A veteran’s origin story rarely starts where you expect. Ours opens with Gomer Pyle, a folded flag at a funeral, and a seventeen-year-old who thought honor was simple—until basic training taught him what that flag really costs. From there, we ride with a retired Black first sergeant through three decades of infantry life, where discipline arrives early, identity gets tested often, and promotions can hinge on more than performance.

We dig into the questions many whisper but few put on tape: What happens when bias shadows your career? How do you counsel a young person weighing service against the claim that the military is a “white man’s Army”? He shares a raw story from Korea about a promotion penciled over for someone who’d already left, then contrasts that with a counterexample from our host—two truths coexisting inside one institution. The tension sets the stage for a wider look at race, merit, and the uneven progress from the Vietnam era to now.

Faith threads through the conversation with real vulnerability. Dragged to church as a boy, he found his way back as a soldier in Korea—after twice failing to walk through the door. That return sparked a habit of reading, testing, and refusing easy answers. We wrestle with a big claim—“Christianity is a white man’s religion”—by separating origins from empires, belief from weaponization, and spirituality from labels. He argues for character and conscience over tribe, and for reading widely so your convictions grow roots instead of slogans.

We close on the government shutdown with a ground-level view: TSA and air traffic controllers working without pay, military towns bracing, safety margins thinning, and leaders insulated from the fallout. It’s not politics for sport when your mortgage, medical care, and flight paths depend on it. Along the way you’ll hear humor, candor, and a hard-won takeaway: know who you are in and out of uniform, question what doesn’t add up, and keep learning long after you hang up the boots.

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