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Heroes' Path Foundation We make these lessons accessible and relevant to future generations.

Heroes' Path Foundation is dedicated to preserving and sharing the lessons of leadership, character, and service through educational programs, mentorship, and historical preservation.

Tonight, somewhere along the Florida Panhandle, a man in a bucket truck is eating a gas-station sandwich and waiting for...
10/10/2026

Tonight, somewhere along the Florida Panhandle, a man in a bucket truck is eating a gas-station sandwich and waiting for the wind to quit. When Isaias moves through, he’ll go up the pole. In the dark. In the rain. Nobody will interview him.

I’ve been thinking about him all day.

Jeff Steinberg and I sat down this afternoon, a few hours before landfall, to walk through the week. A hurricane in the Gulf. A contested strait half a world away. A President who put a date in writing. A man with Ebola who walked through airport screening like it wasn’t there. A room in the West Wing that only two people could enter.

And a ten-minute exercise with your Social Security statement and a pencil that could spare you a nasty surprise in 2032.

None of this is entertainment. It’s the plumbing. You won’t see most of it, but you’ll pay for all of it: at the pump, on the mortgage quote, on the heating bill this winter. The same gallon of diesel runs through Alabama and the Strait of Hormuz on its way to your driveway.

The episode runs twenty-five minutes. That’s one commute, or one load of laundry.

If you heat with oil, call your dealer this week. If you see a bucket truck on your street, wave.

Thank you for walking the path.

October 9, 2027

Every fire drill I’ve ever seen goes about the same way. The alarm goes off at the worst possible time. Somebody finishe...
10/10/2026

Every fire drill I’ve ever seen goes about the same way. The alarm goes off at the worst possible time. Somebody finishes the email anyway. Somebody else stops to pour a coffee to carry down the stairs. Out in the hallway, one person with a clipboard, or maybe a stopwatch, is trying to get a few hundred grown adults to take it seriously.Most of us have been the coffee guy at least once.

This story is about the man with the stopwatch. His name was Rick Rescorla. For eight years he ran fire drills for Morgan Stanley in the South Tower of the World Trade Center, every quarter. He timed them. He made rules nobody had asked for. The man who ran the firm backed him, and the people walking the stairs hated it.

He kept the watch running anyway.

The next time the alarm goes off where you work and you’re tempted to finish the email, I hope you’ll think of Rick.

Then I hope you’ll get up.And when you do, maybe, really consider the whole concept of responsibility.

https://heroespath.substack.com/p/two-by-two?r=ky3s5amp;utm_campaign=postamp;utm_medium=webamp;showWelcomeOnShare=true

For eight years he made a Manhattan bank practice walking down the stairs. On September 11, 2001, they knew the way.

On the twenty-second of September, the boards outside American truck stops read six dollars and fifty-three cents for a ...
09/30/2026

On the twenty-second of September, the boards outside American truck stops read six dollars and fifty-three cents for a gallon of diesel. Nobody held a press conference. The drivers who saw it went inside and paid.
It was the highest price for diesel ever recorded in this country.

Four days later the President turned down Iran's offer to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. Two days before that, the Senate voted on whether to bring American forces home from the war and came up one vote short. Forty-nine to fifty.

And last Monday, somebody in Moscow finished a spreadsheet. It puts seventeen point one trillion rubles into defense for 2027, and fifty trillion over three years. A government will say almost anything. It only has to fund one document.

Nobody budgets fifty trillion rubles for a war they expect to end next year.
Jeff Steinberg and I went through all of it this morning. Less than thirty minutes for this episode. On the drive home, on a walk, or over coffee.

Then write and tell me what we missed.

https://heroespath.substack.com/p/the-heroes-path-dispatch-e64?r=ky3s5&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true

September 29, 2026

Saturday night a woman walked up to me after I'd finished speaking, took a photograph out of a plastic sleeve, and hande...
09/27/2026

Saturday night a woman walked up to me after I'd finished speaking, took a photograph out of a plastic sleeve, and handed it to me.

A young Marine under an American flag, one arm up, holding the pole, grinning at the camera. His First Sergeant had asked who wanted to hold the flag. He volunteered.

His name was Gino. He was twenty-one. She's carried that picture for fourteen years.

I wrote about her, and about what a room full of Gold Star Mothers does with grief when it refuses to stay home, and about a Skype call and some Maryland crabs. It's the best thing I've written this year, and I'm not the one who made it good.

Now the part where I ask for something. If you read this one and think it was worth more than nothing, become a paid subscriber. It costs less per month than a case of Natty Boh. If you can't, subscribe for free and share it with somebody who needs to meet Gino. That helps too.

Either way, say his name. Lance Corporal Eugene "Gino" Mills III. Laurel, Maryland. That's the whole ask.

It's on my Substack, free to read: heroespath.substack.com/p/the-photograph-she-carries

An Evening with American Gold Star Mothers

One day, 164 years ago, a man found something in a field.He was forty-six, the oldest soldier in his company by two deca...
09/17/2026

One day, 164 years ago, a man found something in a field.

He was forty-six, the oldest soldier in his company by two decades, a sawmill owner from Indiana who'd enlisted the year before and had walked farther in twelve months than in the rest of his life put together. On a Saturday morning on September 13, 1862, his regiment halted in a clover field south of Frederick, Maryland, on ground the Confederate army had left four days earlier. He lay down in the grass.

An envelope was lying beside his hand.

Inside were three ci**rs, and for a corporal in the Army of the Potomac that would have been enough. But the ci**rs were wrapped in a sheet of paper, and the paper was headed Headquarters, Army of Northern Virginia, and it was signed for Robert E. Lee.

He read it twice. Then he stood up and went to find his sergeant.

What he'd picked up was the marching order for the entire Confederate army: every division, every road, every day, for the week ahead. It went up the chain of command in under an hour. Whether any soldier in any war has handed his general a larger gift is a question historians are still arguing about.

The corporal went back to his stacked r***e and sat down in the clover.

He didn't get to keep the ci**rs.

https://heroespath.substack.com/p/the-corporal-in-the-clover?r=ky3s5&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true

Antietam: Four days before the bloodiest day in American history, a private from Indiana handed his general the enemy’s plan.

Tuesday, 12:30pm, a conference room on the second floor of a retirement community in Needham, Massachusetts. Iced tea an...
09/16/2026

Tuesday, 12:30pm, a conference room on the second floor of a retirement community in Needham, Massachusetts. Iced tea and cookies on a side table. Jim Joslin had an idea over the summer: nine monthly meetings on how the Second World War was actually won. He partnered with John Mills, who knows everyone in the building. Twenty two people RSVPd and 43 showed up.

Before the first slide went up, I asked the room to raise a hand if they had ever been to Normandy. Most of the hands went up. I asked who had worn a uniform. More hands. I asked who had a father, a mother, an uncle, an aunt in the war. Every hand I could see.

Then I asked the question I ask everywhere, and got the answer I get everywhere, only louder.

What follows is about that room, the two men who built it, and a fascinating story that walked up to us afterward.

https://heroespath.substack.com/p/two-clicks?r=ky3s5&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true

An afternoon in Needham, Massachusettes, a woman with stories about her parents, and perspectives on D-Day 82 years later.

A man in Waterloo, New York, needed room in his garage for his Halloween decorations.So he pulled a sheet of plywood off...
09/12/2026

A man in Waterloo, New York, needed room in his garage for his Halloween decorations.

So he pulled a sheet of plywood off the wall, found a crawl space he had never seen in all the years he lived there, and inside it a cardboard box gone soft with age, full of old paper. He carried it out to the driveway to throw it away. Then the wind turned over the top sheet, and he saw what somebody had stamped across it in red ink eighty years ago.

What was in that box, who wrote it, and why their own families had never heard a word of it, is today's piece on the Heroes' Path Substack. It's also about what gets lost when nobody looks twice.

Subscribe for free and you'll get it in your inbox. And if you really want to help us formally launch Heroes' Path, become a paid subscriber for a very nominal sum each month. And you'll help us keep the lights on!

https://heroespath.substack.com/p/the-box-that-almost-went-in-the-trash?r=ky3s5&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true

A man in Waterloo, New York, was making room in his garage for Halloween decorations. What he found behind the plywood had been missing since 1945.

Twenty-five years ago this morning, a phone rang on my brother's desk in the White House. He was thirty-four, an Army ma...
09/11/2026

Twenty-five years ago this morning, a phone rang on my brother's desk in the White House. He was thirty-four, an Army major, and he was finishing a memo he believed would be the most important thing he did that year. Michael Fenzel and I have talked about September 11 maybe three times in twenty-five years. That isn't much for two people who were both in the White House that morning. We happened to both be in Martha's Vineyard a few days ago. So I pressed play on my iPhone.

Michael was a 34-year-old major on the counterterrorism staff. When the complex was evacuated that morning, I left with everyone else. He didn't. He spent the day and most of the night in the rooms people have written whole books about, close enough to take notes, and then he spent the next twenty years in the war that began that morning. Iraq. Afghanistan, more than once. A battalion on the Pakistan border. And at the very end, a chair across a table from the men we had been fighting all along.

He has never talked about any of this on the record. We have barely talked about it with each other. I used to think that was just how soldiers are. I think now it's simpler than that. Some things you can't say to a stranger, and you don't need to say to a brother, and so they don't get said at all.

This summer I put a camera on a tripod at his place on Martha's Vineyard and asked him anyway. We released the first half yesterday. It's called "Before the Day," and it stays in the summer of 2001, with a young major doing his job. The second half comes out today, on the anniversary. It's the day itself, and everything after.

This isn't a political conversation. What he does talk about is what it looks like to do your job when the job suddenly becomes bigger than you are, what combat teaches that a conference room can't, and what he wants his own kids to understand about that morning when they're old enough to ask.

Somewhere in the middle, he tells stories he's never told outside the handful of people who were in the room for it. I was one of them. I told him he didn't have to. But he told it anyway.

There are many lessons we can learn from 9-11. You'll hear most of them in this video.

We both agree that it's hard to talk about this event and all that followed. Then he speaks for both of us, saying "it's cathartic as hell."

Both parts are up now on Heroes' Path.

https://heroespath.substack.com/p/911-at-25-part-2-the-day-and-the?r=ky3s5&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true

#911

An Interview with Lieutenant General Michael Fenzel (USA, Ret.)

Twenty-five years after September 11, I sat down with my brother, Lieutenant General Michael Fenzel, to talk about the w...
09/10/2026

Twenty-five years after September 11, I sat down with my brother, Lieutenant General Michael Fenzel, to talk about the world that existed before America knew what was coming.

The water outside the windows on Martha’s Vineyard was calm.

My brother Michael sat across from me on a couch covered with old maps. We could see the water from where we were sitting. And what we'd intended to spend as a 30 minute discussion continued for well over an hour.

Just two brothers talking.

And a date that's followed both of us for twenty-five years.

September 11, 2001.

There are dates you remember because something happened to you.

There are other dates that divide your life into two pieces.

Before.

And after.

Michael and I were White House Fellows together in 2001. The odds of that were long, and our father would tell you he never doubted it for a minute. Michael's assignment was the National Security Council, on the counterterrorism staff. Mine was a few hundred yards away on a different floor in the Vice President's Office. On the morning of the eleventh he was at his desk and I was at mine, and at that moment, neither job was the one we'd had when we badged into those 18 acres.

The interview comes in two parts. Part 1 is out today. It's called "Before the Day," and it stays in the summer of 2001, with a young major who was doing his job and had no idea what that job was about to become. Part 2 comes tomorrow, on the anniversary.

I wrote a short piece to go with it. It won't tell you what he said. That's his to tell, and he tells it better than I could.

https://heroespath.substack.com/p/911-at-25-part-1-before-the-day?r=ky3s5&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true

#9/11

A Conversation with Lieutenant General Michael Fenzel (USA, Ret.)

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