hertling on the other side. Stay with us.
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Lieutenant General Mark Hertling
I'm not an astronaut.
- [22:08]
Nicole Wallace
I don't need an astronaut.
- [22:10]
Lieutenant General Mark Hertling
Audiences have spoken. Project Hail Mary is an awe inspiring masterpiece. So I met an alien. If you've fallen out of love with going to the movies, this one will bring you back.
- [22:26]
Commercial/Announcer
Ryan gosling in the first must see movie of 2026. Project Hail Mary rated PG13 may be
- [22:34]
Lieutenant General Mark Hertling
inappropriate for children under 13 only in Peter's Friday. Everyone deserves to be connected. That's why T Mobile and US Cellular are joining forces. Switch to T Mobile and save up to 20% versus Verizon by getting built in benefits they leave out. Check the math@t mobile.com switch and now T Mobile is in US cellular stores.
- [22:58]
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- [22:59]
Lieutenant General Mark Hertling
cost of optional benefits. Plan features and taxes and fees vary. Savings with three plus lines include third line free via monthly bill credits. Credit stop if you cancel any lines. Qualifying credit required LifeLock, how can I help?
- [23:09]
Nicole Wallace
The IRS said I filed my return, but I haven't.
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- [23:16]
Nicole Wallace
What do I do? My refund though. I'm freaking out.
- [23:18]
Lieutenant General Mark Hertling
Don't worry, I can fix this.
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Nicole Wallace
I'm so relieved.
- [23:26]
Lieutenant General Mark Hertling
No problem. I'll be with you every step of the way.
- [23:28]
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- [23:43]
Nicole Wallace
When you watch our politics, and I guess if you've watched closely, as we both have over the last 10 years, General Kelly came to the Trump administration with a story like that his own son died in Afghanistan.
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Lieutenant General Mark Hertling
And by the way, I can't imagine that. Why, that's just a whole nother level when you lose. I mean, I don't know how John did that. And John and I were together in Iraq during my last tour. I was in the north, he was in the west. And we did a lot of work together. And it was before his son was killed and I can't imagine the pain his family. I went to his son's funeral and I was, I think I was the only army guy there with a bunch of Marines, which is a scary experience in and of itself. But it was just, it's just unfathomable to bury your own child because of a war especially.
- [24:38]
Nicole Wallace
Well, and then to decide to keep serving the country that took your son. I mean, I guess for to cover politics and to cover General Kelly's time as chief of staff to Donald Trump and to learn about the things Donald Trump said at Arlington, no less about not understanding why someone would do it and to have a view of the men and women who served, that's anything less than being grateful and floored and in awe and not being able to understand that peace that makes them want to protect you. They've never met to be so far on the other side of that as to disrespect it and believe they're, quote, losers and suckers and to denigrate the sacrifice, I feel like that's another piece we don't reflect on enough. What does that mean to have that person back as the commander in chief?
- [25:34]
Lieutenant General Mark Hertling
There's a sadness to someone who can't understand it. And if you're running for office, in my view, and I would never do it, by the way, it's more than just the problems of the nation. It's understanding the people you lead and reflecting in what our Constitution says. So, you know, I can't speak for John Kelly and what he thought when his boss would say something like that, but I think I know what I would say. The first thing I would say is, boy, that's really sad that you don't get it, that you don't understand why people think that what we're defending is so great, the things that we're pledging are potentially giving our life for is so important that you would brush it off like that. And then the second thing I'd probably do is leave. I can't work for this guy. And I've done that with. With jobs in the private sector since I've retired. I have left because the ideas and the values of the organization didn't fit into mine. You know, that whole Constitution thing, people kind of gloss over that where. Where you're taking an oath to something. I mean, the other thing I did as commander of US Army Europe, when I'd go to the 49 different countries in Europe on visits and I'd be engaging with their armies, I would always ask soldiers, I'd say, you know, what do you take an oath for? Just to see what they're. And, you know, you'd get the responses of, to the motherland, to the fatherland, to the king, to the Queen. The Israeli army puts themselves between the people in the sea. But there are very few countries that pledge life to a piece of paper that's a reflection of ideas and values and what we believe. And now sometimes we can't even get people to say what those beliefs are. I mean, there's a lot of people say, oh, we're far. The. We're for the America's values. Oh, yeah, name me a couple and tell me how you're far. Because it's not just what's in that paper, it's what people have spoken of. You know, FDR for freedoms, Gettysburg Address, us being one people, Kennedy's inauguration, Martin Luther King's. I have. I mean, these are beautiful works of people expressing ideas consistent with. That's what we do.
- [27:51]
Nicole Wallace
Yeah.
- [27:52]
Lieutenant General Mark Hertling
Different than defending a motherland or a king, that's for sure.
- [27:56]
Nicole Wallace
Well, and I mean, that's been brought into sharp focus this year, this first year of Trump's second term. The First Amendment has not been under assault like this in our history. Back to General Kelly, who I've now covered for nine years. He finally gives a recorded interview before the election to warn about Trump's autocratic visions. What does that mean for the military to have someone who is constitutionally atop our government, atop the executive branch, is also the commander in chief, but is now flagrantly according to his most senior generals, General Kelly, General Mattis and General Milley, autocratic to his core.
- [28:34]
Lieutenant General Mark Hertling
Yeah, well, what's cool about the military is through an entire career you're rebuffed, you're polished at every rank, you, you, you go to schools, you're with like minded people and, and don't get me wrong, it's, it's not a perfect organization. There are some real faults within the military, but at every level you go back to a school, a schoolhouse, and you regreen in the army, re blue in the Navy and you think about what is it we're doing. And part of it is the mechanics, the science of your job, but part of it is the art of understanding why you're doing it. And I think to answer your question, politicians don't go to those schools. They're not forced to think about it. And in fact, they're brought up in a world where opinion matters a whole lot more than facts and logic. And that's unfortunate.
- [29:31]
Nicole Wallace
What does it mean for this war that we're entered in now in Iran
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Lieutenant General Mark Hertling
in this particular one, There's a lot of swagger and a lot of bluffs and sometimes I'll say hyperbole is a nice word to deflect from using lies to win the support of people. I don't like any one of those three things. It goes against the value of integrity and truth telling. But it's used as a marketing tool. What does it mean for this conflict that we're finding ourselves in today is it's a marketer who has sold a bad product and isn't given a guarantee behind it like most businesses do. Yeah, he's a former businessman, but he's failed at all of his businesses because of this same kind of thing. When you don't plan an operation, when you don't give it the depth of analysis that it needs to have, and, and you're asking people to potentially put their life on the line to do it. To me that's just, I don't know a word for it, but it's dangerous.
- [30:41]
Nicole Wallace
Eight people at the time of this recording have lost their lives and I think around 140 have been injured. You write about, I mean the whole journal is about going off to war and leaving something for your kids and your wife in case you don't come home. Those eight service members will never come home. We're just starting to learn about their lives. What are those families going through right now? Those eight families?
- [31:09]
Lieutenant General Mark Hertling
Well, I'll carry it forward a little bit if I can and say there's those eight and then there's another 140 or so who have been injured and we don't know the extent of their injuries or how or how or where or why. Yeah, yeah. That's the biggest question.
- [31:26]
Nicole Wallace
Is that normal?
- [31:27]
Lieutenant General Mark Hertling
No. I mean, as a commander of forces on the ground, I want to tell my women and men, here's what we're doing and why we're doing it, because that's part of influence, that's part of leadership. You have to know the why of what you're doing in a democratic army. So you have the eight who have sacrificed their life after raising their hand to that oath and then you've got 140 who. Some of them may be minor wounds like I had, some of them may have lost a leg or, you know, God knows what. And we just don't even know them yet. So going back to your previous question, if there's a politician who's safe in a lit air conditioned room making decisions without understanding the depth of those decisions, shame on them. I mean, you, you work for a president that wrestled with those decisions.
- [32:23]
Nicole Wallace
Yeah. And I don't want to gloss over how unpopular his decisions about Iraq and Afghanistan became. I guess what I would say what I witnessed was deep, deep pain at any pain his decisions caused anyone and a bottomless well of reverence for the men and women of the military and their mamas and their wives and their kids. And I hope, hope it's a state secret that Donald Trump feels those things. I really, I pray, I pray he feels those things. I pray he is a version of himself with the families that we never see. I pray that's true.
- [33:03]
Lieutenant General Mark Hertling
Well, when he said in France at Belleau Wood, I mean that's if you know the fight that occurred at Belleau Wood, it compares to some of the things the Ukrainians are going through today. In fact, it's probably a little bit worse. And to say, you want to go there and to stand among those crosses and stars of David and just reflect on that. It gets back to my statement, you know, we don't reflect enough. Maybe you don't understand why they did it, but try and learn, try and convince yourself that you might understand why young 18 year olds will put themselves in a trench and continue to attack the enemy, to stand for what they believe in as opposed to just hand waving it.
- [33:49]
Nicole Wallace
What do you think about the promise to never take the country to war in the Middle east again. That was a consistent promise. And I was in the Republican Party, where the base had grown so dissatisfied with its leaders that that's how they land on Trump in 16, perhaps mostly because of that promise and the wounds and the discontent with the wars in Iraq and Afghan. And now we are at a war for which there's no stated objective, there's no publicly articulated benchmarks for success. We've been keeping track. There are about nine rationales that have been offered. We followed Israel, they've walked away from. We were going to be attacked. What do you think it means in terms of a publicly stated promise and then a reversal on that promise?
- [34:41]
Lieutenant General Mark Hertling
Well, and you're talking about a publicly stated promise that has to do with life and death and spending our nation's treasure and. And sending people to war with their families back here, worried about them. I mean, that's a pretty big promise to break. And all I was thinking as you were talking about was Bush won. He said one thing. No new taxes.
- [35:01]
Nicole Wallace
Read my lips.
- [35:02]
Lieutenant General Mark Hertling
Yeah, read my lips. Read my lips.
- [35:05]
Nicole Wallace
No new taxes.
- [35:09]
Lieutenant General Mark Hertling
And that caused him not to be elected.
- [35:11]
Nicole Wallace
Bush was such a good example, though, because he also, if you remember, one of the other campaign faux pas, is the scanner at the grocery store. I mean, and Donald Trump, literally, Stephanie Ruhl put it perfectly, lives in a gilded bubble. The idea that you could not be successful for not knowing how a scanner works. No one thinks Donald Trump does anything normal. What does that say about our politics?
- [35:32]
Lieutenant General Mark Hertling
It is the connection with people. And by the way, it also says a lot about leadership. How do you lead? It's just not a formal position where you live in a special house with a parking spot outside and a bunch of security agents. To truly lead, you have to exhibit character. You have to show your presence. You have to understand what you're doing, have a competencies. I mean, that's what corporations look for, right? You have to develop other people. You have to have emotions that bring you into connecting so you can influence and understands what motivates Nicole Wallace before I can. I can't lead you unless I know what motivates you. So when you don't have those kinds of intellectual curiosities, I don't understand how someone who's in a formal position can call themselves a leader when their followers are not connecting those dots.
- [36:29]
Nicole Wallace
When you saw the politics on the right play that out. When they condemned Thermal Milley for wanting to understand white rage, they lost their freaking minds. When he said, I just wanted to understand it.
- [36:42]
Lieutenant General Mark Hertling
After the insurrection, we read Marx so we can understand what our enemy's doing.
- [36:47]
Nicole Wallace
I mean, I used to watch and read every Democratic candidate campaign book so that I understood Democratic campaigns because I was working on Republican campaigns. But by their theory, if you're curious about another perspective, you're what woke is the military woke?
- [37:01]
Lieutenant General Mark Hertling
I am, purposely, because I want to know about other people when I'm working with them. I think you gain a whole lot of strength from that. Not only just your friends, but also your enemies. You better know what your enemies are thinking. Football coaches do that. They always scout out the other team game tape.
- [37:18]
Nicole Wallace
Yeah.
- [37:19]
Lieutenant General Mark Hertling
I mean, you know, it'd be like telling, I don't know, Tommy Tuberville not to have game tapes from, you know, Auburn when he's coaching at Alabama. It's ridiculous.
- [37:29]
Nicole Wallace
We go to a lot of baseball games, and sometimes we sit near the scouts for the other teams and explain to my son like, they're here because they're gonna play them next. And that's part of understanding how to be your best. But what about all the smears against the military for being too diverse or too progressive? I mean, I spent a lot of time on military bases when I worked in politics, and I did not detect a crisis of wokeness anywhere. And if you're the largest workforce in the country, it seems that you want to be excellent for everybody.
- [38:03]
Lieutenant General Mark Hertling
Well, teaching at a business school now, which is what I do, I can cite probably no less than a thousand studies on diversity and how it contributes to a better workplace. It contributes to better teamwork. And in fact, I've had had conversations with colleagues who were former generals and admirals. And the discouraging part of that is we attempted for years to actually drive that diversity.
- [38:30]
Nicole Wallace
Yeah.
- [38:31]
Lieutenant General Mark Hertling
So we could really represent America. I mean, you know, it's fascinating. We have soldiers from every state and the union and all the territories.
- [38:39]
Nicole Wallace
Yeah.
- [38:39]
Lieutenant General Mark Hertling
So they are by. I mean, a kid from New York is a whole lot different than a kid from Mississippi. And you form some pretty good teams that way, too.
- [38:48]
Nicole Wallace
We haven't talked about Pete Hegseth yet. I don't even know what I want to know about Pete Hegseth, I guess. How did Pete Hegseth happen?
- [38:55]
Lieutenant General Mark Hertling
Well, he wasn't in the Boy Scouts, that's for sure, because he's condemned the Boy Scouts now.
- [38:59]
Nicole Wallace
Yeah, that's right.
- [39:00]
Lieutenant General Mark Hertling
You know, the character of a leader, if you go into research, will tell you it's formed by background. What you talk about around the dinner table with your parents, what you learn at church, what you learn in your schools, culture, where you come from and your values. I. I'd kind of like to ask Pete Hath what his values are. You know, what, what does he see important and how do those things drive his decision making? Because that's what values do. Because if you don't have any values, you're going to be a wind sock. You're going to flow back and forth. Unless you believe in humility or integrity or some of the values that are associated with being a good leader, you're not going to be a good leader for everyone.
- [39:44]
Nicole Wallace
Yeah. I'll just go by what's been publicly reported about him, you know, his Fox Weekend News colleagues describing him as smelling like alcohol. Monterey, California, Police Department investigating an alleged rape. The reported stories about his, you know, past marriages, and the reporting around his. I think he said on an interview with Megyn Kelly that he would promise not to take a step.
- [40:12]
Commercial/Announcer
My plan going forward, ongoing, is when I deployed, we had something called General Order number one. It is you are not allowed to
- [40:20]
Lieutenant General Mark Hertling
drink while you're on deployment.
- [40:21]
Commercial/Announcer
Right. So if you're in Iraq and Afghanistan in a combat zone, you're not allowed to drink. That's how I view this role as Secretary of Defense, is that I'm not going to have a drink at all. That's not hard for me because it's not a problem for me. So this is the biggest deployment of my life and there won't be a drop of alcohol on my lips while I'm doing it.
- [40:39]
Nicole Wallace
Clearly talking about a pledge that in the way he talked about it, sounded like it would be hard for him, but because of the job, he promised he wouldn't drink. Could a rank and file member of the military have those things going on?
- [40:52]
Lieutenant General Mark Hertling
No, absolutely not. I mean, because they couldn't get a clearance. I mean, when you have a DUI or a felony arrest or even an accusation, your clearance is pulled. So you can't do anything until it's reestablished. The thing that I have problems with is when you put somebody like that up for a position as important as the Defense Secretary, which is probably the hardest job in government other than maybe state, and you vote for him. Those are the people I have trouble with.
- [41:26]
Nicole Wallace
I think about it now as the midterms near. I mean, one of the stories that we covered in 2020 was that someone had the harebrained idea of having the military seize voting machines. Esper was the Secretary of Defense and Mark Milley was the chairman of The Joint Chiefs and I mean, multiple books and accounts have come out about those two refusing to do those sorts of things. Do you think that a request to seize voting machines would be carried out this time?
- [41:53]
Lieutenant General Mark Hertling
I don't know. It's a great question that I don't have an answer to. But when you talk about those who didn't carry it out the last time, you don't have to like any of those people, but they evidently live by a set of values. I know Millie did. He's an army guy. He lives by loyalty, duty, respect, selfless service, honor, integrity, and personal courage. So he had the personal courage to say no. He had the responsibility of duty to say, this isn't right. He was loyal to the Constitution. So, I mean, I could go down the list of the seven army values, which Mark Milley knows, and say, oh, okay, that's why he did it. It or didn't do it. Esper was a soldier, too, so he probably had those same values and said, we, we can't. This isn't right. We swore an oath.
- [42:41]
Nicole Wallace
And Trump ended up at odds with both of them. What does that say about Trump?
- [42:44]
Lieutenant General Mark Hertling
The funny thing about that.
- [42:45]
Nicole Wallace
What does that say about Trump?
- [42:46]
Lieutenant General Mark Hertling
It goes back to values. Do you have them or do you not? Or. I mean, everybody has values. It's just. What are they? Greed is good. In a movie one time. I think that is a value. Greed is good. From an old movie called Wall Street.
- [43:01]
Nicole Wallace
Exactly. And that's. That seems to be laid over into our politics now. My conversation with Lieutenant General Mark Hertling continues right after the break. We'll be back in one minute.
- [43:23]
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- [44:14]
Lieutenant General Mark Hertling
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- [44:49]
Nicole Wallace
What is your degree of worry about the next eight months and the next three years?
- [44:54]
Lieutenant General Mark Hertling
I'm concerned about our institutions across the board, whether they hold or not. There are indicators in my view that they are holding. Some are bending more than others but I haven't seen any that have broken yet and that's a good thing.
- [45:11]
Nicole Wallace
Well I think the Republican Party broke
- [45:12]
Lieutenant General Mark Hertling
yeah but even their appearing to come
- [45:16]
Nicole Wallace
back Massey and tell us and that's
- [45:18]
Lieutenant General Mark Hertling
the interesting thing because you know the Republican Democratic Party are both needed.
- [45:23]
Nicole Wallace
Correct.
- [45:24]
Lieutenant General Mark Hertling
But they need to be functioning.
- [45:25]
Nicole Wallace
I mean they won't do what they're supposed to do. I mean Congress is supposed to make decisions about tariffs. Congress is supposed to make decisions about war and they're not doing either of those things. So I would argue that the Republican Party's broken and the Republican controlled Congress is badly damaged.
- [45:39]
Lieutenant General Mark Hertling
But you know what, I'm an eternal optimist and I believe, and I've said this to my wife a couple times, we won't be back to what we were, but there's a huge possibility that we could come back better because perhaps we lose the swagger and gain a little bit of humility and as a nation understand what we have done and not try and overlook it and maybe find ways that we can rebuild trust between each other and start having these kinds of conversations. Even though if you feel differently about
- [46:14]
Nicole Wallace
a subject we haven't talked about your wife yet but you write about I think one of the journal entries is trying to explain to your sons why you keep hugging them and touching their hair and why you want to do the same to your wife. This feeling of how much you love something when you think you might lose it, that's this patriotism that I think a lot of people in this fight to save democracy feel.
- [46:37]
Lieutenant General Mark Hertling
That's a great point. Yeah. When you think you might lose it and we have had indicators that we might lose it it we better start believing those indicators because we might unless we get our act together.
- [46:48]
Nicole Wallace
Are you sympathetic to the argument that people want to hear from more of the military leaders who work for Trump who saw him in the room? People like Mattis and Millie and Kelly.
- [46:57]
Lieutenant General Mark Hertling
Yeah, I'm sympathetic to it, but I also understand why they're not.
- [47:01]
Nicole Wallace
Why aren't they?
- [47:02]
Lieutenant General Mark Hertling
Because just. And I, I, I'm really on a razor's edge, truthfully. And I get a lot of grief from both sides for speaking out. Out? Yeah. Just because you hold the title of general or retired general or whatever, people think you're trying to influence them in your direction. And I don't try and do that. I've kind of toned myself down a little bit, I think, and I'm just stating the facts, the obvious, you know, using the Aristotelian approach of logic, reason, and passion. And maybe not as much passion as some of the other two things.
- [47:39]
Nicole Wallace
Why'd you turn yourself down?
- [47:40]
Lieutenant General Mark Hertling
Because I was getting too mad and showing too much emotions.
- [47:44]
Nicole Wallace
What made you mad?
- [47:46]
Lieutenant General Mark Hertling
What was happening? I mean, how can you not get mad at seeing some of the things we saw and using the military in the wrong words and having a bunch of soldiers standing behind you that you hand chews and start cheering and the leadership didn't stop it? That pissed me off. I'll say that right now, because that's a leadership issue. That's not a soldier issue. There's going to be soldiers in our military who are supporters of Donald Trump. Okay, fine. But we specifically tell them you're apolitical if you're wearing the uniform, so take it off or don't stand behind the guy. And that's for both presidents, by both parties as well. Going back to your question, though, when you're a leader of soldiers, when you're a commander, when you have the rank, you have to appeal to both sides. And if I'm, I'm an active duty commander and I start knocking Trump, there's people in my unit that are Trump supporters. So they're going to say, you know, boss doesn't care about my feelings or my safety. Yeah. So it follows down the road. It's the same way as having chaplains who speak in the military about one religion, because every formation has Jews and Muslims and Buddhists and all sorts of. And atheists. The other thing I'll say on the issue of generals speaking out is I think there's a vast number of Americans who think the generals are gonna save us, and they're not. I mean, we take that oath to the Constitution. If you elect a guy that I don't like as the president, I'm still gonna support him.
- [49:23]
Nicole Wallace
But let me just play the devil's advocate. I mean, I think that what people hoped and look, in the end, General Kelly did do an interview, and in the end, Bob Woodward reported on Secretary Mattis and General Milley's views, and General Milley testified. But I think that it is hard for people to understand how different this is. I worked for a president whose policies became very unpopular. No one ever felt like he was threatening to end democracy. They didn't like the things he did. On the other side, there were people that didn't support some of former President Obama, Obama's policies, but no one thought that President Obama was going to end the experiment, the American experiment in democracy. And I think there are people that believe this is a break glass moment. And no one knows better than the generals what that oath to the Constitution means and the unique danger that Donald Trump as Commander in Chief represents.
- [50:16]
Lieutenant General Mark Hertling
And I can understand that. I understand people thinking that way. But if you think that way about this particular president, then, and I would say you might want to think that way same way about President Obama for the people that don't like him or President Bush for the people that didn't
- [50:32]
Nicole Wallace
like him, what Trump's doing more dangerous
- [50:34]
Lieutenant General Mark Hertling
than anything Bush or Obama did, I do. Logically, I believe it is very dangerous. It's threatening what that document means. And that's why I speak out, because even as a retired guy, I still believe that I support and defend the Constitution. So when I see violations of what I believe are constitutional issues, I talk about it. Going to war without the support of the American public and the Congress of the United States and violating rules that courts lay down. Yeah, that starts getting into dangerous territory.
- [51:07]
Nicole Wallace
What is the role now of the military now that we're at war in Iran? And Pete Hegseth, standing next at centcom, talked about how we'd only just begun. Donald Trump on timeline has been kind of all over the place. It's almost complete and it could go on a long time. So I don't know what kind of source he is on escalation, but what would the military be prepared for in terms of what direction the policymakers would?
- [51:36]
Lieutenant General Mark Hertling
It's the same thing they always should be prepared for. Not obeying unlawful orders, period. Will there be some that violate that? I hope not.
- [51:46]
Nicole Wallace
Have they already in the Caribbean?
- [51:48]
Lieutenant General Mark Hertling
I don't know. I don't know the details. Truthfully, to me, it still looks flaky. What happened in the Caribbean looks flaky on what we're doing right now in Iran, but I don't know the background to it. And the more Detailed discussions.
- [52:03]
Nicole Wallace
It seems that Trump is not particularly tethered to what he's hearing in a PDB or an NSC process. Marco Rubio has made clear that Israel's foreign policy drove our timing, at least in terms of deploying the US Military to Iran. I mean, is there a point where the rubber could meet the road here?
- [52:20]
Lieutenant General Mark Hertling
No, absolutely. I don't know what that point is, but absolutely. Bombing civilian neighborhoods. I mean, I don't know what the target list is, but if any military planner is given an order to do something specifically like that without an understanding of the legal implications of a war crime, then, yeah, I think so.
- [52:40]
Nicole Wallace
We are at war with Iran without the JAG officers that were there before Trump was inaugurated last January. How much more difficult does that make this?
- [52:50]
Lieutenant General Mark Hertling
Hugely difficult.
- [52:51]
Nicole Wallace
Difficult how?
- [52:52]
Lieutenant General Mark Hertling
You know, this will be hard for your civilian listeners to understand, but I got to tell you, as a senior commander from brigade level up, brigade being an organization about 7 or 8,000 soldiers, I had a legal advisor. And in fact, it was so important to me in Iraq, my legal advisor became my aide de camp and was with me all the time. He would provide me advice on an hourly versus a daily basis. Now out Secretary Hegseth would say, see, hurtling's woke. You know, he's dependent on the legal versus legal.
- [53:22]
Nicole Wallace
We're gonna unleash the. You know.
- [53:24]
Lieutenant General Mark Hertling
But perhaps that shooting of a guy in a bunker told me the difference between legal and lethal and the repercussions of moral injury on something. That's not to say I'm afraid I'll fight people. I. I killed people at long range, but when you kill them up close and personal, that makes all the difference in the world.
- [53:46]
Nicole Wallace
What is your hope for the book?
- [53:49]
Lieutenant General Mark Hertling
A couple things. The reason I decided to get it published was because I was influenced by someone who said that 99% of Americans don't understand what the military does because only 1% wear the uniform. Less than 1%, actually. So it's hopefully a tool to help people understand not. Not necessarily only what soldiers do, but what family, military families do, because we have. We have become a secluded society with the military. We live on, our military lives on their post. Everybody else is on the outside world. The second thing is to. To really talk about leadership and character and decision making in crises, because in war, war by definition is a crisis. It's chaos, it's dysfunction. And a commander's role is to control that. But crises occur in every single organization, some big, some small. I mean, I was with a healthcare system when Covid hit and watched how doctors and nurses reacted to that. And it was a whole lot the same as what soldiers do in combat. So if this book helps people to understand, going back to the question about values, that your values help you get through crises and help you make decision making in the right way, then that would be valuable. And then the third thing was the evolution of war. In the short time that I live, I mean, I spent 38 years in the active army and in the three different wars, the three different deployments. The first one was a conventional fight with a lot of armor and tanks and all that kind of stuff. The second one was a complex counterinsurgency, which is a different kind of war. The third one was a complex counterterrorism fight fight and nation building in Iraq because it was required after we broke it. The kinds of wars we're facing today, snatching grabs, shooting gunboats, invading a country along with one ally and no other allies helping us, those are all different too. So in each one of those there's a requirement for another analysis of what we're getting into. And hopefully people will see some of the complexities of, of combat.
- [56:01]
Nicole Wallace
What is one thing that people who are not in the military always get wrong about military families or military life?
- [56:09]
Lieutenant General Mark Hertling
There's an ever present assessment that we're all like the Great Santini, that we're all disciplined monsters and we order people around and stuff like that. You don't get 18 and 19 year old men and women to do the kinds of things we ask them to do with just orders. You have to understand their motivations, you have to influence them in the right way and you have to provide an example. At least that's today's military. It is a profession. That's another thing about it that I don't think most people understand the profession of arms with all the professional requirements of knowledge, ethos and values, disciplining those who violate the profession, doing something that no one else can do, which is what journalists do. And again, I go back to being a poor kid from St. Louis, Missouri who had a chance to join the Army. I got in my first year at West Point and said, what the hell have I gotten myself into? And since then, by last count, I've been to 123 different countries and I've seen the value of different cultures. I've had dinners with privates and presidents and kings and I think I've had that great opportunity to see the world and it's a pretty cool place.
- [57:27]
Nicole Wallace
Thank you so much for being here. Thank you for having this conversation.
- [57:30]
Lieutenant General Mark Hertling
This was such incredible fun. Getting to talk to a superhero like you is really kind of cool.
- [57:36]
Nicole Wallace
Thank you for asking you so much. Thank you. Thanks for listening to the Best People. And remember to subscribe to Ms. Now Premium on Apple Podcasts to get this show and other Ms. Now originals Advertisement free. You'll also get subscriber only bonus content like a new premium episode from Main justice on how to assure election integrity heading into the midterms. All episodes of this podcast are also available on YouTube. Visit msnow. The best people to Watch the Best People is produced by Vicki Verdalina. Our Associate producer is Rana Shabazzi with additional production support from Query Robinson. Our audio engineers are Greg Greg Devens, Bob Mallory and Hazik Bin Ahmad Farad. Katie Lau is our Senior Manager of Audio production, Pat Burkey is the Senior Executive Producer of Deadline White House. Brad Gold is the Executive Producer of Content Strategy, Aisha Turner is the Executive Producer of Audio and Madelyn Herringer is Senior VP in charge of audio, Digital and long form. Search for the best people wherever you get your podcasts and be sure to follow the series.
- [58:55]
Lieutenant General Mark Hertling
Lifelock how can I help?
- [58:57]
Nicole Wallace
The IRS said I filed my return, but I haven't.
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Nicole Wallace
What do I do? My refund though. I'm freaking out.
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Lieutenant General Mark Hertling
Don't worry, I can fix this.
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- [59:12]
Nicole Wallace
I'm so relieved.
- [59:14]
Lieutenant General Mark Hertling
No problem. I'll be with you every step of the way.
- [59:16]
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