Tom Basile says real heroes are still out there — if we’re willing to see them
From a White House phone call to a Baghdad war zone, Cable news host & former Iraq adviser explains why mission, faith and prayer must outrank comfort.
Tom Basile says that real heroism is still everywhere: in cops and good Samaritans who step in instead of filming, in mission-focused friends who stay in the fight to save first responders from suicide, and in ordinary dads who quietly make faith and family their first ministry.
He walks through two brutal decisions — saying yes to a White House call that dropped him into post-war Baghdad with no military training, and later uprooting his New York identity after his physician wife lost her job over a vaccine mandate — and how both forced him to surrender control and trust God’s “great magisterium” at work.
Along the way he opens up about losing his father as a boy, how saints like Thomas More and Thomas the Apostle, and leaders like John Paul II and Lincoln, became his roadmap for courage, mercy, and living as an unapologetically Catholic American in public life.
In the end, he says his whole on-air mission is to reach “people who doubt” — their God, their country, themselves — and he keeps his own sanity with Scripture at night, rosaries on planes, and short, constant prayers and pockets of silence threaded through the chaos of the news cycle.
‘We might think there are no more heroes — and we couldn’t be more wrong’
On the Heroic Stories show from Heroic Men, television commentator Tom Basile joins a less formal, more personal, conversation on the man behind the headlines.
Basile’s first move is to push back on the idea that heroism has disappeared.
“When you watch television and you read the news and you doom scroll through social media, you probably think that everything is going to heck and that we don’t have heroes anymore in this world. And that is totally not true,” he says.
Every week on his own show, Basile names a “Patriot of the Week” — someone who has gone above and beyond for others.
“I find someone who is just making the country proud because they’re helping somebody,” he explains. “There are tons of these stories of heroism.”
He often looks first to police officers and first responders, but he insists heroism isn’t limited to uniforms.
“There are so many extraordinary people, young and old, folks who wear uniforms, folks who don’t wear uniforms, who just are willing to give of themselves to help their fellow men and women. And they are the unsung heroes of this country and this world.”
What stands out to him are the people who act when everyone else simply records.
“Every time I pick up the paper and I see a cop who saves somebody’s life, or I see a good Samaritan who is under no legal obligation to help anybody… they could just pick up the phone and call 911, or they can do what we’ve seen so many times — people get up, they get their phone, they get their camera and they’re watching some horrific thing happen and they’re just videotaping it for social media.”
“Every time I see one of those people step in to save a life or to calm a circumstance or to jump into action where they know that they’re putting themselves at risk… those are the people that give me a tremendous amount of inspiration.”
For Basile, those stories are a necessary antidote to a media environment he says is built on “chaos profiteering.”
“You go through social media, you read what’s happening online, you look at what is driving clickbait today, and it’s all negative. There’s a reason why we have a mental health crisis in this country. There’s a reason why people are as depressed as they are,” he says.
“Not only have they distanced themselves from God and from their faith, but they’re also getting a steady diet of doom and gloom and chaos and the worst of humanity. So it’s very important for people to realize that the best of humanity is still among us and to really keep that proper perspective.”
A cop friend on a new front line: saving first responders from suicide
When pressed for a concrete example of the kind of heroism that moves him, Basile goes straight to someone he knows well.
“I have a really good friend of mine who was a police officer. He was actually a fraternity brother of mine when I was in college, so we’ve been buddies for a very, very long time,” he says.
His friend served as an officer for two decades and watched the accumulated trauma of the job crush his colleagues.
“He saw the mental and emotional toll that being a first responder and dealing with trauma takes on the average police officer,” Basile explains.
In retirement, that friend chose an unusual path.
“He went back to school and he became the first police officer to get a degree in applied positive psychology in the country. Nobody had ever done it before,” Basile says.
The goal is simple and urgent: keep his fellow officers alive.
“What he’s doing is now dedicating his life to applied positive psychology as a strategy for helping people deal with trauma to avoid suicides and to do something about the number of law enforcement and first responders who are committing suicide every single year,” Basile says. “It’s a significant challenge here and around the world, and he’s now dedicated his life to trying to save those lives.”
His friend is developing “new methods and new curriculum and new ways to get these men and women to talk about their trauma” so they can process it instead of being destroyed by it.
“Ultimately they may not realize it, but it could save their life and help prolong their lives,” Basile says.
Why does he see his friend as that kind of man?
“Because he’s been there,” Basile says simply. “He’s had several people close to him commit suicide, decide to end their lives because the trauma was so significant. And he decided that he wanted to do something about it. He could do anything with his life, but he’s very mission-focused.”
Basile links that to a larger principle he tries to live and encourages others to adopt.
“I always encourage people to surround themselves with folks who are mission-focused. It doesn’t really matter what the mission is as long as it’s for good. But be mission-focused. Have a ministry in life,” he says.
For Basile, even a podcast like Heroic Stories counts.
“This is your ministry,” he tells Dominic. “Have a ministry. And that’s very difficult to do in today’s day and age with all the pressures of modern society. But he’s decided that he’s gonna do that and he’s already having an impact on his community.”
‘We’re not here to serve ourselves’: mission, men and properly ordered lives
Basile’s insistence on mission comes straight out of his understanding of Christ’s call.
“We need to be — we’re not here to serve ourselves,” he says. “That was part of Christ’s message, that we’re here and we’re called to be bigger than one person, to be bigger than who we are, and to dedicate ourselves to the service of God and his creation.”
He says there are “a lot of different ways” to do that, but modern life constantly pulls men toward lesser goals.
“We’re so consumed with the physical, with the corporeal,” Basile says. “We’re so consumed by our desire to accumulate physical things that we’re not attempting to advance a mission that helps sustain God’s kingdom here on earth and therefore prepare ourselves for eternity and for the next life and the next world and to bring ourselves closer to him.”
For many dads, he says, their first mission is right in front of them.
“For a lot of dads out there, it’s being a dad or it’s being the best husband that you can be. That’s a great mission,” he says. “You don’t have to be the president. You don’t have to be a senator or a governor. Raising children in the faith is a mission and it is a ministry that everybody can kind of call their own.”
From there, he adds, men can take on other work — but with the hierarchy clear.
“That’s a really good place to start, in terms of keeping the service of God and His creation sort of front and center,” he says.
Later in the conversation, Basile returns to the idea of a “properly ordered” life, especially when comfort, culture and identity are on the line.
“You talked about a lot of things just now — culture, familiarity, places where your family came from, places that you may love. But all of those things are very physical,” he said. “Those are not spiritual things necessarily.”
When a man is forced to choose, he argues, that hierarchy has to hold.
“If you have to do something for your family, if you have to do something in order to be, for instance, maybe even more effective at being your authentically Catholic self by pulling yourself out of a particular environment, that’s a matter of properly ordering things,” he says.
“Is my comfort, because this was familiar, is that what should take precedence? Or is it the possibility for a better life for my wife and my children? Is it feeling spiritually encumbered by the fact that, by being in this environment, maybe I’m in some way financing or validating ways of life and values that run so incredibly counter to my own?”
For Basile, the answer begins with God.
“You put the pieces there. And of course you stick God on the top and you say to him, I think I’m hearing that this is what you want me to do. And just also trusting ultimately that if you feel in your heart something is moving you, you have to be responsive to that,” he says.
From a White House phone call to a Baghdad war zone
Basile describes himself as “a very mission-focused individual” — even though, by temperament, he’s also a self-described control freak.
That tension showed up starkly when the White House called and asked him to deploy to Iraq immediately after the initial phase of the war, as a civilian adviser to the coalition government in Baghdad.
“They needed to know very quickly,” he recalls. “I could have done something much more comfortable than get on a plane and, in the space of a few days, find myself sitting on my luggage on the military side of an airport in Kuwait in 130-degree heat, awaiting a C-130 to go into Baghdad for some indeterminate amount of time.”
He had no military background.
“I had absolutely no military or weapons training and almost no equipment that was useful, that was issued by the U.S. government,” he says.
The decision took serious prayer.
“After a lot of prayer, there was this sense that I was going to be doing something for the greater good,” Basile explains. “So I made the determination that that was a way that I could serve my country.”
He accepted the mission as part of a wider effort he believed in.
“If you believe in addressing the freedom deficit, for instance, that leads toward Islamic terrorism — and we see that in the Middle East, and it’s a terrible condition — if you believe that addressing that helps advance religious freedom and liberty around the world, then it was something that I felt like it was important to do,” he says.
Friends thought he was crazy.
“I called up one of my friends — I wasn’t married at the time — and I said, ‘I’m going to Iraq,’ and he said, ‘Are you crazy? Are you out of your mind? You’re gonna go do that?’” Basile recalls.
But the call of mission and faith overrode the desire for control.
“When you get a phone call from the White House and they say, ‘This is the best way that you can serve the president of the United States and to serve this cause of freedom… and to contribute to the global war on terrorism,’ as a patriot that should give you some pause to say, ‘Okay, maybe I need to do this,’” he says.
“I also see very clearly some of the threats because of my time in government to our values and to our way of life, not only as Americans, but also as Christians and Catholics. And so it made sense — as nonsensical as it seemed to be.”
Baghdad, he says, made faith very concrete.
“Nothing will bring you closer to God than being in the middle of a rocket attack or a mortar attack or having people chase after you with RPGs,” he says.
Every night before bed, he prayed the Prayer of St. Michael. Sundays brought one of the most surreal experiences of his life: Mass in Saddam Hussein’s palace.
“We would have Mass in the ballroom of Saddam Hussein’s palace, in his throne room,” he recalls. “Beneath the dome of this grand room where he had painted the horsemen of the apocalypse and a scene of a modern sort of Nebuchadnezzar coming in and conquering Jerusalem. And he painted an extra horse for himself in the dome of this room.”
The contrast between that imagery and the Eucharist stayed with him.
“To receive the Eucharist in that setting gave you a tremendous amount of — it just buoyed you,” Basile says. “Just knowing that Christ is here, even in this room, even in this setting where such evil had presided. Christ is here in the Eucharist.”
When New York says no: a vaccine fight, a move and a leap of faith
Years later, another hard decision came closer to home.
During COVID, Basile’s wife — a physician — refused the vaccine on religious grounds. New York, where they lived, eliminated religious exemptions.
“She was dispatched unceremoniously from her job at the hospital,” Basile says.
The couple sat down and asked a blunt question: what now?
“We were paying an exorbitant amount of taxes to prop up a left-wing government that was increasingly out of step with our values,” he says.
His wife brought him a proposal.
“She came to me and she said, ‘I think it’s time for us to move,’” Basile recalls.
For a native New Yorker, that landed hard.
“I’m a New Yorker. I never anticipated that I was going to ultimately leave,” he says.
Again, the choice required prayer, thought and the willingness to surrender control.
“If you believe, and I think we should, that everything that happens — the good stuff and the bad stuff — is all part of the great magisterium of God, he’s giving it to you for some purpose, to learn from it,” Basile says. “Then instead of being annoyed about the situation, you can say, ‘What am I expected to learn here? And is this an opportunity to do something that you never thought that you would do?’”
Basile laughs at the old saying: if you want to make God laugh, tell him your plan.
“It was a lot of thought, a lot of prayer, a lot of discussion,” he says. “And we decided we would take the leap of faith and we would leave New York for eastern Tennessee.”
The move meant real sacrifice.
“There have been sacrifices and there have been challenges,” he admits. “But overall we had to trust that if we ended up here, this is exactly where the Lord wanted us to be.”
For someone used to controlling narratives in cable news and politics, that surrender was radical.
“I’m the type that I try to control everything,” he says. “When you’re in cable news or you’re in politics, it’s very intense. It can be seven days a week and your brain’s constantly moving. You have to put a show together. You have to determine how you’re going to tell a particular story. You want to try to control the narrative to some degree.”
Life, he says, doesn’t work that way.
“The narrative of your life you cannot control. It is, in many respects, a contradiction in human nature. And that’s where God comes in,” Basile says. “You have to be willing to say, ‘All right, you know what, I don’t know if I have the answer. I’m going to give this over to you and you’re going to do it. I’m just going to turn myself over to your divine will and we’re going to go. We’re going to hit the gas.’”
The move uprooted his family of five.
“It was a really big move, moving three kids and a very well-established house and career and everything else, 750 miles to someplace I’d never thought I would live,” he says.
Losing his father, finding the roadmap — and the stakes of faith
Basile’s emphasis on faith, order and surrender didn’t come from nowhere. Part of it traces back to childhood trauma.
“I lost my dad when I was very young,” he says. “He got sick when I was eight and he died when I was 10.”
Faith, he says, helped him process what happened.
“If I didn’t have my faith… when you have some sort of trauma as a child and then you have to process it, ultimately you do come to a realization — and you have a choice, God gives us this free will — that you’re going to follow his roadmap for how to heal and then how to cope with roadblocks that could be thrown up in your life, or not,” he says.
He sees many people today trying to navigate life without that roadmap.
“We see a lot of people today who, unfortunately, they’re not choosing God. And so they’re trying to find salvation in this very earthly context,” Basile says. “They’re trying to cope with life without the roadmap that we were given on how to do it.”
The results, he argues, are visible everywhere.
“This is one of the reasons why we have a mental health crisis. We have serious identity issues. We have an epidemic of suicides, particularly among young people,” he says.
As a boy, he experienced the Church as a concrete support.
“My faith was important when I was younger in dealing with the aftermath of that,” he says. “I knew that there was something there. There was a faith community. There was a parish. There were people that God put into my life to help me get through that.”
Marriage and fatherhood raised the stakes again.
“Once you get married and you have a family, I think I’ve become a much stronger Catholic and a stronger disciple because it just becomes far more apparent that with the pressures of parenting, the pressures of marriage, of a career, that, yeah, we need this,” he says.
“We need to be able to be in this world, but not necessarily of the world, in order to truly survive.”
Saints, popes and presidents: the heroes who guide him
When asked who his heroes are, Basile smiles at his own name.
“I did not get named Thomas by accident,” he says. “It’s my father’s middle name. That’s how I got the name. But I think that Thomas has helped me pretty dramatically at times — and not just one of them. There are a whole bunch of them.”
He points to Thomas Aquinas, Thomas Becket and, especially, St. Thomas More.
“Somebody who worked in government and politics and in media, who was in public life just like he was — and also an attorney,” Basile says of More. “When you think about someone who was under enormous pressure to put the Church aside for a secular government, the secular demands, the demands of the world instead of the demands of the Church, and who paid with his life because he was not willing to do that…”
More’s refusal to compromise his soul inspires him.
“He was not willing to suggest that a man and his desires, his physical desires, was going to compromise his soul,” Basile says. “His soul was not going to be compromised. So I oftentimes think about him when I’m in a difficult spot.”
He is also drawn to Thomas the Apostle.
“I think he is one of the most extraordinary people in the Gospels,” Basile says. “Here is the doubter. Here’s the guy who said, ‘You’re all crazy. He’s dead. It’s over. This has been real, folks, but it’s over.’”
What moves Basile is the change after Thomas meets the risen Christ.
“He goes from being the doubter to traveling further than any of the other apostles to spread the word of Christ before he’s martyred in what is today India,” he says. “There are a lot of us that could use that example and say, ‘I doubted. I wasn’t maybe the best Christian or the best Catholic. There were times when I fell away from the Church.’ But you can not only come back and reacquaint yourself with Jesus — you can go further than anybody would ever have thought that you could go.”
That doesn’t have to mean formal missionary work.
“I’m not saying that you have to go and be a missionary,” he adds. “Just being an example in your daily life of Christ and the Gospels — there’s that roadmap again.”
Among modern figures, he highlights St. John Paul II.
“One of the great leaders of our lifetime,” Basile says.
He met the pope in 2002 while working with President George W. Bush.
“It was one of the most amazing days of my life,” he says.
What struck him was John Paul’s grasp of America’s role in the world.
“Somebody who understood the importance of America and America’s formula for greatness and what America has meant to freedom for people all around the world, and our role as a nation together with the Catholic Church in trying to end Soviet communism,” Basile says. “He understood that, and his impact is still felt.”
He also admires John Paul’s communication style.
“Benedict XVI was a bookworm,” he says with affection. “He was a theologian. His writing is beautiful if you read it. But John Paul II understood a television society very well. He kept his messaging very simple and straightforward.”
One phrase from the pope still rings in his ears.
“As a young person, I remember him standing up and saying, ‘Do not be afraid,’” Basile says. “If you took nothing away from him, even that alone is so incredibly profound.”
From American history, he points to Abraham Lincoln.
“Lincoln understood — I believe that he knew — that he would not live to see the end of his term,” Basile says. “But he knew the stakes were very, very high. He knew it was incredibly important to keep this country from tearing itself apart.”
Lincoln’s work to end slavery also matters deeply to him.
“In the process, he began a process of addressing the great sin of America, which was slavery,” Basile says. “We reap what we sow. It’s a basic biblical principle, but it’s also important for nations too, not just people.”
Just as important to Basile is Lincoln’s example of mercy.
“He was not a small man,” Basile says. “He put people who were his rivals into his cabinet. He told his generals that when the South surrenders, give people back their sidearms and their horses and send them home.”
Basile doesn’t see many leaders today capable of that.
“That was a tremendous feat for any man,” he says. “Can you imagine anyone being so incredibly forgiving and magnanimous today in the way that he addressed people that had committed the greatest atrocity on the country that we have ever experienced?”
‘People who doubt’: who he wants to serve
Asked who he dreams of being a hero for — apart from God and his family — Basile doesn’t hesitate.
“People who doubt,” he says.
He breaks that down.
“People who doubt themselves, people who doubt their country, and people who doubt their God,” he explains. “And there are a lot of them.”
He points to collapsing trust across society.
“We live in an environment right now where trust in institutions is among its lowest levels,” he says. “Trust in the media is among its lowest levels. Trust in government is at its lowest levels. Trust in the Church is at very low levels. And there are good reasons for a lot of those things.”
His goal, every time he goes on air or steps in front of a room, is simple.
“Every time that I go on the air, I ask for the strength to reach just one person,” Basile says. “Give them greater faith in God, greater faith in their country, and greater faith in themselves. If I do that, if I’m standing in front of a room and I do that, then in some way I’ve succeeded.”
He would like his reach to grow.
“Would it be great to reach millions of people all the time and impact lots of folks? Yeah, I would love to do that,” he admits.
But for now, he’s focused on restoring faith and hope wherever he can.
“If we can restore faith and hope in this country and I can play a part in that, I think that would be a good way to serve God and creation,” he says.
Prayer in the noise: Bible, rosary, adoration and five-minute pleas for strength
In a life built around a 24/7 news cycle, Basile works to keep his prayer life concrete and integrated.
“Try to read the Bible before bed at least a couple of nights a week,” he says. “It doesn’t need to be 15 minutes — just whatever it is.”
Mass is non-negotiable.
“Make Mass a priority. If not during the week, then definitely on Sunday,” he says.
He is also committed to the rosary — especially on the road.
“Say the rosary. A commitment to the rosary I think is really important,” he says. “The rosary is phenomenal because you can say it anywhere. I fly a lot. I’ll be sitting on the plane, and if I’m restless, I’ll say a rosary.”
He wishes the Church taught more clearly that God is not confined to a chapel.
“Sure, you can go to adoration and everybody should, but we’re all busy,” he says. “God is there. Your personal relationship is not something that is once a week and it’s not something that’s only at night before bed.”
For Basile, that relationship is a running conversation.
“Your personal relationship can be a prayer or that conversation when you’re walking down the street in Manhattan,” he says. “It can be anytime, any day.”
He tries to acknowledge God “a number of times a day.”
“A prayer doesn’t need to be five minutes long,” he says. “A prayer can even be, ‘Just give me strength to get through this. I need to get through this for five minutes,’ right? That can be a prayer. It’s an acknowledgement that there is something greater than you.”
The key, he says, is to let prayer become “a real integrated part of your day” until it becomes second nature.
One discipline he still struggles with is silence.
“The one thing I’m really bad at — and I think everybody needs to work on, especially with all the stimuli that we’re bombarded with — is to try to make time for silence,” he admits. “Silence is golden. Silence is when you can listen to yourself and then you can hear the Lord.”
He tries to carve out even five minutes with no noise and no screens.
“It just needs to be you and your thoughts,” he says.
He jokes that this is his New Year’s resolution every year — and that it usually doesn’t last very long.
“That’s very hard to do,” Basile says. “But it becomes part of your day, and ultimately it is very comforting when you can have these little moments where you can talk to God.”