Excerpt From the Book

In the dim predawn glow, the deserted four-lane highway before me seemed endless, extending to distant hills on the horizon. I lay on my side in the nine-inch skirmisher trench I’d dug a few hours before and finished cleaning sand out of my M16A2 assault rifle. I was tense. Enemy fighters from the north might already be creeping toward our position. I needed to make sure my men were ready. I needed to be ready.

It was the first week of April, 2003—the early days of the Iraq War. I was a first lieutenant and executive officer, second in command of Weapons Company, 3rd Battalion, 1st Marine Regiment. We had just survived the first major contact of the war in a place two hundred miles south of Baghdad, called Nasiriyah, where Marines just ahead of our battalion had been ambushed and taken casualties. We’d fought through that city and pushed north along Highway 7, then stopped, dug into the rocky soil, and awaited our resupply. My men and I were hungry, exhausted, and on edge.

I walked down the line of occupied trenches beside each of our company’s lead vehicles. “Are you doing okay on ammo?” I asked my men. “How’s your water—are you hydrating?”

The morning stillness was interrupted by the sound of a motor. I snapped my head around. There was just enough light to make out a four-door white sedan, one hundred meters to the north on the highway, racing toward our position. My heart leapt in my chest. The enemy had recently begun using vehicle-borne suicide bomb attacks against our forces. We had to stop this guy.

“Let’s go!” I shouted to the three Marines closest to me. The four of us, weapons in hand, ran toward the speeding car. This was a gut-wrenching game of chicken we had a good chance of losing.

The distance between us and the approaching vehicle quickly closed to seventy-five meters, then fifty. Suddenly, the sedan screeched to a halt. The door flew open and a lanky Iraqi man dressed in threadbare clothes jumped out of the car. He waved his arms in the air and yelled frantically at us in Arabic. Then his arms dropped and he ran straight at us.

Every instinct told me that this man wore a suicide vest. My adrenaline spiked. “Stop!” I shouted in halting Arabic. “Hold your position!” The man kept running.

I had no choice. I slowed my breathing, lifted my weapon, and took aim. As the front sight post on my M16 came into focus over the man’s chest, a dark mass appeared behind him. I lifted my head. A military truck rolled to a stop behind the sedan.

I watched in confusion as six men in black jumped out of the truck and surrounded the sedan. Without warning, they raised their Kalashnikovs and shot directly into the car. The Iraqi man who’d been running so intently toward our position had stopped at the sound of the military truck arriving and swung around. When the bullets flew, he screamed in horror. Then he ran, even faster than before, in the direction of the car—screaming louder and louder as he ran.

The pieces fell into place in my mind with terrible clarity. At the time, southern Iraq was a desperately poor region. Rural residents faced severe food shortages and limited access to clean water and basic healthcare services. As American forces moved north through the area, Saddam Hussein’s special forces soldiers, the Fedayeen, pushed into the rural areas. There, they coerced poor farmers to fight the Americans, offering food and water in exchange for the farmers’ allegiance and willingness to battle the invaders. In the early days of the war, we fought these untrained farmers by the hundreds. Many of them didn’t even know how to use the weapons they were given. This man had to be one of those impoverished Iraqi farmers. He was trying to escape across our lines to safety because he didn’t want to fight for the Fedayeen.

I yelled at the Marines with me to direct their fire at the men in black. I sprinted as fast as I could toward the car to try to save whoever was inside. My gear felt like it weighed a thousand pounds—I couldn’t get there fast enough. When I finally reached the sedan, the sight left me reeling. The six Fedayeen lay dead around the vehicle and on the side of the road. The car was riddled with bullet holes. In the passenger seat was a woman I assumed was the farmer’s wife. She was young, maybe twenty-one. She lay motionless. What was left of her head was slumped over her torso. She’d been shot in the face and chest. The back seat was covered with blood. A small child lay silent on a blanket. Her right arm was missing, leaving only a stump where the arm had been removed by the gunfire.

Next to the car, the Iraqi man knelt in broken glass and dirt. I could see now that he also was young, probably in his late twenties. He wailed uncontrollably and clutched a small body in his arms—a girl who couldn’t have been more than six years old. I heard a terrible gurgling sound coming from the bundle in the man’s arms. I realized that the child was still alive and trying to breathe. She’d been shot in the stomach and was choking on her own blood. Time stopped for me in that moment. The first golden rays of dawn flicked over the horizon. I smelled fuel, dirt, and blood. I tasted the gunpowder that was still in the air. Despite the man’s cries, I could hear my own shocked breaths. For the first time in the war, my eyes were open, and I was able to really see this man. My heart broke for him. This was someone whose entire world had just been ripped away. I will never forget the look of utter despair staring back at me.

This is…so horrible, so wrong, I thought. What choices did this man have when he woke up this morning? Watch his children go hungry again? Pick up a weapon he didn’t know how to use to fight an enemy he didn’t know or understand? Attempt to escape with his family to safety, knowing that it was likely hopeless, that the Fedayeen would catch them? This man had no options—none.

I felt sick.

I live in a world where I have so many choices. If I have a family someday, I can choose what to teach my kids and where they’ll go to school. I can choose what neighborhood they’ll grow up in and even what brand of cereal they’ll eat every morning. Each and every day of my life, I can pick from an endless range of paths, depending on what I believe is best for me and my family. But this man had nothing.

A powerful rage welled up inside me. It wasn’t fair that the GPS coordinates of this man’s birthplace dictated what choices he and his children had in life. Poverty and desperation had led to a life that allowed terrorists to make this farmer’s choices for him, forcing him and his family to pursue their extremist agendas.

That moment on Iraq’s Highway 7 changed me. It was the beginning of a radical shift in my life. Each night when I closed my eyes to sleep, I saw the image of that anguished farmer’s face. I couldn’t let go of it. The more I thought about what had happened to him, the better I began to understand what I was fighting for in this war. It was about freedom and about choice. It was about both an idea and an ideal.

Poverty makes people vulnerable, I realized on one of those sleepless nights. They lose hope and the power of choice for their lives. But it’s that ability to make lasting choices for ourselves and our loved ones that gives life meaning. It’s fundamental to who we are as human beings. When extremists take that away, we all lose.

I had found my purpose.

When my commitment to the Marine Corps ended, I earned an MBA from Stanford Graduate School of Business and founded a nonprofit dedicated to eradicating extreme poverty in the world’s most unstable, vulnerable regions.

It was a tangible way to address the gap I’d witnessed in combat, a way to help stop the spread of violent extremism and give people new options. I moved to Africa and lived in remote villages for the next seven years. Nuru International grew into a model for facilitating community-led, market-based approaches to alleviating extreme poverty, helping serve over 450,000 people in Kenya, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Burkina Faso, Ghana, and Niger. Then in 2015, after fifteen years of living mostly overseas, I moved back to the United States. I was stunned by what I found. I did not recognize my own country.

I saw government leaders pursuing their own selfish interests and demonizing anyone who refused to toe the line of their political party. I witnessed acrimony and mistrust between friends. I saw fear in the eyes of my buddies as they talked about the future. I watched people commit violent acts against those who dared to think differently. My fellow citizens were at war with each other. What had happened to us? As in Iraq, extremists had taken over and were coercing people to pursue their own agendas. The poison I’d witnessed across the globe had spread to my beloved homeland.

My shock turned to sadness, then rage. This was not the America I left home to fight for, that I was willing to die for. Something had to be done. But I was only one person. I knew nothing about domestic policy or politics. What could I possibly do to help bring our country back together?

A vision began forming in my mind. I realized we needed a strategic plan for bridging the divides among us. I also saw that we had what I believed was an untapped strategic resource—our brave men and women coming home from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq who were looking for purpose and meaning. They needed a new hill to take. Those pieces came together in 2020 when I founded The Brickyard, a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization that inspires and mobilizes people across the country to strengthen our communities and unite us through social connection, service, and civic engagement. We now have tens of thousands of active members in every state in the nation.

The movement has begun, but the stakes are rising rapidly. Today, America is at a dangerous tipping point. Millions of people across the political spectrum no longer believe that the American Dream is possible for them and their children. Like that Iraqi farmer on Highway 7, they feel they are out of options, that there is no hope. They are angry, afraid, and desperate. Since The Brickyard began, the extremists among our nation’s leaders and influencers have only turned up the volume on blaming and shaming. They chase clicks on social media instead of solving problems. Meanwhile, parents and children are shunning each other for voting for or believing in the “wrong” party. According to a 2025 poll, three quarters of Americans, including majorities of Democrats and Republicans, believe that our divisiveness poses a “serious threat” to our democracy. Most troubling of all, horrific acts of aggression—including the assassinations last year of Melissa Hortman, a Democratic state legislator, and Charlie Kirk, a conservative activist—show that we are increasingly resorting to violence as a solution.

Enough. This is not who we are.

I am not offering yet another book filled with handwringing and endless analysis of our country’s problems. This book is a message of hope and a concrete call to action. My life’s journey—growing up in a poor region of Appalachia, battling terrorists overseas as a Marine, fighting extreme poverty in Africa, and helping bring Americans of different ideologies together through The Brickyard—has shown that positive, dramatic change is possible when even one individual steps forward in faith. A single person truly can spark sweeping change. The first five chapters of this book will relate my story—not because I am exceptional, but because I am an ordinary person who, despite many mistakes, is joining with others to make a real difference. The final four chapters will lay out in detail my vision for America, including the five critical and practical steps we each must take to bridge our divides and heal our nation: believe, serve, connect, lead, and restore. Finally, I will describe how coming together as citizens united around a common set of values and identity leads to the larger goal, delivering on the promise of what I call the Idea of America—a nation that stands for the freedom of lasting, meaningful choices for everyone, everywhere.

What do I mean by meaningful choices? That we have access to all the rights and freedoms afforded to all of us who call ourselves Americans.

That if we’re willing to work for it, each of us will have the opportunity for the basic, everyday qualities of life that we all value: A solid roof over our heads. A healthy meal on the table. A job that provides a living wage. A secure retirement. Access to decent health care. Access to quality education. And the chance for each of us—and our children—to pursue our most cherished dreams.

I believe in America and its people. I believe we will choose unity over violence, hope over fear, humility over narcissism, and courage over moral cowardice. But we cannot wait for leaders in Washington to turn down the rhetoric and take action. Each of us, wherever we are right now, must take a hard look in the mirror and realize that we are the leaders for this moment. Let’s show our kids and our country what real leadership looks like.

America is in crisis right now. In times of crisis, fear and despair create crippling paralysis. To break free from that paralysis, we have to start moving and become part of the solution. We must be bold enough to reach out to our fellow citizens, no matter what they believe. We have more in common than we think. It’s time to get America moving.

Let’s step up and choose the courageous path to unity. Together, we can rescue the Idea of America.