If I Don't Return

In late 1990, Mark Hertling, the operations officer (S3) for the 1st Squadron, 1st Cavalry Regiment in the US Army's 1st Armored Division, deployed to Saudi Arabia for what would become Operation Desert Storm, the US-led coalition war to liberate Kuwait from Iraqi occupation. His squadron, known as the Blackhawks, was assigned the advance guard mission for the division, meaning they would lead the attack into Iraq against the Republican Guard, Saddam Hussein's elite military forces. Early casualty projections forecast that over 50 percent of the squadron might not survive. Facing that possibility, Hertling began writing a journal addressed to his two young sons, Todd and Scott, ages eleven and eight, so they would know their father if he did not return.

More than three decades later, on Christmas morning 2024, Scott presented his father with a typed and bound transcription of the handwritten journal, which he had spent months deciphering from ink-smeared pages written under a flashlight in the Saudi desert. Scott asked Hertling to finish the journal by adding reflections drawn from the decades of leadership, combat, and civilian experience that followed. Hertling, who retired as a lieutenant general after commanding US Army Europe, serving three tours in Iraq, and building careers in health care, television news analysis, and university teaching, agreed. The resulting book interweaves the original 1991 entries, preserved in italics, with new commentary connecting each wartime observation to lessons accumulated over a lifetime.

The first section covered the weeks between Hertling's arrival in Saudi Arabia in December 1990 and the start of the air campaign in January 1991. Each night, he wrote a short entry on a topic he wanted his sons to understand: emotions, friendship, first impressions, cultural differences, faith, fear, and marriage. He wrote about crying over their Christmas cards and argued that emotional honesty is a leadership strength. He described his closest friend, Major Marty Dempsey, who would later become the eighteenth chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, as someone whose shared values and humor made him better. He wrote a tribute to his wife, Sue, calling her the most selfless person he had ever known and the center of gravity in their family. He confessed his fear of dying, recounting the morning he drove away from their home in Bavaria and saw Sue watching from the bedroom window. Throughout these entries, Hertling's reflections expanded outward, drawing on travels to over 120 countries, encounters with service members of many faiths, and a doctorate he pursued at age sixty-three. As the UN deadline for Iraqi withdrawal passed on January 15, 1991, the squadron zeroed its weapons, and the journal's philosophical tone gave way to operational urgency.

The second section began on January 17, 1991, when Lieutenant Rich Tunney, the squadron's assistant intelligence officer, woke the unit with news that the air campaign had started. Over the following weeks, the Blackhawks prepared for the ground war while the US Air Force pounded Iraqi positions. Hertling noted that the squadron learned more from BBC radio and CNN than from military intelligence channels. He wrote about Chaplain Steve Thornton, who refused medical evacuation despite a back injury, staying with the soldiers to deliver a sermon on three forms of prayer. In February, the squadron rehearsed brigade- and corps-level movements involving thousands of vehicles, then conducted reconnaissance of the Saudi-Iraqi border berm, where Iraqi guard towers stood unmanned. A violent thunderstorm devastated the camp on the eve of battle, but the squadron recovered and finalized its attack order.

The ground war began on February 24. The squadron crossed the berm into Iraq, took three immediate casualties from anti-personnel mines, and led the division north. At the first major objective, approximately 150 Iraqi soldiers surrendered by waving white flags. Over the following days, the squadron took hundreds of prisoners and engaged Iraqi armored columns, while helicopters called in air strikes that destroyed 27 tanks and prevented an Iraqi tank brigade from overrunning one of the troops. On the night of February 26, after Hertling's Bradley, an armored fighting vehicle, destroyed two dug-in Iraqi tanks at close range, friendly fire from US Multiple Launch Rocket System (MLRS) cluster munitions rained down on the squadron's position. Nearly 30 soldiers were wounded, but none were killed. Medics and combat lifesavers—soldiers trained in emergency battlefield medicine—treated the casualties, including Private First Class Tammy Reese, a volunteer medic and Hertling's first experience with a woman in a direct combat role. Hundreds of tanks from 1st Brigade then passed through the squadron's position to attack the Republican Guard. By February 28, the ceasefire was declared. The squadron had taken more than half the division's total casualties but no deaths.

In his reflections on the combat entries, Hertling traced the full arc of his three Iraq deployments. In 2003, he returned as an assistant division commander in Baghdad, shifting from conventional warfare to counterinsurgency. When the division's deployment was extended during the 2004 Sadr uprising, Hertling flew to Germany to explain the extension to thousands of anxious families in base theaters. In 2007, he returned as commanding general, leading Task Force Iron, his composite command spanning seven northern Iraqi provinces during the surge. Attacks in his area declined by over 70 percent, but the cost was severe. Both sons and his daughter-in-law eventually served multiple tours in Iraq, while Sue bore the burden of worry at home.

The third section returned to reflective writing as the squadron waited for redeployment. Hertling described Major General Griffith, the division commander, visiting soldiers and stepping off script to engage them individually, teaching Hertling about closing the distance between leaders and those they lead. He learned that the family's dog had been put to sleep while he was deployed and wrote about the sacrifices military families bore alone. He confronted the environmental devastation of burning Kuwaiti oil wells and described Iraqi civilians approaching his soldiers with napalm burns and children maimed by cluster munitions, reflecting on how leadership required widening the circle of responsibility beyond one's own forces.

Two entries dealt directly with death. Hertling revealed a truth he had concealed in the original journal: While clearing Iraqi bunkers alone after the ceasefire, he killed an enemy soldier at close range and found a photograph of the man's wife and children inside his helmet. He identified this as a source of lasting moral injury that he carried for years until Sue helped him seek counseling. In another entry, soldiers discovered 25 dead Iraqis in the desert and conducted a mass burial. Captain Roger Alford, commander of A Troop, stood silently over the grave before saying, "I have no respect for any military force that doesn't bury their dead."

Other entries addressed subjects from the absurd to the serious: a volleyball game against Iraqi refugees, Hertling's first television interview about Iraqi torture sites, music as a metaphor for respecting individuality, and a mature leadership framework identifying four elements for assessing leaders: attributes, competencies, methods of influence, and context. At Camp Kasserine, the squadron's final encampment in Saudi Arabia, named after the 1943 battle where the 1st Armored Division suffered a devastating defeat against the German Afrika Korps, Hertling reflected that the humility of that loss prepared the army for later triumphs, while the swift victory of 1991 may have bred the overconfidence that led to miscalculations in 2003.

In his final journal entry, Hertling invoked General Douglas MacArthur's prayer "Build Me a Son, O Lord," connecting each line to decades of accumulated lessons. He declared that leadership is "love in public" and that the purpose of life is not winning but being good and doing good together. He closed with the German farewell Auf Wiedersehen, meaning not goodbye but "until we see each other again." In an afterword, he thanked Sue, his sons, the United States, and Germany, and announced that half the book's proceeds would go to the National Ability Center in Park City, Utah, in memory of US Army veteran Pete Way, who was wounded in Afghanistan but found healing through the organization's programs.