The Vanguard Wall Podcast

Epizodai

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  He Survived the Battle of Wanat — 9 of His Brothers Didn't | 1SG(r) Jesse Queck 09.09.2026 6val 32min

  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 American paratroopers did not come home. 1SG(r) Jesse Queck was an 11 Cha...
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  25 Years in Tech, a Dozen Patents — and He Says You've Been Told Two Lies About AI | Shawn Ennis 31.08.2026 3val 38min

  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 three companies and sold one to Oracle — sits down to take the scariest, most hyped subject on Earth and m...
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  The Kid Nobody Bet On Who Became a Green Beret Colonel | Max Krupp 12.08.2026 6val 51min

  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 — then walked away from all of it to raise cattle in Texas. This is the full conversation: ...
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  The Marines Said No. He Retired a Command Sergeant Major. | CSM Mac McAlister 03.08.2026 7val 46min

  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 to carrying caskets at Arlington with The Old Guard — where he lea...
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  Chris McCoy: He Served With Pat Tillman, Then Left War for the Deadliest Job on Earth 16.07.2026 6val 49min

  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 of drone combat almost no one understands, and what it actually costs to co...
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  Man of War Director William Kaufman on Ukraine, LaMonica Garrett, and Films That Don’t Lie 10.07.2026 53min

  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 — the morning the invasion begins. Kaufman co-wrote the film, shot ...
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  Inside Canada's SWAT: An RCMP Tactical Leader & Sergeant Major | Seb Lavoie 02.07.2026 6val 43min

  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 breach gone catastrophically wrong, the cost on his family, rock bo...
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  The Most Dangerous Flying Job in Vietnam | Hugh Mills 19.06.2026 7val 4min

  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” 00:02:59 Growing up across the street from Bill Clinton 00:29:49 Officer Candidate School — marchi...
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  Marine to Green Beret to Delta to CIA: The Man Who Hunted bin Laden | Gary Harrington 07.06.2026 7val 46min

  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 Recon, the second officer ever to graduate the Marine Scout Sniper I...
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  Air Force PJ: He Was Told to Stand Down. Cole Condiff Was Never Found. | Aaron Love 22.05.2026 8val 15min

  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 instructor and walked out. What followed was five years in aerospace physiology, waiting for a...
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  From Selling Plasma to 8 Figures: Marine Vet Johnny Raushi's American Comeback 08.05.2026 7val 4min

  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 and Raushi cover boot camp, the in-unit suicide that happened seconds...
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  The Last Plane Out of Kabul: Air Mission Commander Reveals What Really Happened | Col(r) Alex Pelbath 27.04.2026 6val 44min

  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 episode, he reveals the moment the Abbey Gate bomb went off, the suspected suicide ...
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  They Said "We've Been Fine Without You." He Proved Them Wrong. | Dr. Nick Barringer 08.04.2026 4val 30min

  If this episode brought you value, drop a comment below — we'd love to know what you're implementing. 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 Legion of Merit recipient, Ranger-tabbed, airborne-qualified combat veteran, and one ...
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  MACV-SOG | How One Man Built the Most Dangerous Training Program in Vietnam | Travis Mills 30.03.2026 5val 44min

  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 to the 5th Special Forces Group and then to Military Assistance Command, V...
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  Kyle Steiner: Korengal Survivor, Green Beret, and the Fight to Be a Good Father 11.03.2026 7val 4min

  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 Regiment, 173rd Airborne Brigade. During Operation Rock Avalanche, he was called KIA ov...
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  He Survived Fallujah… Then Walked Away From Everything | Eric Shelvy (Part 2) 07.03.2026 4val 25min

  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 fugitive task force, and ultimately the decision to sail the world with h...
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  He Refused to Be Put in a Box | Marine, Diplomat, Then Gone | Eric Shelvy (Part 1) 22.02.2026 5val 14min

  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 in his elite Jesuit high school who didn't go to college. He enlisted in the Ma...
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  From Failing Middle School to Special Forces Commander | LTC Chane Jackson 09.02.2026 7val 38min

  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 firefight. Not once.After retiring, Chane taught himself to code and b...
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  Special Forces Officer Reveals Why He Chose Seminary Over the Military | Evan Perperis 29.01.2026 6val 56min

  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 leader with 5th Special Forces Group, he trained elite Iraqi Commandos ...
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  Navy Veteran Opens Up About Depression, Faith & Hollywood | Cody Bobay 19.01.2026 4val 36min

  🔥 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 launching a studio that refuses to bow to Hollywood's agenda—this conversation goe...