It was a complete mindfuck. There were days when I experienced a wider range of emotions than a bipolar Bachelor contestant. I was experiencing pride and envy and sorrow and excitement and nostalgia and hopefulness and a whole host of other feelings that are traditionally prohibited by either the man code or the Army Field Manual.
On one of our last nights of the tour, we were in Iraq doing a screening and a meet-and-greet at a small forward operating base. When the event was over, we got ferried back to the Green Zone in Baghdad in the back of a Black Hawk helicopter. It was late. The other guys in our group had quickly fallen asleep, and I found myself sitting at the edge of the open door staring out into the night as we raced a couple hundred feet over the hot desert of Iraq. A flood of emotion washed over me. I had been over these very same sands with Brehm and Barraza years earlier. I was sitting right where Barraza was when he too stared out into the Iraqi night while his team slept and prepped on the way to the target where he and Brehm would make the ultimate sacrifice.
Somewhere out beyond my field of vision, their legacy mixed with the sands we now flew over. They became part of the history of this place, just like the lessons they taught me as a private and an idiot kid became part of my character as the man only they had known, for certain, I was capable of growing into.
Their example relit a fire inside me in that moment, one that I knew I would need to use as both fuel and as a guiding light in dealing with shit back home. Shit that had to change. Because I wasn’t a warfighter anymore. I wasn’t just a veteran who happened to have a business. I was a leader in the business. I was an entrepreneur. And I had to start acting like it.
Months later, we were in Colorado for the taping of the one-hundredth episode of Drinkin’ Bros, hanging out in the hotel suite where in a few hours two perfect strangers would bang in front of us (for the best podcast ever), and I officially reached my limits. Actually, I had reached my limits much earlier than that, but I needed this time to come to some important realizations before I could have the “Come to Jesus” talk I was prepared to give right then.
As the co-founder of veteran-owned, veteran-run businesses, I didn’t want to accept that some of the people we had hired or partnered with couldn’t cut it. That they weren’t up to the challenges of entrepreneurship. Or worse, that they weren’t upstanding partners. My denial was as much about my own judgment as it was about this romantic ideal of veterans that I’d allowed myself to get swept up in. What I realized was that, at least when it came to the guys who weren’t pulling their weight or were talking shit, I had fetishized their veteran standing just like all those TV and movie producers who turned their veteran characters into puddles of PTSD. I had painted a picture of them as faultless heroes who could push further, work longer, and go harder than anyone else.
That was a mistake. Brehm and Barraza were not demigods. They were men. Men of uncommon courage and unimpeachable valor, but still just men. It was a disservice to them and the entire veteran community to paint their accomplishments as the product of something other than their own hard work and sacrifice. Something that anyone, if they set their mind to it, can achieve. Because the whole point of what we were trying to do, from the very beginning with our videos, was to show the world that veterans, at their core, are just people. They did not lack humanity because they chose to fight. They did not lose their humanity as a result of war. Nor did they turn into idols of worship. Just as civilians can be amazing or they can be assholes, so too can veterans. Their military service may have been the best experience of their lives, but it didn’t redefine who they were in the fucking animal kingdom.
The veterans I was working with were still human beings, and if they stood any chance of getting back to normal life, like we said they could (and should), then I needed to start treating the veterans closest to me—my partners, my employees—the same way. The kid gloves had to come off. The standards of private-sector business needed to be applied. Everyone should get the same amount of rope. You could use it to climb up to the top of our growing organization, to swing to another opportunity nearby, or to hang yourself.
That process started in Colorado in the late fall of 2016. I stepped up to take the reins that I felt belonged to me and willingly assumed all the responsibilities that came with it. I challenged the others in the room to step up and do the same thing. Some did and some did not. Those who did strapped into a star-spangled rocket ship of entrepreneurial success. Those who didn’t, well, that was their choice. You’re allowed to have those in the civilian world—choices, I mean—and I had to be okay with theirs being different than mine.
No hard feelings, just hard goodbyes.
Chapter 18
By Veterans, For Veterans
It’s a funny thing, business. If you look at the history of any successful company that did well in its early days but then one year later grew like a weed and took over the market share, the people who were there at the beginning will always point to some singular decision to explain the explosive growth. Sometimes it’s diversifying product offerings, sometimes it’s changing the branding or the messaging, sometimes it’s pivoting the entire business, sometimes it’s getting rid of one toxic person, and sometimes it’s adding one amazing person. Even if the reality of what had changed was more complicated and multifaceted, people want to zero in on that one thing, almost like a creation myth.
If you ask me, meeting Evan Hafer is what changed the trajectory of our business and, really, the rest of my life.
Back in the second half of 2014, before the movie or the podcast or any of the cracks in the company had started to appear, I was over in Afghanistan on another contracting cycle when I began to get reports from friends back home that someone pretty high up in the ██████████████████████████ was asking around about me. It wasn’t a casual ask, which happens all the time; to my buddies, this seemed like some kind of systematic inquiry. It was a little unsettling, because I couldn’t tell if I was being investigated or being vetted for ███████████████, and I didn’t have enough juice inside ███████ to chase it down and find out one way or the other.
I did my best to put it out of my mind and focus on my job, and eventually the rumor mill stopped, but still it nagged at me until one day Jarred emailed and said that a former Green Beret named Evan Hafer had reached out to us through the Article 15 Facebook page about a potential business opportunity. Evan, like me, had been contracting with ███████ for a while and was living in Salt Lake City when he wasn’t in ████████ running the training ██████████████████████████.
This was the fucker who had been asking after me.
Evan had a small coffee company on the side, where he’d been roasting beans for nearly a decade. He’d seen our videos, and he liked what we were doing with our apparel company, and he thought with the Christmas season coming up, maybe there was a way we could do some kind of pro-veteran, cross-promotional thing that would be fun and profitable for us and give his operation a lift in exposure.