Ben Zweibelson was the kid in high school who was always drawing. Then his father died, the money ran out, and a National Guard recruiter at a Connecticut county fair offered him a way to pay for college. He took it — and he stayed for twenty-two years, four combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, four Bronze Stars, and the Ranger tab. Along the way the Army also gave him three master's degrees and, on the GI Bill, a doctorate in philosophy.

Ben is what that advice looks like when somebody actually takes advantage of all the opportunities that military service offers.

But this conversation isn't really about a career. It's about a cigar box.

Ben's father, Irving, was a 22-year-old Ashkenazi Jew from New York, blind in one eye, who was turned away by the Marines and the Navy before the Army took him. He served in Panama and West Africa. He came home, locked the war away, and never spoke of it again. Ben describes sitting at the dinner table at ten years old — full of The A-Team and Platoon — asking his father whether he'd ever killed anyone, and hearing the man's Parkinson's-stricken hand shake so hard that his wristwatch knocked against the underside of the table. "I had poked the bear, and I didn't understand."

His father died when Ben was seventeen. "If you lose somebody that young," he says, "you spend the rest of your life searching for a ghost you'll never catch."

Bad War Stories — his fifth book, and nothing like the four that came before it — is his answer to that silence. He calls it an anti-memoir: written in the third person, refusing the heroics and the veneer that make war legible to Hollywood, humanizing everyone in the frame including the adversaries and the civilians. Every event in it is real. He fictionalized only the names.

Along the way, we get the stories that don't make the official record: the live-agent chamber at Fort McClellan and the atropine pen he jammed into a training dummy backwards — a secret he admits he has never told anyone until this episode. The white van he parked in a Special Forces unit's drop zone at Fort Polk, three kilometers from anywhere, ending their pre-deployment validation. The four men he dedicated the book to — a high school wrestling coach, two friends' fathers, and a Special Forces colonel who protected him decades later — who between them filled a hole his own father couldn't.

And there's the harder material, too: what the institution does to curious people, why Ben thinks we are training to win a war that may never come, and what he wants his three sons to have when he's gone.

The last question we asked stopped him. He admitted he'd been dreading it since he saw it on our list.

We planned on thirty minutes. We went an hour, and we easily could have kept going.  That's why we're going to have him back with us in October.

IN THIS EPISODE

• How an art student ended up in an infantry battalion — and whether an artist sees a battlefield differently
• Fort McClellan, the Chemical Corps, and a live-agent story Ben has never told publicly
• Lady Luck and the Grim Reaper — "sometimes they switch spots"
• Irving Zweibelson: the one-eyed volunteer the Marines and Navy turned away
• The dinner table question, and the sound of a wristwatch under the wood
• Why Bad War Stories is an anti-memoir, not an anti-war memoir
• Hollywood's war as simulacra — "a copy without an original"
• The four men in the dedication, and the search for a father figure
• Creative curiosity, drones, AI, and the conflict we may already have lost
• Writing as a way through: Ben's advice for any veteran with a story and a blank page

ABOUT BEN ZWEIBELSON

Dr. Ben Zweibelson is Director of the Strategic Innovation Group at U.S. Space Command. He previously spent seven years as the lead design educator for U.S. Special Operations Command through the Joint Special Operations University. A retired U.S. Army infantry officer, he served 22 years with four combat deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan, earning four Bronze Star Medals, the Combat and Expert Infantryman's Badges, the Ranger tab, and Master Parachutist, Pathfinder, and Air Assault badges.

He holds a BA in Fine Arts from the University of Connecticut, three master's degrees (Louisiana State University, Air Command and Staff College, and the U.S. Army School of Advanced Military Studies), and a doctorate in philosophy from Lancaster University in the UK. He has lectured at multiple war colleges, at Yale and Johns Hopkins, and to organizations including IBM. He lives in Colorado Springs with his wife and three sons.

Ben appears here as a private citizen and author. His views are his own and do not represent the U.S. government, the Department of Defense, or any organization with which he is professionally associated.

GET THE BOOKS

Bad War Stories (Helion & Company, 2026)

• Amazon — https://www.amazon.com/Bad-War-Stories-Ben-Zweibelson/dp/1804519421
• Helion & Company (UK) — https://www.helion.co.uk/military-history-books/bad-war-stories-.php
• Casemate (US distributor) — https://www.casematepublishers.com/9781804519424/bad-war-stories/

Reconceptualizing War (Helion & Company)

• Amazon — https://www.amazon.com/Reconceptualizing-War-Ben-Zweibelson/dp/1804517291
• Helion & Company — https://www.helion.co.uk/military-history-books/reconceptualizing-war-.php

Understanding the Military Design Movement (Routledge)

• Amazon — https://www.amazon.com/Understanding-Military-Movement-Routledge-Technology/dp/103248179X

All of Ben's books

• Amazon Author Page — https://www.amazon.com/stores/author/B0C71NLC7C
• Helion Author Page — https://www.helion.co.uk/people/ben-zweibelson.php

His fifth book, On Technology & War: The Power of Uncertainty, is due from Helion later this year.

FIND BEN

• Substack — Sapiens, Technology, and Conflict — https://zweibelson.substack.com
• LinkedIn — https://www.linkedin.com/in/benzweibelson/

A NOTE FOR LISTENERS

Ben speaks candidly in this episode about veteran suicide and about writing as one healthy way to carry what service leaves behind. If you or someone you know is struggling, the Veterans Crisis Line is available by dialing 988 and pressing 1, or by texting 838255.

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We Weren't There

Eighty-one years ago this month, a young colonel named Paul Tibbets took off from a small island in the Pacific, in a bomber he'd named after his mother, and dropped the first atomic weapon ever used in war. Three days later, another crew did it again over Nagasaki. And the deadliest war in human history came to an end.

I always thought I understood that decision: whether we should have used the bomb. I've heard the debate over many dinner tables and in many classrooms. Turns out I understood almost none of it.

My friend Colonel Gerry Tertychny does. Last week he sat down with us and walked, step by careful step, from Pearl Harbor to Hiroshima.  It wasn't the version I half-remember from school, but the real one: The strategy. The science. The man who had to choose, and the much younger men who had to carry it out.

He never tells you what to think. He just shows you how hard it really was — and how easy it is, from a safe seat in 2026, to forget that we weren't there.

Give it an hour. It stayed with me, and I think it'll stay with you.

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For the past two weeks, no American bombs have fallen on Iran.

And yet the consequences of the war have kept moving.

Fewer ships are moving through the Strait of Hormuz, but the effects are traveling far beyond it. They’re beginning to register in fuel prices, shipping and insurance costs, the jobs market, fertilizer supplies, food prices, and even the holiday merchandise being ordered now for November and December.

That widening circle of consequences is the thread Jeff Steinberg and I follow in this week’s Heroes’ Path Dispatch.

Eleven days ago, we were watching for an agreement that might reopen the Strait and begin cooling the crisis. That agreement never materialized. Shipping remains severely constrained, Iran has hardened its position, and the economic effects are beginning to travel well beyond the Persian Gulf.

But this episode is really about something larger.

News arrives as a series of disconnected alarms. A refinery is struck deep inside Russia. Ebola spreads. Congress leaves Washington. Vaccine policy changes. An earthquake devastates part of Colombia.

The useful question is rarely just what happened?

It’s: What connects these events? What happens next? And when does something happening 6,000 miles away begin changing life at home?

Jeff is particularly good at spotting the second and third consequences, the ones that seldom make the first headline.

Near the end of our conversation, we turn toward several signals I think are worth watching very carefully over the next few weeks: fuel availability, grocery prices, holiday shipping, the Colorado River allocation decision, the labor market, and the increasingly fragile mathematics surrounding the national debt.

The shooting may be quieter right now, but the story is not.

Watch or listen to this week’s Heroes’ Path Dispatch with Jeff Steinberg.

Then keep an eye on the ships going through Hormuz.

And keep an eye on the sign at the corner.

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A war can be thousands of miles away right up until your water stops running.

This week on The Heroes’ Path Dispatch, Jeff Steinberg and I talk Iran, oil, cyberattacks, NATO, Ebola, the Colorado River, and one rocket that finally stopped exploding long enough to do its job.

Different stories. Same question:

How much strain can a system take before ordinary people get the bill?

Watch this week's Heroes' Path Dispatch: The Brink, the Bargain & the Home Front.

Because the world has a habit of showing up at your kitchen table without knocking.

https://open.substack.com/pub/heroespath/p/the-heroes-path-dispatch-47d?r=ky3s5&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true

#HeroesPath #Dispatch #Iran #Ebola #Colorado #Minnesota #Subversion #Sabotage #Terrorism #War #Cyberattacks #Washington #NATO #Poland #Russia #Update #News 

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Ten Nights

The war came home this week — to three American families, to the sign at your corner gas station, and to a promise the republic made 250 years ago.

There’s a gas station at the edge of my town where the price has become a kind of national instrument panel. Ten days ago it read $3.84 and falling, and negotiators were landing in Oman with a flicker of hope. This week it clicked well past $4.00. That four-dollar sign is telling you a story most of the coverage isn’t — and it’s the story Jeff Steinberg and I sit down with in this week’s Heroes’ Path Dispatch.

Here’s that story in three sentences. The diplomacy collapsed in twenty-four hours, and as we recorded, American aircraft were flying their tenth consecutive night of strikes on Iran. An Iranian missile came through the defenses in Jordan, and three American families got the knock on the door no family ever wants. And in the middle of it all, the United States Senate did something it hasn’t done since 1961 — it looked at the largest defense bill in our history, and said no.

Our intent with this episode isn’t to alarm you. We made it because you deserve to understand what’s actually happening — and because almost nobody is connecting these pieces in one place.

A Few Things You’ll Only Hear in this Episode

Lindsey Graham’s Private Doubts. The Senate’s most famous hawk died suddenly this week, just after returning from Kyiv. Jeff shares what a person close to Graham told him about the Senator’s final weeks — that privately, he had come to fear the Iran war was “a trap” with no way out. It complicates everything you think you know about the man, and about the war.

The Kissinger Parallel. Washington and Tehran are now bombing and negotiating at the same time. Jeff has seen this movie before — Kissinger ran the same play in Vietnam, and it ran for years. What breaks the loop, and what it costs while it runs.

The Bill, in Dollars. The Secretary of War put the price tag of this conflict at $37 billion so far — and that’s before the costs you’ll actually feel: the four-dollar gas, the inflation turning back upward, and a quiet warning about fertilizer shipments that could show up in food prices by harvest time.

The Constitutional Question. A 60-day War Powers clock is running toward mid-September. Whatever your politics — whether you think this war is necessary or reckless — the question of who decides belongs to Congress, and this was the week Congress finally started acting like it. We tell you exactly what to watch, and what you can do about it.

And because the world is never only one story: Spain won the World Cup on American soil in front of 80,000 people at MetLife, a 19-year-old consoled the greatest player of his generation on his last walk off the stage — and for one clear Sunday in New Jersey, this country showed the world its best face.

This week the war became a story about three American families — and about an old promise: that the decision to send our children to war never belongs to one person.

Why we Do It This Way

Every story on the Dispatch has to survive two questions, asked out loud: So what? — why it reaches your life — and Now what? — what happens next, and what to watch for. No doom theater, no partisanship, and when a claim comes from a single source, we tell you that on the air. That discipline is the whole show. Twenty minutes, once a week, and you’ll walk away knowing what it means for your family — not just what happened.

If This is Your First Time Here

Heroes’ Path is where we make sense of a noisy world together — the international and domestic events that actually reach your kitchen table, explained plainly by people who’ve spent their lives in uniform and in the arena. Subscribing is free, it takes ten seconds, and it means the Dispatch lands in your inbox every week before the headlines catch up.

If the Dispatch is useful to you, the single most helpful thing you can do is forward this to one person who’d appreciate it. That’s how this community grows — one trusted hand-off at a time.

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The kid who works the counter in our neighborhood gas station spent part of his week on a ladder, pulling numbers off the price board and hanging higher ones. He hung those numbers because Iranian missiles hit oil tankers in the Strait of Hormuz, seven thousand miles from his ladder. Within hours of the first strike, oil rose six percent. By the weekend the increase reached his pumps, on our street in Annapolis, and your checkbook.

Professor Jeff Steinberg and I sat down Saturday night to walk through the week, and the week kept coming.

Every story on our Dispatch has to survive two questions. So what: where does this touch your life? Now what: what happens next, and what should you watch for? A story that fails those questions gets cut. Several did this week.

If you want the Dispatch in your inbox every week, subscribe below. Some of our discussions, the more sensitive ones, will be available only to our paid subscribers. Jeff spent decades inside the rooms where this work gets done, and certain conversations we'll be having with him belong in a smaller room.

So, pour the coffee. Here's the week.

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This week’s Heroes’ Path Dispatch, made especially for our paid subscribers. Pour a coffee. It runs about 30 minutes, and with Jeff' Steinberg’s insights, I think it’s worth every one of them.

When I was 13, my mother took us to see the Freedom Train. Maybe you remember it. It rolled through the country for the bicentennial carrying Lincoln’s top hat and Wilt Chamberlain’s shoes, which were roughly the size of canoes. You stood in line, you filed past, and you left feeling like you’d touched something. The country was 200 years old and we celebrated it together, in person, out loud.

This weekend the country turned 250. The celebration on the National Mall got chased indoors by a heat warning and a line of thunderstorms, the president spoke at nearly 11 at night, the crowd was thin, and most of America marked the occasion the way we mark everything now, on a screen, alone. Heat, rain, and argument. Honestly, a pretty fair portrait of where we are.

Our main feature for this dispatch centers around a single question. Here’s the question. If I asked you who runs the Pentagon, who would you name?

Most people say Secretary Hegseth. Fair enough. But the man actually running the building, the chief operating officer of the largest and most expensive war department in American history, is a billionaire financier named Stephen Feinberg. He built his fortune buying distressed companies, stripping them for parts, and moving on. He almost never gives interviews. He’s staffed the Pentagon’s upper floors with his own former executives and about 30 veterans of the big Wall Street banks. And he now sits on roughly $1.5 trillion. Most Americans don’t know a single thing about him. That’s not an accident—it may be the design.

Now hold that number, $1.5 trillion, and set another one down next to it. For the first time in our history, the United States spends more just paying interest on its debt than it spends on its entire military. About a trillion dollars a year. Eighty-eight billion a month. Not on ships, not on schools, not on roads. On interest.

Jeff and I spend the back half of the episode walking through what those two numbers mean when they collide, and I’ll warn you, this is where it stops being a Washington story and starts being a kitchen table story. It reaches your grocery bill. It reaches the $84 I paid to fill up my truck this week. And it reaches Social Security, which is now facing a decision date, not a someday, an actual year, and it’s closer than most people think. If you’re retired, or close to it, or you’ve been paying in every week of your working life and quietly wondering whether it’ll be there for you, this half hour is for you specifically.

None of it is meant to frighten you. It’s arithmetic. And the good thing about arithmetic is that it can be faced. It just has to be looked at honestly, in the daylight. That’s the whole reason this Dispatch exists—for you.

Along the way we also cover the jobs report that was worse than the headline let on, the ceasefire with Iran that Jeff calls fragile and I’d call a coin standing on its edge, why Netanyahu wants an urgent meeting at the White House, and the three things to watch this coming week, starting with the NATO summit.

Two hundred fifty years ago this country was born, in part, out of a fight over money. Debts, taxes, and who decides. It seems fitting that on our 250th birthday, the deepest question in front of us is arithmetic again.

Thirty minutes. We made it for you. Go listen.

Stay curious, stay engaged, and thank you for walking the path.

John

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What are we actually celebrating this week?

I sat down with Michael Shriver to talk about the founding and the American habit of giving, and how closely the two run together. Mike spent forty-five years around other people's money, raising it early in his career, then giving it away as a foundation executive at MBNA and Bank of America. These days he rebuilds old bicycles in his garage and hands them to people getting back on their feet.

The men who signed their names in that hot room in Philadelphia pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor for strangers they would never meet. Sacrifice and generosity turn out to be the same impulse, told in two voices.

We trace it from ancient Greece to Carnegie's libraries to the organizations that rose up after 9/11 to bring our wounded home. Well worth your 45 minutes.

#philanthropy #independence #independenceday #substack #HeroesPath #webinaris about Michael Shriver

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In a small room in Oxford, Florida, a man holds up a brass shell. It stands three feet tall and weighs forty-five pounds.

He had it remade after the war. He pays to haul it from school to school and hall to hall, because when he tells people what he fired at German planes from a ten-thousand-pound gun, they don't believe him. A few veterans, he says, are all liars. So he brings the proof and sets it on the table.

That man is Irving Locker. He is 101 years old. He still works out three mornings a week, and he still thanks God every day that he can get on his feet. He learned that habit in the war.

This is his account.

The signed essay

Irving Locker was the youngest of seven children in a family that had no money and, by his telling, everything else. His mother gave him one instruction over and over. Take care of your brothers and sisters. Watch out for them.

He carried it to Fort Dix in 1943, into a barracks with fifty strangers, and then across the Atlantic. When the Army asked who could drive a tractor trailer, he raised his hand, though at sixteen he could barely reach the door handles. A lieutenant took one look and sent him to the machine guns. The machine gun sergeant sent him to the big guns. That is how Locker came to a ninety-millimeter antiaircraft gun, ten thousand pounds of steel with a barrel fifteen feet long, firing a shell three feet tall.

He made staff sergeant at 18, in a combat zone, in charge of sixty-five men. Every sergeant who had trained him now served under him. He says he got there the way his mother taught him, by convincing the men he was there to get them home. Sixty percent of them went deaf in both ears from the guns. When they asked to pack cotton in their ears, he refused, because a man who can't hear can't take an order.

He landed at Utah Beach on a Higgins boat. When the front ramp dropped, the dead and the wounded were already on the sand. The order was the same all down the line. Get off the beach. Don't look, don't stop, get off the beach. He kept moving.

He went through the Ardennes in the worst winter in twenty years, sleeping in holes he dug with wet boots and a wet coat, and he came out with frostbite and most of his men alive. By the spring he was near Berlin, and he saw what the Nazis had done in the camps. He is a Jewish soldier, and he does not soften what that meant to him, then or now.

What he brought home sits in his living room. A German Luger with handles he had remade so no one would steal it. An entrenching shovel with his name stamped in the handle. A mess kit. The helmet liner he washed and shaved and bathed in, because his unit could never be near a building when the guns fired. And the shell, three feet tall and forty-five pounds.

In June 2024, Irving Locker went back to Normandy for the 80th anniversary of D-Day. He had been drafted to a place no one named for him and ordered to do things no one explained. This time he stood on the ground and listened to people tell him what it had cost. He says it was a different thing entirely.

He is 101 now, and he still goes to the schools with the shell and the shovel and the flag. The men who signed that flag are gone. Their children come to his door, and they take it in their hands and kiss it where their fathers wrote their names.

—John

Credits

Special thanks to NewDay USA, who made this visit with Irving possible and sponsored his return to Normandy for the 80th Anniversary of D-Day. And to Caz Rubacky, for the extraordinary skill of his video production.

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Heroes’ Path is about clarity: about ourselves, our road ahead, and the world around us.

Today we’re launching The Heroes’ Path Dispatch, the first in an ongoing series designed to make sense of the events shaping our lives, our families, and our future.

In this first episode, Professor Jeff Steinberg joins me to unpack Iran, gas prices, China’s rare earth leverage, and the war in Ukraine.

The war may be quieter this week, but the world is not.

Subscribe to our Heroes’ Path Substack and watch The Dispatch now. 

#HeroesPath #Update #Dispatch

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