The Vanguard Wall Podcast
The Vanguard Wall is a long-form interview podcast rooted in the world of combat veterans, special operators, and first responders — the people who did the hard things and carry them home. The host — himself an Army and law-enforcement veteran — sits down with them to talk about what they did, what it cost, and what they carry. The show goes deep on the moments most podcasts skip — the call you made under fire, the teammate you lost, the door you walked through that you can't walk back out of, and the long quiet work of putting it back together. Past guests include Green Berets and Rangers, MACV-SOG veterans, Marines from the Battle of Fallujah, Delta Force operators, Air Force pilots, CIA case officers and Ground Branch, and the law enforcement and emergency responders who do the work most never see. It doesn't stop at the uniform. The Vanguard Wall also brings on the builders, storytellers, and experts whose lives speak to the same audience — entrepreneurs and founders, filmmakers and actors, and voices in health, human performance, and resilience — because hard-won wisdom and a story worth telling are worth hearing wherever they come from. Topics: combat operations, special operations, training and selection (Q Course, Ranger School, BUDS), leadership under stress, PTSD and trauma recovery, health and human performance, entrepreneurship, storytelling, family, faith, and the transition to civilian life. For warriors. For the families who love them. For anyone who wants to understand what service — and grit — actually demand. New episodes every other week. Long-form video on YouTube. Audio on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and everywhere podcasts are heard. — CONTACT / OWNER EMAIL — admin@thevanguardwall.com
Episodes
Eleven days from going home. Fourteen months in eastern Afghanistan already behind them, bags half packed — and the order came down to build a brand-new combat outpost on the valley floor, in the low ground, in the middle of fighting season, surrounded by high ground they were forbidden to occupy. Three days later, at dawn on 13 July 2008, roughly 160 fighters hit Combat Outpost Kahler from every direction at once. Nine Ameri...
If you’ve read the news in the last three years, you’ve been handed two stories about AI — and they can’t both be true. Story one: the machines are coming for your job, your kid’s job, your retirement, your privacy. Story two: it’s all hype, a bubble about to pop and take your 401(k) with it. Shawn Ennis — 25 years in technology, an Auburn-trained engineer with a dozen patents, who built th...
Colonel (r) Max Krupp will be the first to tell you he doesn’t tell war stories — you have to pull them out of him. Over 28 years he became the first Texas Army National Guardsman in history to earn the Green Beret, wore a Bronze Star with Valor for a single day in Kandahar Province that by rights should have killed him and the Afghan company he was advising, and was on the Army’s fast track to general — the...
The Marine Corps turned him down at eighteen. Twenty-four years later, CSM (Ret.) Donald "Mac" McAlister retired at the very top of the enlisted ranks — a Legion of Merit, two Bronze Stars, and a Purple Heart, with five combat tours behind him: two in Iraq, three in Afghanistan.
This is one of the most honest conversations we've ever recorded. Mac takes us from a self-described "heathen redneck" childhood in Hammond, Louisiana...
Chris McCoy served in the 75th Ranger Regiment alongside Pat Tillman and speaks plainly to the cover-up of how Tillman died. He recovered bodies inside the Pentagon after 9/11, fought through the high mountains of Afghanistan, then walked off the battlefield and onto a Bering Sea crab boat — one of the deadliest jobs on Earth. He returns to The Vanguard Wall for Part 2: the war stories he’s never told, the modern face o...
Director William Kaufman brings Man of War to The Vanguard Wall — a grounded military action thriller set on the opening morning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, starring LaMonica Garrett and out now on digital via Well Go USA.
LaMonica Garrett (1883, The Lioness, The Terminal List) plays Connor, a burned-out ex-operator at the lowest point of his life when a girl he's spent years protecting calls from a Kharkiv orphanage ...
Seb Lavoie is the most decorated operator most people have never heard of. Over 20 years he went from a French-Canadian kid with no childhood memories to a soldier, a covert air marshal, an ERT tactical operator and team leader, a court-recognized tactical expert, and the Divisional Sergeant Major over 8,200 people — then pride cost him his leg, and faith rebuilt him.
Hostage rescues, the Surrey Six gang murders, an explosive ...
Hugh Mills flew the OH-6 “Loach” as a low-level aeroscout in Vietnam — statistically the most dangerous flying job of the war. Shot down 16 times, three Silver Stars, four Distinguished Flying Crosses, three Purple Hearts. Author of the classic memoir Low Level Hell.
📖 Low Level Hell: https://a.co/d/0glrcnww
CHAPTERS
00:00:00 Introduction — how Greg Coker connected them + “Low Level Hell”<...
At Tora Bora in December 2001, Gary Harrington sat on one of the closest American observation posts to Osama bin Laden — close enough, he says, to watch the bombs he was calling in streak past the ridge sideways. Then the war handed him to the CIA, and he spent the next decade hunting the same enemy from the inside.
Harrington is the rare operator who wore the uniform six different ways: Marine Corps infantry officer, Marine R...
Senior Master Sergeant Aaron Love — Air Force Pararescueman, 22 years, five combat deployments — is the first PJ ever on The Vanguard Wall. Fewer than 500 people have earned the maroon beret. The pipeline carries a 91% attrition rate — the longest special operations selection pipeline in the DoD.
In 2002, Aaron quit on a pool deck at Indoc. He'd made it through Hell Night. He said three words to an instruct...
Marine vet Johnny Raushi joined the Corps at 17 for a free skateboard sticker. Four years later he came home broke, picked up change in a gas station parking lot, and sold his plasma twice a week to fund the first batches of a pomade he was perfecting on his stovetop. That pomade became Johnny Slicks — an 8-figure American manufacturing company employing 30+ people out of a North Carolina facility, fully U.S.-sourced.
Asher an...
The last C-17 lifted off Kabul's runway at 11:59 PM on August 30, 2021. The man who gave the order — and made the radio call "Math Safe" that officially ended America's longest war — tells the full story for the first time.
Colonel Alex Pelbath (USAF, Ret.) commanded SOUL-2, the only C-17 Special Operations unit in the world, and served as Air Mission Commander for the final flight out of Afghanistan. In this epi...
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What does it take to fuel the most elite light infantry unit in the U.S. Army — and earn their respect doing it? Dr. Nick Barringer didn't just study performance nutrition, he built the standard for it inside the 75th Ranger Regiment.
Dr. Nick Barringer is a retired Army Lieutenant Colonel, Bronze Star and...
In August of 1968, Travis W. Mills was shot five times in a single engagement at FOB 4 — the deadliest night in the history of U.S. Army Special Forces. He survived. And then he went back to Vietnam.
A Green Beret who served with one of the most classified units in American military history, Travis Mills sat down with The Vanguard Wall Podcast to document a story that couldn't be told for nearly three decades.
Assigned ...
CW2 Kyle Steiner — 173rd Airborne, Korengal Valley combat veteran, and 7th Special Forces Group operator — joins The Vanguard Wall for a full-length documentary-style interview covering combat, resilience, and legacy.
Kyle Steiner was 20 years old when he deployed to Outpost Restrepo in Afghanistan's Korengal Valley, one of the most dangerous places on earth, with Battle Company, 2nd of the 503rd Infantry Regimen...
He fought in Fallujah at 21. He carried a diplomatic passport in Moscow. He investigated explosives for the ATF. And then he walked away from all of it — sold his house, pulled his kids out of school, flew to Panama, and bought a sailboat.
In Part 2 of this conversation, Eric Shlevy picks up where the war ended and takes us through every chapter most people never get to hear: embassy life, the State Department, the ATF...
On November 22nd, 2004, a photograph appeared on the cover of Time Magazine — a young Marine, 21 years old, face locked in a primal scream in the middle of the push on Fallujah, Iraq. That Marine was Eric Shelvy. And if you think you know where his story goes from there, you're wrong.
Eric grew up in St. Louis — Catholic schools, divorced parents, weekends riding in his father's police cruiser. He was the one kid...
Chane Jackson was told he'd never make it past eighth grade. A teacher gave him an "H" on a paper because an F wasn't low enough. He never made honor roll once.Fast forward: West Point graduate. 75th Ranger Regiment. Green Beret commander. Five combat deployments. Over 100 direct action missions in Afghanistan and Iraq. Three Bronze Stars. Fluent in Arabic. And he never lost a soldier under his command—never fell back in a fi...
What does it take to go from a self-described "nerdy drama club kid" to leading Green Beret teams in Iraq? And what kind of man walks away from a 20-year Special Forces career to pursue seminary? This is the story of Major Evan Perperis.Evan spent two decades in the US Army — Ranger School, SEER, Pathfinder, Special Forces Qualification Course, and four combat deployments to Iraq and the Middle East. As a Green Beret team lea...
🔥 This is the story Hollywood doesn't want you to hear.
Cody Bobay went from being an alcoholic 13-year-old in a broken home to encountering God in a Navy barracks—and his entire life changed in ONE SECOND. Now he's fighting to take back Hollywood one film at a time.
From nuclear warfare missions to battling depression, from marriage crisis to standing up against church criticism, from devastating rejection to laun...
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