Tell My Sons

At the high point of a soaring career in the US Army, Lt. Col. Mark Weber was tapped by General David Petraeus to serve in a high profile job within the Afghan Parliament as a military advisor. Within weeks, a routine physical revealed Stage IV intestinal cancer in the thirty-eight-year-old father of three. Over the next two years he would fight a desperate battle he wasn't trained for, with his wife and boys as his reluctant but willing fighting force. When Mark realized that he was not going to survive this final tour of combat, he began to write a letter to his boys, so that as they grew up without him, they would know what his life-and-death story had taught him—about courage and fear, challenge and comfort, words and actions, pride and humility, seriousness and humor, and a never-ending search for new ideas and inspiration. This book is that letter. And it's not just for his sons. It's for everyone who could use the last best advice a dying hero has to offer. Mark's letter and his stories illustrate that the greatest value of a life is to spend it for something that lives after it. That in the end you become what you are through the causes to which you attach yourself—and that you've made your own along the way. Through his example, he teaches how to live an ordinary life in an extraordinary way.