From Gun Truck to Healthcare: Ret. Gen. Mark Hertling, Former Commander of 90,000, Talks Leadership in Workplace

These days Mark Hertling lives in Palm Coast, teaches physicians and healthcare administrators how to lead, and talks geopolitics on CNN. When he has a moment, he appears before civic groups for a talk, as he did on a Saturday last month when he addressed the University Women of Flagler at the Hilton Garden Inn, as he will again on May 17 as the keynote speaker at Flagler Tiger Bay’s monthly lunch. Whatever his theme, the retired general loves telling stories. He teaches by parables.

Like this one: During George W. Bush’s ill-fated “surge” in Iraq around 2007 Hertling, who ended his long military career as the Commanding General of the Seventh Army and the U.S. Army’s 90,000 men and women in Europe, was on patrol in Iraq with a group of about a dozen soldiers. He was riding in a truck equipped with a 50-caliber gun (the kind somehow still not available at your local Florida gun shop). Always genial and unassuming, the general asked the soldiers, by way of an ice-breaker, how they ended up in the army.




He usually gets straight answers–my dad was in the Army, 9/11 led me to it, a sense of adventure, that sot of thing. Not this time though. The question was answered with laughter, Hertling, now a Palm Coast resident, told his audience as he spoke to the University Women of Flagler at the Hilton Garden Inn on a Saturday morning last month.

The soldiers told him to ask Pvt. Green, the guy manning the gun.

“I’m not going to tell you why I joined the Army and you can’t make me,” Green told him. Hertling reminded him that as his division commander, he could. “It’s not about why I joined the army,” Green went on, “it’s what I did before I joined the Army.”

He’d been a male model. Magazine shoots and the rest of it. His platoon had proof.

He looked it, too. “One good looking kid,” Hertling remembered as they got back to base. “Got cleft chin, he’s got dimples, he’s got blond hair, but his face is covered in dust, and he’s smiling.” So how did he end up in the army?




“I was involved in some things with a bunch of other female models,” Hertling continued, quoting Green’s story, “and he said I woke up one morning in a hotel room after drinking too much. I went into the bathroom. 19 years old. He said, I looked at myself in the mirror, and I said, I gotta do something more important with my life.

“So if that doesn’t stab at the heart of an old two-star general, nothing will,” Hertling said, beginning to choke up. “I tried to keep it together and I tried to make a joke out of it: So Green. How’s that working out for you, running a gun truck?”

Hertling pauses again to collect himself: “At that point, he said, Sir, he said these guys are my brothers. He said, I didn’t have a family when I was growing up. These guys are now my family. He said the army has taught me about values, loyalty, duty, respect, selfless service, honor, integrity and personal courage. And by the way, those are the seven Army values.” Of course the room erupted.

It was Hertling’s best story of the morning, and possibly the most illustrative of his theme. He’d not turned up at the University Women’s meeting to speak about wars and the military, Ukraine or or Putin (as he will be doing at Tiger Bay), but about leadership.




“You learn that but you don’t really understand that the first thing before I try and influence them,” he said of men and women in battle, “is to understand who they are, to understand their motivations for doing or not doing something. When as a commander of the army, everybody thinks it’s real easy because you just order people around. You have to influence them and convince them.” But it’s not that different in the private and public sector workplace: “As a leader, you somehow have to get into the heart and soul of the people you’re leading, develop that trust with them, communicate in words that they understand and that they will take action on, and at the same time, be a person that they believe in with all the attributes I talked about before.”

Hertling has made a second career in leadership consulting since retiring from the military in 2013 after 38 years, crafting a Physician Leader Development course for AdventHealth in Orlando, where he held a senior executive position for six years, turning it into a book (Growing Physician Leaders: Empowering Doctors to Improve Our Healthcare), then leveraging that into more leadership consulting for four other hospitals.

“That’s a lesson of leadership, that you always have to be open to new things,” he’d said in relation to a different story, “and use the Aristotelian approach of logos, pathos, and ethos–logic, reason and passion and combine those in your communication.” His interactions with the soldiers in the gun truck to finally get Green to speak, in other words, was an example: he built an understanding he didn’t have and a rapport that may have helped make the unit more cohesive.

It’s that sort of thing Hertling has sought to apply in healthcare, where the fragmentation and hierarchies between physicians, nurses and administrators are nobody’s secret and every healthcare organization’s bane. He made it sound as if applying the same leadership principles wasn’t that strange of a jump from military ranks to healthcare, though for Hertling, adaptability has always been second nature.




Developing his own outlook and values was an Odyssean journey, starting from his birthplace in St. Louis, where he’d grown up “lower class on a good day,” and entering West Point in 1971. It wasn’t a propitious time to do so. Lyndon Johnson’s and Richard Nixon’s follies in Vietnam had sunk the military to a low point in public credibility or respect. But he was looking for his way into the world. He’d never left St. Louis or been on a plane before going to the military academy in New York.

He ended up living in Europe for nine years, three in the Middle East, lived in Washington State and California, in Louisiana, in Kentucky, in Washington, D.C., in Virginia, in New York. In all he moved 25 times with his wife, went to 119 countries at last count, dined with corporals, presidents, kings and queens, and never lost his sense of humor. (The punch-line to one of his jokes: “It takes us more generals to get an ounce of brain,” and when an audience member asked him how she should refer to him, he said, “You can call me Mark, or your Excellency.”)

“The fact that we were able to experience so many different cultures, so many different things, I think contributed to that view of the world, which is a definite element of what leadership experts call attributes,” Hertling said. “There’s a great lesson to be learned that when you go outside of your own culture, and try and find information and see other people’s points of view, it helps to build better organizations and better institutions.”