Lucky Charms And The Long Road Back (Jim Bennett)

A full-ride scholarship, a Pentagon internship, and a clear military track should have meant a smooth launch. Jim Bennett did the opposite. He chased the Appalachian Trail, learned what it means to “hike your own hike,” and then carried those lessons into the Michigan Army National Guard as 9/11 turned weekend service into a new era of war and responsibility. 

We talk through the moments that shaped him: Hurricane Katrina relief in the Gulf, the grind of leadership training, Kuwait convoy operations, and a darkly funny “bomb threat” that was literally a duct-taped box of Lucky Charms. Then the tone shifts to what most people avoid saying out loud: the pressure of Afghanistan contracting, the cost of a lapse in integrity, and what shame does to a person when the uniform comes off and the consequences stay. 

Jim also shares the way back. Suicidal thoughts, Alcoholics Anonymous picking up the phone, PTSD, and the slow work of rebuilding a life through service, creativity, and a blue-collar small business in HVAC and indoor air quality. If you care about veteran stories, military leadership, recovery, and real second chances, this conversation stays with you. 

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Transcript

Welcome And Meeting Jim

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Today is Friday, June 19th, 2026. We're talking with Jim Bennett, who served in the Michigan Army National Guard. So good morning, Jim. Good morning, Bill. It's good to see you again. I know we ran into each other and uh we had served together uh during Hurricane Katrina. Twenty years goes by faster than you'd think. It really does. And I think the old adage was the older I get, the quicker it goes by. Yeah. Yeah. So we'll start out really simple. When and where were you born?

SPEAKER_04 0:30

Well, I was uh I was born uh September 14th, 1977, right outside of Boston, Massachusetts. Uh grew up in a town called Somerville, um, across the street from Cambridge, and I went to JFK Elementary School. Then uh for seventh through twelfth grade, I went to Lexington Christian Academy. So every day I did drive by one of the original Minuteman statues and knew about Revolutionary War stuff, Battle of Concord in Lexington, and grew up all around all of the founding fathers' activities from the Revolutionary War, as you would see it from the Boston lens. So would you call yourself a history buff then? History buff? No. Um, I enjoy it, I appreciate it, I recognize the sacrifices of people that came before us. Uh there's a lot of it that I don't really understand. You know, to study history is to study war and to study economics, uh people and land and their associated values with that. Um and then now that I guess we're part of history, it's uh I still don't understand it, you know.

SPEAKER_00 1:53

Well, good enough. Good enough. So growing up, did you have brothers and sisters?

SPEAKER_04 1:57

I have a brother and two sisters. I'm the third of four. Um, we grew up in my grandfather's house. He passed, my grandmother passed on that side before I was two, and my grandfather passed uh right before I was twelve. So we lived with my grandfather for 10 years uh with my parents and siblings. And then um after I graduated high school, I went to Michigan State. So go green. Go white? Yeah. In 96, I found myself as a Spartan, having never been to the state of Michigan before. We flew out for orientation, but I knew nothing. I had worked in a sporting goods store in high school. I'm an Eagle Scout, I played sports,

Growing Up Near Boston

SPEAKER_04 2:40

and I honestly thought I was going to the University of Michigan State. And uh the sporting goods store I worked at was called MVP Sports, and they were brought out by Dick's Sporting Goods, who I worked for while I was in college as well, here in East Lansing. And uh a gal that was working in the apparel department, she's no, you you're not gonna get that shirt with the blue M on it. You can't wear that. I think you're going to a different school. Just buy your clothes when you get out there. And I was like, okay, sure, you know, I want to use my employee discount to get you know college clothes. And then I show up and everybody's wearing green and white, and I find out that the University of Michigan is a different school, you know, because I grew up, we didn't have a Massachusetts State University. Right. You know, there's MIT, there's UMass, there's hundreds of schools, you know, in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and I grew up surrounded by a lot of them. Um but but here I was, I knew nothing about um the Big Ten, anything. I didn't even know I wanted what I wanted to study in college. I had wanted to get into West Point, and I missed, I had a shoulder injury as a high school senior wrestling, and I missed the physical aptitude exam by a few feet you got to throw up basketball from your knees, or at least you did 30 years ago. Anyhow, um, and so I applied for the ROTC scholarship, at which I got the two-year scholarship after being in for a year or two. Um, I was drinking so much that I didn't um I didn't have the grades when I started. Um, for reference point, in high school I'd been National Honor Society, and I had an honors college scholarship to get into MSU, partial scholarship. Um I want to say it was like four grand out of I don't know what tuition was back then, but it was more than 10. Yeah um now it's you know it's a couple hundred grand to go to college. Right. Things have gone up, obviously. So anyway, um I wasn't on scholarship, but I was still participating in RTC's classes. And I pledged a group called the Persian Rifles. And what that group did, amongst other things, was we did drilling ceremonies. So marching and carrying the American flag. We were the color guard for MSU's football, basketball, and hockey games, as well as some special events, and we divided those sports

Michigan State ROTC And Reserves

SPEAKER_04 5:20

with our Air Force counterparts. So part of my college experiences during my um first four years of college, uh, I think there was 12, but my first four years of college, I did over a hundred color guards. Wow. Which was pretty nice because when you don't have any family in the state of Michigan, uh you and you don't have a car, uh, what are you gonna do on the weekends, you know? Uh I was washing dishes in the dorms and sophomore year, and later I was in a student cook, and then later on I got into maintenance and I did repairs in the dorms and uh led a paint crew one summer. But to be able to go to the football, basketball, and hockey games for free after being there um on the ice, on the field, on the court with the national anthem, uh that was that was a that was a pretty big deal to me. That was a great honor. Um but academics weren't my priority. So in 97-98, as a sophomore, I joined the U.S. Army Reserves and I was in the 303rd MPs out of Jackson. However, I didn't have a car. One of my uh classmates, uh Sean Cross, he was a couple years ahead of me, he drove me down for my initial weekend. Um, and then I went to basic training, Fort Jackson, South Carolina, the summer of 98. And while I was there, my scholarship had been approved. So I graduated from boot camp and promptly went full ride out of state tuition for my two-year scholarship with MSU, and I left the reserves. And in having two years of ROTC completed at that time, we were putting in applications for what you were gonna do uh the summer between your third and your fourth year. You have opportunities to go through what they call cadet troop leadership training. I'm sure they call it something different. Again, it's been 30 years. Well, it changes every week. It changes every week. Yeah. So um our captain there at MSU RTC, his name was uh Dennis Chapman. He um, I believe he made colonel. He had a law degree, uh, and uh he had faith in me and believed in me. So they put in for me to be a participant in the cadet internship program in the Pentagon. I had interned in DC uh as a high school student in '96, and I needed internship credits to graduate from James Madison College with a degree in international relations. So after finishing up five weeks of running around the woods with the backpack in Fort Lewis, Washington, which I think is now Joint Lewis McCord base out in Washington state. Um, so it was five weeks of field training and leadership classes where you do infantry stuff.

Pentagon Internship And Y2K Work

SPEAKER_03 8:20

Right.

SPEAKER_04 8:21

Uh I flew right from there to the Pentagon, and I was a cadet internship program. It was fairly new at the time. It wasn't their first year, but there weren't many of us in the program. And they put me up in the Holiday Inn in Crystal City, and you made like $15 or $20 a day. And you wore your dress uniform, and I was an intern on Y2K, and we worked on things um called the SipperNet, the NipperNet, which is secure and non-secure internet protocol relay network, the communications backbone of the Department of Defense, or they call it Department of War now. I think it got changed last week. Right. But uh but it was all exciting. My parents had done IT, and I thought I wanted a career in IT, and what better place to do it than the largest office building in the world.

SPEAKER_01 9:23

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 9:24

You know, um, I know where the purple water fountain is. Um, you know, little little little things like that that you learn when you have the no escort required badge, and uh you're you become friends with the different people. Um my girlfriend at the time was a White House intern, which has a whole other story going on with um those that remember Bill Clinton. Oh, yes. Um but so that was that was an interesting experience. It was just a few weeks. I briefed a three-star general once a week. I spent a lot of time at Starbucks because there was over 50 Starbucks in the building at the time. So if you imagine an office building that has over 20,000 employees, uh you didn't know there was over 50 Starbucks. You know, that's that's mind-boggling. That's just just put that into perspective. Yeah. And uh, but I just the folks that I was working with, and for the colonels and generals and all that, and the civilian contractors who were retired military, they were just great. They treated me wonderfully. Uh, but it was not a passion. My my mind wasn't in it. I didn't see myself as a in the future working with computers at all. Yeah. Um, and was just like, what's the what what what can I do that's just not this at all? And I had stumbled upon a walk in the woods by Bill Bryson, which is a great allegory. Some of the stuff in there is potentially truthful. Uh, but it's about somebody who's walks, hikes good sections of the Appalachian Trail. And I felt, they've made a movie of it since then. I felt, you know what? If this guy can do it, here I am, prime of my life. I was 21, 22 years old. And uh, no, yeah,

Choosing The Appalachian Trail

SPEAKER_04 11:15

I was 22. And I was just like, you know what? Why graduate college in four years? Why boat go back to that ROTC scholarship? Um, screw it.

SPEAKER_00 11:24

I'm gonna go hike the Appalachian Trail. So I want to pump the brakes for a second here. So you were at Michigan State. Uh-huh. Full ride. Full ride. You had just finished up your internship, and you're like, ah, screw it. I'm not doing any of this stuff. Exactly. Yeah. How'd that feel?

SPEAKER_04 11:40

Um well, um at the time. At the time, uh, considering what my father did for a living and where he was, and how important graduating from college was to both of my parents who had just spent a lot of money putting me through six years of private school, right? Along with my three siblings, you know. Uh, and we were a one-car family, you know. I mean, it was, you know, there was there was some mac and cheese and and and and some we can't afford this moments growing up, you know.

SPEAKER_01 12:14

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 12:15

And and and my my parents worked very hard. My mom went to night school at UMass Boston to get her bachelor's degree while raising four kids, you know. My dad spent 50 years at a university working in IT.

SPEAKER_00 12:28

And um So education's very good. Yeah, huge, huge. Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 12:33

My older sister's a teacher. Yes, you know. And um, and and and I was uh I had done I had done well academically prior to college.

SPEAKER_03 12:44

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 12:44

And I mean I was I wasn't something, I mean, there's only like 30 people in my class, and I was somewhere around 10th, you know. Um and those above me had gone to prestigious universities. But still, it was um, I could have done whatever I wanted to do. You know, I did I had done well in math, especially. And I I just felt, you know, the international relations degree would be useful because the army would send me wherever and I'd have a degree that would be useful. And if I was gonna get into business, you know, we have a globalization of economies, and if you're gonna work for a multinational corporation, you gotta get a good degree in something. Right, right. So uh, but no, I was just like, quite frankly, fuck it. Yeah, and uh that was the first time that I wanted to my in my mind I was dropping out of college. So I had a little bit of time left in the summer of '99 after my Washington State and Washington, DC Um experiences. I had oh I had almost two weeks left. So I went from DC to Boston, uh, you know, some of all my parents uh were, and I uh I called around and tried to find somebody to go hiking with me. And my brother uh said, uh I'll drive you. I wanted to do the last hundred miles. I call it the hundred mile wilderness, which is not quite a hundred miles, and calling it a wilderness is a little bit of a stretch, I suppose. But um I said, I'm gonna grab some camping gear and I'm just gonna go, you know, I'm

Hundred Mile Wilderness And Han Solo

SPEAKER_04 14:25

not with my combat boots and whatever, you know, knew nothing about long distance hiking. Right, you know, I mean, I was an Eagle Scout and I had taught hiking and camping as a camp counselor all through high school at a Boy Scout camp in New Hampshire. But um I didn't I was like, yeah, I've read a walk in the woods, you know, it's gonna be, you know, fine. You know, I'll go take a week.

SPEAKER_00 14:46

How bad can it be?

SPEAKER_04 14:48

Exactly, you know, and uh and and this way I want to plan my my through hike for Georgia to Maine by doing just this hundred miles. I had just seen the Blair Witch Project, which was filmed on the Appalachian Trail in Maryland, and that kind of shit's in my head, you know. But how bad can it be? Right. So my brother drives the probably eight hours, um, if not more, and drops me off in I think the town is called Munson, Maine, and says, All right, well, I'll see you on the other side, you know? And uh and we we took a couple photos at the sign, and I entered the woods at night, and you know, I've got all the wrong gear um in a knapsack that I had bought and at the local gun shop, Roach's sporting goods. And I wouldn't know it wasn't even at the sporting goods store that I had worked at in high school. I just was like, screw it, we're gonna walk to the nearest, you know, store, just grab a few things and um, you know, suck it up, right? Because I've been in the army for three years, you know, part-time, but I was I was in I was in good shape. I could do um, you know, I could do two miles in under 12 minutes, and you know, my push-ups were decent. But so anyway, I uh I'm in the hundred-mile wilderness. And as I, you know, I I figured I'd meet people as they were finishing up, the through hikers that had started in Georgia, and meeting them would be the best way for me to learn how to do it the following year, the whole thing.

SPEAKER_01 16:24

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 16:24

And if I was short on time or what other things happened, because yep, it's a low success rate. At the time, I believe it was 12% success. That, you know, if I came up short, I'd have at least the last hundred miles done, and maybe I could do it in sections over, you know, a lifetime. So there's this uh other college student I come across or young guy, and his trail name was Jedi, and he's wearing like Nike Air sneakers, and he's carrying like a very light backpack, doesn't have much on him, you know, for weight, and he's got these trekking poles. You know, they're like cross-country ski poles. The main brand is Lucky L E K I. And I'm just like, what are you doing, man? You know, and and I'm sitting there and I'm sucking it up, and you know, I'm hurting, you know, and I'd I'd I'd done, you know, at least five miles that day.

SPEAKER_01 17:13

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 17:14

And he's, you know, done more than 15 at this point because he had started, you know, at the shelter before the road crossing and all that. And he's telling me about the shelters, and I've got a whole heavy tent on me. And he's like, Yeah, I don't carry a tent, I just sleep in the shelters. Anyhow, and he's like, you know, he's like, Well, what's your trail name? And I was like, I don't have a trail name, just Jim Bennett. And I was like, Well, you know, I'm I got stuck hiking by myself, nobody wanted to join me, and if it's hard to find people short notice, but I just needed to just just go. He's like, Oh, yeah. And uh, so that's how my trail name became Han Solo. Because you were with the Jedi because Jedi, Jedi, a guy named Jedi named me. Uh-huh. And uh, you know, rule of nicknames is if you get a cool nickname or something that's like borderline, you know, positive, you keep that nickname because people can call you whatever they want to call you. You treat others how to treat you, and you become what you surround yourself with. And I I I was a fan or I was familiar with the Star Wars movies, um, but I didn't realize how big of a thing this was going to become.

SPEAKER_01 18:19

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 18:20

So I get to Mount Katada, my brother comes up and um with a buddy of his, and um we do the mountain, we get off the mountain, my brother drives me back home, my dad drives me back to MSU, and um I moved back into the dorms. And so

Thru Hike And The Aftermath

SPEAKER_04 18:45

the whole dropping out of college thing didn't quite work out. Yet. Yet.

SPEAKER_00 18:48

Okay, more to go.

SPEAKER_04 18:49

So here I am, I'm in my fourth year, and I had moved from Case Hall, and I'm in Wonders Hall, and I'm the RA suite mate. It's just me and my buddy who was in the Marine Reserves, and he was a history major. We had classes together, and um, and I just studied and trained for the Appalachian Trail. I read over two dozen books on all things hiking, wilderness survival, whatever. I started volunteering with Boy Scout Troop 180 in East Lansing. Um, I had emailed while I was in the Pentagon, I emailed uh Scoutmaster Bruce McCrae. Hey, do you have any vacancies for assistant scout masters or merit badge counselors? You know, which is always a yes, it's a volunteer thing. Oh, right. You know, I'm an Eagle Scout and I'd like to help out with uh local high schoolers. And he's like, sure. And I didn't I hadn't realized that uh it wasn't the closest scout troop to MSU. It had an MSU website. I figured it was the closest one. So grad students, uh, well, Skip Venbloom, Dr. Skip, um, and then other like professors and people would pick me up and uh take me to the scout meetings, which were at Sherry's Ecks Synagogue over on Coolidge, and uh on uh was that Tuesday nights, and we did that for the next several years, and I found out that there was another troop closer. Um, but this one was organized. They had it created the Michigan International Camperies, they had um ice climbing trips in Canada, they did exchange programs, they they had this stuff going on. Uh Philmont Scout Ranch in 2001. I led a crew down there because I hiked the Appalachian Trail in 2000.

SPEAKER_01 20:28

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 20:29

So I uh I dropped out of college the first time. Um I wasn't going to class, I flunked out of ROTC that year. They said uh, you know, you gotta pay back the scholarship. And I was like, yeah, whatever. It's no big deal. It's like 20 grand. I'll pay that back. And because I'm gonna become a professional athlete, sponsored, and all that other stuff, because I'm top shelf and you know, right, gonna go do this this this difficult thing. But uh I rolled my ankle on the first mountain because I was trying to run, and then I sucked it up, spent Easter weekend at a biker bar called Two Wheels Only, Dry County, such as Georgia. Um, had the really great moonshine with the sheriff uh while we were shooting pool, waiting for my um package to arrive because I had mailed my stove in advance and the post office wasn't open because it was Easter and I was a day late to start, so that's why I was running on Springer Mountain, and it just kept going forward, you know. Um real bad ankle. But what was I gonna do? Like, I had taken finals early, but failed a couple of my classes, and I really had no intention of going back to MSU. You know, I was gonna find myself in the woods. I hated the army. I remember getting in arguments with the cadre about they wanted me to do stuff, and people were telling me what to do. I mean, it's the army, you know. You people are gonna tell you people are gonna tell you what to do.

SPEAKER_00 21:54

That's how that works.

SPEAKER_04 21:55

And you kind of need to put your ego aside because, quite frankly, what they're What they're telling you to do is, you know, keep you alive.

SPEAKER_00 22:03

Right.

SPEAKER_04 22:04

But you were having none of that. I was I was gonna have absolutely none of that. You know, this was keep in mind, you know, the Y2K thing had been a big driving force for all things technology. And then the summer of 2000, the vibe um with supporting the troops and the military, this is about 10 years after Desert Desert Storm and the Gulf War.

SPEAKER_00 22:27

Right.

SPEAKER_04 22:27

Um, which was quick and easy for me to watch when I was in junior high. And, you know, overall military was an alright thing, but it it was not a common thing to have American flags on your neighbors' doorsteps, you know, like you do. Right. Right. Because we know what happened the following year. Um but here I am in the woods, I weighed 137 pounds. Uh, for reference point, I'm over 210 right now. So 70, 75 pounds ago, I was on Mount Katahdin for the second time, having finished my through hike. Four months flat. Along the way, I met a guy that had become my partner. We worked for three months together. His name, his name was Jeff Weichstra. He's past uh cancer took him a few years ago. Healthiest guy you'd ever meet, otherwise. Um, his trail name was Stubble because he couldn't grow facial hair. You know. Um I met all kinds of people with all kinds of trail names. Uh, my favorite is Merlin. Uh that's his real name.

unknown 23:36

Oh.

SPEAKER_04 23:36

And since Merlin's real name was his trail name and his partner Dan, Dan just kept his regular name. So good old Dan and Merlin in Ohio. Uh Merlin was on Jeopardy and talked about hiking the Appalachian Trail with Alex to Rek. Um, so you meet a lot of interesting people along the ways and people that you stay in their homes and you pay for hostels, and you just have to have that attitude of, I'm gonna make it. You know, this storm sucks tomorrow. You know, it's not Annie, the sun will come out tomorrow. Tomorrow's gonna suck too. Right. You know? Um, but the worst day on the trail is better than your best day in an office. Yeah, I don't care what you tell me. If you're sitting in an office staring at those four walls and your boss is coming up to you on Friday asking you for that TPS report, I'm sorry, man, but go get your red stapler somewhere else. Yeah, right. Um just free, you know? Um and this was Map and Compass days, the trail is very well maintained. Um but I got um my dad drove me from Maine uh back home to Boston, and then I faced the reality of I had paid all my credit cards in advance, the minimum payment. I I wrote the checks in for each month, and uh well the credit card companies had cashed the checks all at once, and I hadn't made a credit card bill in three, four months. So I'm calling around the credit card company saying, hey, no, I wrote those checks and postdated them. You can't do that shit, you know. That's not how life works. That's not how life works. And all the credit cards that I'd gotten, it was just answering the mail one week. Because if you're a college student, you just get flooded with all that stuff.

SPEAKER_00 25:21

Yeah, they want to get you in the system early.

SPEAKER_04 25:23

You know, so you know, my my parents had helped out, they had paid for care package service, company called Hike USA, and um, you know, I had saved for gear, and the scout troop um had given me a couple gifts, and uh, but I still had a couple thousand dollars. Uh, some of which, you know, because I I got some souvenirs along the way. I put I sort of patch into my backpack. I used my um book bag from school as my hike as my backpack for the Appalachian Trail because I figured if you have a small pack, you can't carry much stuff.

SPEAKER_03 25:52

Right.

SPEAKER_04 25:53

Um pack light, freeze at night, definitely true. Um but the uh so it was a couple thousand bucks in debt uh from that trail. And uh but not nothing out outrageous, you know. Yeah somewhere in the two to four grand realm. Even then it was, you know, it was doable, you know, a hundred bucks a week, and I'd have it set in like a year and go get a job was my thought. My parents were like, no, you're gonna go back to school and get a job. And I'm like, Well, I lost the scholarship and I'm not taking your money, but we'll figure it out.

SPEAKER_00 26:29

So I I I wanna I wanna just ask a quick question here. So I, you know, um I I get that education is very important to your family, and at this point, um, I don't this for lack of a better way to say it, you're kind of disappointing them. But yet, so here's the fun thing they're still very supportive of them.

SPEAKER_04 26:48

Here's the thing, they could not have been and still are very supportive.

SPEAKER_00 26:52

That's awesome.

SPEAKER_04 26:53

Here and my parents are amazing. Um, shout out to uh Wally and Claire, mom and dad. Yes, the uh they live in Maine now. My parents have sold the house in Boston when they retired um a couple years ago. But uh my father kept a journal.

SPEAKER_03 27:09

Oh boy.

SPEAKER_04 27:10

And I still have it.

SPEAKER_03 27:11

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 27:11

My parents are uh 78 now. But the uh, and this is Father's Father's Day, Sunday, it's a couple days from now, so happy Father's Day. So my dad kept a journal, and I didn't know this, and he gave me his journal after the hike. And it's all um my dad had been an electrician for the Navy during Vietnam, and he had told me, you know, don't join the military, don't enlist, and all that. And we have plenty of family that was in the Navy. Um, I'm the only one that joined the Army. My scout troop growing up was like a Green Beret. My scoutmaster and other parents, like my dad, were they were Vietnam vets, and they I don't know what they had for their own PTSDs, but it was uh we had gone to Camp Reese at West Point and things like that as a scout. That's how I wanted to go to West Point. But uh anyway, so my dad kept this journal and he writes in all caps, you know. But I mean, you know, large and small letters, he writes in like the block method, so it's very easy to read. Um, and just every day he'd he'd write something each time I had called home or wrote a letter. Um oh, a letter. You would put a stamp on an envelope and put it through the U.S. Postal Service to communicate with people.

SPEAKER_00 28:21

You would write on paper with a thing called a pen.

SPEAKER_04 28:23

Yeah. Right. And uh and and I mean email existed, but it wasn't, you know, I wasn't walking around with a smartphone in the woods. I had started with a with a cell phone, but the reception was bad. And I had one that took double and triple A batteries so I could interchange with my headlamp. And a couple weeks into that I just mailed it home and said, screw that. Um, because there was no signal. Plus, we still had payphones.

SPEAKER_01 28:46

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 28:46

Um, payphone was something you would put change into the machine and you could talk on the phone, or you would call and say, We had a baby, it's a boy, and they would get your message. Um, so anyway, uh my dad kept this journal of uh James called and he's here and he rolled his ankle, and my goodness, I don't know what he's doing. He's you know, dropped out of college and had this scholarship and all these other things, but he's in Georgia and he's okay. And then it was he's made it to the Smoky Mountains. James called and we he asked for socks or whatever it would be, right? Right, and uh and he would he would he would write in there, and this is uh I don't know how many pages it is, but it's uh it's a few pages. And uh and you see the you know, allegorically kind of a way of just seeing my dad's emotions and his feelings, which are rare moments, you know. I mean, my dad hugs me, we say I love you, that kind of stuff. I call him several times a month. My mom's in the background, always busy doing stuff, dishes cleaning, exercising, whatever, you know. Um and they live right on the ocean, and she takes her hikes every day. And my mom even hiked a couple miles of the Appalachian Trail with me. You know, when I was crossing through Massachusetts, I went home for the weekend and I saw the X-Men movie with my younger sister. This was the same summer as the first Survivor season for that reality show. So, anyhow, so I read my dad's letters, and uh it it it it it just kind of made me cry because he was just so proud of me that I wasn't giving up. College wasn't my thing. Um, I got lost in the Sea of Green, you know, because MSH was just so huge, and I came from this tiny little Christian bubble and just had no boundaries, no filters, and was living, you know, I didn't participate in the riots, but those were the years that we were, you know, lots of couches were on fire. You know, if there was a basketball game, you know, something was burning, yeah, you know, go, you know. Um, and it was nice to watch us win the national championship. And like I said, I was doing color guys in those days when we had the national championship and then uh several frozen four and final four appearances and stuff for basketball and hockey had done really well. Um so anyway, uh he was just proud of me. And it was, you know, yeah, we're going to Maine to pick him up, and he's gonna finish. My uh one of my scoutmasters and a couple of guys from my scout troop from Troop 3 Somerville, they came up and did Mount Katin with me. And uh, which I thought was amazing. I was, you know, there was, you know, people there at the so to speak finish line. You know, the final mountain, it's um over 5,000 feet high, and it's not an easy one. You gotta use your hands to climb the rocks and stuff, and uh, and there's nothing near it. It's you know, you're in a state park, but there's you know, it's not like it's people have to drive several hours out of their way to spend their their time with you. So it's it's um it's a few-day commitment to do something like that. Yeah, um, but yeah, people were proud of me. And that fall, um, so I got my Eagle Scout in '95. That fall, uh, three more scouts um had gotten their paperwork through, and I got to speak at their Eagle ceremony, which was amazing, and one of them had hiked Cataitan with me then. Um and so that was pretty, pretty amazing. We had quite a few Eagle Scouts at the troop I volunteered with in East Lansing, but my troop that I grew up in in Somerville, we only had one a decade. Um, my uncle uh David had been a scout, had been an Eagle Scout out of my troop, and his he was the one from the 1960s, you know, and then there'd been one in the 70s and one in the 80s, and you know, the my uncle had passed of cancer, but the Eagle Scout from the 70s and the 80s, they came to my ceremony in '95. Yeah. That's how rare it was from the troop I had grown up in. So to watch three at the same time. And there have been times where the troop was just me and those three guys, um, was was pretty amazing. Um, but so here I am. I I like the Appalachian Trail. My dad takes me back to MSU. We get my stuff out of the dorms. The dorms are full. You know, there's no room at the end, go find someplace else. And so we open up the state news, and you know, college newspaper. And a newspaper is something that exists on a type of paper, and they put ink on it, and you read the words and you hold it in your hand. And uh and you can't zoom pinch the thing. Yeah, you know, and then there's there's a section in there, classified, and that's how you would find jobs. Cars. Yep, cars, people, people, yep. And then um, you know, there was a section for you know, rooms for rent, apartments wanted, that stuff. Right. And I learned about the student housing co-op, and I moved into a house while a fraternity was moving out. So it was a new co-op, 20-bedroom house. It was the largest house in the 12-house student housing co-op system. We called it the Phoenix House, like rebirth. And it was located almost right behind Crunchy's, which is a well-known bar in East Lansing. Best burgers and tots you'll get amazing

Phoenix House And Joining The Guard

SPEAKER_04 34:05

burgers. And then on Thursday night, I want to say it was 18 bucks. But if you had four people, which is easy to do when you live in a 20-bedroom house because there was 25 to 30 of us. Um, and I got a rent discount, so because I did maintenance. So it was only a couple hundred bucks a month to live there, including the meal plan. Um, and as long as you had four people, you could get a bucket. A bucket was just like a mop bucket, like a dish rag, kind of a bucket.

SPEAKER_00 34:31

And it was two and a half gallons of beer. So I want to I want to stop you there because the bucket of beer, usually a bucket of beer means you get a bucket with a bunch of beers in it. This is a bucket with beer in it. Yes. No bottles. Right, no bottles. Okay, I just want to paint that picture for the folks.

SPEAKER_04 34:46

Paint it for the folks. Crunchy still exists. Yes. And I don't know what the price is now, but it was you needed four people. And we we had German engineering students in the house, and you know I'm Danish, so maybe that's close enough. But I would go out on Thursday night and we would do karaoke, 99 left balloons, or you know, 99 red balloons.

SPEAKER_03 35:11

Oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_04 35:12

And uh the Germans would get so drunk that they would sing in English. Um, their English was okay. Um, but they would try to do the German version and all that, and you needed four people to get a bucket. And they give you pitchers, you know, like serving pitchers with the bucket. Well, we would each just have our own pitcher and just take the pitcher, dip it in the bucket, take our rag, wipe the pitcher so we wouldn't spill beer everywhere, and then we would just drink the pitchers. Well, when the bucket gets empty, you get a sp- you just get another bucket.

SPEAKER_01 35:43

Right.

SPEAKER_04 35:44

That's how it works, you know, and then for 18 bucks, I mean, with them with a nominal tip, we're each tossing in five dollars a piece for our portion of the bucket. Uh, and we would have, well, we would have more than one bucket, um, and do karaoke on Thursday nights, and then we would stumble back across the field behind the bar and we'd get into the Phoenix house, 239 Oak Hill. And uh, you couldn't get lost because it was even with snow, you you you really couldn't screw that one up and uh and just go towards the light. Um, but I um moving into the Phoenix house, shooting pool on the front lawn, and I don't know if the keg was on the lawn at that day or if the kegs were inside, but um I met somebody who was a member of the National Guard. And he said So what year are we talking? We're talking fall of 2000.

SPEAKER_00 36:44

Okay, so we're fall of 2000.

SPEAKER_04 36:46

April 21st, August 21st, Appalachian Trail. Went home for a couple days, went out to MSU by you know, before classes would start. Yeah. And uh it was just enroll back in classes. What classes can you take? You're not gonna finish, you know, this year as year five, you know. Um, if you've seen Animal House, double secret probation, I had a 1.8 GPA, which those of you that are bad at math, 1.8 is below two, okay? And you needed at least a 2.5 to keep the RTC scholarship. So I wasn't really gonna get back on that one.

SPEAKER_00 37:21

What was it Dean Wormer said? Fat, drunk, and stupid is no way to live your life. Exactly, you know?

SPEAKER_04 37:26

And um, and so moving in the Phoenix house was it really was an animal house. Yeah, um, we had our own toga parties. Um, my friend who was in the National Guard, we did some of the biggest Halloween parties. I mean, over 400 people in the house for Halloween each year. And the wonderful thing about after October 31st, rents due. You know, same thing with New Year's, you know, New Year's Eve, rent's due on the first. And you could pay your rent in beer cans because 10 cents a can adds up to $200 very quickly. I think the full price was like $370. But you could clean your house for a couple hours after one of those parties and get a few hundred bucks in cans. Didn't even own a car. Friends would jump in with me from the house, and we would three or four of us could pay our rent. Now, you also made money off the door for charging a cover for those that weren't part of our system. And then I would make money off the kegs that were in the attic because uh not everybody was able to bring their own alcohol for some reason or another, you know? Um there were there were folks that had age discrimination.

SPEAKER_00 38:30

Right.

SPEAKER_04 38:31

Imagine that.

SPEAKER_00 38:32

So you meet you so you have this buddy that's in the National Guard?

SPEAKER_04 38:35

I had this buddy that's in the National Guard, and I'd gone through boot camp in '98 with the reserves. And he says, uh, you ever think about joining the National Guard? And I said, Absolutely not. That sounds like a terrible idea. I hate the Army, but hate the Army, you know, like this Captain Dennis Chapman who had gotten me my security clearance. Um, he did a simultaneous membership program and helped guys with the National Guard stuff. And, you know, what does that guy know? You know, I mean, he put me in the Pentagon with the security clearance. I don't want to get into the back of that world, you know. I I hate the army. Right. And um uh this gentleman, uh, well, his name's Tom McCulliff. He's retired now. I can throw him under the bus. His grandfather was a general in World War II. He said nuts to Patton if you've seen the patent movie, McCulliff. And uh, like we built a Trojan horse and dressed in togas for Halloween one year, you know. And uh, because you know, good Spartans, you know, the cops actually threw Trojan condoms. No, I'm sorry, we were throwing Trojan condoms around, and there were shenanigans with gals. Um, but the cops gave us glow sticks, that's what it was. We gave the cops condoms, and the cops gave us glow sticks. Because you're never gonna believe this, but folks in law enforcement are oftentimes also in the National Guard.

SPEAKER_00 39:50

Imagine that.

SPEAKER_04 39:50

Imagine that, you know, and um, you know, Tom may or may not have known a few of them. And he was in the Marshall Street Armory, which is first of the 119th Field Artillery, in Lansing, which if you've just hiked the Appalachian Trail, that's walking distance. You know, it might have been three miles. Um, it's really not that far. And uh, you know, you put a duffel bag or a ruck on your pack and jungle boots in your feet, and you'll make it. So anyway, he's like, no, you joined the National Guard. You don't have to go through boot camp again, you know, and you're obviously in physical shape. And um yeah, we just go up north and go drinking one weekend a month. It's no big whoop. And I'm like, all right, you know, he's like, but you have to go through your AIT, you gotta go through, you know, your whatever job you want. And I was like, oh, I'll go back to that secretary school thing, you know, because it's admin, human resources. Yeah, I'll get a government gig in the future, whatever. Just just be chill. Um, if you're not in combat arms, they call you a pogue person other than grunt, POG. I was like, yeah, I'll just go, just go full pogue, you know, never, never, never do any action stuff. And uh I worked for Roger Pope. He's passed, but we you know, working for the Pope was kind of a huge deal for me because he's just an awesome guy, and they always had work for me. If I wanted to come in during a week or two, spring break, Christmas break, it was government admin work, and they had work for me. And I went back to Fort Jackson, South Carolina, summer of 01. And uh I was uh E3 at that point. So if you have over 60 college credits, you're an E3.

SPEAKER_03 41:27

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 41:28

If you're an Eagle Scout, you're an E2, so I was never an E1. Um, and then uh here I am, former cadet, E3. I pick up, I joined the E4 Mafia. Um, that's what you call it when you become a specialist. Uh your rank is E4, and you're fairly untouchable because your leadership knows, quite frankly, you don't give a fuck. You're gonna show up, make sure you don't lose your rifle, and whatever task that you've been assigned to do, you're gonna do your job and you're gonna know how to hide so that you don't get stuck washing pots and pans because that's what privates are for. Um, so and oh and I was planning on doing more hikes. Uh, my roommate at the Phoenix house, Stan Sendritti, he works for the Park Service now. He uh he had just come off of the Pacific Crest Trail uh working at uh, I think it was Crater Lake National Park, and the Pacific Crest was the second one on my list, and the Continental Divide was the third. And he's like, Why don't you just get a degree in Parks and Rec? I'm like, you can get a college degree in Parks and Wreck bullshit. Stan was working on his master's in a similar field. That's what brought him to MSU. He had gone to Chico State as his undergrad. So here's a guy that came from a party school going to MSU during I would call it the Riot years, you know, we had some parties going on. And I was like, I can get a degree in parks, recreation, and tourism resources, bachelor of science. So I take statistics classes, right? My economics classes for my bachelor of arts didn't necessarily apply. I did take global issues and fisheries and wildlife, and that kind of towards both degrees. So in 2007 and 2008, I completed two bachelor's degrees. Um, I think the Bachelor of Science was 07, and I got accepted to graduate school. They asked me to go to graduate school at MSU. I haven't finished that one yet. One paper shy. Um, but when you're paying for college yourself, you tend to focus on classes and doing well. And when you're a Parks and Rec student, there really is no homework. There's field chips, but it wasn't, I wasn't writing 35-page papers and applying to law schools and things like my former peers were. So um, so my roommate's a Parks grad student, and I learned about getting a graduate um or undergrad teaching assistant job, and I took GIS classes because I obviously knew Map and Compass well. And the faculty said, Oh no, you're you're a field kind of guy. Um, we'll teach you GPS usage and geographic. Information sciences and software on how to do map design and things. I was like, this is fantastic. I'll get jobs in the parks and rec industry and service. And if the military wants to use me for my my map skills and map design stuff, you know, that could be, you know, that could be all right. At least I won't get lost like all the lieutenants. Right. You know? Right. Because you can't spell lost with an LT. And um, you know, the military's all right, National Guard's all right, you know, not a fan of officers, but you know, this E4 thing's going all right. And uh so summer of 01, I'm here I am, and I'm I I think I was just an E3 and I hadn't made the specialist yet, but September 11th. Uh it was a Tuesday morning. And that was my third year in the co-op. So I had my own room at that point, I had my own bathroom, I had the room in the basement off the kitchen, and I mean it was Tuesday, which there's a why in that day, so I was

9/11 Changes Everything

SPEAKER_04 45:00

I was shit faced.

SPEAKER_00 45:01

And uh have you been drinking all along? Like, were you a pretty big drinker during this? Yeah, it sounds like it, but I'm just curious.

SPEAKER_04 45:10

Like you're like consistently drinking. Oh yeah, being alcohol, it's like fish. Okay. Um, so the uh the phone rings. Um, we had a house phone, so everybody living in the house, we all just shared one phone, and some people had phone lines in their rooms. There's a couple that did. I don't like I had one the year before, but I didn't really use it much.

SPEAKER_01 45:34

Right.

SPEAKER_04 45:35

And when you live in a house with all those people, you don't really need to call your friends and ask if they want to hang out. You're gonna sit down and play PlayStation 2, put Tony Hawk on Spider-Man mode, right? Have a few beers, you know, and when the pizza shows up, you're gonna answer the door, and whatever name is on the pizza, you'll tell them that's you. And um help yourself to a slice and then tell your roommate that their pizza arrived, you know? Nice. Yeah, I was just that considerate, you know. Yeah. Um, but no, uh, and then maybe you watch some law and order, whatever. Um, anyhow. Um, so the phone rings, and my mom's on the phone and she wants to know if I've been called up. I said, called up for what? And she says, We're under attack. And I was like, Well, no one can call me because I'm on the phone. You're blocking the line, but what do you mean we're under attack? And you could see, because the phone was like in the hallway. You could see the living room there. You can see that my friend Damon Williams. Um, he's a comic book store manager, and he worked for the co-ops as well. He's uh, and he said, Yeah, Osama bin Laden. And I'm like, what? The second and I watched the second plane hit the World Trade Center because we're watching the first one's on fire. I watched the second plane hit, and uh I had no idea who Osama bin Laden was. And here's a guy who's working on an English degree and he did some IT um, you know, stuff. He was a pretty smart guy. And I I had so many years in on an international relations degree, and I didn't know any of this stuff. And then you're watching an airplane in in the building that I had worked at two years before. And, you know, there was a fourth plane that um went down in a field in Pennsylvania. And the world changed. And I I started, I said that my birthday was September 14th, 1977. So this is September eleventh, and that uh Friday, which would have been my birthday, um it was a day of mourning. Everyone's I mean, what's everyone? Everyone. Candlelight vigils. Um and it was it was real. I was in the army. And we were a nation at war. And this is the start of the global war on terror. I I didn't join the National Guard so I could go to war. I joined the National Guard so I could help people if there was like a natural disaster, some sort of a stateside emergency. I I didn't, I wasn't looking for Desert Shield, Desert Storm kind of action, and I sure sure wasn't gonna wear jungle boots in an actual jungle. I just wanted to get drunk at Camp Grayling up north, maybe occasionally go to Battle Creek and you know, shoot off some rounds at Fort Custer, um, and and hang out at Bud Rock and have a couple of Buds. Um, you know, sit in the woods in a tent and refuel a generator in the middle of the night and just pretend, you know.

SPEAKER_00 49:02

This was glorified paintball. Hide out on the three sisters.

SPEAKER_04 49:06

Yeah, exactly. I was getting my I was getting at the time regular Montgomery GI Bill, and I was getting federal tuition assistance, and I was taking out student loans, and that's how I was paying for college. And because I had to pay back that ROTC scholarship, and if you get a paycheck from the government and you own the government money, the government has a very straightforward, simple way of taking its money back from you with 7.5% interest. So gross pay minus taxes minus two-thirds percent of gross pay. I forget the math. But I made something like $40 a weekend, you know, instead of four to six hundred bucks. I was getting like $40, $50.

SPEAKER_02 49:44

Right.

SPEAKER_04 49:44

And um, you know, and I didn't know, but it was enough I could pay for gas for somebody. Back then you could get a tank of gas for 20, 30 bucks. Uh the other day I filled up my tank and it was over 150. So things have changed in price. I mean, I have a truck now, right? I've got six. We'll get to that in a minute. Um but yeah, it's September 11th, 2001, I'm in the army. And we're at war. And I'm so hungover. And I uh I just walked around campus that afternoon. And I I still have a copy of the newspaper, the state news, the school newspaper, did a midday edition. And I I still have the copy. Because they were passing it out, you know, telling people what was going on. Um because uh like we had we had we had wired our house for internet, um, but it wasn't like there was still some people had dial up in different places. Campus, I think, got wired at that point. When I lived on campus, you didn't have you had to share your phone line with your internet line. And um, if your roommate wanted to talk on the phone, you had to go to the computer lab to write your paper and dot matrix printers, and um things are much different now when it comes to IT. We've got computers in our pockets and we can make phone calls with those computers too.

SPEAKER_03 51:10

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 51:10

Um, but uh anyway, it was just I want to say sobering, but it really wasn't. Not for you anyway. Not for you, no, no. I was drinking that night. Yeah, um, you know, I mean it was a Tuesday. Um, and I think classes were canceled that day and the next day or something. Um in Parkson Rek, I don't think you have morning classes. You certainly don't have Friday classes. If I had morning classes, I think my earliest would have been like 10 20 or something. Yeah. Um, but uh so anyway, we go on. And uh the units were all getting called up as time went on, and I had a paper pushing job, so they had me push paper. Um one, I led a scout troop uh to Philmont Scout Ranch, and I had done my AIT in South Carolina, and I hiked the Vermont Long Trail, which overlaps the Appalachian Trail. Um so I hiked that one south from Canada to Massachusetts through the state of Vermont. Um I was planning more hikes in 2002. I hiked most of the Pacific Crest Trail. I had issues on that one, I sort of have some scars. Um and I do my annual training for two weeks, and then I got a job at a Boy Scout camp here in Michigan, and um I got married for the first time in 04. I did the Continental Divide Trail in 05. That counted as my Proction Rec internship and field experience and independent study, and I used a GI Bill for that. So I got paid to go hiking. And I finished the Pacific Crest Trail at the end of that summer, and I had hiking experiences, you know. Um, I was in the Bob Marshall wilderness between her Grizzly and her Cubs in 05. And that at the time was the scariest moment of my life. Um, I came out on Skathe from that experience, and I came home and I had my first week of classes in 05, and my unit was my unit was deployed. My artillery unit was deployed at the time. They had an Abu Ghraib mission and they had a Guantanamo Bay mission. So if you see the bad stuff in the news from Abu Ghraib with the detainees, the prisoners, that treatment, and if you see the bad stuff in the news from Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, those incidences were the year and two years prior to my our my National Guard unit, my brothers in arms, those guys going in and did the right thing. Um they they they they adhered to the Geneva Convention. Folks did honorable service and commendable service. Um folks got attacked in Abu Ghraib while they were there. I have friends that got purple hearts from that attack. There's Wikipedia pages on that. And um, I know war I know I know it's war is hell from what's war is confusing. There's no winning of it. Um and and I don't know what it means to do the right thing, honestly. It depends on who tells you what to do. And if you get caught doing what you're not supposed to do, you should you you gotta you know come straight forward um with all that stuff. But I I was just an E4 in O5, and my unit was downrange, and Bill, as you know, the storm was coming. And we were they were predicting uh and I had done GIS stuff, you know, and you and you learn infrastructure, roads and bridges and what's gonna collapse and planning those things. Well, Hurricane Katrina did devastation along the Gulf from Florida to Texas and everything in between. And uh the governors of the affected state had called for for aid, you know. And FEMA was involved and all the federal agencies, and the states the governors to each state said, yeah, we'll send troops. So I called up the National Guard. Um Jim Robbins, my E6. And uh and I said, Hey, send me. And uh he's like, You sure? I was like, Yeah, this is a big deal, man. I want to be part of this. This is why I joined. And I know our unit's not gonna get called for this because our unit's downrange, right? And those of us that didn't go downrange were back here to do supportive tasks, um, go through our own trainings and and so forth. But uh, you know, a guy named Tony Thompson had taken my place. Uh Tony's still alive. Um, but uh I I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, you can send me. I'll do this. And I had financial hardship because they're garnishing my wages. Right. Um, but I joined the 1776 MPs out of Taylor, along with I think the 1775 MPs, and we were in uh task force cyclone out of Ohio Brigade. And I rode along with the diesel fuelers, I rode in the gas truck, um, and we we pumped gas for Humvees and other MP vehicles all the way down. Um like they gave you a camelback and said, you know, we're leaving in the morning, like four hours of sleep or something like that. We looked like the Beverly Hillbillies. Yeah, oh God, yeah. Yeah, our shit was just strapped to the outside of our vehicles, you know.

Volunteering For Katrina Relief

SPEAKER_04 56:45

And um we we resupplied N route and we didn't know if there was gonna be gas down there when we got down there. And we had all these vehicles that we needed to fuel, and I rode with Ricky Southwell, who has passed since, and there was uh two guys in the other fuel truck, and those guys were from the 182nd Artillery. And um, I believe, I don't know, it's been 20 years. So uh we're down there in 05, and I was on night shift operations, dispatching the MPs to go and break up riots and humanitarian missions and doing all the response things and around and making people helping people provide safety and law enforcement. There's a lot of looting going on. People had lost, I mean, everything, everything. Disney Plus has a special on it, and they've done documentaries about it. But if you haven't seen that level of devastation, you just words can't describe the smells. Um, it was the horrificness of dead sea life um being in there compared to the other forms of death that you experienced. And they had these riverboat casinos that were just giant hotels types of structures that had flooded in and washed ashore and destroyed Route 90. You know, the highway's been taken out, and those riverboat casinos had smashed into the hotels on the other side. I mean, we got a Ronald McDonald statue miles away from the McDonald's that it was supposed to be at, you know, and I've got pictures from sitting with that one. You know, I was wearing BDUs. I saw ACUs for the first time because um, unlike the Marines, the Army likes to change camouflages every other week. Um, I counted up, I had six different camouflages during my career. Yeah. Six different camouflages. Uh, that's a lot of wardrobe malfunctions. And if you're a part-time trooper, that's a lot of shit out of pocket. Um, but uh anyway, I had a guy put a gun to my face because he wanted more food. We're passing out food and water on the street corner because I would do daytime operations to help out. And um it was he was in a convertible, and there was a gal with him, and he put a handgun in my face, and my rifle was strapped to my back, and I was I was holding the case I wanted to say Jimmy Dean Heat meals. Um we weren't passing out on Mary's, but we were passing out Jimmy Dean Heat. Uh we're packing passing out precap package meals, and we were giving out cans of Anheuser-Busch water. I still I kept a six-pack, I still have a couple cans left, but it was a white can with blue lettering on it. The beer industry had um decided to just put water in um for because that's the it was just to give water to people.

SPEAKER_03 59:31

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 59:31

And um we're giving out water by the truckloads, and uh, so yeah, Anheuser Busch canned water, and we weren't allowed to have alcohol because we had live ammo. So I guess I had a month of sobriety. Um so but we were in Gulfport, Mississippi, staying at uh Air Force Base, but we were in tents, and Hurricane Rita came in and it destroyed our tents, fucked up my laptop, um, because I brought my civilian laptop down with me and all that. And I was making like a hundred bucks a week, but really I was paying off that debt a bit, but I was helping people. I felt good about helping them. And MSU professors were all like, nope, you're good for the semester, you know, we'll you'll make up your classes when you come back, and um, you know, do some, do a PowerPoint on uh dark side of tourism or the economic impacts of natural disasters on tourism facilities and things like that. One of my parks professors was a Korean war vet, Rick Paulson, and he had me visit his uh, we were stationed at the LSU campus um after Mississippi. We spent a couple weeks in Louisiana, and uh and I visited one of his classmates from graduate school, and he was like a department chair or dean over there. Um so it was interesting being at the LSU campus and uh having breakfast with the RTC cadets. And here I am in E4, you know, and um we could do no wrong. I mean, you they couldn't even, we had we didn't have ammo in Louisiana. Uh, but if folks knew that you were in the military, you drank for free at the bars, they were so hospitable to us. Keep in mind, this is right after 9-11, right? A couple years after 9-11, so like the support your troops stuff was super high, and we're doing humanitarian relief, and America, American people just loved us. And uh, you know, all the you know, thank you for your service, thank you for your support, right? All that, you know. Um, and then I came home from that mission. We drove back and I finished my semester, and um, you know, my unit came home, people came home differently. Uh, my unit deployed a couple of times, and my sixth year enlistment came up uh because it was 01, so here I am, 07. My sixth year was up. I was a happy-go-lucky E4. I was gonna graduate with my Parks and Rec degree, go to grad school, and they were like, Well, why don't you go to Officer Candidate school? Good old Tom McCullough.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:02

Because ROTC worked out so well.

SPEAKER_04 1:02:04

Yeah, so here's my roommate. We're you know, we lived in the same co-op for three years there. He was in a different room, and he's working as a retention sergeant, recruiting, so I don't know. He always had something going on.

OCS And Becoming An Officer

SPEAKER_04 1:02:15

Yeah, he's in E6 now, he had gone from E4 up, and um, you know, he did done customs and border stuff right after 9-11 at the Lansing Airport, you know, the confiscated people's knives. Oh, yeah. He used to be able to take a knife on a knife on the airplane, right? Right?

SPEAKER_00 1:02:30

When I and and nail clippers, yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_04 1:02:32

And um, so my hike in 02, I had brought a knife on the airplane, they confiscated it, and my gear sponsor, Glenn Vampesky, picked me up in San Diego. He gave me the Swiss Army knife off his keychain, and that's what I used, the Pacific Crest Trail, because I was testing one of his backpacks. Um, so anyway, um, but uh my old five hike, I got picked up by the mayor, and the town judge had a bed and breakfast, it was a small town. Yeah, uh, but anyway, so so here we are. My six years is up, and I'm like, guys, I did my six years, you know. I still owe money, right? You know, I haven't paid off the debt, you know. They're they're milking me 7.5% interest, and you know, E4s don't make much pay. Why would you think I'd want to go to officer candidate school? They treat you like shit. And when you graduate, you're a lieutenant, you know. Fuck those guys. I don't want to be an officer. And uh, they're like, no, we're all we're we're going to war. And I was like, well, I know we're still at war. I work in human resources. I'm aware that there's a shortage of lieutenants. And so uh, you know, they took me out for lunch. We went to Pisanos, and uh I was with the Scott Myers, he's a colonel now. Oh, yeah. He was a major at the time. He's a general now. Oh, that's right. I just him and Heather, I they just posted their picture the other day. Yeah, Scott Myers is general, the General Myers. Yes, and um, so so anyway, Scott was a major back then, and uh, I'm retired, I can call him by his first name. So, anyway, so we're sitting down, and I forget who else was with us, might have been Obi Yorby, Yordi, or Jeff, I forget, uh, or Mark Telly, I forget. I don't know, they're all colonels and generals. So, anyhow, um, we're sitting there and I was just like, what are we doing? And um, maybe Jeff Terrell, he's a general too. So uh El Pablo Estrada, he's a general. He tried to get me commissioned before through ROTC because I finished the last ROTC class, but it had been too long since my 09 or my 99 um summer camp. So in 05, 06, they couldn't commission me through ROTC, even though I completed the program.

SPEAKER_01 1:04:26

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 1:04:27

And uh so I went to OCS. And um must have been a hell of a lunch. Yeah. It was. They picked up the tab. Um and uh we might not have even been drinking during the day that day. I don't I don't remember, maybe I was. Um so 07-08, it did state OCS, class five, one. We had over a hundred people start. There was a huge push. Over a hundred folks, phase zero. I don't know how many of us actually went to the first phase, which was Minnesota. And then um Camp Ripley still, yeah. Well, it was in 07, so yeah. Yeah, okay. A lot of ticks. And then um we did the final phase out at Fort Lewis again, which I had been through before. And it was just, you know, two weeks of running missions and getting trained. And uh, so yeah, I commissioned in 08. And uh my my friend Mark Krause, he was in E7. We he carpooled with me a lot. I had one car at the time when I was married. Um, so and then I I used the career starter loan that my colonel, now General Jeff Terrell, signed for me. So you get one year grace and then 25 grand over five years at 2% interest through USAA. And that's how I use it as a down payment for my first house. So I got out of my one bedroom basement apartment that I was renting from a real estate agent who I knew through Boy Scouts here in East Lansing, Muscle Men. Dave Lederberg, great guy. And we'd gone hiking in New Mexico together at Philmont and all that. His son's one of my Eagle Scouts. But uh so anyhow, um I was able to buy my first house and get the down payment loan because I was an OCS. And that before commissioning, rather than going and becoming a personnel officer, they said you're gonna get a bonus if you go artillery. I never got the bonus. I was supposed to get the bonus anyway. I never got the $7,500 bonus. So if anybody ever offers you an incentive to do something, um, don't do something because of the financial incentive.

SPEAKER_01 1:06:37

Right.

SPEAKER_04 1:06:37

Even if it they after twenty seventy-five grand after they tax it, you're left with like four, maybe five. And I still hold a grudge on there, but I can let it go because of some stuff that's happened since then that's been good for me. Um, but I commissioned as a field artillery officer, and I spent um six months in 2009 at Fort Sill, Oklahoma. At the time, they had an additional two-month course that you had to go through, basic officer leadership course two, because they counted OCS as Bullock one or ROTC, but they had felt there, we're 10 years into the war at this point, or however many years, I don't know, it's oh nine, so eight years in. Yeah. And let center on lessons learned and whatever, they said, you know what, lieutenants need to have more of a boot camp background because you're all going to war and you need to have that kind of experience. So everybody that became a lieutenant had to go through and like basically boot camp for lieutenants. So we had E6 and E7 instructors, but they weren't drill sergeants and they weren't black hats like you have an officer candidate school. They're just regular NCOs. And it was okay, gentlemen, formations at this time. And we're doing basic training activities. And next to us is the privates in boot camp with the drill sergeants, and then there's the lieutenants like lanes. Right. And you couldn't fail. Um, you know, uh, I don't know if we had a gas chamber for that one again. I had to go through a few over my career anyway. They don't call it gas, they're supposed to call it whatever the chemical classes. Right. But um, you put a gas mask on, I don't care what they call it. It sucks. But um, and you throw grenades and do all the like live grenades, and you do all the weapons training stuff that people in boot camp have to go through. Um, and then for me, I stayed on for another four months for my regular artillery school, which although I'd done well in math, um, missiles, rockets, and cannons, and field artillery just in general, it's not easy. And it's not easy. And when you have a parks and rec degree, um, I have zero classes in math for my college degrees. And I've I've got well, three completed now, almost four college degrees, zero college math. I did calculus in high school or whatever, but anyway, uh I did well in SATs and GRE, but uh before going to war. Um but I graduated. Um, I was calling back, good old Jeff Ostoff, he's a colonel now, he's my mentor, he's a first lieutenant when I was a second lieutenant, and he was my captain when I was a platoon leader. But uh I graduated from field artillery school, and I actually made a flow chart, color my number flow chart for low angle safety T. And I think they use that in the class today. Captain Udala um might be using that, but there's 14 variables, they're called the one, four factors, and they don't do rounding, they do interpolation. It's all it's just different, right? You know, and the Marines are structured and they're organized, and they just do stuff a certain way. Most of the undergrads are Marines, which is interesting because they get a reputation for not being the best and the brightest. But I'll tell you, could not have a greater respect for the Marines that I served with. Um, not only were they amazing athletes, but they knew how to do what they were doing, they were focused. So I would do extra training with the Marines. So on Sunday, I would do the computer classes with the Marine captain. And I worked with the Greek army because they're better at the metric system, and I learned little combinations of if I take a piece of learning from here, I take a piece of learning from here. If there's extra study opportunities, because I've been feeling tests on how to retake them on Saturdays, right? So to pull my head out of my ass. Once you get behind, it's harder to get caught up.

SPEAKER_03 1:10:27

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 1:10:27

And I I created this color by number thing, and I got 93, 97 on my final exam and on my safety exam, which is like the big one. Right. You got to get over an 80 on that one. So I'm in the 90s, haven't coming from like failing. Like I was getting in the 40s or whatever. Like I wasn't like missing by one or two. These are four-hour exams. Yeah, you're bringing close. Yeah, you're bringing in like milk crates full of textbooks, and like I'm just drowning. But I cut open my books, I put it in my own three-ring binders, and I had highlighted and tabbed, and as long as it was in your own notes, it was open notes, open books. Yeah. But I'm finishing these tests in about two, two and a half hours. And they pulled me aside for cheating. And they pulled my squad leader aside as well. He had a math degree at a Marty Rock. And being caught for cheating is um, that's terminal. It's a big deal. Big deal. You got to meet the Commandant, there's colonels, general, like you're people in Michigan are being alerted because if you're on the National Guard, it's um they have to check in with your chain of command back home as well.

SPEAKER_01 1:11:33

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 1:11:34

And um, here we are, you know, you stand tall in front of the flagpole kind of thing. And they're like, just tell

Artillery School And Cheating Scare

SPEAKER_04 1:11:40

us you cheated, we'll let you take it again or something. You can get recycled, just you know, like, I mean, you can you it doesn't mean that you're a bad person. Right. And I'm like, but I didn't cheat. And they said, but you have the same exact as Marty Rock. And I'm like, yeah, and well, it's it's you know, I'm just gonna put out the Princess Pride. Inconceivable. Right, right. Inconceivable, you know, right for all these problems, all these stuff, and I'm like, right, but we use the same process. Yeah, the process works, you know, it's a flow chart, it's colored by number. You get your reds, those are your input, yellow is where you gotta do shit, and green is your outputs, right? And if you want to look at our work, that's fine, but I we just put the inputs in the places, and I broke down, we call it break it down Barney style, but we simplified it. So it leads to the math steps. It's literally just says, like if you were doing a computer, F7, right?

SPEAKER_01 1:12:38

Right.

SPEAKER_04 1:12:39

But in us, it's these manual graphic firing tables, GFTs and all that. It's literally just says flip to this page. Little note here that says turn to this thing on this firing table for that to get the number from there. And then it's the most basic of math functions there. You're either adding a small number or subtracting a small number, like for those little little portions. It's we're not doing trigonometry, we're not doing geometry, like as you might see it. You don't have to understand how it all, like the deeper maths and the meetings, you literally just have to fucking color by number. Yeah, okay. Like a third grader, no joke, could do this. And all I know is that I went through every former test, I took the practice test, I went through every homework. I locked myself in my room with a case of monsters, coffee, all that, right? And on your field problems where you get to draw the maps and do all that stuff, instead of using these templates, right? I'm using shot glasses and pint glasses because I realized when you guys are talking to us about doing the beer math, right? You know, to get it close enough, I realize I'm not the only alcoholic in this program, right? Right, right. The military is designed on drinking. So I'm, you know, so I'm using the bottom of a shot glass and the top of the shot glass to draw my radiuses and my diagrams of, oh, well, if I need a circle of a hundred meters or whatever it is, it's just quicker for me to do this. Right. And obviously, I've got my drinking glassware all around my room, so this is just quicker, right? And, you know, because we had a field problem we had to present as well as the written exam and stuff. And Adams and I were like pretty much the same. And uh, and they're like, so we both just said, no, it's our work, it's open notes, but it's our own notes. He had copied my notes in his own handwriting and he went through and he explained the stuff to me, and he was like up for honor grad. Yeah, you know, so he just figured I'd copied off of him and him cheating during the test, right? You know, like what'd you do? Swap notes in the bathroom break or something? No, you know, because no, we couldn't, you know, because there's only like one at a time for a bathroom, you know, like they're real big on that. No cell phones allowed. Um, your calculator could only have four buttons on it, you couldn't have a programmable calculator kind of thing, you know? Like a $10 kind of calculator, right? The most basic. And I wasn't even using a calculator, I'm using a pencil, right? Yeah, like pencil and blank sheets of paper, plus my notes. And that's another thing that they thought was like, you're not using a calculator, you're clearly cheating. No, I'm doing the math in my head because it's just simple numbers and I'm writing it down on my scratch papers, and that's why it's faster because I don't have to flip to the calculator and go through these other things and all that, and that's why I'm taking less than two and a half hours to do these exams. Anyway, um so we graduate because clearly we didn't cheat, right? You know, and there was people that I mentored in my unit after that, Bravo 119th out of Alma on this is this stuff, but uh, and so I got first lieutenant 18 months. Um and then I went to Kuwait uh because I had a clearance from '98 background check. When I commissioned in 08, my 10 years was due. And they said, Well, since we have to renew you for your 10 year, we're gonna upgrade you. And I said no, and they said yes. So the person that I had gone to the 303rd with, Sean Cross from 1998, uh at MSU, uh, well, he worked for Office of Personnel Management. And small world that it is, he was assigned to be my investigator to upgrade me for my TSSCI clearance. And uh there were three interviews for that. It's supposed to be just one, but there was enough nuances that he had to fact check and verify all these other jobs that I'd had. And I had a lot of part-time jobs because I was in and out of school, in and out of hiking. Am I gonna graduate? Am I gonna drop out back and forth? But I have a degree, have two degrees, right? B A B S. And uh, and I've got a commission and I'm a branch qualified field artillery officer, and I'm in graduate school in 09, right? But here we are and talking to the neighbors and all that. And the first wife says, uh, we were still married at the time. And uh, she's like, Well, your foreign trips is like, yeah, well, he's got a degree in international relations, he's got a degree in parks, recreation, and tourism, but doesn't have a passport, you know, never went to the school that has the largest study abroad program, I think, in the world. Yeah, right, yeah, and didn't do study abroad. And I was like, Well, yeah, but you need a GPA. I had brought my GPA up to a 2.2, right? I'm getting three point pluses, Shia Dean's list, yeah, right, as a park student, and I brought my GPA up to a 2.2, like double triple probation, and then I was on single probation, like every semester I had to go before, you know, the university board or my college had to say, yes, we're aware that he still has below a 2.0. Well, when you have 200 college credits, changing your average, right? You know, it takes a lot more. I could only take classes that I knew I was gonna do well in because I couldn't risk only getting a 3.0 that semester because my GPA needed to show that I'd gone up a tenth.

SPEAKER_01 1:18:09

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 1:18:10

So going from a 1.8 to a 1.9 to a 2, 2.1, and then a 2.2. It took me over two years, probably three years, to get my GPA up to a 2.2. And here I am, I'm generally speaking, doing my best, right, to get good grades. And I'm paying for it, you know.

SPEAKER_00 1:18:27

Right.

SPEAKER_04 1:18:27

And um, you know, mom and dad still helped with like dorm expense or um living expenses and stuff. Um, but I'm I'm trying to trying to pay my own way and not mooch on, I don't know, society, I suppose. I don't know. You want to do your own. But uh so we go to war, I'm in Kuwait, I get divorced for the first time. Tom Hetchler, Michigan Veterans Law, former first sergeant for my unit. Um, he represented me and I got a coffee mug like everybody else. And uh I ran a marathon in Traverse City before going to war, and I ran a marathon in Kuwait. Um, pounding sand for 26.2 miles is a really good way to get out your frustrations.

SPEAKER_01 1:19:08

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 1:19:08

Uh and then during the

Kuwait Deployment And Gate Incident

SPEAKER_04 1:19:10

divorce, I said, fuck it. I'm just gonna join the infantry. And uh I'm gonna go to Afghanistan because the 125 infantry battalion out of Michigan National Guard, they had a vacancy for assistant logistics officer, um, battalion assistant S4, and specifically for contracting. So I went through Defense Acquisition University, took a bunch of classes, all online. Um, your colonel's got to recommend you and all that. So I became a contracting officer representative. And the following year I went to Afghanistan. And they also added field ordering officer to my list. And Afghanistan was not the cakewalk that Kuwait was. So I want to back up.

SPEAKER_00 1:19:50

So you went to Kuwait, you were in Kuwait for a year then? With deployment, yeah, nine months plus or minus, yeah. And then so you came home and then For like a week. And then you deployed to Afghanistan.

SPEAKER_04 1:19:59

Yeah. Wow, boom. Yeah, I met my second wife in between. Yeah. Yeah, her dad was an HVAC guy.

SPEAKER_00 1:20:03

Um so so essentially, um I mean, Kuwait, pretty easy.

SPEAKER_04 1:20:11

I played poker with people for the World Series of Poker. Yeah. Um, we had USO tours. Yeah. The cheerleaders from the Cincinnati Bengals who were in the Iron Man 2 movie came out to us. Um, things like that.

SPEAKER_02 1:20:26

Yeah, okay.

SPEAKER_04 1:20:27

Um, I had the gateway mission, so it was our job to escort people from Kuwait City International Airport. I had full flight line access, concealed carry, wear civilian clothes mission. And uh I was a convoy platoon leader. We did several hundred thousand miles. I had three dozen troops plus a medic and a platoon sergeant. So there's 39 of us in the platoon. I was one of three platoon leaders in our company, which artillery calls battery. Most of our battalion was going in and out of Iraq. And I never went into Iraq, I just gone to the border. Um, so we had a wall of shame where people had fucked up, they got a write up, and this is your article 15. One night, I almost skipped over it. I uh Jeff Ostoff, he was my captain, he calls me up and he says, uh, hey, I gotta put on some clothes, I gotta pick you up. I'm gonna drive over. We got an incident at the gate. So we had we had an entry control point. We had two of them, but our non-tactical vehicles, mostly like Chevy Yukons or whatever. Our guys are coming back from Quate City International Airport, and this is 24-7 operations, so it's the middle of the night. And uh, we were right next to like three miles, 5k from Aliasalim Air Base, which gets attacked at the opening of a Transformers movie, and it's referenced throughout the Iron Man movies. So if you're into the Marvel or um those 82 those movies, um that's where I was. Uh Camp Virginia doesn't exist anymore, but we were right there next to Ali Hassalim. And uh there's been an issue, there's a bomb threat. And uh you gotta get in the you gotta get in my uh truck and gotta take you to the gate. And I was like, well, if there's a bomb threat, I'm not going to the gate. That's not where I go. I'm not, you know, are we under attack? No, it's uh it's not that. It's you know, the they found something and and you're it's on a vehicle with your guys, you know, people in my platoon had a a bomb threat. And uh I don't know if I put sneakers on or if I was wearing flip-flops. I know I had my army PT shorts on, physical fitness, you know, like wearing a pair of shorts. I don't, I think I put on my Army t-shirt. Probably the reflective belt, because that was the big thing. You had to wear your high visibility reflective belt. Yes. Whether you're wearing camouflage or not, you have to be highly visible. That way a vehicle doesn't back up to you on the motor pole in the dark. Um, Sergeant Major said so. Um must be true. Yeah, must be true. So anyway, and I'm the safety officer as well for the battalion. I get to give like presentations every month on don't get hurt stuff and all this safety, physical safety, all these workplace safety stuff. And uh I'm like, all right. Um, so I'm wearing probably wearing my fitness like outfit shorts and t-shirts, but nothing that says my name and rank on it, which becomes significant in a second. Now, Jeff, good old Captain Ostov, he's wearing his full duty camouflage uniform because he was getting shit done in the office, working hard, doing his commander thing. He was putting in some hours. I was probably burning movies on pirated software and possibly Skyping somebody. Okay. Not sure. I was single. Anyhow, um, needless to say, I was not in a military mind frame, but that's just me. So Jeff and I are at the gate and we meet the base commander for the first time. And he was just the same as me, so that was wonderful. Yeah, right. And I knew You can't be wrong, he can't be wrong. Right. And um, and his lieutenant was with him in uniform with his name and lieutenant rank on it. And I knew who his lieutenant was because he was the contracting guy, yeah. And he was mentoring me for my contracting courses, and I was talking about what the job would be like to be a contracting officer rep because I was going to Afghanistan the following year. So, anyhow, Jeff's talking to the lieutenant because you know they're they're twinsies, they're both wearing camouflage uniform. Hey, lieutenant, hey sir, right? They got that established. Well, there's the base commander, and he doesn't know who I am yet, and he's wearing, you know, just his army t-shirt and shorts. And I walk up to him and I say, So what do we got? Right? And he's just like, oh, you know, um, I don't know. I'm told that there's a bomb threat, and uh, there's my three guys, Molary and Curly. They're on their knees, you know, and it was Jimmy Churchill, he was a sergeant, Joey Desire, he was a specialist, and um Ethan Blummins, he was also a specialist. And uh they're like, hey man, we we thought it was a joke. We were just playing games, and uh Churchill,

Lucky Charms Prank Bomb Threat

SPEAKER_04 1:25:25

uh we called him preacher. He's like, I just I told him I didn't want any part of it. Blummins was like, I I thought they were our friends, and we were just playing a choke on the security guards, which are civilians, right? Right. And Joey Desire is just like, I I was just holding the flashlight, you know, and I'm like, what the fuck did you do? You know, like this these these guys are not terrorists, they're not like the freaking bomb. Like, we we there's not they're not they're not the guys. I'm like, these are not, these are not the druids you're looking for, okay? It's not a bomb, just show me the device, right? And the security guards, they're being very serious, right? That's their job. They got one job, don't let bombs in. Yeah, right. And they they put the mirror underneath the vehicles, they do all these security checks, just like going through, you know, a high classified thing, right? And they're like, well, it's and uh this is this is very serious. And so I'm like, well, show it to me. It's not a bomb. What do you got? Duct taped with the words eat me written on it, on an individual round bullpack of cereal. Lucky charms, which is made by General Mills. That's the bomb. They had duct tape a box of cereal and written eat me on it underneath their vehicle, and thought that the security guards would find it funny. This is the bullshit I had to put up with. Now keep in mind, I have not been known to be without pranks myself. I was a camp counselor for many years. Right. Right. And, you know, I what's the top of a flag called? The finial or whatever? Yeah, the finial. The finial. So a couple of unit guide on finials might have been souvenirs of mine. I was in Bravo. Charlie and Alpha are definitely missing a couple apiece. Sorry for Sergeant. So anyway, um, so here I got these guys, pranksters, bomb threat. Country is on high alert. People and Airfon with a big flag is they're an alert. There's a bomb at Camp Virginia. You never get alerts. Like our weapons were never put on semi. I don't recall ever putting any ammunition anywhere near my firearms whenever I went anywhere. My ammo was in its um clip, and that was like in a pocket somewhere. Shit. I kept my ammunition in my glove box sometimes when I was walking on airplanes in the airport. Like, um, anyway, um, and I was interviewing with the three star general for an A decay. Job like my career might have been going somewhere, who knows? Um, but my job for Afghanistan was set, and I'm dealing with these um these bright rocket scientists, and on our and so I said, uh, well, we haven't had a fire drill. What? We haven't had any training exercises recently. The base hasn't been shut down on alert for any drills. We've been here for quite a few months. Sure, this wasn't a training exercise. You know, the base commander's like, you know, this is my version of it, okay? And there's only a couple of us there at the time. So if you have a different version of it, feel free. Um, the captain's pissed. Um, there was no there was no joy in Mudville for him. Right. And um, because you know, he was, you know, wanted to go up in rank, and he has. And uh, it's almost like hey, sir, it's a fucking box of cereal. I don't know what's supposed to tell you. And I was like, what? I was like, that's a lucky charms, man. And uh, and uh, and he's just like, you make it go like I don't know. So we had to go before additional subsequent levels of leadership and ranks of people. So I became known as, now keep in mind, I have a degree in international relations so I could talk my way through a grizzly bear, right? Put a handgun in my face and Katrina, I'll be fine, right? So I became known as the guy that successfully, simultaneously defended three international serial killers. Nice. It gets worse, Bill. Nice, so much worse. So the guys were on the wall of shame for that incident, right? And their punishment was headcount at the dining facility. We had two parts where you'd come in and get scanned in for your meal card or whatever for your ID. And those other units on the base, instead of rotating it around, these guys were just it. And the sergeant had to walk between the two checkpoints for getting people meals. I believe each E4 got a $500 fine. The E um, oh, during office of Canada school, I finally paid off my debt for ROTC. So when I commissioned, I was making real money. So going to Afghanistan, I was making O2 real paycheck money. Plus, I was single and renting out my house back home to my um future second ex-wife. Uh so anyhow, um, so I was I was making good money and uh and I'm dealing with these serial killers. And the sergeant, I believe, got a got a thousand dollar fine. And um Blovin's made it his profile picture, and every like St. Patty's Day, he's got like the lucky from Lucky Charms t-shirt on there. Joey Desira was on TV, he was in the ads for anti-smoking commercial. Um, it's a preview for one of the new Terminator movies. He's in it. Soldier surprises his mom at the airport. Well, we sent him home early because he was a fuck up.

SPEAKER_01 1:30:52

Right.

SPEAKER_04 1:30:52

And um, so he surprised his mom at the Lansing Airport, and she's wearing a reflective vest, and he says, Mom, I'm home. And it's a big deal. He got like 40, 50 grand from Good Morning America or some bullshit for doing that. And my ego had some resentments on there because of course I found out while I was in Afghanistan the following year, and I was like, of course, the lower enlisted guy has got a you know, got off, you know, in ET Formate 5, the E5 made e6, E7. Uh Blovinch joined the Air Force, had a good career. Um, and I'm but I mean, these were great soldiers who honestly thought that they were just doing a little prank. Right. And uh it was taken very seriously and all that. Um but uh so there's there's there's the first part of my serial killer. So 2010, 11, I got divorced and I was in Kuwait and I was a convoy plateau leader. And my uh three of my soldiers planted a fake bomb, which was a box of cereal, Lucky Charms, which is made by General Mills. And I had already volunteered and I spent really 11. Um, we did National Training Center with the infantry out in Fort Irwin, California. So I ate an MRA on Thanksgiving. And then we went to Mississippi, Louisiana for pre-mobilization training where I'd been for Katrina. Um I forget all the ins and outs because everything happened, felt like everything happened fast because I was in logistics and our shit was everywhere. Because we were sending stuff overseas, but we're also getting trained in California in the desert, um, where I'd hiked across, you know. So, like, yeah, the army is sending me to places that I've been for hiking, and the army sent me to places that the army sent me before. However, Afghanistan's new, and and I knew it was gonna be I mean, this is a serious infantry unit. For perspective's sake, two of the gentlemen that were part of this battalion won the world sniper competition, beat out active duty, you know, ranger team, people from the acronym like places. Um, so like like these guys have ranger tabs on their uniforms, special forces, sap like this is this is not um hanging out with your buddies going fishing. This is these these folks are uh they already had purple hearts from their previous war experiences. Um and here's me with my parks and wreck attitude, right? And I'm writing the contracts. Anything that they bought, the water that they drank, the food that they ate, it's all paid for. You know, the maintenance on the facilities, and even though, you know, like the lumber for us to buy. I mean, you're in a third world country, you know, surrounded by mountains and countries that may or may not like us, you know, like Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was involved because our shit got hijacked on a land convoy. Three, four months into Afghanistan is when our equipment arrived, finally, I think. You know, and you're like, well, I got along this far without that duffel bag, so don't need my third set of uniforms. I've been living with two sets of uniforms for the first four months I'm in country, whatever. Right. So, anyhow, we did our pre-mobilization training in the Gulf of Mexico. My flight to Afghanistan was delayed by a week. So rather than being in Afghanistan for Christmas, I was on Bourbon Street for Christmas with um another lieutenant and then two captains. Like we did, you know, four of us rented a room, shared it, had had an enjoyable time on a four-day pass. And then we went back and waited for our flight, which was delayed a week. So we arrived right at New

Afghanistan Contracting And Integrity Fallout

SPEAKER_04 1:34:50

Year's. So if you count 2011, fine, but 2012, I was Afghanistan for the next like nine months, and did over a billion dollars of defense contracting in nine months. However, I exercised poor judgment in a small commodities purchase of around eight grand. And I was selected to be retained, but not promoted to captain. I was denied any end-of-tour ribbons. Um, I had been nominated for a bronze star and I lost it because I lied about an air conditioner. Um split units, uh, they call them Chigo was the brand. And I had said that they were two by sixes because I had money approved for it, and I lied to the leadership about that for a few days. And the E7 that I worked with turned me in because he had integrity. And uh it's interesting. Because uh that year they had started back home something called Northern Strike.

SPEAKER_01 1:35:57

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 1:36:00

And uh that was it's a big deal with Michigan National Guard because it integrates field artillery and infantry, and I just deployed the field artillery and I'm with the infantry. And there was supposed to be a big career in the future because I was making a big career move having this contracting job because over a billion dollars, it's it's a lot of responsibility for a lieutenant, and they um, you know, with great power comes, you know, great utility bills. And uh the the price was due. I had done a lot of other things. And uh this is what they they caught me on. And I I said, yep, I did it. And I wrote up an apology letter, the memorandum of I fucked up, and uh they call it memorandum for record, but you know the a three-star that I'd never met in a different region, uh, gave me a reprimand. And a general officer memorandum of reprimand, Gomar. And it's the first thing in your personnel file when anybody opens it up, it's just a giant red flag. Don't pass go, don't collect your two hundred dollars. Career killer. It's a career killer. You are meeting with a prosecutor, an attorney, and you're being tried with treason. And uh that's mentally where I was. I'm gonna get a death sentence for treason. That's not what happened, obviously. I was over-exaggerating because the shit's in my mind.

SPEAKER_01 1:37:26

Right.

SPEAKER_04 1:37:27

And um a friend of mine from Officer Candidate's school was a medical service officer, uh, Jesse Reedy, and uh he greeted me when I got off the airport because I came home early, just like the serial killers have been sent home early. Here I am coming home early. And uh he's like, uh yeah, you guys sit down with the prosecuting attorney. I'm not allowed to let you like leave. I don't know what happened, I don't know the details. And I was like, I'm losing. Um I gotta, you know, you violate an army value, you know, which is integrity, is one of them. It's a ver there's a list, you know.

SPEAKER_00 1:38:06

Loyalty, duty, respect, yeah, honor, integrity.

SPEAKER_04 1:38:11

You can learn it as leadership as an acronym or our childs. In boot camp, they taught you our childs. Yeah. And then in my leadership courses, they taught you uh loyalty, duty, respect, self-service, honor, integrity, and personal courage. Right. They put a P there to make it work. Um and integrity, yeah. You know, if you don't have integrity, it takes a lifetime to get it and a moment to lose it. Right. There's no getting it back. Right. And of course, it had to be over some fucking air conditioners. And we're in the sun, it's July, and we're in the desert, and I felt that they were needed, and I didn't want to wait the six weeks to get them shipped, and um, I was just getting shit done. None of them were for me. I I never touched any money. It's a catch purchase, but I had a pay agent. And they did a full audit investigation. Colonel Verbanick investigated me, and they were like, We didn't realize you had this much responsibilities on here. What in the hell? We have projects going on six different bases. Closing these bases, moving the shirt over here. We built a power plant, water purification unit. They're called Ropy, Reverse Osmosis Water Purification Unit. And I was working on a master's degree in sustainable communities. If I wasn't in the army, it would be Peace Corps. Never finished the master's, but I thought, you know, power and water in a third world country, I'm doing good things.

unknown 1:39:30

Right.

SPEAKER_04 1:39:30

You know, we're saving over 60 million a year on bottled water, you know, Nestle, and sorry, and we're saving over $40 million a year on gas because we're spending over $15 a gallon on gas.

SPEAKER_01 1:39:42

Right.

SPEAKER_04 1:39:42

And all these generators, you know, versus a power plant, prime, a four megawatt power plant with coming to diesel. These are big defense contracts we're working on, as well as lots of small commodities products. You know, if the guys downrange needed nuts and bolts, you know, I'd talk to the locals and say, hey, I need some nuts, nuts and bolts, right? Anything they needed, I got it. Um, and and sometimes we were buying things that wasn't what it said on the paperwork. And uh there were some things that I said no to. But generally speaking, you know, um I got it. It was my job to get shit, and I got it from wherever I got it from. And thank God I never had my fan hands physically touch any of the actual money. Because I know people field roaring officer that got foo. The foo goes to jail. I know folks that went to Leavenworth. My boss, uh, Captain Steve Dawson, he's a great guy, he's an engineer, works for um military projects. He's just like, no, man, I know folks that are higher ranking than you that are in jail for doing this stuff. They're at Fort Leavenworth. He was in Poland at the time. We was a NATO mission, we had a lot going on. Yeah. Training in the Afghan National Army, Afghan National Police, and he's going around doing all kinds of things. He's like, man, sorry that I missed this. And another one major that I was reporting to, his dad was a giant. He's like, I can't, I can't cover for you, Jim. I don't know what to tell you, but just tell the truth. You know, you lied to a sergeant, but then you lied to the executive officer, and as an extension, you lied to a battalion commander, who is the base commander, and we're all trying to help you, but you gotta, you gotta take this one, man. You know, this is gonna hurt. We'll see what we can do about your career, but you'll never have command. You know? Um at that time I had 12 years in. So I came home dishonored. I mean, I have an honorable discharge on that, on all of my DG24s. It's all honorable discharges, but you know, when your friends are getting bronze stars, you know, um, I had to return the battalion coin, you know. Which I had mailed to my father. My dad had to mail it back. Yeah, you know, they made it as painful as possible. And it was not a private deal. It

Civilian Reset And Cereal Supervisor

SPEAKER_04 1:42:05

was it wasn't public. I wasn't admonished in public. Nobody flogged me with uh, you know, any of that, but it was not a secret. Right. Um, it was because you go from being the guy that gets shit done to you're on the sidelines. And I came in on advanced party early before that, they call it Torch.

SPEAKER_01 1:42:27

Right.

SPEAKER_04 1:42:27

Like I was a freaking match on the torch with Steve Dawson, you know? And and you're one of the earliest ones to go home before the new units fully arrived. You know, your duties and responsibilities have been handed off to a colonel, you know, the deputy commanding officer, lieutenant colonel. Like, why is there a colonel in this meeting instead of the lieutenant? You know, and they're like, well, it's a colonel level responsibility. Well, why did you guys give it to a lieutenant? Because he said he could do it. Because I kept saying yes, I kept taking on more responsibilities. And had I not done that thing with those air conditioners, quite frankly, it would have been worse. I'm glad that they caught me on that as opposed to something bigger, larger. Right. Um, other things. Glad nobody was hurt. Um put the trust of the people that trusted me with their lives, you know. I regret that. So I come home and uh I got a gal that's been living in my house for a year, and we're getting together, and her dad owned an HVAC company. I knew him from Boy Scouts, he introduced me to his daughter because I got a new furnace. Well, at the house that it I kept from the first divorce, you know, first AC, whatever. But then I um I get a phone call. Oh, I had um, I skipped over. I worked in marketing for two men in a truck back in the 08 crash. Okay. I had a LinkedIn account and I had a Facebook account. Um, folks call me Mr. Facebook. I'm on it a lot. And I had set a goal to go from 150, like Malcolm Gladwell tipping point, to 500 on LinkedIn for connections. So my last three months there, I was like, I gotta get something going on, civilian world, I've got to get my civilian stuff going, gotta work on these resiliency things. And uh, I can't focus, I can't focus. And but I cleared the 500 mark on LinkedIn and I get a call one day. I mean, I'm on Massachusetts unemployment, and um I had 60 days of leave or something, I don't know. And uh I get a call from the Lucas group, it's a headhunter, and I got connected with a guy named Dan McCall who has his own headhunting group now. I talk to Dan all the time. At least once a month, I pass him a review. You got a bachelor's degree, you're recently discharged active duty combat vet. How would you like to get a career in manufacturing? Never been in a factory. Sounds like a great idea.

SPEAKER_01 1:45:05

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 1:45:06

Make me the supervisor of something I don't know. Sure. What could possibly go wrong? Have we learned nothing in Afghanistan? So uh I had over 20 job interviews inside of a month. And uh big name, Fortune 500 countrys. Uh, the day of the Connecticut School shooting, I was in Chicago at a career hiring fair. I had seven interviews that day. And General Mills was the nicest. And I made him wait six months. And that's how I became a serial supervisor, having formerly been defending serial killers. I'm now making cereal for General Mills.

SPEAKER_00 1:45:47

Lucky Charms.

SPEAKER_04 1:45:48

It wasn't Lucky Charms at that point. It was Cinnamon Toast Crunch, Reese's Puffs, Golden Grams. Yeah. But they asked me during the interview have you ever had an experience that was stressful? Well, I just spent two years in the Middle East, you know, got a gentleman by the name of Todd Bear. Um, he got all the dad jokes, don't poke the bear, right? And it was like Ron Swanson from the show Parks and Wreck, right? That kind of a guy. Got along with him real well. His son was uh a lieutenant in the Army, signal corps, I believe, whatever, or his R O T C about to become a lieutenant at the time. And I'm going and I'm interviewing him with his dad.

SPEAKER_01 1:46:21

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 1:46:22

Right? You know, factory tour walking around, and um, we should take me out for lunch, we're sitting down, you know, because it's an all-day thing. And um, and I say, well, you know, in Kuwait, I had an amazing safety record, no accidents, no mismissions, did several hundred thousand miles of convoys in the most deadly roads on the planet. But one night we did have this bomb threat, and it was really stressful because uh my gosh, you're just pulling a practical joke, you know, with a box of cereal. And um, you know, it it turned out we had to work work our way through it, be honest about it, and show integrity and and say it was just all in fun and games, and we turned it into a training experience and a safety test. And that's how I became known as the guy that defends serial killers. And obviously, good old Todd Baer, he laughed. Yeah, he's like, oh, serial killer's good. I was like, Yeah, that's about as stressful as it gets in Kuwait as a lieutenant. Your son should go to Kuwait, be a signal officer, he'll he'll he'll be great, you know? And I didn't mention shit about Afghanistan, any of the stuff that we did with the German army, the nights where it was quiet, the nights where it wasn't quiet, the shit that happened in Ali Asaleim was uh was what I stuck with, you know. Um, I never got blown up in Afghanistan, but not everybody came home. And we had some days that were red with blood. And the bases that I'd been to got attacked on days before and days after where I was there, and we had to send out, we had to hook equipment up to helicopters and send in repair supplies, speed balls, they call them. And there was there was there was some some some tough times. Um like I said, there was um some some of my colleagues um in our brother and sister infantry and artillery and cavalry battalions and our higher brigades. Um we were short-handed because it was not much in terms of space. The weather was uh, I mean, uh working in construction and combat in the mountains and the snow is tough. And uh there was no milkshake machine. Um, you know. Right. But uh, you know, I should have stayed in Kuwait. Um a lot of lessons learned. I learned how to make furniture out of plywood. Um, you know, I learned a lot about electrical. You know, you learn a lot about Ohm's law when you're living in other countries because they use different voltages and amps. Anyhow, um so I was a factory supervisor for three years. And then um we got a new plant manager, he was a marine reservist, uh, Jeff and uh Wilson. Anyhow, doing my two weeks up north, and Jeff Ostoff tells me I lost my commission, I'm not getting paid, I'm not getting made to captain. I'd been on a federal task force for a while, and then working for a different general, and I got a couple of achievement medals, a couple I don't know, I got two or three achievement medals and five commendation medals in the career. Um, but there was no getting over that reprimand. Right. So I had 15 years in. What do you do? So I said you can resign your commission, you come back in as enlisted. And here I did, I completed ROTC, I completed OCS. And I was given the opportunity to resign the commission after two combat tours and some humanitarian. Emissions. And that same day, I got a call from my plant manager that they're closing the factory. Because they can make cinnamon toast crunch in Cincinnati and they can make Reese's Puffs in Albuquerque. And they don't need an old building with a leaky roof, and they don't need union workers. Operation Catalyst. And they they eliminated a couple thousand positions of corporate as well. They had cut other factories too.

SPEAKER_02 1:50:26

Right.

SPEAKER_04 1:50:27

Operation Century and Operation Catalyst. And the entire cereal industry did it as well. It wasn't just General Mills. They didn't renew the contract with BCTGM, one of the largest unions out there. Auto industry had done it before. Housing industry had done it before. This is just part of life going through being in middle-aged, with I hadn't finished my master's degree. But I have I was a Fortune 500 supervisor. And I had had a federal career, you know. But if you don't do 20 years, there's no pension. And if they're closing your factory and you're not an engineer on the career track, you know, when they're cutting 4,000 jobs, you're one of them. You're one of them. You know? So you hang your head low and you just go in each day, wondering, like quantum leap, is it your last? Right? Right. You know? Am I getting fired today? What can they fire me for today? Right? You know, am I gonna kill that guy who's microwave and fish in the microwave? Or am I gonna put decaf in the coffee pot for the third shifters? You know, I was brewing coffee with decaf for the third shifters because I was a second shift supervisor. I did not care. You know, my careers are over. I'm depressed. I wasn't drinking at work, and I wasn't coming in drunk. But I was getting home, I was watching Netflix at midnight, I was paying the babysitter, or my wife would be there one or two weeks out of the month because she traveled for work and a stepson at the time. It was nothing. My father-in-law had a job for me working at his heating and cooling company, and I was gonna use post-9-11 GI Bill plus federal tuition assistance and go through Lansing Community College and take my father-in-law's classes. And we were gonna go work at the VFW National Home for Children and Families because they were his largest client, and his son-in-law is a veteran. And well, clearly I knew something about air conditioners, right? You know, and I knew something about boiler operations and steam heating and cooling because I was working in the food industry, right? Finding me something to do, you know, help mismanage the office or whatever. I knew some small business stuff, having done marketing and customer service for two men in a truck, you know. But I sat down with a retention sergeant and I said, what's this job? What's that job? What can I get as an E5? Where can I just sit in the corner somewhere and just be left alone and just be a pogue? I don't want to get dirt on my boots, right? I want to sip coffee, I want to be left alone somewhere. They let me keep my clearance, but I wasn't necessary because I picked a job and the Army sent me to coloring school in 2016. Billy asked before my MOS was. Well, I had been a 71 Lima converted to 42 Alpha, which is admin, and I'd been a 13 alpha, which is field artillery. Well, I took an MOS that no one's heard of, no one should know what it is, and it doesn't even exist anymore. And went to Fort George G. Meade, Maryland, summer of 16, for eight or nine weeks for the basic multimedia illustrator course. If you've seen the movie Good Morning Vietnam with Roger Robin Williams in it, um, Defense Information School, 25 Mike was the MOS. And it's all the branches. They have other names for them for the other, you know, branches. This was before um Space Force, but all the other folks were there, and since then, Space Force has been part of it. I was told this is a dead-end job. It's not going anywhere, we're going to eliminate it. You're doing manual arts with graphite pencils. You're drawing on a blank sheet of paper. Team of the Unknown Soldier. You know, art school, you might see a bowl of fruit or whatever. Right. For us, it was an ammo can and a couple grenades.

SPEAKER_03 1:54:18

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 1:54:19

And that's your assignment for the week is I'm a lefty. And you sit there and you get the smudge, you know. And I should clarify, my younger sister is an outright artist. She went to Maryland Institute College of Art. She has her own business. She's done wonderful things. And she and her husband both have their graphics design degrees. And I will be, I'll tell you, I am not an artist. I had no art background at all. But if there's one thing the military taught me is you don't need to know how to do anything for the Army to tell you that that's your job and that's what you're doing.

SPEAKER_00 1:54:50

They'll just teach you how to do it.

SPEAKER_04 1:54:51

And they will just teach you how to do what you need to know, and as long as you follow your instructions, you'll be okay. Right? And if you don't know what you're doing, just you know, ask for help. And also, um, you know, they say fake it till you make it, but in this case, it was I was at the state headquarters. Yeah. Public affairs office, funded by Cyber Command, with a Darth Vader toaster. This is, mind you, my trail name is Han Solo. I'd become a Star Wars fan.

SPEAKER_00 1:55:18

Right.

SPEAKER_04 1:55:19

And here I am, you know, working inside the Death Star. Right. And, you know, the the IT folks, right? The Geek Squad, you know, there's a little sign in front of their door that says Batcave, you know, and these E4 mafia folks, these are the guys I was playing Diablo with, you know, back when I was an E4 or doing shady shit as a lieutenant. You know, the guys I was getting shit for, the folks that processed my, you know, my fuck-ups. They were like, oh, hey, Sergeant Bennett, how's it going? You know? Welcome back. You got stripes, you know, you're an E5. And I was like, yeah, I don't know. Are E5s allowed with the E4 mafia? And they were like, blood in, blood out. Once you're family, right? You know, you'll always be family. And um, so I was welcomed back as an NCO. And I got a warning label every time I got a new lieutenant colonel or an 05 or above that hadn't understood, no, no, no, that's a former lieutenant with his boots off. Like my shoes like were on the floor, like my feet were on my desk in socks. I'm kicked back, my jacket's off, it's just a t-shirt, and I'm literally fucking around. I'm photoshopping and Facebook. And they're like, this is your actual job, bro. Right. Like, Facebook's my job. Like, you work in the public affairs office, you've got a sizable Facebook account. And now, after the factory, it just grown. I now have over 23,000 contacts on LinkedIn. I've been at the 5,000 make-believe friends list on Facebook for over a decade now. It's unreal. Um, my cell phone's approaching 10,000 contacts. Um, it's a little things like daily habits. So, in the process of losing the jobs, the factory closing, losing the commission, I wanted to kill myself. I couldn't shoot myself because I couldn't find my handgun. I bought a commemorative piece when I was with the one with the infantry. It was all customized. Um, after the first suicide attempt, I actually sold it to my boss, Steve Dawson. He bought it off of me. He knew something was going on, but he was looking for a firearm and all that. I didn't tell him about the suicide attempt. I didn't tell anybody really. I was gonna splatter my brains across a 1912 Brunswick pool table because my wife had told me, get your shit together, scaring the kid.

Suicide Attempt And AA Answering

SPEAKER_04 1:57:35

I'd act like an asshole that day. I didn't been drinking. But I saw that commercial with Joey Desire in it with the anti-smoking thing on TV. And here I am pulling weeds in my backyard, selling my house in Chicago, decluttering, selling my collectible items to pay bills. I'm on unemployment, you know, bottom of the barrel. I was shitfaced on St. Patrick's Day at home alone, you know, as a stepfather responsible for a small child. You know, taking on minor league baseball games, drinking at the game and driving home. I was a terrible person. And she put up with more than she should have. And uh it was um everything it took my father-in-law to give me another chance, but I quit drinking on my own, with my back against the wall. I had no place else to go. I went to AA. I called the suicide hotline, they didn't answer. AA answered that night. My bestie, he's really my brother now, Gary. He had a year of sobriety. I'll out him. He's retired, he's okay. He's still sober. Um so March of this year, I gave my 10-year talk at the INO Club West because I'm a lifetime member there. And I went from cannons to crayons. Missiles, rockets, and cannons as a field artillery officer, and I went to coloring school. And right after I came home from coloring school in 2016 with just a few months of sobriety, I have a sponsor in Maryland, you know. Um, we'll we'll call him Jay. And uh I have a sponsor here in Michigan. Um and I spend holidays with him and his family. We talk all the time, we see each other every week at meetings and stuff. I I chair meetings on occasion. I speak on my anniversary. Um and uh 2018 I graduated with my associate's degree because I couldn't finish I couldn't write like I used to. I can't do a lot of things like I used to. It's not getting old, it's there's head shit. I got hit in the head with one of those two by sixes, and I got a little bit of blood, it wasn't much, but they gave me a line of duty head injury in a combat zone, and that attributed to my 100% PTSD evaluation that I got three years ago. But 2016, 2018, I went to trade school and I worked at the family shop. Um, and I lived in my father-in-law's house. And uh without alcohol, though, I was just a dry drunk, I was a mean guy. People were fucking around with me, and I would take it way too seriously. I didn't have a sense of humor. People around me felt like they were walking on eggshells. And I would you'd ask to borrow my car, and I would act like I was some entitled prick, you know, even though I was living in someone's house for free.

SPEAKER_01 2:00:34

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 2:00:34

You know, and I was getting paid to work in his shop while I wasn't profitable, you know, and I was getting paid to take his classes because of the way the GI Bill works, the Federal Tuition Assistant works. I did not have the attitude of gratitude. You know? And I I they say you lost everything, but I gave everything away. Nothing was taken from me. You know. Um losing a child through the divorce, losing contact with a 12-year-old. But it's it's better for him and it's healthier for him to not be around somebody that's just quite frankly abusive. Yelling and you know, I I threw a pizza once. Like I I had a bass at house, she was put down because she got depressed. That's what I bel that's what I've been told. Um her name was Blue. You know? I'm not John Wick, nothing like that, you know. People around me gave their homes. They they they cooked meals for me, they took me into their homes, and I was not uh behaving anywhere nearly appropriately. Lying, stealing, and cheating. And thinking that things were alright. But um I was given, I guess, a fourth chance. So coming out of coloring school, and in that time, General Vadnay found out that he had a coloring guy. You know, what's this MOS? What's this 25 mic roll-up?

SPEAKER_00 2:02:13

This is 25 is IT. What's this guy doing on my MTO?

SPEAKER_04 2:02:17

Right, yeah, yeah. What's what's what's illustrator, you know? Yeah, multimedia illustrator? What the fuck is that, right? And they sat me next to Helen Miller, who is she cleared 40 years. She was a E8 master sergeant. She'd been on the Federal Task Force that I was on as a lieutenant. And um, and the public affairs officer

Cannons To Crayons In Public Affairs

SPEAKER_04 2:02:35

that I was originally with, he had been a field artillery officer with me in Afghanistan. He was the fire effects coordinator, Bill Hume's great guy. He retired as a lieutenant colonel. I think he transferred to the reserves. Great guy, Bill and Helen. And um, I mean, you know what it's like. I mean, when it's just you're calling each other by their first names informally within your work group. Right. You know, and they're like, they knew I'd fucked up. But I could sit in the corner and I can call her. The funny thing is, is you have a corner office, right, with a large view of the motor pool. Because I'm I'm photoshopping and Facebook. Nothing I'm working on is classified.

SPEAKER_01 2:03:12

Right.

SPEAKER_04 2:03:13

Right? No one's trying to hack my files. I got a Gmail account, right? On the other side of the wall is the people with the badges, there's warrant officers, there's colonels, there's the state emergency operations centers, there's there's all kinds of folks doing all kinds of ninja stuff, right? I am none of that, you know? And um, and then Vadney says, General Vadney, I call him Uncle Greg, you know, the dude's literally hugged me a half dozen times. Great guy.

SPEAKER_01 2:03:45

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 2:03:46

And um, and he's just like, hey, I want a logo. And so uh it was Colonel Don Dancer. And she Colonel Dancer says, uh, hey, uh General Vadney, what's a logo? And I was like, good for him. She's like, right, but you're the you're the guy. And there's guys that, you know, like you can design coins, you do all the graphics stuff, you know. And uh, we have an E8 master sergeant who was also, he was a first sergeant for a bit in between there, Ron Raffleck, and he's like, dude, I don't know what to tell you, man, but when I interviewed for this job, I had bought Adobe Illustrator, I read the box, I had installed it on my computer, but I didn't use it. And I was like, right, so you've got more experience. He's like, but it's your actual job title, you know. They brought me in as a full timer during that time as a GS7 or something. I don't know, it's doing there. Plus, I was helping out the family shop and going to trade school. Anyway, so 57 versions later. If you Google it, you can Google on your whatever search engine you use. Google's easy. Type in the words Michigan National Guard, go to the images tab, top left corner, you'll see it. It's round, it's red, white, and blue. It's got the Minuteman statue on it. There's a little blue oval, it says visit. Click the visit, takes you to a Wikipedia page. Click the oval again or click the logo again. It's got a black background, and below that it says, you know, Sergeant James R. Bennett. My Virin, visual information registration identification number, V-I-R-I-N, is T D 900. I have a stormtrooper named Bill.

SPEAKER_00 2:05:18

There you go.

SPEAKER_04 2:05:19

Tango Delta 900, T D 900. Why aren't you at your post? You know, why do you even know I exist? Right? When no one knows what your MOS is, nobody knows that you even exist. And Helen's cubicle has uh, or it had rainbows and unicorns, all themed out with it, right? Her tape dispenser was a unicorn farting rainbows, you know. So the tape itself was rainbows. So you had to walk past the Darth Vader toaster and go beyond the land of rainbows and unicorns to find my desk. And if I wasn't there, I was in the bat cave. And if you know, you know.

SPEAKER_01 2:05:56

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 2:05:56

And if you don't, you don't, right? But if you can find the but if you're talking to the guy that knows where the purple water fountain is, right, it starts to make sense. I was known as someone that just knows how to get shit done. And version 54 got out, and that's got dots on the side. I'm sorry, that has stars on the side. I couldn't draw a star to save my life. I'm hand. I did it in Photoshop, not Illustrator. And first sergeant, you know, Raffleck would say, Why aren't you using Illustrator? You're in Illustrator. I said, First sergeant, I had three days of training on Illustrator. I had a full week on Photoshop, the rest was manual arts, you know. So, you know, I mean, he doesn't know what he wants. One week it was purple, you know? One week it was black and white. They're like, we need a black and white version. And I drew something that looked like Sons of Anarchy, uh-huh. You know, but you can, you know, and then uh, so anyway, I registered in the heraldry office. I said, fuck it. Dot on the left, dot on the right. We'll call them pips because you have to say what every single thing stands for. Right. You know, is it two stars or is it four stars? How why are the stars? What do the stars represent? You know what? The stars represent, I don't fucking know dot dot. Performance improvement plan. I don't care, right? Dancer put everybody's name on a mug, and we all got mugs. Anyhow, so they put that logo everywhere. It's on business cards, it's on laptops, it's on the walls made out of wood blocks, it's on the center of basketball courts. They made it into four-foot diameters, but you can't scale it because it's in raster form. Uh-huh. They had to make the graphics in vector and somebody else's marketing department, somebody else had to redraw the thing that I drew 57 times because I didn't use the right software. I don't, you know, whatever. I'm an E5, I just need a 20-year letter. Leave me the hell alone. Do not give me another assignment, right? Right. So God bless America. My uh, my dead end job wasn't dead end, but my family business was. My father-in-law died two weeks before I graduated, 64 years old. Well, I did not become his business partner. I got divorced in summer of 18. I was recruited by several companies. Um, I worked in a franchise of sales, I worked for the union for a few months, stuff was not clicking. I was getting experience, but you don't learn a ton in trade school. You gotta get some field experience in there.

SPEAKER_00 2:08:12

Right.

SPEAKER_04 2:08:13

I had altercations with people at work. Um the police had gotten involved. Like, it was bad. Um, you know, when you're pouring hot coffee on someone's face at work, and he's your brother in law. Like I I blame myself for the death of my father-in-law. I mean, he was on meds, but it's still like this dude was um solid of the I mean he was literally Santa Claus, you know? Um there's it would take ten people to fill his shoes. And uh I lived at my bestie's house, Gary's, for a year. I lived at different people's houses, you know, like a year at a time. I had kept a house in the divorce, but it was a rental, and folks said don't lose the rental because you're not sure what you're gonna do for income bouncing around. I had a couple hundred grand of bad debt, a little over 200 grand in debt that I kept from the divorce. A lot of it was student loans, because when you're drinking, it doesn't matter how much college money you have. Right. Anyhow, um, and then some credit cards, and I got in a truck for two grand from my father-in-law's friend, and it was no 7F-150 that had like 50 or 60,000 miles on it. And I'd previously been driving a Honda Civic. I didn't even know a tape measure until 2018. No experience swinging a hammer. And uh, because I'd been doing management office job kind of things. So being a field technician for the union didn't work out.

SPEAKER_01 2:09:51

Right.

SPEAKER_04 2:09:51

I didn't know what I was doing. They're like, yeah, you'll figure it out. Just go take the overtime. I can't afford the overtime because it's making more money doing side work as a handyman. I had started Rise Up Restoration on paper. And then fall of 19, it was, you know, my last time getting fired. I drove to Ohio on Friday afternoon and bought a duct cleaning machine that I'd planned on buying on Saturday, but I got fired on Friday, so fuck it. I had gotten people a prepay or done something or other. So I had bought a machine for under two grand with my $2,000 pickup truck. September of 19. I did two grand of duck cleanings that weekend. I'm grateful that at the time I had a good relationship with a franchise restaurant and I did a duck cleaning there on Sunday because they were closed on Sundays. Um, and then on you can guess who it is. And then on Saturday, I had done duck cleanings for several of my army buddies. You know, a lot of my clients now are National Guard folk. Anyway, um, so here I am, it's Monday morning. And September of 19, and I'm free and clear. You know, I got some hand tools, I had some experience flipping houses for a property manager in Lansing. The guy that managed my one rental had given me a lot of opportunities, and he let me live in the flip houses and things like that. And uh, you know, because no investor really minded having overnight security. Right, you know, and um it was sober, you know, it's weird doing construction work sober as a veteran. It's weird being in the National Guard as a sober person. It's this weird thing that happens when you're sober and you're away for the weekend up north. People give you the keys to the government vehicles, yeah, and they say, Hey, go pick up the Latvians at the airport. You're part of the state's partnership program, and you're in Northern Strike. Can you do an extra two weeks? We need you at the Joint Visitors Bureau. It's like the Latvian army on a pub crawl at Mackinac Island with a warrant officer and a sergeant first class. And I wasn't drinking, you know, they're like, you get everybody back safely. I wasn't like a formal pub crawl, but you know, I mean, we're we're giving people their day off, you know, while everyone's doing field maintenance and we're giving our visitors a good time. And the folks from the various three letter agencies, I was their tour guide.

SPEAKER_02 2:11:59

Mm-hmm.

SPEAKER_04 2:12:00

And each time there, you know, like the leadership people would come and go and they'd be like, dude, you have a degree in international relations. You have a degree in parks, recreation, and tourism. You deploy with the field artillery and the infantry. I was the safety officer for the first time we did a sling load mission. So hooking cannons up to helicopters, I knew something about, right? Because I was a safety officer when we did that at Camp Crayling. And that was in the winter.

SPEAKER_01 2:12:25

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 2:12:25

Right? Extreme cold weather training. General Vadney came out with my former roommate, Tom McCullough, all that, and slapped me on the back and was like, go on, Bennett. Hooah. You know, and this was when I was also doing Federal Task Force stuff, knowing I wasn't going to get a command. They were still giving me these opportunities, right? And while I was on that federal task force the following summer, yeah, you can Google it. They dropped a cannon and I was in Indiana. Sorry, guys. You know, shit happens. There goes two million. No one was hurt. Um, it was an interesting career, I'll say. And we got a new general. General um Rogers. General Paul D. Rogers, PhD 1 each. Very different personality than General Vadnay. Great amount of respect for both of them. I have never hugged General Rogers. Um, and I recommend to everybody else stick with the salute. You know, you're outdoors. He's very approachable if you salute him at the appropriate number of paces, preferably, you know, with a colonel between you and him and all that. It's a governor-appointed thing. Um, I should clarify, my first wife babysat for the governor. Um, and General Rogers wanted a logo as well. And this Northern Strike thing was still going on. It's still going on today. We have uh partners with a half dozen countries, there's a couple dozen states that are involved. All the branches come in and they want to play the war games and do all their stuff. It's a big deal.

SPEAKER_03 2:13:52

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 2:13:53

And they branded it. Camp Grayling with the airspace, going out to Alpina, which is an Air Force base. They rebranded it all. National All Domain Warfighting Center. It's a mouthful, and depending on how who you ask, there's a hyphen between all domain or there isn't a hyphen. Um, you can look it up on your own. But I drew the logo for that. Um, I photoshopped a Russian satellite in there, you can look it up. The truth is out there. Um, the rockets have red tips on it. There's your red rocket. Some people get a different joke out of there. But when you're the coloring guy and you get a 20-year letter, you know, that one was four versions because General Rogers knew exactly what he wanted, but more importantly, we had a deadline. Yeah, the sign had already been paid for. The print shop needed the illustration prior to print, and it needed to be in vector format so you could scale it to the right size. Right. That thumbnail on Photoshop wasn't going to fly this time, you know? And um I spent six months during the pandemic um at film school. They merged the MOSs, 46 Sierra is the new MOS. So I got I got to go to Defense Information School for a second time. And then the following year I went a third time for a leadership course, and I um I got pinned as an E6. They sell it at the post exchange, the PX. You can just walk in and buy your rank, it's no big deal. So um, and don't tell first sergeant. I skipped formation and pinned myself. Um sorry. And um I think maybe uh maybe Nick, my battle buddy, pinned me. I forget. We're both E6s. It's nice when your boss is the same rank as you, and neither one of you gives a fuck. Because you both have 20-year letters. And uh, anyhow, so yeah, I went to photojournalism school. I'm a photographer, videographer. I did the logo for Michigan National Guard, I did the logo for Nadwick, and I had rise up heating and cooling, you know. I sold clean air during the pandemic. Even when I was gone in Maryland, I got my teaching credentials, I did online consulting. Um, I bought an office building on a land contract for 15 grand down. My parents had given me a gift, 15 grand. Um, and then I had another 15 grand gift, nice to have two parents. And I bought a van and I bought some upgraded duck cleaning equipment. And uh, because air quality became a big deal with the pandemic. Right. Um, as big as patriotism was on September 12th, you know. People still wear masks in different places. Um oh, I was photographing inside the National Statistics Supply before PPE was available. When the governor had to give her press release, yeah, I was taking photos for General Terrell, who was a colonel at the time. Hey, I bet I need photos. We need to send out a press release. Colonel Dancer and uh Captain Andy Leighton from the Air Force. I think he was a lieutenant then. They put out the press release with my photos. This is a photo I took with my phone, my cell phone. Yeah, but I knew where to go. I was like, oh, I can get in there. You know, if you're in the trades, you know how to get inside of anywhere. You know, just walk in with a tool, you'll own the place. Um, but uh it was some amazing assignments. I was uh wingman for an Air Force Master Sergeant, David Iacer. We filmed the warden at Jackson Prison Complex for COVID response. Um Nick and I went up to the UP and we filmed Porcupine Mountain State Park. We were doing historical work with the historical society, construction work at a park. And here I am again, parks and rec degree, right? And a construction, you know, skilled trades associate's degree, right? You know, I'm like, I got two college degrees plus like a decade of experience at this point. And the National Guard Corps of Engineers, they're doing construction work on the park as their annual training. Because General Rogers was using the troops to do real-world mission and assignments, and it was COVID-friendly stuff and social distancing, and some stuff started to make sense. And we were doing responses to there was movements for Black Lives Matter and just civil disturbance responses because people have the First Amendment, and I believe in the First Amendment, and I believe in the safe exercise of your speech. Uh post-pandemic to talk inside of

Building A Business And Giving Back

SPEAKER_04 2:18:20

the um state capitol building in Lansing. Because uh, and this is while I was living in my office down the street from the Capitol building, didn't have a hot shower in it. You know, I was gonna get around to doing that eventually. But uh I spoke out for hashtag rent is too damn high. And I said stuff like, what the fuck is PMI for primary mortgage insurance? Right. And I hadn't had a TikTok account yet. Now, mind you, robust account on Facebook, robust account on LinkedIn. I didn't, I hadn't had a TikTok account, but my friend had one and he did the hashtags for that, and we had over a million views in under 24 hours. People were messaging me that they saw it, they're like, hey man, you're you're trendy on TikTok. I was like, I don't have a TikTok account, don't, you know, was it that three-minute thing of, you know, what the fuck is PMI? Right? Like, I don't know. You know, I I've seen it. Um, I I know in three minutes I used the F word seven times. I thought they were gonna be a 15 to 30 second clip, but then again, I thought this was gonna be I I honestly thought I'd be out of here in a half an hour, and that was three hours ago.

SPEAKER_03 2:19:32

Right.

SPEAKER_04 2:19:33

But it's okay, Bill, you're listening. The um oil change can wait, whatever else I had going for today. So rise up heating and cooling, living in my office, not really making money because every time I took a job, I'd have to buy more tools and do stuff. And I don't know how to do the SBA small business loans, not dealing with computers, cash or check of time of service is greatly appreciated. How will you be paying me today? You know? Um, and the customers were my friends, you know. And if you're charging at the time, I think it was like 300 bucks, was what I was doing a duck cleaning for. Now we're at 800. But a few months ago, I spent over 30 grand on equipment. And a few months ago, a friend of mine asked if my offer still stood and if I was gonna be open to having him come work for me. And I said, you do realize, like, this is dirty jobs micro stuff. This is humble. We are in crawl spaces, we are in addicts, we're in places that folks don't quite frankly want to know anything about. You know, I've got folks that don't know how to change a filter on their furnace. A few years ago, we started doing dryer vent cleaning because customers asked if I listened to the customers, and that's the leading cause of house fires. And nobody wants to do dryer vent clean. Dryer vent cleaning is good money. You know, simple cleaning services. Go look up Cody Sanchez, all those small business stuff. Go to the School of Hard Knocks, you know, or if you can follow Clint Eastwood steps and go to Heartbreak Ridge. Um, you know, I'll finish the master's degree at some point. Um, but I learned how to do furnaces and water heaters and air conditioners, and I've got my teaching credentials, and I've got a couple guys that work for me. And I've we've got two trailers now. One's for the duck cleaning, one's for installs. There's six trucks, but we really should only have two. Yeah. You know, some of them just need to go move on to pasture. Um, the vehicles keep finding me. People keep saying, hey, I think you could use this. Uh all I want for this is, you know, this roofing friend of mine, very successful roofing company. My buddy Steve just one day said, Hey, uh, end of roofing season, I'm gonna sell a couple of trucks, but uh, this box truck, you should have it, Jimmy. I don't like people calling me Jimmy, but if your name is this gentleman's, you know, good old Steve, um, I'll let the bald man call me whatever he wants. And he's like, uh, as long as I get an envelope, you know, once you get it paid for, I'll give you the title. Insurance agent's a friend of mine, go on ahead. I'll give you this truck. It's 18,500, but I'll just take payments from you. Pay me what you can when you can.

unknown 2:22:27

Wow.

SPEAKER_00 2:22:29

Nice to have people like that around, isn't it? Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 2:22:32

My bookkeeper or somebody that I had known I knew, you know, through programs. Hey, my landlord needs 35 grand for this office building. It's on Michigan Ave. It's probably worth 70. You can do a $15,000 gift. I'll pay $600 a month. You pay her off in three years with my rent money. Give him that building. I should be homeless. During the pandemic, I was taking work that would come my way. Just working nonstop. Gotta pay the debts. And a friend of mine, a warrant officer I'd been to Afghanistan with, we weren't that close in the wars, but when you come home, it's anyway. He said, Hey, uh, would you put in a tub for me? I was like, Yeah, I teach piping at Lansing Community College. Piping, you know, I can pipe in your tub or help you out. I got a plumber buddy, Jody, I know from two men in a truck. Jody had come in and we did the cloth foot tub for me. Already had the cloth foot tub, you got it from a renovation project somewhere else. I put so I put the tub in. And a couple years later I get a message on Instagram, hey, um, you still live in your you know, yeah. Um, what do you think about a land contract on my log cabin? I had gotten 100% from the VA, which comes with a lot of benefits, one of which is no property taxes. Pure PTSD. So I've I got a house for $850 a month. You know, and I gotten vehicles with seller financing, houses, office building with seller financing. I couldn't work with the system. I, you know, couldn't get a mortgage approved. I mean, I had a 500 credit score on a good day back then. Coming out of divorce is tough, but all of that was my own doing. You know, neither of my ex-wives had any negative impacts on my finances. It was my own spending choices. You know, the first one wanted to have kids and I couldn't, or whatever. And she had kids, and I believe she's happily ever after. And the second wife wanted to have a relationship with somebody who wasn't an asshole. I mean, they're not asking for much, folks. You know, bar's pretty low. Bar was low. She wanted somewhere that she could be safe around her child, you know? And um, you know, God bless America, you know, there's been um you become what you surround yourself with. But honestly, you become your true colors come out, and when you start loving yourself and caring about yourself, maybe caring about others. Uh, this year we've donated over $20,000 to a nonprofit called the League of Enchantment. And they visit the pediatric ward at Sparrow Hospital and other hospitals. They visit the sick kids, and they dress up as um superheroes, Batman, Wonder Woman, Spider-Man. The list goes on and on and on. Um I don't know, I just write the check. Um I dress up as a Ghostbuster sometimes. Who are you gonna call? It's weird. You know, not me. The phone's on silent, so is Ryan Holmes, another Ghostbuster. Uh, my sponsor is Art Program. Um it's weird. I had to borrow money to eat at the gala dinner when the League of Enchantment had their first gala. It was like 75 bucks or something. My friends from Kiwanis chipped in and sponsored tables, and they still come this year. We had 40 people at my five tables. It's weird. Local um Tux rental place or whatever, Bariamas. They do free dry cleaning for your military uniforms if you got a dress uniform because they were founded by a World War II vet. They've been good over there. They gave me an amazing deal on a on uh a penguin suit. So I got to dress up as the Batman villain, the penguin. Uh-huh. I have a tuxedo now. It cost me like 130 or I don't know. It was wasn't all that much for a suit, but uh well, you're not sure if you can afford that pack of ramen or a gallon of gas. And the next, you know, you turn around and you just you pay off those debts. And you have this thing called an IRA, and you clear that 20-year mark and you have this pension coming, um, and that 100% award from the VA. Life-changing. You stop calling the suicide hotline, you know. I answered the phone at Alcoholics Anonymous Central Office for almost two years. It was a great way to write my fourth step, which is painful, but you gotta write it down. You gotta put pen to paper. Um, I've sponsored people over the years. Um, sometimes people reach out. I've had the same sponsor now for 10 years. One in Maryland, one in Michigan. Um, I've got a German Shepherd. Got a girlfriend. Um, you know, whatever you lose, uh it's not the book of Job. Um it's just, you know, the book of Jim. James was taken. Um you don't like Jimmy, so you don't like Jimmy, you know. Not unless you're gonna give me a truck. You can come. Right. Um, but uh, I mean, I made the payments on there, you know. Um, so yeah, rise up. We're on year over eight now. Um, I've got friends that do other businesses, well-networked. I mean, the Lansing Chamber of Commerce, the Home Builders Association. We're joining the DeWitt Chamber of Commerce now. Um, I've got Business Network International memberships in and out of those. Group called the Tuesday Titans. I've retired from them. I come in as a volunteer, what do you call it? A visitor, a guest, or they don't lock the door at seven o'clock in the morning on Tuesday as a David Chapman. So go ahead. Um, but uh there's one person per category in some of these really exclusive clubs. Yeah. And when you pick your own category, you're always in the clubs. You just have to know what categories are vacant and just say, hey, I'm willing I'm there. Put your hand up and volunteer. Just take the job that nobody wants. That's why I got that contract in gig in Afghanistan. Nobody wanted it, you know. Um, uh nobody wants to go clean dryer event. I'm the dryer vent guy, you know? Yeah. Put a sticker on the ductwork, cross off all the business information, and I just lefty chicken scratch, just text Jim, you know, 517-625. Or so I'm sorry, 517-648-2514. I should know my own phone number by now. I don't know. I have an assistant that keeps track of that shit now. Um, but uh it's just crazy. Yeah. Um, you know, you and I were at the credit union, and the folks at the credit union said, hey, you should go in and talk to this. They know who I am when I walk in at Consumers Credit Union because my checks are clear. Um, you know, um, and I have a car loan with another one. Um, it'll be paid off quickly. I'm spending $500 a week on my car loan just to get it off. Um, trying to pay off the house as well. I don't like debt. Once you have fought so hard to get debt free, even when you have low interest, you know, and my credit's in the 700s. Yeah, not perfect, nobody's perfect. I still make mistakes. I fuck up every day, you know. Um, but I went to a minor league baseball game last Friday night with my um my buddy Keith from the credit union with his son. And I didn't drink any alcohol. And um we shared, you know, they get those plastic baseball helmets, souvenirs. Yeah. That they we've got a popcorn helmet, and um I go to the I go to we call them, like they call me Grandpa Jim. And um, we got to share popcorn out of the popcorn bucket, and my friend trusts me to hang out at the kids' birthday parties, and uh um and I've got a you know, I've got a grandson. We're not related, but that's okay. You know, his birthday's in September, and we get to share birthdays, and I've got a grandma, grandma Lee. Her birthday's in September, and we can share share birthdays as well. I got a 93-year-old grandma, and I've got a eight-year-old grandson, you know. Um my dad's still proud of me, my mom's proud of me, they tell me they love me. Um, I've hiked the triple crown. I've I've done done some things, you know. I've fallen short on a lot of stuff. You know, I never made captain, I never finished my master's. Um, they say disability is is measured differently. You know, I still have ten fingers, I have ten toes. Um, I've got survivor's guilt. You know, why me? Why did I survive? You know, I don't have any resentments against those serial killers. You know, it's a funny story now, right? You know, right? I mean, everybody came out okay, you know, everyone's been promoted. Even I got promoted. You know, I got promoted from E5 to E6. Exactly. You know? Exactly. Um, you know, what's the difference between an E6 and a and a first lieutenant? You know, I mean and a second lieutenant. A second lieutenant's never been promoted. Right. You know, you're an 01, right? Right? You know? Um, and uh it it and so what if it's it's strike? I mean, just in the civilian world, you know, you go to a corporate America and you say, hey, I just left a career that I had for 26 years and I got promoted five times, and I received over two dozen awards that you can wear on your fruit salad rack on the left shoulder of your uniform. Do you mind if I sip coffee in the corner over there? And they're like, Yeah, sure, here's a pack of crayons, you know? Yeah. Um, what do you know about safety? Well, I know if you wear gloves, you're less likely to cut your hand. All right, we can get the factory workers to wear gloves, you know? All right, that's your big initiative, yeah. You know, wear gloves.

SPEAKER_00 2:33:04

Right, right. Well, and it's it sounds like throughout the whole uh everybody ended up where they were supposed to end up, right? Sometimes it's hard to get there.

SPEAKER_04 2:33:11

Yeah, you know, I mean, uh if uh I don't want to get too biblical, but if you look up wheel of apostasy in the old testament, um, a simple way of looking at it is sin, suffer, sorrow, salvation. I'm still full of sorrow, but uh there's some salvation going on in life. Yeah, and um, you know, that the sin is those are the f ups and uh the suffering. A lot of the suffering in our lives, though, is just self-inflicted. Right. You know, the army wasn't gonna give me the death

Final Lessons And Farewell

SPEAKER_04 2:33:40

penalty, you know. I overthought that. Yeah, you know, I went down the those thinking traps, right? You know, the worst I had to lose was my commission.

SPEAKER_02 2:33:51

Right.

SPEAKER_04 2:33:52

Right, which I kept for three years, you know, was I blackballed shore, right? Um, but I mean, I deserve I mean, I lied about a defense contract where money was involved. We're supposed to be setting good examples with the locals, and I'm running this corruption thing, right? I mean I was retained. I was deemed worthy of redemption, you know, Colonel Connolly, Colonel Stemmetz, Colonel Vermont, I mean, all these people, you know, like I'm calling them like the colonels, you know, and generals, as well as the captains and the majors, you know, my peers who were lieutenants with me, you know, there was a shockwave. They're like, dude, you were the Eagle Scout, right? You know, and the guy I was getting the money from and doing the draws from in the vault in Marzari Sharif, he was from Michigan State. They had to investigate an active duty officer who knew me as well because we both went to MSU. And he was like, no, that's not Jim Bennett's character. That's not the guy I know.

SPEAKER_03 2:35:08

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 2:35:08

And they're like, but but it was air conditioners, it wasn't lumber, you know, it was in English, it was also in Arabic. And the pay agent was an E8, Master Sergeant, 30-year career guy. I risked his career. He's like, Lieutenant, I'm not gonna lie. Yeah, you know, the money's what the money was for. I never, I don't get in the middle of your field ordering, but you know, we're in charge of large responsibilities and big projects, and you have to be impeccable. There's a book that's called The Four Agreements. You have to be impeccable with your word. Because without that, you just don't belong. And do I know guys that lied about bigger things? Sure. You know, I like to think of them as recruiters.

SPEAKER_00 2:35:55

Um, you know, at the end of the day, they're a lot, their lies don't make your lie okay.

SPEAKER_04 2:35:59

Right. Their lies don't make my lie okay, you know, and I say that as veteran sarcasm, okay? But you know what I mean.

SPEAKER_00 2:36:05

But like nobody I was a recruiter at one time, so I totally get what you're saying.

SPEAKER_04 2:36:08

Yeah, and I've recruited people. I was a Boy Scout mentor, Eagle Scout mentor, you know, and plenty of my troops and folks that I know in the community who joined the military. And there's lots of great wonderful careers in the military. You know, I've worn many right, many left shoulder patches. I can wear two different right shoulder patches. Um, you know, I don't even know what I did in Kyrgyzstan, you know, or Romania, or various other places that I may or may not have been for a few days at a time, you know, and a lot of my assignments I was in uniform, and a lot of my assignments I wasn't in uniform, you know. What is the truth? What is the ethical, you know? Um, but there's getting shit that done that needs to get done, and there's using proper channels. And quite frankly, they're saying no. You know, folks of us that are Gen X remember the 1980s movies. Um, Back to the Future series, Michael J. Fox, big star. No, Biff. You know, he goes to the past, he goes to the present, and he comes, he goes to the future, and he comes back to the present again. And all he learns about the whole ordeal through those three milits through those three movies is to say no. You know, in a time where Nancy Reagan was telling us, just say no, just say no. You can be so much more productive in life through your careers, through your relationships, just saying no to people. They'll respect you in the morning. They want you to do something and it's not just no. Yeah, no, it's a complete sentence. It translates to Spanish very well. No, see, right? No. French, Spanish, French, Spanish. It goes all the whole people in all kinds of languages. If you just, you know, no. Um, now you can have a justification, and I'm not saying don't shirk at your duties, absolutely do your duties. Um, but you can only fit five pounds of shit in a five-pound sack.

SPEAKER_01 2:37:53

Right.

SPEAKER_04 2:37:53

They'll say we got to get all this stuff done. Well, what are your priorities? What's the priorities of work? You know, if at the end of the day, what's our daily objective setting? I learned from also from a Spartan at uh General Mills, Softkrua. Daily direction setting, your first hour on the floor, walk through the factory, make sure everybody's working safely, and just align on the goals for today. Let's have a safe day with this amount of output. Can we do that? And check up on them, you know, as needed. Five, six hours later, talk about overtime. Hour before the workload is done, verify that everything is gonna get done and it's supposed to be. Get your shift notes ready and be ready for the third shifters to come in, right? And uh did we accomplish today? After action review, right? Cool. We got five pounds of work done in a five-pound sack. Right. Eight hours of work, eight-hour shift. Cool. Don't tell your boss you can get 16 hours worth of work done in an eight-hour period. They're gonna expect that. Well, that no, they're gonna have to cut some corners. And you'll have to cut some corners. Are you cutting safety? You know, are you cutting food safety? Right. Right? Are there rat hairs or metal in the food? No, no, because we're not gonna go against the food safety monetization monetization act, you know. And my I took a guy to the hospital once because he cut off the tip of his finger. You know, where's your gloves? Shut up and take me to the hospital. Okay. You know, we reduced accidents, we reduced injuries.

SPEAKER_03 2:39:20

Right.

SPEAKER_04 2:39:21

You know, they and and and that was not cutting corners on that. That was just a workplace just accident employee trying to do what he thought was right and the checks cross-cutter for making checks serial. But but at the end of the day, um, we are a result of our decisions and our actions.

SPEAKER_00 2:39:43

Well, and that uh that's kind of a good segue. I think you answered the the the next question I was going to ask. Um, you know we've been talking for, uh I'm looking at this, we've been talking for almost three hours. And uh uh as we kind of wind down our conversation, yeah, um, I always ask, what message would you leave with people? Like if someone's listening to this 100 years from now, uh, over the last three hours, we've learned a lot of lessons. Someone's listening to this a hundred years from now, they're in the wrong place. Oh, I don't think so. All right. Well, we listen to something a hundred years ago, so that's the purpose of what we do, right? Um so you know, thinking it in those terms, there's been a lot of lessons in your life. Yeah, a lot of things that you learned, either good or bad, or a little bit of both. Um, what message would you leave with people?

SPEAKER_04 2:40:29

You know, Grandpa's Jim, Grandpa Jim's message for the Veterans Archives is quite frankly, take the assignment and make it yours. There is no such thing as a dead-end job. You can make whatever career you want to make of yourself. Not all paths are straightforward, you know. You have to hike your own hike. But hold your head up high. When you fuck up, own it. When wrong, promptly admit it. You know, these are not my phrases, these are phrases I've learned from reading books and listening to other folks. But you know, at at the end of the day, take more pictures. You know, re remember these experiences. You know, you you smell the flowers. Because you're gonna have the days where you're gonna be smelling the most atrocious things, you know. I mean, on those road trips back from Katain with my dad, he rolled the windows down because of the stench. Um, I wrote a parody to the song The Gambler that Kenny Rogers wrote called The Hiker. And uh my partner Jeff's deathbed. Um I sang it to him one last time, and in his depth on the hospice, he still yelled, make him stop, he can't sing. You know, those were his final words to me. And uh I uh I like to believe that he's in heaven and he's looking down, and each time I broke my hiking poles over my course of my hikes, he would mail his out to me. And uh I'd take photos of this these poles in front of outhouses and Porter John's and just things of, you know, you can, you know, if you can I can shit post with the best of them, right? Right. And but but that's you have to have humor and uniform. You know, people have seen the show Mash in the movie Suicide as Painless as the theme song, you know, meatball surgery as Hawkeye calls it. And it's it's making the best of the bad situations, but don't make the situations bad. You know? In Katrina, I learned the difference between heaven and hell. Imagine a long row of folks, and uh there's two sides of the table, and you can't you can't reach the people across from you, but there's a plate of food in front of you, and you're starving, but there's a spoon strapped in your hand, and you can't feed yourself because it's just a long spoon, and you can't you can't even lefty it in, you know. And then and it's hell, you just sit there starving. There's food in front of you, but you can't figure out a way to get to it. In heaven, it's the same exact thing. Heaven is the same as hell, it's just the people treat each other different. In heaven, you spoon feed the person across the table from you, you know, and you can go a little bit to the left, you go a little bit to the right, you know, and you can serve, you know, a couple people in heaven, but in hell you're just sitting there bitching and not helping anybody else. And if you want to live a good life, just help other people and you become what you surround yourself with. And if you surround yourself with people that you've helped, those people are gonna help you back. It's not quid pro quo, it's just building a sustainable community, and there is no peace. Peace is not the absence of war. We'll never be in a world without war. There will always be war. But we can have heaven here just by helping people. That's it. All right.

SPEAKER_00 2:44:32

Well, thanks for spending this time with me today. I really appreciate it, and uh really appreciate your story, Jim. Thanks, Bill.