Hanford Insider

Hanford Insider: Dallas Poore "Warriors of the Wind" - Veterans Day Special

• Rob Bentley • Season 3 • Episode 15

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Start with city hall, end on the open road. We bring you a fast-moving update on Hanford’s museum agreements, zoning changes, and a grant-funded tree plan, plus a key route change for the Hanford Christmas Parade that adds 2,000 feet of viewing space. The community calendar is packed with Veterans Day events, local theater, and a rescheduled band showcase, while our sports desk breaks down Sierra Pacific’s water polo semifinals and Hanford High’s playoff showdown with Liberty.

Then we slow down and listen. United States Marine Corps captain and Iraqi War veteran Dallas Poor joins us to share the moments that shaped him—leadership in the field, the relentless work that keeps aircraft mission-ready, and a near-fatal Okinawa dive that became a permanent reminder to keep going. From personal loss and the ripple effects of suicide, Dallas built Warriors of the Wind, a movement that pairs motorcycles, community, and measurable mental health gains to bring veterans back from isolation. He explains why so many veterans say “my motorcycle saved my life,” and how wind therapy, group rides, and shared purpose recreate the camaraderie missing after service.

We dig into his plan to document 500 veterans across the country through a visually rich docuseries, track outcomes with validated VA tools, and bring the data to the VA. With a foundation designed for corporate social responsibility funding and a submission to Angel Studios’ Angel Guild, the project aims to reach those who won’t walk into a clinic but will press play and feel seen. Dallas also offers a simple way forward: find a Vietnam or Desert Storm veteran, say thank you with specificity, and mean it. That small act matters more than you think.

Subscribe for new episodes, share this with someone who needs to hear it, and leave a review to help others find the show. Got a story or event? Email HanfordInsider at gmail.com and let’s get the word out together.

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SPEAKER_02:

On this episode of the Hanford Insider, we'll hear from Marine Corps veteran Dallas Poor about his mission Warriors of the Wind. Rob will give you a quick review of the community calendar, and later I'll be back with your sports report. This is the Hanford Insider for Monday, November 10th.

SPEAKER_01:

Each episode, we take a closer look at the people and the stories that make Hanford such a great place to call home. Thanks for tuning in. Now let's get started. The Hanford City Council met last Tuesday, November 4th. A few of the items on the agenda included approval of the license agreement with the Carnegie Museum of Kings County through 2026. They also approved the zone tax amendments to allow banks or credit unions to be located outside the downtown area. And they approved the purchase of 600 trees from the Fonseca nursery, as well as an agreement with an arborist to make sure all of the trees are planted properly and well cared for. This was paid from grant funds that were received. In general business, they approved a new social media policy that would allow citizens to comment on posts. Finally, they decided to table the contract agreement extension with a current city attorney because one of the city council members was absent and they felt it was important to make a unified decision. The council will meet again next Tuesday, November 18th. In other city news, drivers will want to avoid the intersection of Dowdy and Sixth Street this week, as the old building on the northeast corner is going to be demolished. It probably won't take long. The building had been falling apart for years, and the owner finally agreed to just tear it down. Despite being old, it has no historical value. It was far beyond repair. Over the years, it has housed a saloon, a tailor, a barber shop, a butcher shop, and an auto parts store. The Hanford Christmas Parade is coming up on the day after Thanksgiving. Registration closes this Friday, November 14th. You can sign up for your entry on the City of Hanford website. Just Google Hanford Christmas Parade 2025 and it'll come right up. One big change this year is that it will go down 7th Street all the way down to Reddington Street instead of turning north on Irwin Street. This is adding an additional 2,000 feet of viewing area. Please help us get the word out about this. I know there will be people setting up their chairs early, and we'd hate for people to set them up on Irwin Street as they probably have for years. Now let's take a look at this week's community calendar. The King's Players are presenting Murder by the Book at the Temple Theater in Hanford each weekend in November. Visit Kingsplayers.org to get more information and to purchase tickets. The 13th Annual Veterans Day Festival is being held on Tuesday in the Civic Park next to the courthouse from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Later on that evening, the Hanford Elks will be hosting a Veterans Dinner beginning at 5.30 p.m. And in Lamore, my band, the Liberty Middle School Band, will be participating with the Lamore High School Band in the 12th Annual Veterans Day Parade in downtown Lamore beginning at 6 p.m. The 13th Annual Hamford Band Showcase, scheduled for Thursday evening, is being moved to Wednesday evening due to the anticipated rain coming in later this week. The event is free and begins at 6 p.m. at Neighbor Bowl. Senior recognitions will begin at 5.30 p.m. Following that, local middle schools will combine to perform the national anthem. The evening will end with each high school performing their 2025 competition field show before the championships that are coming up. Operation Christmas Blessing is already in the works. For more information, you can contact Kara Fleming at 559-392-2295. Kara was a guest on our show back on December 1st. Remember, you can go back and listen to any of the over 120 episodes of the Hanford Insider at HanfordInsider.com. If you have an event coming up and you'd like some help getting the word out, let's work together. Send your information to HanfordInsider at gmail.com. Be sure to subscribe to my weekly newsletter to get a complete calendar of events. It's the most comprehensive community calendar available. Now let's check in with the birthday boy, Eric Bentley, for the latest in high school sports as the fall seasons wind down.

SPEAKER_02:

The girls had a more defensive approach, holding both Matilda Torres and Santa Inez to only three goals, beating the Toros 18-3 and the Pirates 8-3. This sets up a semifinal doubleheader at Sierra Pacific on Wednesday. It'll be the girls up first at 5 p.m. taking on the four-seed Lamore. The Golden Bears won both regular season matchups against the Tigers, 16-6 in their September game, then 9-6 in a tournament matchup during October. Then the Boys will take on four-seed Bakersfield at 6.30. Bakersfield beat Hanford High in round one, then El Diamante to get here, and it won't be the first meeting between the Golden Bears and the Drillers either, as Sierra Pacific emerged victorious 13-8 in their matchup back in August. Regardless of the outcome of those games, the section finals for all divisions will take place at Sierra Pacific on Saturday the 15th, but the Golden Bears are one win away from being able to play for a section title in their home pool. There was plenty of exciting football playoff action last week, and Hanford High got to rest up and watch it all as the Bullpups on by waited to see who they would play in the second round of the D-1A playoffs. Their opponent will be Liberty from Bakersfield as the three-seed Patriots throttled San Joaquin Memorial 49-14 last Friday. Should the Bullpups emerge victorious this week, they will play the winner of the Bakersfield Christian vs. Sanger matchup for the section title. Kickoff at Neighbor Bowl for the semifinal showdown with Liberty is set for 7 p.m. And Youth Baseball is right around the corner. Registration is now open for managers, coaches, and volunteers. Whether you've coached before or are new to the game, all are welcome to make an impact on the community. You can sign up at their website www.hanford youthbaseball.com. As always, we like to cover as many sports as we can, but we can only do so much without you. Any sport, any team, any level, if you have a score report, a story idea, or a team update, please let us know at HanfordInsider at gmail dot com. I'm Eric Bentley, and this has been your Hanford Insider Sports Report.

SPEAKER_01:

Today we pause to honor the men and women who have worn the uniform of the United States Armed Forces. Veterans Day reminds us that freedom isn't free, it's secured by the dedication, bravery, and sacrifice of those who step forward to serve. To every veteran listening, thank you for your service, your resilience, and your example. We honor not only your time in uniform, but the lasting impact you continue to make in our communities. Today, I'm honored to be joined by United States Marine Corps captain and Iraqi War veteran Dallas Poor. Hey, Dallas, thanks for joining me. Thank you. Nice to be here. Dallas, we know that uh you have a very important nonprofit, Warriors of the Wind, but for those of us who aren't as familiar with you, uh, can you tell us a little bit about your upbringing and what led you to enlist in the Marine Corps?

SPEAKER_00:

Well, I grew up in small town Iowa, and there's not a lot to do there. So I worked real hard to, you know, make it a little more entertaining. Uh, play a lot of sports, was a bit of an athlete, and uh I think ever since I was little, I'd always wanted to serve. So, you know, I'm approaching junior, senior year, not real sure what I want to do next. And um it just kind of hit me, you know, maybe maybe the military would be good for me because I don't know what path I would take if I went to college. And so I kind of made a deal with my parents that I wasn't gonna go to college. Uh, I was gonna go off and try other things, and they they gave me the gentle nudge that some people need. And so I said, if there's one particular scholarship uh that I was wanting to get, if I get that, I'll go to school for a year. I made them that commitment. And that scholarship, the reason it was important to me was it was uh memorial scholarship for my best friend who had committed suicide. I didn't think there was any chance I was gonna get it. Uh I thought it was an easy way out of going to college, but as it turned out, uh the stars aligned that I got that scholarship, which then led to uh ended up with a football leadership scholarship, uh bunch of grants, and it all just worked out okay. So ended up as a freshman uh at Graceland University in Lamoni, Iowa, and just my path kind of started there, and it really kind of stuck with me. I I knew I wanted to be a Marine. I wanted to try for Marine Recon. And that is not what ended up happening, but um basically I my parents convinced me to go back to school for one more year, and so I completed my sophomore year, kept playing football, kept doing the the leadership and the choir and all that stuff. I was I was big into extracurriculars, and I think I had five majors between two colleges I went to, but basically between during my sophomore year, I found out about the Marine Officer Program. And they had talked me out of enlisting by letting me keep a truck that I was driving that I was borrowing from them. And it was a little, you know, piece of junk truck, but it was a reliable truck and it was fun. And so I made the deal that yes, I'll go back to school for a year, I won't enlist, but when I found out about the Marine Officer Program, that wasn't an enlistment. All that was is an agreement to go to officer candidate school for four and a half weeks, and then you can drop out if you want to, with no further commitments. So that was a little more palatable for them. I kind of outsmarted them a little bit on that one, uh, possibly the only thing I ever outsmarted them on. But so I went to OCS uh for six weeks that summer, the summer of 1998. That was what's called OC uh PLC platoon leaders class juniors, and then did the same thing the following summer uh for seniors, so a total of six uh 12 weeks of combined training. And then after my sophomore year, transferred to Iowa State and pretty much just continued the academic stuff that I had to. I didn't still didn't want to be in college, and uh ended up taking my commission as a Marine Lieutenant in December of 2000 after four and a half years because I had switched majors so many times, I kind of kind of screwed myself on the credits. So what year was this? What uh what's the time frame that we're talking about? I signed my first enlistment contract in 1999. No, let me think. I gotta think carefully. 1997, November of 97. And that kind of started the clock on my time in service. And then I went to OCS. I was paid as an E5 during OCS, so that's a sergeant in the Marine Corps. Um, so during my time in OCS, I was paid as a sergeant. I go back to school. I'm just, you know, just building time is how it kind of works on paper. So by the time I got out of the Marine Corps, my total time in was, I think, 11 or 12 years, I don't remember exactly, but I only did four years of active duty. So 1997, uh, then I got out of active, well, I got commissioned December of 2000, left active duty uh January of 2005, and then I stayed in the reserves and resigned my commission uh sometime in 2009, February, I think.

SPEAKER_01:

So in your four years of service, you had one tour, and I know that there are lots of stories, and we could probably do a whole separate show on just some of the things that you experienced. But can you kind of tell us, share with us a little bit about some of the things that you experienced and some of the things that stick out on your mind?

SPEAKER_00:

Well, I think anybody who's served uh can would probably agree with me in saying that as you know military personnel and veterans, we we walk away from service with some pretty good stories, some bad stories to go with, but uh by default, we get to do some interesting things that you don't get to do working as an engineer sitting in a cubicle somewhere. Um so I've got standout memories from various countries, you know, flying the back of a helicopter over the Australian coastline, scuba diving in the East China Sea, you know, there's the recreational parts of what we do and get to see some pretty cool places, and then there's the reality of what we do, which combat service is its own category of of uh memory, I guess. But as a whole, I mean, the thing I valued the most in my time in service was just being around Marines, you know, being to lead these guys that are just incredible Americans. Their their loyalty and their their commitment to their country is something that until you see it, especially in a combat zone, you know, you see how hard these guys are willing to work, and I say guys, men, women, both. It's it's a really special feeling to know that these people exist in America. I didn't have to work in the same ways they did. I I was on the leadership side in the officer corps, and so I wasn't out there turning wrenches. I was more, you know, delegating the work and so on. There's just story after story I could tell you of, you know, Marines working 18, 20 hours to keep aircraft airborne in combat, for example, and I'm probably undershooting that sometimes. You know, they'd be sleeping under helicopters because they didn't they didn't want to spend time going back and forth to their tents or you know, whatever. So just their unwavering commitment to our country and to the mission was really something to see in person.

SPEAKER_01:

Um Yeah, my dad is was actually a uh United States Navy veteran, and he had some wild stories, and he told us about some of the tattoos that he got. And I understand you have a tattoo story.

SPEAKER_00:

I got a couple. I think you're probably talking about the one on my wrist, and so my left arm is eventually gonna have a sleeve tattoo. I I've got memories that I like to keep, and I I like storytelling, it's something I enjoy. And so my left arm is gonna be for things that should have killed me, but didn't somehow. So what this is is grid coordinates for the Monza Dreamhole in Okinawa, Japan, in the East China Sea. And basically, I was out scuba diving and we went out to this vertical cave system. It's about a half an hour surface swim from uh from shore, and it was me and another Marine captain. Beautiful day. I didn't bother checking the weather because I looked outside and it was just stunning. It was just the calm, flat sea, no wind, no waves, not a cloud in the sky. And so we jumped off the dock with all of our dive gear. We swam a half an hour with a heading of 020 on my compass, and you get out to this buoy that's floating on the surface, and you descend down to this vertical cave system. Beautiful, beautiful ocean animals down there, shells and so on. And then you come out the side of a coral wall at about a hundred feet below the surface. So pretty good adventure story right out the gate, uh, whether anything more than happened or not. But we enjoyed our dive. It was pretty calm down there, but as we started getting low on air, we start ascending, and by the time we stop at 15 feet to let the nitrogen escape our system for safety reasons, we see that the sea is getting a little choppy right direct directly over us, and we kind of look at each other. I remember the look in his eyes, and I'm sure I had the same look. And we get up there to the surface, and we are in the middle of a developing typhoon half an hour from shore. So there was a Japanese boat we could have commandeered right there at the buoy, but we're like, that's an international incident waiting to happen. So we're just looking at a very, very long swim in a developing typhoon. And you know how there's accordion roads where they're real bumpy when you drive on them? Well, this was like an accordion ocean floor, except for it was like maybe it's five feet below the surface, maybe it's two hundred. So when these these waves that are overhead tall would slam into us, it would knock us down into these crevices that are jagged, you know, they're jagged, they've got sea urchins and stuff lining them. So we were getting thrashed pretty good and bloody and everything else. But by the time we reached the shore, this very old, very short Okinawan man had to pull us out of the water because we were both just completely wasted, exhausted. Um, so that's that's the memory of all the ones that I've had that have been, you know, close to death. That's the one I'll always remember as being like this might end really badly for me. Yeah, it's pretty terrifying.

SPEAKER_01:

So let's move on to Warriors of the Wind. Um, this is an exciting project that you have, and you're very active on social media, and uh you've appeared on numerous podcasts. So let's let's uh get into it. Let's uh talk about the name Warriors of the Wind and how did the idea take shape?

SPEAKER_00:

This could definitely be its own podcast. Uh if you ever want to talk about like an existential revolution, that that's what this is for me. Um people have described it as a lot of different things, but there was a long period of my life where I was going through some pretty hard times mentally. Um, I I lost friends in combat. I had lost friends to suicide once we came back from war. And, you know, I I I've dealt with a lot of suicide loss, unfortunately. And it's something that really started in me when I was about 15, 16 years old when I lost a friend to it then. And Warriors of the Wind is definitely a direct response to the fact that I got tired of losing friends to suicide. That's ultimately how it started. It really started probably in 2006 when the guys at iCombat deployed with, we lost a series of those people to, you know, some were suicide, some were overdoses, things along those lines. I don't want to be too specific with those things. But bottom line is we were losing very good people very prematurely, and it was an absolute tragedy, and it was wrecking the rest of the unit that loved these guys. Um they say, especially with suicides, there's a trickle-down effect, or the ripple effect, they call it, of for every suicide, there's roughly 115 people that are negatively impacted by that incident. And I definitely saw that in inside of our ranks with I'd have people calling me up middle of the night, crying, saying, Sir, are we cursed? Why why do we keep losing these people? And these are very tough people that are calling me that are breaking because of this problem. So Warriors of the One Foundation it started as a YouTube channel that I had started as I was climbing out of my own depression. So it's kind of my own life trajectory turning into something that is now a tangible thing, a business entity, I guess you might call it. It could be called everything from a mental health study to a movement to a community. It's a lot of things. Uh motorcycle organization, we're built around motorcycling for mental health uh as well as suicide prevention. And essentially it was a YouTube channel that I started for the purpose of just talking about mental health issues. Uh, because one of the biggest problems we face as veterans is we don't like to talk to people. We bottle everything up, we go with our training, you know, you lose somebody, you kind of you grit your teeth and you move on because you have to, you've got to finish the mission. Well, what the military is getting better at, but they're still not great at, is they train us really well for the most part. They don't necessarily untrain us very well. So I have no need now to walk down the street with my rifle at the ready. I don't have to worry about a tire exploding in the street nearly like I had to worry about a bomb going off. But that's not a natural thing to disconnect from. There needs to be a process to disconnect from it. So Warriors of the Wind. Wind comes from wind therapy. The YouTube channel, essentially, I put out a few hundred videos, and somebody that I combat deployed with was looking at my channel with me in San Francisco. And he was just looking at the content, going, There's a lot to this. I I think you're really on to something. And so as we're talking through this in a in a Mormon church, uh, about ten minutes from where I was working on a job site as a construction manager, that's where we we linked up, was at his church, and we linked up for every night for like six weeks. He's just looking at all my videos, seeing the theme of me caring about my fellow veterans, me addressing problems uh that needed to be talked about. And he kind of stops me mid-sentence, whatever we were talking about with analytics or whatever fun conversation it was, and he just goes, Sir, have you ever thought about being a documentary? And the look I must have given him uh when he said that, I like I thought I misheard him, so I clarified it. And I looked at him like, being a document, what do you even mean by that? And he goes, and I was kind of laughing at him. I'm not not trying to be rude, but I was just taken aback by it. And he goes, No, I'm serious. Like your passion for keeping veterans alive is more than just a YouTube channel. There's I've never seen anybody as passionate as you are. And so I just kind of went, okay, I I don't know how to turn passion into a documentary. And he just said, a documentary about you, what you're doing, what what drives this. And so one thing to know about Marines is that we're really, really bad at saying no to dares. And if somebody tells us something's impossible, that's pretty much a guarantee we're going to go after it. So he essentially dared me to make a documentary, and he showed me an avenue I could pursue to do it, which was Angel Studios. So anyone can't with a creative project in mind, as far as things he would see in a movie theater, for example, or on TV, can submit a project to Angel Studios. It could be any person in the world, as far as I know. As long as the desire is to amplify light. So it's a faith-based platform that doesn't have to be about God or anything like that, but it needs to be something that makes the world better. And the thing that I'm choosing to amplify light with is keeping my fellow veterans alive and well and helping them live good lives and take better care of each other. So long story short, I took the dare and I continued doing things with motorcycles, putting them to video, talking over that with this gravelly voice I have, and just kind of rolled with it. I started interviewing a lot of veterans for a while. I thought I was gonna make a documentary about homeless veterans on the street and me trying to help them get the help they need. So I did a lot of filming in San Francisco at crazy times at night and dangerous places, trying to find these people, and I saw a lot more than I was bargaining for. It's a pretty crazy place, very dangerous place at night. And so got a lot of crazy riding footage in dangerous places, uh, went back to Timacular area where I was living at the time, and then I started going to VFWs and American legions and talking to veterans in grocery stores. So anytime I saw a veteran, I had some questions like, you know, are you willing to talk about what it was like when you were healing coming home from Vietnam? I wouldn't ask them about what'd you do in Vietnam. I wouldn't ask them like, hey, did you ever get blown up in Afghanistan? I'm asking, what has your journey looked like since you've been back on American soil where it's theoretically safe? And the answers I got, now keep in mind I'm I'm riding to these places on motorcycles. I I look like a biker. And they so many of them focused on that. And it really surprised me with this. So these I didn't know what to expect with all this. I didn't know if they'd be willing to talk to me, I didn't know if they'd be willing to, you know, be on camera. Um most of these were casual conversations, but in my mind, I'm information gathering, I'm looking at trend analysis. And one of the things that really I I found so compelling was the simple answer, my motorcycle saved my life when I got back from Vietnam or Afghanistan or Iran, you know, fill in the blank place. And when they said that, these are combat veterans I'm talking to. These are guys that have been shot at, have probably shot back a lot of them, and a lot of them have been wounded. And for them to say that with the look in their eyes that I'm familiar with, what they were saying was if I didn't have my motorcycle, I might not be here because I may have taken myself out on purpose. That that's the look I got. Exactly. So I would kind of unpack that a little bit and ask them questions, and next thing you know, we're talking about favorite kinds of motorcycles and memories and this and that. So I kind of as I continue this journey of what what is this documentary I'm making, it I kind of landed on after talking to dozens of people, probably hundreds of people, that what this is is a docuseries at the individual level. You know, people telling their own stories, their own journeys, and everything about it should be real. It should be a story that writes itself. Motorcycles provide a natural scenic backdrop, um, especially with the action cameras we have now. I've at one time I had three Insta360, or I'm sorry, three 360 degree cameras mounted on my motorcycle and a cell phone. And so um it provides a lot of interesting footage, so it's visually captivating. It's a good story. Um, they're beautiful machines, it's got great engineering and cool sounds, and you know, roughneck looking people that are a little different than most. So as I continue this journey of, okay, so I'm gonna make a docuseries, it's gonna be about veterans and motorcycles, and somehow we're gonna be helping each other. That's where the community comes in. So I started riding with Combat Veteran Motorcycle Association and CVMA for short, or brought my vest in today because I didn't want to leave it in the car. And um, what I noticed was a lot of people felt the same way I did when I started riding at the ripe young age of 44. Um my whole world changed. Like every mental health issue I had worked through, whether it was depression or anxiety or not being able to sleep, all of it improved when I started riding motorcycles. When I started riding motorcycles in groups, my entire outlook on life changed. The beauty of the scenery we were riding through, the the hand-in-arm signals that are reminiscent of what we do in the military. Um, the way we talk to each other, the meet up at a certain point, you know, go back to the rally point, you know, is is kind of the military way of looking at some of these things. So you get a bunch of people that have been used to operating in groups like this, going from point A to point B in the military in various capacities. You put them on motorcycles and there's just this natural flow. It's a natural beauty. Um, it's kind of like a synergistic I don't know. It's kind of hard to describe, but we all understand it. Those who ride in groups, especially veterans who ride in groups, we understand exactly what I'm talking about. So I noticed that a lot of people felt the same way I did when I started sharing with them my ideas for this docuseries. I got a lot of people going, wow, like that could be really powerful. So ever since then, I've been kind of framing okay, what is this docuseries going to do? So the docuseries is not just about television. That's not what it's it's about veterans healing together. So the reason television is important to me at this point in the game is because television can get to a lot of people that we should be very nervous for, people that are isolating. They're drinking themselves to death, they're hitting the bong or whatever they're doing. Um, television can get to places that no one else can get to. So we can hang a banner over a freeway. It's never going to do as much good as it is on TV for people that are avoiding the general population. So I truly think if we do this right and a on a on a large enough scale, it can save a lot of lives. I I believe that my heart, soul, and spirit. Um, it's something I think about constantly with the amount of people we can save with this because the goal with it is 500 veterans across the country. It's going to be a mental health study that we're going to take to the VA showing the mental health benefits of riding. I've already got our first warrior of the wind inductee tracking his mental health with VA forms that they use at the hospitals. Um, so the the qualitative and quantitative analysis is already starting. So this this big idea of 500 veterans, it we're clearly not there yet. We are working on sponsorship. Uh I've got the mini-series pilot pretty well put together. Uh it's all films. Now I'm editing it with the help of my cinematographer. And what's going to happen is we're going to submit the miniseries pilot to Angel Studios. They've got something called the Angels Guild or the Angel Guild that is a million strong, and they vote on we like this idea, it deserves funding. Yes or no, green or red, basically, green light it is what they call it. So at that point, I've got instant exposure, clearly. Um, I've already got a pretty large social media platform, YouTube, Facebook, uh, Instagram, TikTok, all the checks in the block for the most part. So basically, for the last two years, even though this docu-series, mini-series isn't out in the open, people are very well aware of the foundation that's going to fund it. So Worries of the Wind Foundation that I started two years ago was founded in order to fund the series through corporate social responsibility campaigns. So businesses that have money to spend on a good cause can pay for our miniseries and get IRS write-offs for it. So I put a lot of thought into this. I've got a board of directors that have very thoroughly vetted my ideas. I've had this looked at by colonels, generals, senior enlisted personnel. I've been as high as the secretary of the uh VA's office. I've talked to one of the military colleges uh about suicide prevention. So there's some very, very big involvement in what we're already doing. I I don't want to say too much, but I've got some some very major companies that I'm talking to about sponsorship already. And people can see when I get in the room with them that this is no joke, that I am all in. And when somebody knows you're all in on something that is gonna do a lot of good in the world, you start getting support that you weren't expecting. And that's I'm very happy to say, after a very long journey, uh that that's where we're at right now, is some very big people are paying attention to us, going, wow, this is gonna do some real good. And that's where that's where we're at. So when this thing hits Angel Studios, I would like to think that we'll get some positive attention, but if we don't, I I'm a Marine Corps officer, I have backup plans to backup plans. So that's that's where we're at with that.

SPEAKER_01:

Dallas, with all of this information available to veterans, uh, how can we support veterans more?

SPEAKER_00:

I think by far the most critical part of supporting veterans is just letting them know hey, we appreciate you, especially in the work that I've been doing in the last couple of years in particular. Vietnam veterans and Desert Shield, Desert Storm Veterans of 1990 and 91 are two groups of people that I think everybody knows how Vietnam veterans were treated when they got home. Desert shield, desert storm veterans, a lot of them feel forgotten. It was a small, you know, military conflict, which I I don't like using that word, a war is a war. But just seek these people out. If you see somebody with a Vietnam hat, they're proud of their service. They may not talk about it too much, but it's an opportunity to go, you know what? I know how you guys were treated when you came home. And for me, I wasn't alive then, but I can sure say, as an American, I can thank you now, and I really appreciate what you did for our country. And I did that last weekend at the VA in Fresno with a lot of Vietnam veterans, bit by bit, group by group, and there were a lot of tears. Just that one simple act. Um same thing, Desert Shield, Desert Storm, uh, just letting them know, hey, I I know you guys were in a war that didn't get a whole lot of publicity compared to the other ones, the long ones, but war is war, and they're gonna have memories that they want to forget as well. But just knowing that they're appreciated, that people understand that their patriotism is what keeps us free is is a big deal. So that kind of keeps them going sometimes.

SPEAKER_01:

Well, once again, Dallas, uh, thanks for coming on the show, and I just want to take a quiet moment to say thank you to all the veterans who have worn the uniform and to the families who've stood beside them. Your courage, your sacrifice, and your love of country reminds us what true service looks like. We owe you more than words can say, but we'll keep saying it anyway. Thank you. Thank you for your service, thank you for your strength, and thank you for your example. That's all the time we have for this week's show. If you enjoyed this podcast and you'd like to show your support, you can go to buymeacoffee.com/slash Hanford Insider to make a donation. If you'd like to join the Hanford Insider email list, stop by my website at HanfordInsider.com to sign up for updates. You'll also get an exclusive copy of my newsletter in your inbox each week. I also need your help getting the word out about the show by liking and sharing on social media or telling a friend. For more information about the show, you can find this podcast on Facebook, Instagram, Threads, X, and YouTube at Hanford Insider. If you have a show idea, be sure to email me at HanfordInsider at gmail.com and I'll look into it. Thanks for listening. Have a great week.

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Rob Bentley

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