Bro, that is so fucking [amazing/awesome/ridiculous/cool]. You know what you absolutely HAVE to do? [INSERT grotesque kill or necrophilia sequence]. Dude, can I be in your movie? Just like as an extra or whatever. You don’t have to pay me. I’ll bring my [INSERT frighteningly large private weapons cache].
Okay, so this was definitely the craziest idea we’d ever had, but I was at least convinced now that it wasn’t the stupidest. If we built it, they would come. Also, they would watch it.
Just as quickly as the idea came together, so did everything else. We partnered with another military-themed clothing company, Ranger Up, to produce the film and create the Indiegogo campaign. We hired Ross Patterson as writer-director and worked with him on the script, kicking around the most offensive jokes possible and the most elaborate kill sequences we knew we could pull off, oftentimes over Messenger from thousands of miles away while I was deployed. That insane chat thread, which still exists archived somewhere, belongs in the Library of Congress, etched into the wall of some kind of monument, or appended to a petition at The Hague. I’m still not sure which.
I will spare you the details—no one wants to read about how a movie happens, that’s fucking boring—but the movie, called Range 15 after the names of the two companies, was very successful as far as self-financed independent films go. It was one of the largest Indiegogo campaigns of all time. It rose to #1 and #2, respectively, on the Amazon and iTunes charts for all movies the week of its release. It featured William Shatner, Sean Astin, Keith David, Danny Trejo, Marcus Luttrell, Randy Couture, and had the most decorated military cast to ever appear in a movie. Thanks, Clint, Dakota, and Leroy….I still owe you some beers! It also spawned a full AFE (Armed Forces Entertainment) tour of American military installations in the summer of 2016 that, in a very real way, changed my life because despite the outward success of Article 15 and Leadslingers and Drinkin’ Bros and now the movie, internally things weren’t great.
* * *
—
Here’s the thing about scaling a business: You have to hire people you can trust, or at least learn to trust, because they are going to be the ones you delegate entire segments of the business to handle. Having spent virtually my entire adult life in the military, the only people I really trusted were other people from the military. We look after our own. Whatever objective is placed in front of us, our goal is to conquer it. Together. Whoever Jarred and I were going to partner up with in those early days, I knew I wanted them to have served. I didn’t care which branch, I just knew that I needed them to share our beliefs about service, sacrifice, and brotherhood. I didn’t need them to have fought next to me in the trenches or anything like that, but they sure as shit better know what it’s like to sleep in a hole or sit down in freezing swamp water at 0400.
I knew what this kind of veteran looked like when I saw them—I worked and lived with hundreds of them—but I had no idea where to find them in the civilian world, mostly because I was still working as a contractor as we launched the business, which meant that I was out of the country for months at a time. Fortunately we had Jarred, who pretty much knew everyone. Still does. I remember one time we randomly came up with a skit and needed girls for a last-minute shoot, so Jarred walked into a Mexican restaurant at 1 P.M. on a Tuesday and pulled out two waitresses who were in the middle of working the lunch shift to come out to his house and wear bikinis in a video. For free. Every guy has that friend or relative in his life who has the stones to do shit like this. Jarred was mine.
He knew a former Air Force guy who had become a graphic designer, and he hired him to make us a logo. He found another veteran who traded us three months of accounting work for an AR-15 with full mods, because freedom. He hired his old Air Force boss to run our website. We hired a close friend and former Ranger, Vincent Vargas, to assist in all things marketing. There were probably a hundred other things like that he pulled off that I didn’t even know about while I went back and forth between El Paso and El Sandbox. I’m glad he did them, too, because almost without even realizing it, we stumbled ass-backward into a veteran-owned, veteran-run, veteran-supported business model.
This arrangement worked just fine for the first few years. Videos got made. T-shirts got shipped. Whiskey got drunk. Podcasts got recorded. But as our successes became more self-perpetuating—when we didn’t have to hustle quite as hard to sell a thousand of the newest T-shirt as we had for the T-shirt before, or the T-shirt before that—I noticed that certain members of the team weren’t carrying their weight. The little things were getting missed. Things that make a business more efficient and therefore more profitable. Things that, in the military, can be the difference between living and dying.
What made matters worse, because I was deployed constantly and I was out of the country more than half the time as a result, there were people on the team who thought that either I didn’t care as much as they did or that I was doing less work than them. At best, especially as the company really started to grow, I was simply out of sight, out of mind. At worst, I was just the social media monkey out in front of the business, not one of the integral players behind the scenes also helping make the business go. I could handle the ego hit of that kind of whispery shit talk; it was when it was combined with a hypocritical lack of effort that I got pissed.
Things on that front really started coming into focus once I quit contracting in May 2015 and the movie started to heat up. I was back stateside now on a permanent basis. I was there, in the flesh, every day, participating in board meetings and brainstorming sessions, leading writing sessions on the movie with Ross, doing conference calls with the Ranger Up guys, filming with Jarred and developing our brand, both for the company and for the movie’s Indiegogo page. All those naysaying shit talkers got a good long look at just how much work I did and how much energy I put into our business. And I, in contrast, got a courtside seat for their abject fuckery.
Still, I gave them all the benefit of the doubt and put my concerns on the back burner, because in the month between when I quit contracting and our Indiegogo campaign closed, we raised nearly $1.5 million. That was real fucking money, and we had to deliver. This shit had just gotten serious, and it demanded our best effort and complete focus. We spent the entire summer writing and casting and scouting locations, all on top of our normal business workload.
In October, we shot for an insanely hectic two weeks outside Los Angeles. The following June the movie exploded on its release, and shortly thereafter I found myself overseas with Jarred showing it to thousands of American servicemen and women.
The tour was one of the most humbling experiences of my life. Wherever we went, hundreds and sometimes thousands of soldiers lined up to come in and watch our movie, then afterward lined up all over again to say hi, take pictures, and share a moment. It had barely been a year since I’d been more or less where they were—deployed, armed, battle ready, surrounded by brothers and sisters. Now I was standing there in shorts and a T-shirt and flip-flops, selfishly worried about the loyalty of some of my own team back home, but also just as ready to shoot the shit with these guys as I was ready to go out and shoot the shit out of bad guys.