Ep. 22 - Transformations, Tributes, and the Thrill of the Bow

On this episode we welcome Nate to the show. Last year in collaboration with C and B Quality Coatings we designed and built a custom Hoyt Alpha X bow as a tribute to the soldiers that were lost during the tragic attack at Abbey Gate. We received thousands of entries for the bow and Nate's story rose to the top. Nate shares his extraordinary story of military service, the emotional impact of a tribute bow, and his journey in archery. The conversation weaves together themes of resilience, gratitude, and connection through shared experiences and the healing power of honoring heroes.

• Nate’s military journey and experiences in Afghanistan 
• The significance of a custom bow dedicated to fallen soldiers 
• Transitioning from the Marine Corps to the Army and adapting to changes 
• Discovering a passion for archery as a form of therapy 
• The emotional impact of winning the tribute bow raffle 
• Adventures in hunting and the bonds formed through shared passions 
• Closing reflections on honoring heroes and sharing our stories

Thanks for joining us on The Bowtreader Podcast. Leave a comment to let us know where you are listening from as well as any topics that you would like to hear us cover. Be sure to like the episode and subscribe to follow along.

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Transcript

Tribute Bow Giveaway Winner Interview

John 1:19

Hit the button here and we'll get started. Okay, so we got Brandon across the table here this morning. Howdy, here we go, he's always mixing it up.

Brandon 1:29

I try not to get stale, you know, just something fresh.

Nate 1:31

I think it's great Gotta throw something different in there every now and then.

John 1:35

There you go. All right. So we got a new voice down there. So this is Nate. Nate, tell everybody hello.

Brandon 1:44

How's it going? Everyone, it was close. It was so close. Definitely, so far I've been the most obedient.

John 1:48

You have man, Anyway it's been a running joke.

Brandon 1:50

We have.

John 1:51

I tell somebody to say something and you know, either they say exactly what I said or you know, kind of like, what you did and just say I don't even know what you said. But anyway, perfect, it's perfect. But anyway, so nate is, if you guys will remember, if you follow us on social media or anything like that, you'll remember that last year we did a bow that, um, I had custom cerakoted by cmb coatings down in savannah. Chris did a phenomenal job on this bow for me and that was a Hoyt alpha X 30. And, um, what we did, it's, it's really a tribute bow to the 13, um soldiers that lost their lives when we did our um disastrous pullout of Afghanistan. Um, and and I, if that offends you, you need to go and really read and look at what we did and it was just a disaster, it just wasn't handled correctly. Nobody should have lost their lives. And so we did that bow as a tribute to those soldiers, all 13 of them. Their names are engraved on that bow.

John 3:03

And then we did a? Um, we did a campaign to try to give that bull away and, uh, you know, we, we did it through social media because that's the easiest way to do something like that, and it was different. It wasn't just a regular giveaway where we were like hey, enter to win, you know, and give us your email address and follow us on social media and all this kind of stuff and you'll be entered to win this bow. We wanted people to tell us their story and I was amazed we got thousands of entries. That's cool and we had some people that entered a lot.

Speaker 3 3:39

And even though they entered a lot.

John 3:40

It was counted as one entry. Yeah, you know, I mean was counted as as one entry. Yeah, you know, I mean it wasn't counted as one entry. Let me let me rephrase that it was counted as as one user right. So one user might've had 1500 entries right, and Nate had like 1500 entries or something.

John 3:58

But that's not why Nate won. It's not why we gave the bow to Nate. We gave it to Nate because of his story, and so I've invited Nate to come on the podcast and share a little bit about his story. But I was amazed by some of the stories that we got. You know, some of them were you know, I want my dad to get this bow because he used to be in the archery and he's gone through a battle with cancer and you know, we would just love to see him get back into it. Um, one of them was, um, a guy that was still deployed. He didn't enter for it. Three other people entered him for it, um, so that was really cool, um, but when I read nate's story, I was like I was going through reading it and I was like, man, this is the guy. I had no idea who it was.

John 4:49

I mean, I knew you because you come in the shop but, excuse me, drink some water there. But when you like, when you read somebody's name sometimes for me at least I don't put a face with the name- oh, I'm absolutely terrible with that.

John 5:08

So I was showing Wes one day and Wes was going to be here with us this morning but he wasn't up to it, wasn't feeling good. This morning I was showing Wes, I was like man, you've got to read this story. And he said what are you talking about? And I showed it to him. He said wait, said wait, dad, that's nate. I said who's nate? And no, he said it's nate, nate, you know. And I said oh okay, dang, I didn't, I didn't even put two or two together. Uh, because I like I'll know people by first name, but I don't know last name right you know, and I was like his last name's, chrysal, is, did I?

Life Changing Decision

Nate 5:41

pronounce that right? Uh, it's actually chrysal. So, like I always tell people, the y is a double e, but you know it's I've. I've had it messed up since as long as I can remember, and as long as you don't add a t in there and make it crystal, I'm like I know who you're talking to.

John 5:55

So no, that's perfect. So, yes, I I showed it to him. He's like dad, that's was like all right. Well, I said you know it's not time to close it out or anything. It's going to run, you know, until Thanksgiving or whatever the date was that it was going to going to close. So we left it open and let a bunch of stuff continue to come in and and I mean hands down, you had the best story because of some of the interaction that you had with some of those folks. I thought that was really cool. I want you to share some of your story. Like I said, whatever you're comfortable with sharing about your time in the military, you're still in the military. Talk with us about that. We'll ask questions. If we ask a question you don't want to answer, just don't answer it.

John 6:45

All right, you know, uh, but but yeah, share, share your story with us.

Nate 6:50

Well, uh, let's see where we start here, Not not, not with when you were born.

Brandon 6:55

No, no, don't go that far. I was born in, you're right.

Nate 7:06

My mama said I was the best. No, so you know. Graduated high school, a few of my friends went off, joined the military, I I was one of those kids back in the day that was pretty smart on tests. I was not the smartest bull, but, uh, I'm pretty good at taking tests, so had some good test scores. College I was going to uh gave me a full academic scholarship. Oh, wow, okay.

Nate 7:25

I didn't know that, yeah no, I, and you know I I got it and I was like, wow, maybe I am kind of smart, you know, maybe I can prove some people wrong here and started going and I was like, man, this is just. It's not like I. You know, I had goals and still to this day, I would love to get a degree in what I was going for, but it didn't make sense to me that I had to do, you know, classes that pertained nothing Like I'm really good at math and I am terrible at writing essays. Okay, so they're like oh, you're going to. You know, you got to take this English class. I'm like I want to be a sports medicine athletic trainer. What does me being able to write a paper do with how I can treat an injury in sports and how I'm going to wrap an ankle or tape someone up, or something like that? I was like I don't understand this. 18, 19 years old, I think I know everything. I know nothing about life at this point years old.

John 8:24

I you know. I think I know everything. I know nothing about life at this point, man, if I knew half of what I thought I knew when I was 18, I'd be a genius yeah, I know half of what I knew when I was that's probably.

Nate 8:32

It's kind of like my grandpa said it's. You know, it's better no 10 something than 100 of nothing yeah, hey, there you go.

John 8:38

I know 10 about a lot of stuff.

Nate 8:39

That's, that's me. Yeah, you know I'm. I'm one of those like I'll hit you with a weird fact. You're like why?

Speaker 3 8:43

do you know about this?

Nate 8:44

I'm like I don't know I watched a youtube video on it one day. That's my depth of knowledge. But no, so I I didn't want to put myself into any debt any more than you know a normal college kid would do, because I I was, my tuition was all paid for, but I was living on campus in the dorms, so I'd taken student loans out for those and I was like the juice ain't worth the squeeze here because I can see the road I'm going down and it's gonna be a lot of money that I don't want to spend. So I was like, all right, I gotta, I gotta have a plan. And I was like, all right, well, think I'm going to join the military.

Nate 9:22

And just woke up one day and decided that you know, I'm going to make a major life change on the fly and started thinking you know what branch would I join? What's going to work for me? And I had three or four friends from high school, from my graduating class, that had all joined the Marine Corps, and so for me it's kind of a no brainer. I was like man, if I do this, at least I can, you know, contact them and they can kind of guide me through everything, cause I didn't know anybody in the Navy, the army, the air force, and you know the city I was going to, or you know that my parents moved to, that I was living in there's air force base town, so like I was used to seeing know military so where were you living at this time?

Nate 10:02

omaha, nebraska, okay, got it, yep. So where are you from originally? Atkinson, nebraska, little, little itty bitty town up in the sand hills. Got it, uh, by the, I'd say, about 45 minutes an hour from the border of south dakota. Okay, loved it up there, it's. That's still home to me in a way all right sure I love the.

Nate 10:22

I love the small town, slow life, don't I do not like living in a city, right? Sure, I love the. I love the small town, slow life, don't? I do not like living in a city we used to have that here in Statesboro.

John 10:29

It used to be small town, slow life, Not. It doesn't really feel like that anymore.

Nate 10:32

No, it's, I mean I can. I can even remember back when I came here the first time up through this way and was in statesboro. I was like man, this place not that big and that was 2016 and even since then it's insane.

Nate 10:45

It's crazy how much it's grown but yeah, so joined the marine corps in 2012. Uh, went to boot camp, played all the fun games that they like to play with you there in san diego. Okay, um, and for anyone that does listen, that is in the Marine Corps. West Coast is forever the best coast. After that, went to school, or the MOS school, got my MOS and shortly thereafter reported my first unit in Camp Pendleton, california, and got told literally less than 48 hours after I got there, like hey, we're going to Afghanistan in about three months. We're about to go do a month of training, you'll get a couple of weeks to leave and then we're leaving. I was like you said what?

Speaker 3 11:31

That was quick Like.

Nate 11:32

I'm 20 years old, you know, don't know nothing, been in the military for all of a week, basically, and they're like you're going to Afghanistan and really, like you know that back in that timeframe, a lot of people my age were joining because they wanted to go to combat or like that was their calling, and really for me it was like I'm just trying to make a little money and stay out of debt and figure out my life. And you know I was pretty physically fit and pretty smart at my job. So I was like you know, maybe this is a good fit for me. Went to Afghanistan in 2013,. Came back in 2014. Definitely grew up a lot.

Nate 12:15

You see a whole different side of the world and you stop taking for granted what, what, uh, what we have here. That was, that was a big thing, because you know we would go out on patrols and stuff and you see the village locals and they would stop and they, you know, they'd give you bread and chai tea and everything like that and they're just so thankful for, like you know, you give them, you know the mres that we get our meals. You'd give them a piece of bread out of that or like a cookie, and it was the greatest thing in the world to them. So what were you doing? What was your? Uh, so I was a combat engineer, okay.

Nate 12:56

So in afghanistan my main job I it kind of depended on the unit you got thrown with. So I got attached to first battalion ninth marines uh, deactivated now, but known as the walking dead and everybody was like, oh yeah, they named the unit after the show. I'm like, no, if you know the unit history, they get that name because of vietnam. So in vietnam, one nine got the whole battalion got wiped out, like within a matter of 24 to 48 hours, like I think it was less than 10 of that battalion was alive. Wow, um, fast forward. Like a year later they had reloaded the battalion, sent them back out. You know, back in those days they wore the unit patches on their uniforms that are sewn on and the old uniforms, and the vietnamese, the viet kong, were like, uh, they're like what we killed all these guys. You know this doesn't make sense. So they started calling them debauchee, which is the dead walkers in vietnamese. Wow, and so the the name stuck and they became the walking dead.

John 13:59

So what about that? Struck fear in their minds.

Nate 14:02

Yeah, oh, I'm sure that's the psychological warfare that was probably insane back in the day like that. But so it's a huge pride thing to get put in that unit because they're a unit that only gets reactivated in like stuff has hit the fan right and you know global war on terror, stuff has hit the fan at that point. And a few years before I got there they had stood the battalion back up and I got there right after they had just done a training exercise and um had one of the worst training incidents in history. Uh, they were up in Bridgeport, california doing mountain warfare training in the snow and then they immediately pulled them down to Hawthorne to do all their live fires. And there's lots of reports. You know everybody says there's, there's, was it? Three truths there's your truth, my truth and the truth.

Speaker 3 14:55

Yeah.

John 14:57

Well there's, let's say there's, three sides, or yeah, three sides.

Nate 15:00

Yeah, let's say there's three sides or yeah, three sides, yeah. Let's say there's three sides, yeah, there's three sides, yeah.

John 15:04

So your side my side in the truth right here we go.

Career Crossroads

Nate 15:05

I'm sure somewhere in between of those reports is the truth. Yeah, not sure. I you know, knowing a lot of the guys in that unit and the stories they told and the way they explained it. I'll leave that up to interpretation because you know I'm not that guy well, you weren't there.

Nate 15:21

Yeah, I didn't do it and excuse me, they, uh, they lost seven guys in a training accident in a matter of about 30 seconds they had a they had a mortar round which, for anyone that doesn't know, is basically a shotgun shell with propellant in, like a nerf football if you remember the, the old nerf footballs with the fins on the back. Yeah, it almost looks just like one mortar round, looks just like one of those. Well, story is they double fed in the tube, oh my gosh. And it imploded the tube and killed the teams, the two mortar teams that were right there, and critically injured some other ones that thankfully survived. But you know, that was two, three months before I got to the unit. Okay, so like I had heard the story because I'd been in training, so you know, you see all the stuff in the marine corps that's coming around, because small marine corps, right, and I was just like I'm going to that unit, like those guys don't play around and it's a huge pride thing. So went to Afghanistan with them.

Nate 16:27

Uh, was a combat engineer, so I was lead patrol sweep, so I I carry around a metal detector in front of our foot patrols and just listen for a beep, hoping, hoping to all that is above us that I'm not going to hear that beep. Yeah, because that means you know you gotta mark. We call it mark and cordon. So you're, you're marking it with baby powder, chem lights, whatever it might be, and either bypassing it, waiting for eod to come, or we'd call it bipping, we'd blow in place. So carry little charges and we'd blow it in place.

Nate 17:01

Okay, um, so we did that a lot and then did a lot of like village interactions. So we met with elders and stuff and they'd bring us in and sit us down and we'd have food with our interpreter and it was. It made me a lot more thankful for what I do have Like to this day. Like that is one of those things that's like forever has changed me and made me so grateful for all the opportunities and things I get in my life. Came back in 2014 and just just marined right, did a lot of training, a lot of schools, became a marksmanship instructor, which was my like end all be all goal in the Marine Corps. Like I love shooting, I love teaching and really I really love teaching. And it's funny Cause when I first started, you got to teach these classes and you got to go through a school where you teach these classes to everybody else is trying to be an instructor and I was so scared of public speaking Like I, you know you'd get me in front of him.

Nate 18:01

I'd be like today we're gonna, you know just stuttering along by the end of the two weeks of class, cause you're teaching a class every day. So, like they normalize it so much for you, like I could get up there and just spit ball class, no issues at all, loved it and yeah, fell in love with that. And then that was 2015,. Late 2014, early 2015,. I started instructing.

Nate 18:27

I was doing that, had procured some orders for basically my dream assignment for the Marine Corps and was getting ready to re-enlist. And that's when if everyone remembers 2016 for the Marine Corps that's when Barack Obama, when he was president, decided you know, we don't need 200,000 Marines anymore, we only need 170,000. Well, the way the Marine Corps works when you're reenlisting is you have to wait until you're six months from getting out or until your contract's up before you can reenlist, okay, and the year resets for how many numbers they're gonna get every october. Guess when my ets date, or my day I was getting out, was september, so I had to wait till was it march or march or april? Well, by then, all that stuff had gotten pushed out by obama. So everybody started freaking out because, like, oh, I can't wait.

Nate 19:21

I I got to make my decision now, so I go in to the, the nco that's in charge of helping you re-enlist and I sitting there like, yeah, I want to re-enlist, I already have these orders in place to go to paris island to be a it's called pmi primary marks troop instructor. So, like all the all the new guys, all the recruits going through boot camp, you get assigned to pmi and they're in charge for teaching everyone in that platoon.

Nate 19:45

Like this is their first time they're gonna touch, you know, an m4, m16 and okay, I was like this is my chance to give back, because, like I didn't, really I had no intentions of ever being a drill instructor or a recruiter. I just didn't see myself wanting to do it. But I was like this is the way I can do something outside of my career, but still in a, in a path that I love, that's looked upon very highly, because there's only 10 pmis at paris island and 10 at san diego, so there's only 20 marines out of 170 000 that you know get to wear that title at any given time. And I had orders for it and I was like, oh, yes, yeah. And then so he was like, all right, let me see what I can do. Come back a couple days later. He's like hey, you know, we thank you for your service. You're gonna get out on this date. Really, uh, here's a handshake thanks for everything you've done for us.

Nate 20:38

And I was like wait, what do you mean? They're like, yeah, so there's no spaces left to re-enlist. I was like, well, what if I? You know what if I change my job? Because I loved the marine corps at that time, like I wanted to stay in. At that point I knew this was like kind of my life. Calling for a job was like I'm supposed to be in the military, like this is, this is what I'm born to do. And he's like man there is nothing open. He's like the only way possibly for you to stay in was to go to MARSOC selection, so Marine Special Operations Command to go through their screening and selection process and get selected.

John 21:17

To go in and be like a recon Marine or something like that, to be the Marine.

Nate 21:19

Raiders Okay, yep, or something like that. To be the Marine Raiders Okay, yep. So that was before they changed it officially to Raider Battalion and started calling them Raiders again.

Nate 21:29

So that would be a pretty big contrast to what you had been doing then, right, like I had been doing you know, some combat-oriented things with my MOS, but I wasn't, you know, that front line out, like my mission is. You know, whatever cause, there are special forces, right, um, mos for the Marine Corps, that's their version of you know, green berets or Navy seals, that's, that's theirs, that's their version of that. And I was like I don't. I didn't have a desire or like that drive to want to do that. So I was like I'm not going to lie to myself and say that I could do it. I probably could have, but I didn't feel the calling for it. So I was like I'm not going to do that.

Nate 22:15

And so I did my thing, got out, thing, got out and you know, live in life for about 30 days after I got out and this is in California. So I got out and I was actually married at the time and, uh, moved to 29 Palms, california, and if anyone knows where that is, that's the high desert and it is not a great place. There's nothing out there. And my wife at the time was going to cosmetology school to get her license to do all that stuff and she was like a month from graduating. So I was like, yeah, I'll just you know, because we had. I had just been driving there every weekend because I was like, yeah, I'll just you know, because we had I just been driving there every weekend because I was like there's no point to move you to pendleton, pay a lot more money and all that, it's just it didn't make sense. I was like I only got six months left when we got married.

Nate 23:14

Um, so I moved there and you know, I was doing the thing being being a husband, stay-at-home husband, and wasn't bringing any money and I was just like I just there's an emptiness in my life. Yeah, I was like there's such an emptiness. I was like I wonder if I can backdoor this whole process, go to the marine recruiter as a prior service marine and just right back in. You know it's, it's a new contract, not a re-enlistment. Yeah. So I was like maybe, maybe I can get away with this, went and talked to marine recruiter, like hey, man, you know how it is right now we can't. I was like, okay, that's so crazy to me that they were turning down experienced people to protect our country.

John 23:59

I mean, but they were still enlisting new recruits.

Nate 24:02

I was like yeah, and I was like well, so how is putting me back in a worse decision?

John 24:08

You already know your return on investment with me, right right and I get the whole thing about not wanting to go to essentially special forces. So my cousin went through Navy SEAL school and he was almost done, he'd gone. I think he had gone through you know, hell week, I'm sure, yeah. And then some of a group of seals came in and talked to him and and, like you know, had a, had a a real like come to Jesus, meeting with them, like this is what this is really going to be like. You know, this is, this is what your orders are going to look like. You're not going to be taking orders from somebody in uniform. This is a different world. He called his dad and was like Dad, dad, and I don't know how the conversation went. I didn't. I mean, I've been told some parts about it, but I didn't have the conversation with him. So I don't want to put words in his mouth or say whatever. The short story is he rang the bell, you know he got out.

John 25:13

He's like you know what? I can't see myself doing this because it was. He realized it was going to be something that was very different, right. So at the the time, let me try to get this right. I think the insertion team was was handled by the army for seals, and the navy created their own insertion team uh, I'm pretty sure that's how it went well.

Nate 25:42

so, at least with my knowledge is, is that you had special forces like green berets in the army and that that had existed longer and their kind of point was to go in and teach local militias and stuff like that, okay, um, kind of like they did in vietnam. You had the, the Mac V SOG guys, right, and now spoiler alert, I'm in the army now.

Speaker 3 26:08

So I know.

Nate 26:09

I've done a little reading cause like in the Marine Corps history, the history of the Marine Corps, such an important part that's indoctrinated into you and I like I've seen that that doesn't really exist in the army unless you go out and find it yourself. It's not like beat into your soul.

Nate 26:31

Um, well, the marines, the few, the proud, right, yeah, and it's, you gotta know what you're proud of. Yeah, it's, it's crazy and it's all the history. Um, so I know, with the mac v saw guys that that was the precursor to green berets. Essentially okay, that's what they were called before is they're kind of a off the books unit that was doing some stuff in Cambodia and stuff like that Try to start coups to overthrow the communist regimes and all that. And I I think the Navy kind of got jealous and they were like well, we want to have our own super cool people. They're like, well, we specialize in the water.

Speaker 3 26:57

So they started with the, so they started with the.

Nate 26:59

So they started with the, the udt seals, the underwater demolition teams, and that's kind of where it started. Was the whole like all right, go out. You know the black, the black suits that everybody's seen, you know, if you've if you've watched the commercials, you see them come out of the water and they're all super crazy with their and everything. And I think it kind of just evolved from that and like into like underwater demolitions. So taking care of you know the the, was it the limpid mines that they'd put out in the water for the boats and everything, and like getting rid of that or like going in and placing charges on boats for people we didn't like and making sure those boats, uh, became coral reefs.

Military Career Path Decision

Nate 27:35

Yeah, yeah so I think that's kind of where those subsets started. And then I know, when you get into like we call them them the tier one units. So you know, your, your Delta guys, um, and like your seal team six, that's like those were started, so like Delta was supposed to be specifically for um, for Chuck Norris, right, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.

Nate 27:56

Chuck Norris, always for Chuck Norris uh no, but they were supposed to start specifically for, like, was it airplane interdiction? So like if, uh, you know, a terrorist took over a plane, like they were the ones like hostage rescue and stuff like that, and then seal team six had a completely different thing and then the global war on terror changed a lot of that, but I think that was the original of what it was supposed to be. As far as my knowledge with it goes I mean, I'm not super versed, I'm sure there's people that can tell you a heck of a lot more than I could.

John 28:26

Yeah, I don't know the whole story. I know that, I know that you know he's, he's um involved in, in doing some of that, but he's not on, you know, an actual seal team, because it just became something he realized it was going to be. You know more than what he wanted to do, right, so, um, so I, I totally get that yeah, it is.

Nate 28:47

Yeah, I just kind of just did not want to get out over my skis on that one back in the day because, I mean, even then I was. I looked back on that and I was 2015, 26, early 2016 and I'm like man, I am not anywhere so you're like 22 years old at this point 23 23, I think, yeah, yeah, I would have been 23 here, yeah, so three.

John 29:06

You couldn't get back in the marines, nope. So I was like what's the next best thing?

Nate 29:09

so you, so you drive a wedge into the army. Well, actually, then. So, first off, I didn't go to the army first. Okay, coast guard. I went to the navy, okay, okay. And I was like what's the next best thing to being in the marine corps, being a corpsman in the Navy who gets attached to Marines? You wear the same uniform, you act the same, you talk the same, I know the lingo, I know the guys, I love medical stuff. So I was like this seems like a perfect fit.

John 29:34

Yeah, I wind up on a carrier or something. Yeah.

Nate 29:36

Going to the Navy. I'm like I want to be a corpsman. They're like, okay, sure. They're like, uh, let's start doing your paperwork and stuff. I'm like I got my DD two, 14, that I get your prior service. I was like yep. And they're like you can go on a sub, oh. And I was like no, I'm not going on a metal tube.

John 30:04

So I had the sun. So I was like that's not happening. I've got a customer that, um, he was um on a sub, he's, he's retired now. Older, older gentleman. He was telling me a story one day and I'm gonna get this wrong. This has been several years ago. He was telling me about this, about how many days they were under one time, and it was. I was shocked.

Nate 30:19

I mean, it was, it was they'll go like six months without seeing the sun. I mean he told me how many days it was it was. They'll go like six months without seeing the sun. I mean he told me how many days it was.

John 30:26

And I was like wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Are you sure? He said man you? He said you have no idea, I'm sure, and and cause I thought he was like you know. I mean, like I said, he was an older gentleman. I was like maybe he just forgot or something.

Nate 30:40

Right, got a little mixed up.

John 30:41

And then he started telling me you know he wasn't sharing things he shouldn't share. But he was telling me and obviously I've forgotten about it now, but he was telling me details about it, you know, about what they would do, how much food they would have and all this kind of stuff. And what I wanted to ask was well, what the heck were you doing? Why did you have to be under the water for that long? Yeah, you know, doing that and it was. You know I didn't ask that question, you know. I just kinda I wanted to so bad. I wanted to know what he was doing. You know why, where they were in the world, why, why they were having to do this or whatever. But let me tell you that that takes a different breed of person to be able to do that.

Nate 31:23

Yep. So after the Navy was like that, I was like all right, cool, army's right next door Went right next door. They're like prior service. I was like, yep, they're like all right, cool, we can fast track this. You want to go to MEPS next week, which is the Military Entry Processing Center? So that's where everyone goes when they're going to join to swear in for the first time ever. I'm like sure. They're like all right, five, 5am next week. Give me these papers. They scan them in. They're like you're good.

Nate 31:47

Cause I still had a clearance. I still had a security clearance and everything I was still. You know, I still had an active clearance, cause they're good for 10 years.

John 31:53

So I was like but you're so, you're still like only a few months.

Nate 31:57

I'm literally two months from having got out.

Nate 31:59

Okay, all right, and I was like all right, cool, you know I'll go to maps, no big deal. I go in there, I get to bypass doing all the normal people stuff, like for people that have never joined. I drove myself there and I just sit in the chair and I just wait and they call me back and it's a civilian that sits there and they like help you pick your duty station off, what's available based off your MOS and stuff like that. And I was, you know, I didn't want to go to a school for an MOS and I had some certifications from before I was ever in the military for like mechanic stuff. So I was like go be a mechanic, I love working on, you know, I love working on cars and trucks and all kinds of stuff. Like I just like tinkering and I'm pretty good at it. Like that's, that's one of those things. It's like uh, I'm pretty good at figuring it out real quick. And so they're like yeah, if you go be a mechanic, you don't have to go to school, send you straight to, you know, your first duty station for the army.

Nate 32:53

I was like sold, let's go. Yeah, all right. All right, what do you got for me? You know I'm sitting back there and it's an older gentleman. He's like I got, uh, I got korea, I got germany and I got was, uh, one of the bases in alaska, whichever. You know, there's two army bases, it's it's not the good one. I know that it's not the one in anchorage, because my dad's best friend was stationed there for 13 years in anchorage and he's like you don't want to go to the other one. Okay, it's like the frozen tundra up there.

Transitioning From Marines to Army Dynamics

John 33:25

Yeah, pretty well, anchorage is like a frozen tundra to me, yeah, to me too, yeah, yeah, I don't like cold.

Nate 33:31

Like I'm from Nebraska and I do not like cold, it gets below 50. I'm like, nope, this is not for me, yeah.

John 33:38

But yeah, it might be 50 below up there.

Nate 33:40

Yeah, exactly, and I was like I can't even imagine. And they were like, yeah, well, you have to sign for one of them. I was like, actually, fun fact, I've done this before, I know your games, I don't actually have to do anything. And they're like, well, you can't just walk out. I was like watch me. So I just walked out, just left, meps got my car and meps was in la. So from la to 29 palms, uh, without traffic is a three and a half hour drive.

Nate 34:07

With traffic, which there is always traffic in la is five and a half five and a half six, so I left at like midnight the night before to be there at 5 am. So you know I'm tired, I'm crabby, I hungry, I haven't eaten anything. I'm driving home stopping, got Carl's junior whatever. Health food, yeah, yeah, health food. Yeah, I was real healthy at the time, right yeah. But I'm driving home and the Sergeant major for that whole recruiting area for like all of Southern California calls me. He's like hey brother, what happened? He's like hey brother, what happened?

Nate 34:46

I was like y'all gave me options that are not gonna work. I was like I have a wife. It's november at this time. It's like I'm not like I drive a freaking acura coupe like sports car. I was like I'm not driving to anchorage, or not even anchorage, but I'm not driving to alaska. In that, not moving to Alaska, I was like and I'm not going overseas as a first assignment, it's not happening. He's like what, if you come back tomorrow, I can promise you I got better things for you. I was like I'll come back tomorrow. However, if you don't have anything different, I'm walking out again Like I'm not gonna put myself through that stress in life at this point Cause, like I know well enough and good enough that those things change every day.

Nate 35:29

Yeah, and there's always spaces, like anywhere, that ever tells you like, oh, we don't have any more room for any more. Of that I must. They're, probably, unless you're like one of those super specialized sneaky squirrel jobs. There's always room, and I learned it being a mechanic in the army is that there is always room, like that. We, they could be like, oh, yeah, you have every. You know 25 people you're supposed to have. No, they don't. They have nine. Yeah, they have nine, and somehow they say we have 25. Don't know how it works, but it always works out that way. Okay, so I go back the next day and they're like alright, so we have Korea, we have that same place in Alaska and we have Fort Stewart, georgia. I was like, well, I didn't know anything about the Army, I just knew that they say different things and they do things a little different. But other than that it's kind of the same. But I was like, where in Georgia is that? Because I knew Fort Benning.

Brandon 36:21

That's where I was born actually.

Nate 36:23

Yeah, I feel like anybody that knows the military knows, you know, fort Benning, fort Bragg, camp Pendleton maybe, and that's about the extent.

John 36:32

If they're a chopper guy, they know Rucker and stuff like that, right yeah.

Nate 36:34

Yep, um. So I was like they're like, oh, it's over by Savannah Georgia, by the coast. I was like, sounds pretty nice, Take it. And they're like what? I was like I'll take it, are you sure? I'm like, yep, I'll take it. So once you take that, then it's official You're in Yep, I literally I signed. I guess you could call it. It's like a confirmation email for a hotel.

John 37:00

I've had many try to put me on a reservation before.

Speaker 3 37:03

Yeah.

Nate 37:04

And then so so I did that. And then you walk next door and you swear in Okay, okay, now I'm officially in the army. Get my orders, my official orders. Like you got 10 days from tomorrow to say hello at Fort Stewart, okay, and I knew I was joining, so spent the next two days packing everything up, everything I own.

Nate 37:28

Driving across the country Took three days or two days, whatever it was Stopped in Nebraska because it was along the way. Saw my family, drove the next three days, made it down here and signed into you know Fort Stewart and they're like where's your uniform? Like I showed and signed in, you know for certain. They're like where's your uniform. Like I showed up in you know jeans, and I think it was november, so I was like jeans and a hoodie. It's like don't have what do you mean? You don't have any. It's like here's my orders. Like okay, where, where'd you go to school? Where'd you go to basic training? I was like I didn't and I was. It's really common now, like I, there's a lot of prior service Marines running around the army, like it is kind of crazy. The running joke is we're all joining the army to fix it now.

Speaker 3 38:13

Ha, ha, ha.

John 38:13

There we go so what you're saying is college sports is not the only thing that has a transfer portal. That's getting out of control.

Nate 38:19

Yeah, it's. Yeah, actually, you know, that's the perfect analogy for it Now that you say that I hadn't thought about it that way. But that is definitely how it's been. And uh, so I'm like one of the first, like I didn't. There was no other prior service Marines in my unit when I got there, okay. So it took them doing a whole bunch of research, making a whole bunch of phone calls, to figure out how to even get me uniforms, finally get this paper. I got to go take it, get uniforms, get all the stuff, cool.

Nate 38:52

Mind you, I don't know the way army does anything. So I show up to my unit the next day I got to do PT, because you do, you know, physical training every morning. So I'm walking in PTs in see my officer. I'm like hey, good morning sir. He's like are you going to salute me? I was like I'm in PTs, I do not salute, because in the Marine Corps you don't. If you're not wearing your cover on your head, you don't salute. Well, in the Army that's not a thing, you just salute all the time. It's almost like a better safe than sorry.

John 39:21

So now I have to start learning army isms and and you got to start being able to recognize people's faces and stuff right and you're not just going off of how they're dressed.

Nate 39:29

Yep, and I was like, oh, this is going to be a culture shock. And it was like those. Those first six months were hard. They were real hard. I had a hard time kind of letting the marine corps go in a sense, as far as, like you know, a lot of conversations those first six months I started with, well, in the marine corps we did this, or you know, back in the marine corps, and then I had to, like I kind of slowly came to the realization like, hey, we are not in kansas anymore, we are not in the marine corps, I'm the marines. Like I can't, you know, I can't click my heels three times and end up back where I came from, but I can't make the most of what I got now. So then I started embracing the army because I fought it.

John 40:06

I, I fought the culture change so hard but there was no way back, Like there wasn't. There was not a way back.

Nate 40:12

Believe me, I try.

John 40:13

I explore every option I can think of. I was seeing the writing on the wall Yep.

Nate 40:19

The gears in my head were turning and they were just spinning smoke at that point. So I finally embraced it and I guess I probably should have prefaced by saying this when I got out of the Marine Corps, I was a sergeant, I was an E-5. The only way for me to come into the Army was to take a hit on rank and be an E-4, so a specialist. They wouldn't even give me corporal stripes as an NCO. I'm like look, I've spent two and a half almost three years as an NCO. I've been a platoon sergeant, I've led 50 dudes. None of that really mattered. They're like don't care, wow. So I had NCOs when I first got in the Army, and maybe this is why it rubbed me wrong. But I had NCOs that'd been in more years than them. Yeah, they hadn't really done much. They would go to teach classes to us. I'm like, no, you're wrong, that is not how you would do any of that, cause they they would talk about like patrolling operations or like convoy etiquette when you're on deployment. And they're like yeah, if you know, if we get shot at from this direction, we're going to do this. I'm like no, you would not. No, like I would the from this direction. We're gonna do this. I'm like no, you would not. No, like I would.

Nate 41:25

The running joke is, all of us in the military have a little bit of autism, and there's nothing wrong with autism. Like you know, we hyper focus on something. Mine was like that stuff, like I was big on like the plan a, the plan b, knowing all those things, I was like no, you would never do any of this and I would like lose my mind over what they're telling me. They're're like well, this is what it says in the book. I'm like book's wrong. Yeah, book's wrong. Don't listen to the book. Stop listening to the book as long as you're not you know.

John 41:48

So what you're saying is you had some people leading you that had never been there.

Brandon 41:52

Exactly yeah, theory, because they didn't have a lot of practical application.

Learning Archery and Hog Hunting

John 42:06

So I'm going to say this somehow without incriminating anyone. I have two friends that are going through like a Bible study right now. All right, two girls are going through this Bible study right now and part of what they're talking about is forgiveness. Okay, you know. So you get into a situation with somebody where there's a riff and you're trying to you're trying to mend this and you know so this girl that's leading it is.

John 42:33

She's, she's kind of, you know, saying you go, you go by the book, this is. Then you do this, and then you've done this and this doesn't work. Then you do this, and then you will get to a point of restoration and the other girl she's talking with she's like I've done all that and there's been no restoration. You know this person. I can't restore this relationship. I've tried to do everything possible to restore it and she's like well, no, you messed up on a step somewhere. It's like listen, you know, when you're dealing with people, or like in your situation, when you're dealing with a combat situation, it's going to be different.

Nate 43:17

Yeah, it's a fluid.

John 43:18

Yeah, it's a fluid dynamic and so she's looking at you know, looking at what paul said about getting restoration, and I think it's important to say to to look at that. Paul also said as much as it depends on you yeah, I mean it takes two. It takes two restoration right, yep, so um, and, and that'll be. You know, that'll be one of those areas where somebody would say well, the bible contradicts itself. No, it doesn't.

Nate 43:44

No.

John 43:44

It doesn't contradict itself. I invite anybody that ever feels like there's a contradiction in the Bible come find me and show it to me and we'll go through it, because I'm of the belief that it doesn't exist. It doesn't. Let me make sure I enunciate really good on that it does not exist. Um that, that, that there, um, I believe that scripture, that the bible is the inerrant word of god and there are no mistakes, and that everything that needed to be communicated to us was communicated to us.

John 44:18

um, now, how we learn to apply it to our lives is where the breakdown happens, I think yeah, right, yeah so, like in this situation, with this guy that had never been in combat situations, like you, you know he was just going off of what the book said right which which, unfortunately, you know, was going to wind up getting some people hurt, if not killed, you think a lot of those books.

Nate 44:44

They didn't update the whole time during the global war on terror because they weren't going back and asking the squads that went out there like, hey, how did you guys actually do this versus how we tell you to do it?

Brandon 44:56

How did you?

Nate 44:57

handle this situation. They're 10 years outdated.

Brandon 45:01

When I was in construction construction you get a lot of young architects who are out of school and in theory the drawings work, but when you try to put it in place it doesn't. And it would have been helpful for contractors architects to work together on design with what actually works, but there's almost a lot of times it seemed like there was a riff between there's almost a firewall between those two.

Brandon 45:27

Oh, there is, so that we draw it, you do it this way and there's not much give and take, whereas, like what you said, if you go talk to the people who are on the ground, you could write a much better book yes, exactly yeah so, and you know you, you go into the army and you're going to be a mechanic.

John 45:44

Who does a mechanic hate most?

Nate 45:47

an engineer, an engineer, yeah right that's what I was thinking when you're talking about, because they put screws in places. Theory is everything, yeah, and then practical applications are completely right. Common sense is not existent in the engineer world either you know you you'll.

John 46:01

You'll go to take something apart and there's a screw somewhere that, once the engine is in the box, you cannot get to it. You can't get to this bolt right. You're literally taking a flat piece of bar and you're welding a socket onto the end of it so you could try to get to it.

Brandon 46:18

I've never worked on a tank, but the most frustrated I think I've ever been putting something together was a rocking horse.

Speaker 3 46:26

Christmas.

Brandon 46:26

Eve, I think I punched a rocking horse in the face. I'm like who would design it this way? Whoever designed this has never put it together. Oh my gosh, that's funny man.

Nate 46:39

Eventually I ended up having a kid. We'll get to that. But yeah, kids furniture. That's funny man. Eventually I ended up having a kid, we'll get to that. But yeah, kids' furniture. Yes, yes, same thing. I have never been so angry in my life or anything from Ikea. Like you ever get to that point where you get like so frustrated and angry. You just start like it could be 65 degrees in your house you start sweating and you're just like hot and angry.

John 47:04

That's the point where my wife just walks out of the room. Yeah, kids, it's better if we just went. Let's go outside and throw the football or something. Oh my god.

Nate 47:08

But yeah, so alright, so Anyway yeah Army yep, had some riffs, finally got it figured out and they sent me to our first aid combat lifesaver course for the Army. I've done a bunch of medical training from when I was in the Marine Corps but I got to get certified on the army.

John 47:24

Well, I mean, people in the army are different than people in the Marines. There is different there's different veins and stuff like that yeah.

Nate 47:30

You got to learn how to do the army way, which which my best friend in the Marine Corps was our Navy Corpsman. Okay, you, okay, you know me and Tommy. We were inseparable and, like I was, that guy eats, sleeps and breathes medicine while he was in.

Speaker 3 47:44

Okay, all right.

Nate 47:45

He got out, he's a, he's a cop down in Fort Worth. Well, he was in Fort Worth, he's in Corsicana, texas now. Okay, got it. But yeah, like we I mean me and him are outs from him little tips and tricks for plugging holes and stuff like that. Um, but so I'm doing the army one and there's a guy from my unit kind of you hear him talk and you'd be like, oh yeah, he's definitely like from the deep South. Yeah, name's Stu and you know, find out, he's really big into hog hunting and I've done a little bit of hunting in my life at this point A little bit.

Nate 48:28

But I only ever used rifles. Like I'd shot, you know, bow and arrows in PE class back in the day and I loved it, loved archery. But like I hadn't had a lot of experience, especially with compound bows, I'd shot some. You know the recurves that every school had that are beat to heck and I was like you hog on a bunch and we're just sitting there BS, and he's like yep, and I was like what do you use Cause? Like I had always heard you know hog hunting or seen the videos of people hog hunting.

Nate 48:57

You know going out shooting 20, 30, going out shooting 20, 30, 40 hogs and stuff like that. And I'm just like that looks so fun. I was like, and I bet it tastes good Cause like I love pork. So I was like I bet you this is a great time. And he's like I use a bow. I was like what do you mean? He used a bow. Fast forward, find out. He's actually selling his bow Cause he had just got a new one. And John actually selling his bow because he had just got a new one. And john, I'm sure you can tell me what year, but it was a psc vendetta.

Nate 49:27

Oh wow, so it's 2010 or 2011 yeah, something like somewhere around there, 20, maybe 12 yeah so it was the vendetta xs, so it's a 28 inch axle axle rider, short bow.

John 49:36

Loved it I think they made that bow for um several years. Psc usually does.

Nate 49:40

Yeah, they've run them for a few years. I've learned that. So that was my first bow and the first time I ever drew it back. I derailed it, uh-oh, because I didn't know anything. You know I'm gripping it as tight as you can grip something First time ever using a release. So I'm like just yanking on it, turning it in my hands, it's getting all cockeyed and all of a sudden it derails and huge sound. I'm like, oh no. And I just look at because stew's there with me. I'm like, did I break it? He's like it's not broke, but you're gonna have to get the string put on. I'm like, all right, well, where do I go? He's like there's only one archery shop around here. I was like, where's that? He goes up by savannah and you that shop and went there. They were not the greatest interaction for somebody that's definitely very new to the sport and the culture and lifestyle of archery. I didn't ever go back there after that time. We'll just say that, and, but they fixed it. So here.

Speaker 3 50:48

I am.

Nate 50:49

And then Stu gives me a little lesson and I start YouTube and videos on how to actually draw a bow. The right way, cause you know, a YouTube degree is better than most degrees you're going to get nowadays.

Brandon 50:58

That's. That's what I like to say.

Nate 51:00

Like, oh, anytime, I'm going to work on a car YouTube. Nowadays you can do anything. That's that's what I like to say. Like, oh, anytime I'm gonna work on a car. Youtube's sitting there, whether or not I know what I'm doing. I just do it because maybe they have a quicker, easier way. I think that's how elon musk built the space shuttle. I'm pretty sure it is. Yeah, I'm pretty sure there's probably a 52 part series that he watched and it explained it all. But, yeah, so started doing that, went out hog hunting. I think my first like four shots I took on a hog because I was like the jitters of all jitters. Yeah, the like white tail fever had nothing on me in this point, and we were hog hunting at night so we had lights mounted on our bows. So you you're. She is legal in georgia by the way.

Nate 51:38

Yes, it is, it is legal and you know, come to full draw, click that light on. You got like two seconds right. It's pretty quick. They're gonna either stand there and look at you for a second and then walk off or they're just gonna turn and run, yeah, so click it on.

Nate 51:56

They stand still and you're like I got two seconds to make sure I have this pin lined up. With this peep, everything go and I missed like the first four shots and I was getting so defeated and this was all like in the first night I was like I'm so defeated I'm not good at this archery thing at all like I thought I was going to be good at it because I'm good at shooting guns. So I was like it can't be that different. It was very, very different, yeah, and then we went out the next weekend. He's like, hey, man, and I felt bad because we would later on we would just alternate shots on, like who got to shoot at a pig. So you know, we had like six, seven spots we'd always go to in the same night because we'd go out from like 11 pm to four or five in the morning when, when the hogs are out, when they're playing, so like, so like I shoot one, he shoots one, I shoot one, he shoots one, and that's how it got later on. But you know, back then he was like, hey, just keep shooting, man. And I was like, dude, I feel so bad, he's not getting any hogs Like. He's just standing here watching me miss.

Nate 52:55

Finally, everything worked out. Shoot my first hog and this thing just goes zipping and I got a lit knock on the arrow and you just see this little red dot just disappearing off into the distance and I'm like I don't know where it went. And he goes. Well, we'll just drive around until we find it. Okay, sounds simple enough to me, and you know we have. He had night vision, so that little knock is like a spotlight on on the planet for everything. Right then, so he, he's like got it. We walk up dead hog, okay I was like that's cool all right now.

Nate 53:35

How do I clean it? Because I ain't never cleaned a hog before, I've cleaned deer. So I was like can't be that different, but I also don't know. So he teaches me to do that. And then, boom, that becomes like our weekend routine. Okay, like almost every weekend you want to find me. I was out shooting hogs. Like it became like my obsession. Like I didn't even care about deer hunting for like three years. All I want to do is shoot hogs. And I'm still the same way to this day. Like if I'm up in a tree stand and I hear hogs fighting and get going after it. But I still got like an hour of light left and I think a deer might come. I will get down and go find hogs, like I. I'm just like this will be fun, but yeah, so stew and me became best friends and hunted for years and now you said he was.

John 54:20

He was definitely southern by his accent. Where was he from? He was from like upstate maine what wow? Yep that is crazy.

Nate 54:30

He had a thicker accent than like your cousin's grandma from southeastern arkansas.

John 54:36

Really, I was just like I met a girl here in the shop two weeks ago and she sounded like ultra country and I said where? Where are you from? She said New York. I was like wait a second, there's no way oh yeah, Upstate New York.

Nate 54:52

One of my really good friends from the army is out. He's a welder now and he moved back home upstate New York and he's the same way. He's got got some twang in his oh yeah, I was like hilarious. What in the world? I was like you're from maine, it's like people are from there, because I'd never met anybody from maine and I was like I didn't even know that place was actually real. I just thought it. He's like yeah, man, we can go up there and hunt one year.

Brandon 55:17

I'm like is it cold.

Parenting as a Single Soldier

Nate 55:18

There he goes. Yeah, I was like, nah, I'll stay here. I was like you can go up there and shoot moose and bear and the deer they have up there. I'm like I'll, I'll stay down here. It's nice and nice and warm moose is delicious.

John 55:30

I have not had moose.

Nate 55:31

It is so good I.

John 55:32

I've got another customer that he went on a hunt up there and, um, apparently they grow a lot of broccoli in maine and so the moose was in the broccoli field but they had to wait for it to get out of the field before they could shoot it. And anyway he gave me some steaks off of it and some big cuts and, man, it was so good, it was the reddest meat I've ever cooked.

Nate 55:57

It's like a side note. Have you seen the thing about the moose population in North america is declining at like an 80 rate? No, so they're getting. Because of the like last five years, with the winters being so warm, it's not killing off the tick population really, yeah, because usually you know you get that good winter freeze up, especially up north where it's, and it kills off that tick population. So it's not that bad. But like hunters are shooting moose and they're literally like their whole skin is crawling with ticks, like that it looks like they're moving and it's they're getting that way after this year.

Nate 56:33

Yeah, they're getting poisoned and it's it's killed off a lot of the population I was steve ronello was just talking about. It is like. That's like a thing we need to be paying a lot of attention to right now. I like him because he's just so about conservation. I like to listen to what he Because he's out there a lot more than any of us are going to be. That's his life. Yeah for sure, that was a fun little side note. Worked as a mechanic, was doing that loving, loving. It got promoted. Finally I was back to being a sergeant. I was like, all right, cool, now I'm a big boss again. And that was right, as I was getting ready to leave here and the girl I'd been dating at the time, uh, she ended up pregnant and had my little son, my son Grayson, and that was three months before I moved from here, moved to Fort Campbell, kentucky.

John 57:30

Yep, yeah.

Nate 57:31

Right there on the Kentucky Tennessee line. I lived on the Tennessee side because if you've ever been around Fort Campbell, the Kentucky side right there is not the nicest.

John 57:39

So you were like Clarksville then.

Nate 57:41

Yep, okay cool, I was in Clarksville, I loved Clarksville. Then, yep, okay cool, I was in Clarksville, I loved.

John 57:43

Clarksville yeah, clarksville is a cool town. It's small.

Nate 57:46

It's gotten a lot bigger.

John 57:48

Yeah.

Nate 57:48

And it's really nice and there are college there.

Nate 57:52

Uh, yeah, austin P, austin P, there you go. Yep, yeah. So I was like, all right, cool, going to tennessee, this will be fun, I'm gonna do some whitetail hunting up there, so find a bow shop. So what kind of stuff were you working on? Uh, so I was a wheeled vehicle mechanic. So like I worked on the humvees, uh, the bigger trucks and stuff like that. But like we had, I was in an artillery unit.

Nate 58:19

So we had the Paladins, the big tract. It looks like a tank but it's not a tank, it's a self-propelled artillery. So instead of you having to tow it around and set it all up, it looks like a tank but it's an artillery piece gun. So I worked on those. The running joke for me and a couple of the guys there is like a 91, bravo, which is a wheel vehicle mechanic. Is a 91, everything like we're the ones that can work. We're not specialized, we can pretty much work on anything. Yeah, it's got, you know, an engine, we'll figure it out. So I worked on a little bit of everything. Uh, I never touched like abrams or stuff like that, like the main battle tanks, but like Bradleys, paladins, anything with wheels I touched. I liked tinkering.

John 59:08

So those things have diesel engines or jet engines or what are they?

Nate 59:11

Everything has a diesel engine, and then the M1 Abrams has a diesel turbine, so it basically sounds like a jet.

Brandon 59:20

It's crazy.

Nate 59:21

Those things are insane. Um, but yeah, so did that. Moved to tennessee to to be a mechanic up there. That was like that was my next duty assignment and my son's mother ended up deploying a couple months after we got there and this was 2019. Well, what happened? Early 2020, the world decided we don't want to go outside anymore yeah and we all know how that went.

John 59:51

But so I'm a single dad well, we all decided we don't want to be around each other. Yeah, that's. At least we were told that.

Nate 59:57

Yeah, we were told we're not supposed to hang out with each other anymore you're not allowed to have friends, um, but I'm, you know, a single dad to a nine month old.

Europe Deployment Wasted Resources Discussion

Nate 1:00:05

My kid's mom just went to afghanistan and now I can't leave my house, or so you say. So a month goes by and then they're like all right, yeah, we're gonna go back to work. Okay, cool. Well, guess what? My son went to daycare on base yeah, guess what Wasn't open. Still the daycares, yeah.

Nate 1:00:28

And I, I was starting to get stagnant at work, cause I kind of realized the career progression for a mechanic Once you're an NCO sucks like there's. Now you're just managed, you're a manager, you don't get to work on stuff anymore, you actually get yelled at half the time when you work on stuff. So I was like I don't get to work on stuff anymore, you actually get yelled at half the time when you work on stuff. So I was like I I don't enjoy the army anymore, like I don't know, I didn't enjoy my job because I was just doing dumb stuff. I was literally just doing paperwork, or like standing over someone's shoulder telling them to work faster, essentially. But like in my head, I'm like I want to turn wrenches with you and help you and teach you, but they didn't want me turning wrenches. They, they wanted me explaining why it's not done yet to you know people in charge. I'm like this is dumb. And then they're like, hey, you need to come to work. I'm like that's cool, I would. However, I'm staying home. My son like no, you're going to come to work. I was like okay, it's not open. Like well, you gotta figure something out. I was like all right. So I figured you know, it'll open in a couple of weeks.

Nate 1:01:26

I hit up my son's mother. Her mom and dad live in, uh, pennsylvania, by Pittsburgh, just North Pittsburgh, and so I was like, hey, could you guys help me out, take Grayson for a couple of or a couple weeks, and then I'll get him back once daycare opens. Of course they're amazing and they were wanting to help. So I was like, great, so get him up there on a weekend, get him settled in. He's okay, he's doing great, you know, he's not even a year yet, so he doesn't know. Yeah, like you don't have that wherewithal yet. And then the daycares open back up and I'm like, hey, I want to, you know, take leave this weekend or take vacation time and I want to go get my son.

Nate 1:02:12

They're like yeah, fun fact, uh, covid, you can only go 50 miles from your house. I was like, yeah, I get that, that's for fun. Right, like I'm going to get my kid. Like no, it's like okay, I get that, that's for fun, right? Like I'm going to get my kid. They're like no, I was like okay, so what happens if I go get my kid? They're like you're going to get kicked out. What For disobeying a lawful order. I was like you're telling me you're going to kick me out of the military for getting my kid At this point, like I'm over life, like like you guys want to see belligerent like welcome to me being belligerent.

Nate 1:02:44

I'm going to show up and do the bare minimum and I'm going to have an attitude about it the whole time and I'm not going to be someone that's a fun to work with. And that's basically what became of it. And I just did that and I was like I want to stay in the army, but I cannot do this job anymore in this kind of a unit, can't? It's like I need to go back to doing something. Even if it doesn't have transferable skills, I gotta do something fun that I enjoy. I was like what do I enjoy? I was like I like watching stuff go boom.

Nate 1:03:12

I like being out on you know, with the infantry and doing stuff like that. All right, all right, so let's start narrowing it down. You know, went through the list, narrowed it down and I ended up focusing in on ford observer. So basically I'm out there with the infantry and then, when stuff goes south, or before stuff would go south, I'm the guy calling up to our mortar teams, to our artillery support or to helicopters or attack helicopters and I'm getting ammunition put on people. I, I'm the magic eraser on the battlefield, essentially. So I make things that are, I make buildings and things that are there disappear. It's a fun job. I actually love that job.

Nate 1:03:52

So I went to school for that in Fort Sill and that was my new job and then. So I was doing that and then Russia, ukraine, happened and our unit at fort campbell was like they're like, hey, russia, ukraine just took off two months, we're gonna be there. Well, like we're gonna be. You know, the first ones in. I was like, all right, like war is back on the menu today. I was like I'm all about it, and so it gets closer and gets closer and you, you start seeing the writing on the wall. Is that? You know, the us is not gonna get involved as far as personnel, and I was like, oh, I've seen this story before, I know how this works.

Nate 1:04:34

And so we go and we're in poland and I mean, you ever seen like those little, those little airfields, like little airports where, like you'll get like crop dusters and stuff take off from? Yeah, people got like their little Kodiak planes, yep, yeah, so if you imagine building 100-man tents about 50 meters from that runway, that's where we lived in Poland for nine months. We didn't have a gym on base. We kind of had a cafeteria, I guess you could say it was a cafeteria, but we weren't have a gym on base. We kind of had a cafeteria I guess you could say it was a cafeteria, but we weren't getting real food. It was like they heated it up in water and gave it to us, like warmed it up, so it wasn't like real meals, but we were allowed to leave base every day somebody loves boiled meat yeah, that's basically what it was boiled meat, boiled eggs, powdered eggs that you add water to gross.

Nate 1:05:21

But we were allowed to leave base every day at the end of the workday. So it was essentially like being at Fort Campbell in Poland, like there was like I knew it was kind of I hate saying it this way it was a joke.

John 1:05:34

Y'all were there, just kind of we were wasting time.

Nate 1:05:36

Yeah, we were wasting time. Like, truthfully, we didn't do any training for nine months.

Speaker 3 1:05:42

What.

Nate 1:05:44

Yeah, because we were the first ones over there, so nobody had the connections that in the coming years they have now. My old unit is about to go back to Europe in March, but they actually have a training plan in place for it.

John 1:05:57

So y'all were just over there kind of hanging out doing PT every day, Sitting on our thumbs every day.

Nate 1:06:00

Oh, we can only do PT for like the first three months we were there. We got there in June and we can only do PT till like September. And then there was snow on the ground and ice Like we couldn't physically I mean safely do. You couldn't go for a two mile run.

John 1:06:19

So what you're telling me is, we had, we had a battalion or group of it was a battalion, yeah okay over there that essentially sat there for months and got pretty much from battle ready to not being battle ready we went from battle ready to the most like lackadaisical unit.

Nate 1:06:43

They were letting us take like four day weekends and you could go anywhere you wanted in europe.

John 1:06:47

Which, oh my gosh it was don't get me wrong.

Nate 1:06:50

Don't get me wrong was really cool, like it was a great experience because, like I went, to.

Nate 1:06:55

I went to budapest, I went to spain, I went to italy. Like I got to have some very awesome experiences. Now, 10 out of 10, I'd never want to go back to Europe. I just don't. I like the United States, like I'm a Midwest boy. I grew up in the Midwest. The furthest I'd ever been before I joined the military was Oklahoma. I used to go down to Oklahoma and watch car races and stuff all the time when I was in high school and college.

Nate 1:07:19

I besides that, like I'd never left nebraska yeah, I was I'd never seen the ocean. You know, first time I ever saw the ocean was when they made us run along the edge of it when I was in boot camp in the marine corps. So I was like that's the ocean, that's what that looks like. It's like huh, that's a lot of water. I was like I'm used to lakes but yeah, so wasted nine months in Europe and this this is the part that'll make you sick. So we have the numbers. We got told the numbers how much it costed to run that little outpost. Essentially that we were on per day $1.4 million per day per day and we were there 270 days Dude.

Nate 1:08:04

So about about 340 million dollars, yeah, and that's where it's like this is disgusting what you think elon would have said about that I don't know, oh I don't know, but I've like everybody is upset about this, I'm like, I'm all for it, like let's get rid of all the wasting of money listen, I, I get you know, I get that we needed to be, we needed to have a presence, we needed to be there in case right, I get that too, but I completely understand that, but it's like it's just thrown together like yeah

Nate 1:08:35

it was, it was it was like let's throw some stuff at the wall and hope it sticks, because we had a whole brigade, so six battalions.

Nate 1:08:45

There was two and a half battalions in Romania, two battalions in Poland, which the battalion I was part of before that when I was doing reconnaissance stuff was. They were the ones that no joke, like when the US was sending ammo to Ukraine, it went to this airport in Poland because it was like 50 kilometers from the Ukraine border Right, so that was like the furthest most friendly area of NATO they could send it to. So like they were actually like security making sure nobody messed with all that equipment and ammo and everything that was coming off those airplanes. So like they had a real job but like we had no purpose and it was like it got. Very like we talk about winter depression, like with you know, like people say that's a real thing, is like the. Or seasonal depression, when it's when it's cloudy daylight for seven hours a day.

John 1:09:39

eastern Eastern Europe yeah.

Nate 1:09:41

Poland.

Speaker 3 1:09:42

Yeah.

Nate 1:09:42

Like I love Poland, I love the people, like the people were amazing. But, man, if you weren't depressed because you're like I'm going to wake up at 9 am, I'm going to sit around and teach classes to my guys for a couple hours, I'm going to eat some crappy food, I'm going to take a nap for an hour, I'm going to teach a couple classes, I'm going to go to the gym. And we had to pay for a gym membership off base. We were paying taxi cabs every day. They had to cover that $1.3 million.

Nate 1:10:09

Well, because they didn't build a gym for us on base and there was no way for us to work out. So we were like I'm one of the people that I love fitness. So I was like I'm going to go to a gym, I will find one. And it was like 25 bucks a month for a membership at this gym in the little town in Poland we were in, which was cool, like I didn't have a problem with paying that. But it's like that was what I looked forward to every day. It was like, well, at least you know, at least I'm not sitting on my behind for a while.

Speaker 3 1:10:34

Yeah, yeah.

Nate 1:10:44

And so that's all I did for nine months was work out and teach classes, like, as truthfully, like it was a waste came back from there and I was on orders back here to fort stewart. And so I came back here, uh, I was working as an instructor for the, the non-commissioned officer academy out there for a about six months and it just wasn't a about six months and it just wasn't, wasn't jiving. I guess you could say there's some things and didn't work out. And my old sergeant major from when I was at fort campbell was the division artillery sergeant major and I was like, hey, I need a job. He's like come work for me. I was like deal, because I mean he's the best guy I've ever worked for in my life, wait, wait wait, he was at Fort Campbell and now he's at Fort Stewart.

John 1:11:24

Yep, yeah, I know him. He's an awesome guy.

Nate 1:11:27

Sorry, Major Rudder.

John 1:11:29

He's a cool guy.

Nate 1:11:29

Yeah, he grew up in Ranger Regiment too. Okay, so he's a mean. He is the epitome of everything you want to see in a leader like I. Base so much of what I do on, like on a daily basis, off my interactions I've had with him for the last three and a half four years now.

Bow Tech's Crazy Season With Matthews' Lift

Nate 1:11:53

He's incredible to work with yeah, like I think he's going back to campbell, possibly this summer. That's the rumor. If he does, when it comes time for me to get orders, like I might just going back to Campbell, possibly this summer, that's the rumor. If he does, when it comes time for me to get orders, I might just go back to Campbell. Yeah, because I'll work with him again in a heartbeat. He has been the mentor and leader I needed. Yeah, that's cool. So 12 and a half years later, here I am.

Nate 1:12:17

I moved back here and I was in the market for a new bow last year brown right around thanksgiving there you go and you know, watched all the mfjj videos of him reviewing all the new bows as they came out and I was like, all right, well, let's go shoot everything. And mutual friend of ours told me to come out here. Okay, yeah, a mutual friend of ours told me to come out here, tony, yeah, and he's like go check out boat shredder yeah, I was like, where's that?

Brandon 1:12:48

at brandon, we'll catch you yeah, I got to get to a meeting, but I look forward to listening to the rest of the podcast there, you go, there you go.

John 1:12:55

All right, we'll catch you next time. Hey, the key should be in the door so you can get out. Okay, okay.

Nate 1:13:00

But yeah, so yeah, Tony's like go check out Boat Ride in Statesboro. Man, he's like my buddy's the one that owns it. He's an awesome shop. I was like okay.

Speaker 3 1:13:09

Yeah.

Nate 1:13:10

Mind you, we go back in the past. I had a terrible experience at a different shop so I was like what do I do now?

Speaker 3 1:13:15

Yeah.

Nate 1:13:23

So I'm glad, glad I found this place came in here. It was packed and you know I don't remember who all was working here at the time, but all the bow techs were running around monkeying helping people fix stuff up, and it's the middle of hunting season.

John 1:13:30

So you got all the fixes. Yeah, that time of year it's pretty crazy.

Nate 1:13:35

You were helping people, everyone's helping people. And finally, little old Bryce comes wandering by and he I was like, hey, man, this is my draw length, looking to buy a new bow today yeah all right.

Nate 1:13:48

Well, what are you trying to shoot? I don't know everything and I feel bad now because I made him spend two hours sitting up every single bow and I was so on that train if I needed a longer axle axle bow so I completely wasn't paying attention to any of the shorter bows that year and so I was shooting all the 32s and longer and I ended up selling it on a lift 33 and put a deposit in because I found out y'all weren't gonna be getting them for a little while and right, yeah, so this was.

John 1:14:17

This would have been like November of 23.

Nate 1:14:21

Yeah, okay, and it was funny because I'd call y'all every two weeks. I'm like hey, y'all got any lifts in, yet you got my lift in, yet you got my lift in yet.

John 1:14:31

Yeah, so that year we had a wait list for lifts, right? So by the end of February maybe we had gone through like, um, let's see that bow launched the second week in november yeah, yeah, I think I was here like two weeks after it released, yep so we, we had our demos, we had started getting some bows.

John 1:14:56

Uh, we got bows in december, anyway, by like by like, by like, this time, you know. So this is, you know, right around Valentine's Day. Right now I don't know when this episode will drop, but it's the 13th of February we had sold like 100 of those things. It was crazy.

Nate 1:15:12

Oh, they sold like hotcakes. They're a great boat. It was crazy. They're awesome.

John 1:15:15

Yeah, so it did take Matthews a little bit to get ahead of that.

Nate 1:15:20

I don't think they could have anticipated the number of bows. It was insane. It truly was they were selling, they outsold all other bow companies combined four to one with just the lift. Yeah, that's crazy. Yep, I don't think we'll ever see that again for like the next 10 or 15 years.

John 1:15:37

Yeah, I'll tell you. It was wild Insanity, but yeah, I'll tell you it was wild Insanity. I started 2024 selling a Lyft. On the first day I was open in 2024, I sold a Lyft. The last day I was open of 2024, I sold a Lyft.

Nate 1:15:52

Oh, that's pretty cool.

John 1:15:53

Yeah, I texted my rep. I was like well, I started the year and ended the year the same way. He was like what do you mean? I said I was selling a lift.

Nate 1:16:07

nice, you know, that's that's how the year went I mean it was, it was the year of the lift by a long shot. So I mean, we just sold so many of them. Oh yeah, so I think it was the first week of march, maybe the second week of march, yeah. I finally, I think west called me, yeah, and he was like, hey, man, your bow's here. Yeah, I was like, oh, shoot, go. I'm pretty sure I like I talked to my boss at work that day and I was like, hey, what do we have going on this afternoon? He's like nothing. I was like, all right, cool, I'm going to the bow shop. I got to pick up my new bow. Bye.

Nate 1:16:29

Yeah, hit the ground running and I started putting arrows through that thing. I was hooked. Oh yeah, Cause I mean think about it. My last bow was from roughly 2011.

John 1:16:49

Right so that jumping. Oh, it was a huge.

Nate 1:16:52

All right, I'm back All right, but yeah, so shot the heck out of that lift. I I was. I think I came in here like two months after I bought it and I won't say anything bad, but I put a lot of arrows through it, yeah, and you were like hey man, I think you need some different strings.

John 1:17:09

Yeah, yeah, and. I was like what do you mean? Set of strings out?

Nate 1:17:12

Yup, and you were like, let me build you a set of strings. I was like, okay, you know, I'm always, I'm always willing to let, to not have to pay the big name when I can give the, you know, give my business to a small business. I'd rather, I'd rather give it to a small business nine times out of 10. Yeah, and you put those strings on there and I was like, what in the world did you do to my bow?

Nate 1:17:34

Like it is night and day difference, like I pretty sure that day I put 300 arrows through it.

John 1:17:42

no stretch, no nothing right oh oh, this is what I've been missing in my life yeah, so so we do, we, we have a string company and um, we build primarily with um, bloodline fibers and um, and it's it.

Nate 1:18:01

It is a different material yeah, I mean just alone the fact I don't have to wax them ever yeah, it's so convenient. It's one less thing I have I can't forget right, yep and um it, it.

John 1:18:13

It finishes at a smaller diameter, uh, which you do pick up a little bit of speed. It's not significant, I mean, it's not like it's a huge difference.

Nate 1:18:21

No, I think I picked up three feet per second yeah.

John 1:18:24

I mean, it's not like you're going to. You know, I'm not going to sit here and say you're going to pick up 30 feet per second, it's nothing like that.

Nate 1:18:29

Yeah, I picked up two or three feet. It was the amount of like how rock solid, steady, everything stayed Right.

John 1:18:41

That was the part that helped me out and made me happy about it. That's the biggest thing that I've noticed. What's up, griffin? How you doing, buddy? Good, yep, all right, we got Griffin joining in the show here this morning. We're just talking about when he got his new lift last year. So, griffin, this is Nate.

Speaker 3 1:18:59

Nate. What's going on this?

John 1:19:00

is the guy that got uh, my bow from last year. Okay yeah, awesome so he's been kind of sharing his story with us and everything and and uh, but yeah so so we build out of that, beat out of that, um, that bloodline material and you, you know it. It took some time to learn oh yeah material.

John 1:19:20

um, I got to be really good friends with the guy that owns the company that makes it and so we actually got to, you know, go through a couple iterations or a couple generations of the material with them, as they were working to develop some new stuff, and I really feel like you know where they're at with it. Right now is just an awesome material. I mean, it's really really good and we did have to. So we used to build with BCY.

Nate 1:19:51

That's like the industry standard and if you're going to build a string.

John 1:19:54

You're going to work with BCY and they're a great company. I love the folks at BCY. I can call the owner at BCY right now. I've got his phone number. I can call the owner at BCY right now. I've got his phone number. I can call him right now and get him on the phone and you know. So I think he's an awesome guy. But the material that Bloodline is using, the blend that they're using and everything you don't have inconsistencies in diameters from color to color. No, not at all.

John 1:20:23

Right, so with the BCY material, we would notice inconsistencies, and to me that's something that's really important, right, the diameter of the string the finish string is really important because to this extent so like with a flow color you know, flow green, flow orange, flow yellow, something like that it would wind up being thicker because the color is essentially on top of the string. I say, did they have to, like, coat it differently? And so when you're building with one of those colors you have to drop string count, and it's not. You know somebody's going to hear that and be like oh my gosh, I don't want to do that. I don't know, I don't want to flow yellow string or something. It's not. You're not in any way having a subpar string, right?

John 1:21:13

or even worrying about catastrophe yeah or a string break-in or something like that because they're so overbuilt when you, yeah, when you lay these bundles up, it's I mean you could pick a car up with them with a bowstring.

John 1:21:23

Oh yeah, it's, it's insane. Um. So anyway, you know, we we learned through the process we had to change our formula a little bit. Going to this new material, um, we changed our process of stabilizing the bundle. Um, so traditionally, you, you lay up a bundle, you lay up a string, you twist it and then you put it under constant pressure. We have found that if we will cycle pressure on at that step of the build process, we get a much more stable finish string than if we were to do it otherwise.

Speaker 3 1:22:00

So you're putting some pressure on it, letting it off, yeah, coming back with some pressure and stuff so so we'll cycle that string and we can, we can cycle.

John 1:22:07

We can cycle a string in about 20, 22 minutes what would have traditionally taken hours to stabilize a bundle right. That speeds up that whole bunch. And people, you know people refer to it in the, in the, in the industry as as pre-stretching the string or whatever in reality, you're really not stretching anything.

Archery Enthusiast's Winning Experience

John 1:22:30

What you're doing is you're stabilizing the bundle. So you've got this, you've got this bundle of strings that you've laid up. So, when you lay it up, you've got, you know, just a, basically a continuous loop that you've put together. Right, you've got this big circle. If you, if you were to hold it out, you've got a big circle. Um, so what you do is you twist that up. Well, if you think about twisting uh, uh, you know, just get, get a piece of yarn, get a piece of fishing line or something, and twist it up and you pull on it. You're gonna, it's gonna become longer to become longer because you're getting that bundle tighter.

Nate 1:23:05

It's all tightening down on itself.

John 1:23:08

All you're doing is stabilizing the bundle. It's taken us some time to learn through that. We built strings for two years before we ever went to market with them. I can't tell you how many strings I've built and just thrown them away because I didn't like it you know, no, it doesn't look good.

John 1:23:23

Yeah, uh, no, I it's not. It's not going to be what we want it to be or it's not stable. We've got a bunch of peep twist on it. You know, some of the first strings we built, we would put them on a bow and we pull them back. And as you're pulling back, you're just watching the peep twist and I was like like why is this doing this?

Speaker 3 1:23:40

That's what I was about to ask. Has that that, that method, has that helped with like peep twists and everything?

John 1:23:44

Yeah, that's one of the things that Nate was saying on his string. You know, he brought his, he brought his bow. In several months after we put a set of strings on it, he said I want you to look at the string, looking at it, and and I was like, I was like nate, um, I said I'm missing something, buddy, what's?

Nate 1:24:04

what's wrong?

John 1:24:05

he's like nothing. 7 000 shots, yeah, 7 000 shots.

Nate 1:24:06

There was no serving separation anywhere there was a hair of serving separation, but that was like on the cam loop itself. Yeah, so that's hooked on. Yeah, that's like that's expected.

John 1:24:15

Well that's so. There's a difference between serving separation and serving cracking. So anywhere where you have the string, make a real tight turn, a real tight bend. You're gonna have serving cracking right there, yeah, and that's all I had yeah, and then my own stupidity.

Nate 1:24:31

I guess you could say from hanging my release, like you told me not to do, on the loop all the time right, yeah, and I like that had like a little wear on the, on the serving and on the string, but other than that, like no fuzzies, nothing like that thing was.

Speaker 3 1:24:43

It sat in the heat of the stand and getting wet in the rain and everything and it just did not care I just remember setting up bows with other aftermarket strings that we used to go and it almost became a default where we're like hey, man, like if you got time, go home, shoot this thing like as many times as you can. You bring it back to us. It's free, like I'm gonna. I'm probably gonna have to fix some peep twists on it, it's gonna be free, it just is gonna take some shots to get it out and everything. And that was kind of like a standard of putting a new set of strings on yep, yeah, and it's.

John 1:25:18

it's with this, with this, this new material. You know, part of it is the material we're using, part of it is the process that we're doing. Um, it is just, it is an extremely stable bundle.

Nate 1:25:29

It is and I think I had- I mean not even like a 16th of a turn on my peep, after about 200 shots and I brought it in and you guys I it in and you guys I. We didn't even have to make a peep adjustment, we just twisted the d-loop and it fixed it right up, yeah never once had actual rotation, rotation right. I was like this is insane. I've never seen this.

Speaker 3 1:25:50

It blew my mind have you conquered the, the peep rotation out of a solo cam? Yeah?

John 1:25:56

yeah, it's not there anymore that's a.

Speaker 3 1:25:58

That's a. That's a task in itself, right there.

John 1:26:00

Oh, yeah, yeah. So a solo cam, so a string on like a Hoyt Alpha X is going to be, you know, 30-something inches long. Right, a solo cam bow might have a 90-inch string.

Speaker 3 1:26:15

Yeah, just because that thing wraps around that solo cam down at the bottom and then comes up into itself and back into the other cam.

John 1:26:22

Yeah, yeah, so if you're you're dealing with an 80 or 90 inch string, you know it's. It's all that more important for that for that bundle to be stable.

John 1:26:31

And yeah, some of those first ones that we would build, man, I would, I would get so mad, I would just I would throw it away, I would just dump it. You know, with something wrong, get rid of it, we can't use this. And so we finally got that figured out and we're still learning Every day. We're still learning new stuff with that, with the guys that are working in the string company building stuff. We're always trying to tweak and get stuff a little bit better, trying to change our process a little bit to make a cleaner looking string, um, you know. So that's, that's where we're at on that. So it was really cool to put that string on your bow because I knew you were going to shoot a ton, um, and really, you know, really get some feedback on it.

Nate 1:27:15

So 2024, I'm pretty sure I've put more arrows through a bow than I have the rest of my life combined. I took it way too serious, honestly. I made it like an addiction, oh yeah. And then hunting season started and had fun, made some things not move anymore yeah, you tagged out man and then I put I put one of those arrows that everybody said was too light.

Nate 1:27:41

Y'all didn't say it, but a lot of people would say it was way too light. I put one through the skull of a hog about a 120-pound hog and out that rear end and it flew about 10 yards past.

Nate 1:27:52

I was like who's going to say I'm not carrying energy now? Then I think I came in here just towards the end of the season to have y'all just check everything out. Towards the end of the season to have y'all just check everything out. You know, towards the end of the season it's been banged around a bunch and I was like, hey, you know, I kind of just want to do a health check on this thing, right. And that's when I saw your bow, the Hoyt, and I was like what is this? Yeah?

Nate 1:28:17

And then y'all told us or told me, and I was like, oh, I'm entering this raffle, yeah, and man, the day that you were like what color strings would look good on this, I was like I don't know why the heck is he asking me what color? Strings would look good. On this, I was like, I like red.

John 1:28:31

Well, I had red on it at the time.

Nate 1:28:32

Yeah, you had red on it. I had red on my lift. I'm a Huskers fan so I bleed red. There you go, and I was like I don't know, red would look good again. He's like all right, well, we'll get some red strings made up for you and we'll stick them on there. I was like wait what? Yeah man, I tell you, I didn't even know what to say. I was speechless.

John 1:28:54

Yeah, he just ran up to me, gave me a hug. I was like, all right, all right, that's good, don't make it weird, yeah, I mean I've entered.

Nate 1:29:00

I've entered so many raffles in my life. Going back to bake sales in grade school and stuff like that never won a thing in my life. And I walked out of here and I'm not going to lie, I was driving home and I was crying like a little baby.

John 1:29:12

Oh man.

Nate 1:29:13

Yeah, really cool. I was like this thing is going to be. I will never get rid of it, like even if I stop shooting that bow, one day it's going to be a wall hanging.

John 1:29:22

Oh yeah.

Nate 1:29:23

That bow is never going anywhere.

John 1:29:25

Yeah, yeah. It turned out to be a really cool bow and it is a blast to shoot and we got the next project.

Nate 1:29:33

Now too.

John 1:29:33

Yep, yep. So we're not going to reveal that yet, but we've got another bow that we're getting ready to do. That will be a lot of fun, so I'm excited about getting that one going here soon. But yeah, so that's your story, that you shared a lot with us about your military journey, your career in the military and what that looked like and how you got into archery and everything. So that's really cool to hear about that. And you know know, our original goal was, whoever we gave the bow to, we were going to bring them in and we were going to do a hunt and everything. Well, we didn't get to do that with nate because he'd already tagged out um, which is 12 deer in georgia. So that's pretty impressive it was a good year.

Nate 1:30:17

Yeah, so we're.

John 1:30:18

I got skunked every year, going back to 2016, before that yeah I've been skunked for seven years yeah, well, I was like, needless to say, you figured it out this year or last year lots of, lots of time.

Nate 1:30:33

Yeah, and throwing a couple cell cams out where we thought might be a good idea, just to get an idea what the population was doing on public land, definitely changed the game this year oh yeah I mean before we were running no cameras and we're like I mean there's some sign here, yeah maybe this is a spot oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, trail cameras are great when you use them the right way, when you, when you, when you overuse them and you become lazy, then they're not very good yeah, and we only went to cell cams just for the fact of like it's less pressure

Last Minute Hunting Success and Plans

Speaker 3 1:31:00

right, yeah, it's less not checking them and stuff.

Nate 1:31:03

Yeah, because we were like, I mean two years ago or 20, yeah, 2023 season, we were going out every other day to check sd cards, yeah, and we didn't see anything.

Speaker 3 1:31:17

Yeah, I saw some hogs and all that you know especially on public land, where it really land where it really makes them skittish.

Nate 1:31:24

Yep, and I hunt Griffin Ridge almost exclusively, and that was I mean. You're not going to see no Boone and Crockett bucks out there, but if you want to put some meat in the freezer they got enough out there you can. You just got to figure out the patterns and they're weird. And that hurricane this year after how many days was it A month of no rain? That messed everything up. I was on a. I was bound to tag out by October 1st and then that hurricane hit and it slowed it down Like I every. We had them pretty patterned out and then everything went to. Was it hell in a hand?

Nate 1:32:03

basket real quick yeah and I was just like I don't know what to do and we had to like reset and figure everything out again. And then I pulled it together one day, like I had one just insane day for rifle season yeah and I was like well, I'm done. I was like put the tools away.

John 1:32:21

There you go.

Nate 1:32:21

And then I think I came in here and told you all I was like what's 7 plus 2? Or I was like what's 9 plus 2? You're like 11? I was like yep, because me and my buddy went back and looked on all my tag saves and I was one shy and I was was like I have a tag left yeah, and it was like, but it was like the last week.

John 1:32:46

It was like two weeks left and I went out.

Nate 1:32:49

I had my buddy wasn't going out because I don't have a truck. So like, if I want to go to griffin ridge half time and for anyone that's been there, like, unless you got a truck, you're parking right at the like the trailhead. You got to walk three, four miles in to get to any of the spots. And I'm not saddle hunting yet. That's the goal for this year is to get in a saddle and lighten the load. But I was carrying sticks and a platform and bow, especially when it's hot during the day. I just got old so quick. So it was like, unless my buddy was going out, I wasn't going out there. I tried a different spot and there that was a waste of my time. That was, that was a waste of my morning, yeah, but yeah, I just it worked out real good a few days yeah, well, we'll, we'll, um, we'll get a hog hunter too in with that new bow here oh yeah, it's got to eat soon, before it gets hot, we'll we'll get out and do some hog hunting.

John 1:33:42

I'm always up for some hog hunting. Yes, sir, that's a lot of fun, man. Well, good stuff. Well, thanks for coming, thank you Thanks for being on the podcast, sharing your story with us, and excited to shoot that bow together. Oh yeah, It'll be happening.