{"id":2541,"date":"2026-10-27T07:35:00","date_gmt":"2026-10-27T11:35:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/davidbrownonline.com\/?p=2541"},"modified":"2026-10-19T04:34:31","modified_gmt":"2026-10-19T08:34:31","slug":"write-it-down","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/davidbrownonline.com\/index.php\/2026\/10\/27\/write-it-down\/","title":{"rendered":"Write It Down"},"content":{"rendered":"

I was driving home from work when a retired general on The Art of Manliness<\/a> podcast described a briefing he sat through in 1991. Mark Hertling was an Army major in Germany with two boys at home, ten and seven, and he was told his cavalry squadron could take casualties as high as 50 percent in Desert Storm. His unit had found out it was deploying from the television news. He did the math any father would. Then he did what most of us never get around to. He wrote it down.<\/p>\n

He started a journal so his sons would know him if he didn’t come home. Life before the war, during it, and after, if there was an after. Along the way he wrote down the things he wanted to teach them himself and might not get the chance to: friendship, marriage, faith, fear, the value of a handwritten note. One line stayed with me the rest of the drive. “Don’t waste a day when you think you have nothing going on.”<\/p>\n

He came home after about eight months. Then, in his words, “I kind of threw the journal into a foot locker.” It sat there for more than thirty years, until Christmas morning of 2024, when his younger son handed him a typed copy. “He had typed it up,” Hertling said, “which in and of itself was a difficult task because my handwriting is terrible.”<\/p>\n

I recognized that foot locker. I have one. Mine is a journal.<\/p>\n

The thought that rode home with me is one I carry most days anyway. As a father, I am preparing my children for a world in which I no longer exist.<\/p>\n

Every parent is doing that, whether we say it or not. Most of us file it under someday and go back to permission slips and practice schedules. Hertling didn’t get to. Somebody stood in front of a map and put a number on it. The rest of us never sit through a briefing like that, so it’s easy to go years without thinking about it.<\/p>\n

I suspect that’s why so few fathers write anything down. Putting it on paper means admitting the number exists. It feels a little like tempting fate, so we don’t, and we tell ourselves there will be time.<\/p>\n

I love motorcycling. That has never been a secret. But I’d be lying if I said I think about safety the same way I did before I became a father. Every time I get on the bike, there’s a brief pause. I pray that today is not the day the Lord decides to call me home.<\/p>\n

Then I ride.<\/p>\n

Anyone who carries risk, for a living or for the love of it, has some version of that pause. It might come in a patrol car before the shift, or on the way to the airport, or so quietly you never notice it. A two-lane road at dusk doesn’t care how many kids you have at home, and neither does anything else that can take you from them. What matters is what you do with the pause once the engine is running.<\/p>\n

I have written letters to my children. They are for their futures, life advice for different stages, the things I would want them to hear at the moments I might not be there to say them. They live in my journal.<\/p>\n

I have never shared them with anyone. Not even my wife.<\/p>\n

If Hertling’s son hadn’t sat down with thirty-year-old pages and a lot of patience, that journal would still be in the foot locker. My letters are in a book nobody else has opened, and nobody knows to look for it. For a man who has spent his career preaching preparation, that’s an awkward thing to admit. Until someone else knows those pages exist, I haven’t finished the job.<\/p>\n

I didn’t grow up with letters like these. I never had a relationship with my father, and even now we rarely communicate. Perhaps that is what drives me to be better with my own children. Nobody handed me the words, so I’m writing them down myself.<\/p>\n

For a lot of us, this is open enrollment month. Sometime in the next few weeks you’ll click through the life insurance screen, confirm the beneficiary, and maybe promise yourself again that you’ll get the will done. The form asks who gets the money. Nothing on it asks what your kids should hear from you. Almost nobody plans for the father: the voice, the advice, the specific thing you believe about each of your kids that they don’t believe about themselves yet.<\/p>\n

Hertling said it plainly. “If you want something to last, write it down on a piece of paper.”<\/p>\n

So write one page to each of your children. By hand. Not a will and not a goodbye. Just what you’d want them to know if you weren’t there to teach it, and what you saw in them before they could see it.<\/p>\n

Hertling gave a good example on the podcast. A friend, he said, is “someone who will see you at your worst and at your best and accept you for both and that you do the same for them.” That’s a sentence a kid can grow into. It means one thing at ten and something else at thirty, and it still sounds like the man who wrote it.<\/p>\n

It doesn’t have to be good. Hertling’s handwriting was bad enough that typing it up was a project, and his son did it anyway. Your kids won’t grade the prose. They’ll read it for proof that you were thinking about them, specifically, when you didn’t have to be. Start with what you see in them. Most kids hear plenty about what they need to fix. Very few have it in writing, in their father’s hand, what he believed they already were.<\/p>\n

Then do the two things I’m still working on myself.<\/p>\n

Tell one person where the pages are. Your spouse, or the friend you’d trust with your kids. Tonight, not someday.<\/p>\n

And don’t save all of it for later. Hertling’s sons got his journal thirty years after he wrote it. The advice held up, but there were a lot of ordinary days in those thirty years when a ten-year-old could have used some of it. A letter written for the day you don’t come home can do a lot of good on the days you do.<\/p>\n

There’s a line in my letters I want my kids to carry long after I’m gone. You are more capable than you think. You are braver than you realize. It’s written in a journal they’ve never seen. It also belongs at the kitchen table, on a random Tuesday, when nothing is going on.<\/p>\n

Saying it out loud is harder than writing it. On paper you get to choose every word, and nobody is looking at you while you do. That’s exactly why it’s worth doing at least once while they’re young enough to need it.<\/p>\n

You don’t need a dangerous job for any of this to apply. Your kids will live part of their lives without you, whatever you do for a living, and your words can be there when you aren’t.<\/p>\n

Pick one of your kids and start the page tonight.<\/p>\n

Write it down while you can still read it to them.<\/p>\n

\n

The Art of Manliness, Episode #1,132, “If I Don’t Return: A General’s Wartime Journal for His Sons,” with Mark Hertling (Sept. 8, 2026). All Hertling quotes verified against the episode transcript: https:\/\/www.artofmanliness.com\/social\/fatherhood\/podcast-1132-if-i-dont-return-a-generals-wartime-journal-for-his-sons\/<\/a><\/p>\n<\/span>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I was driving home from work when a retired general on The Art of Manliness podcast described a briefing he sat through in 1991. Mark Hertling was an Army major in Germany with two boys at home, ten and seven, and he was told his cavalry squadron could take casualties as high as 50 percent […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2542,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_custom_body_class":"","_custom_post_class":"","om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[44,14,12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2541","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-humanfirst","category-insight","category-journal"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t