Every Marine defends their boot camp. Randall Parkes is one of the few alive who saw both sides of it, San Diego recruit, three years as a Parris Island drill instructor, then back to MCRD San Diego as a First Sergeant. Ronnie asks the question every Marine argues about, and for once the answer comes with full context.

And that's just the warm-up. Twenty years from a founding MARSOC Raider: walking into the monitor's office to dodge Albuquerque and walking out with orders to a unit he'd never heard of, boot camp on the morning of September 11th, a drill instructor story he's never told on any show, and the phone call from his old interpreter as Kabul fell, eight months of paperwork going nowhere, and the Bro-Call that finished the job in days. Plus turning down Sergeant Major, EMDR at the VA, and the benefits playbook he wants every Marine to run before they get out.

This episode is sponsored by Bulkhead Energy — www.bulkheadenergy.com

CHAPTERS

0:00 — Cold Open

2:46 — Welcome to Vegas Veteran Voices

6:50 — A Funeral, Dress Blues, and a Navy Dad

8:38 — The $10,000 Offer vs. the Eagle, Globe, and Anchor

10:16 — Security Forces, Bangor, and Coming Home Pale

12:03 — Accidental Orders to MARSOC

15:56 — Boot Camp on September 11th

19:47 — Four Combat Deployments

22:25 — Kandahar and the Gunny

27:11 — Becoming a Drill Instructor

31:23 — The World's Smallest Drill Instructor

35:37 — San Diego vs. Parris Island: The Verdict

37:44 — Turning Down Sergeant Major

42:09 — The Kabul Rescue

50:21 — Using Your Benefits: GI Bill, USC, and the VA Loan

59:45 — EMDR and Mental Health at the VA

1:05:04 — Wrap-Up

1:05:38 — Outtake: Full Send

If you're a veteran in crisis or having thoughts of suicide, call 988 and press 1, or text 838255. The Veterans Crisis Line is free and confidential, 24/7.

Vegas Veteran Voices is a Las Vegas–based 501(c)(3) nonprofit media organization telling veteran stories with the production they deserve. New episodes every Friday.

#MarineCorps #ParrisIsland #Veterans

Radio Battalion is chock full of nerds. Edward Haines would know. He led them.

He signed an infantry contract in 1995. Somewhere in boot camp the Marine Corps pulled him out of his platoon, sat him in a back room, and had him do things with language and sound that nobody explained. He walked out of there a signals intelligence Marine and spent the next twenty years in rooms most people will never hear about.

Radio Recon selection on Friday the 13th, 1996. Reconnaissance course. Airborne. SERE. Three MEUs back to back out of First Radio Battalion in Hawaii, learning to swim in cammies with a kettlebell in his hands. During the invasion of Iraq he was pushed out forward of the infantry, because that is what recon means when it goes in front of your billet. Later, Fort Meade and the National Security Operations Center. Fifty-some Marines under him at one point. Two soldiers at another. Retired a Master Sergeant in 2015.

Ten years out, there are still parts he will not get into.

The men he led were not what you would picture. MIT dropouts who ran out of tuition money. Cal Berkeley guys. Linguists with top secret clearances at nineteen. All of them, by the needs of the Marine Corps, still had to sweep the parking lot and cut the bushes. Almost all of them understood that. One of them did not, and took his objection further than anyone at that battalion thought a person could take it.

By his last deployment to Afghanistan, Ed was I MEF, headquarters, behind the wire and full admin by his own description. He and some others ran CrossFit on base. A couple of the local Afghan linguists trained with them.

Then Kabul fell.

He got involved with some folks. He gave them names. Some of his linguists got out. He will tell you it is still twisted in his mind, because he knows they could not get everybody, and he knows there are people still over there who are afraid, and there is nothing he can do about it. That one keeps him up.

Also in this one: the MEU that flew its helicopters home and left his team stranded in the hills at Camp Pendleton, and how a payphone, a shopette, and a case of Natty Light got them back. The machine gunners who wore plastic vampire teeth on patrol in Iraq, in front of kids who had not seen an American since the eighties. Morse code at Fort Huachuca until the whole schoolhouse started clicking at each other in the chow line.

Today Ed is a licensed athletic trainer at Coronado High School in Henderson. He tapes ankles for kids who were not born when he first deployed. He will tell you he was not much of an athlete himself, that he made the football team rather than played on it, and not to go looking through the old papers for his name. Then he will tell those kids that not being the star does not mean your life stops here.

Twenty years of listening to people who did not know he was there. He is still not looking to be seen.

Stories Over Stigma.

Guest: Edward Haines, USMC (Ret.), Master Sergeant, 20 years, SIGINT / 2600

Host: Ron "Ronnie" Long, USMC, OIF

---

0:00 Chock full of nerds

1:17 Welcome back to Triple V

1:26 Growing up in Las Vegas

5:38 GI Joe, dad, and the recruiter's phone call

7:00 Why the military before college

8:39 Standards, and who can hold them

10:49 The special recruiter nobody tells you about

14:19 Morse code at Fort Huachuca

16:29 First Radio Battalion, Hawaii

19:56 Selection on Friday the 13th

20:48 Three MEUs back to back

24:44 The MEU left us in the hills

28:15 Kuwait, Camp Commando, and over the border

29:59 What Radio Recon actually does

32:39 Vampire teeth on patrol

33:58 Break

34:00 Comms as an E-3 with nobody above or below

35:42 Delegation, burnout, and learning to let go

40:30 Why Ronnie does this

41:47 Welcome back

42:13 Too good for yard work

51:22 The fall of Kabul and the names he passed

56:32 What it costs, and who chooses to stay

59:36 Found and lost over there

1:01:21 Out in 2015, and the CrossFit gym that never happened

1:03:29 Finding athletic training

1:06:35 Working with teenagers who heal in front of you

1:08:45 Mentoring kids toward the military

1:11:18 The weekend brief

1:12:33 Outro

Bruce Cardenas grew up in a New Jersey steel mill town of 1,200 people. He wanted one thing: a badge. The police chief looked at him and said "you're young, dumb and immature." Then he told him exactly where to go instead. The Marine Corps.

What happened after that doesn't make sense on paper.

LAPD, January 1988, right before the most chaotic decade in the city's history. The riots. Rodney King. The earthquake. Every single day of the OJ trial, standing at the courthouse. He was involved in all of them, and what he says about the officers he knew will stop you cold.

Then he walked away from full-time patrol and everything changed again. A gym conversation with a woman making protein bars in her kitchen turned into Quest Nutrition. Celebrity protection turned into a multi-million dollar company. Mariah Carey. Ricky Martin. J-Lo.

Today he's with Legendary Foods, a snack company spending $20 million a year of its own money on cancer and heart disease research. He's a patient in one of the studies. He'll tell you why.

And he's still a cop. Seven dollars a month.

This episode is about what happens when somebody tells you no and what it costs to prove them right about where to go instead.

️ Vegas Veteran Voices

Stories Over Stigma

Anyone in America can open a martial arts school today. No license. No background check. No training. Nothing. Rob Ingram has spent 13 years proving why that's a problem.

He was born with a cleft lip, got jumped outside gym class at 11, and walked into his first dojo on his 12th birthday, because his mom had already signed the contract. Twenty-nine years later he's the industry's watchdog: McDojoLife, calling out fakes, frauds, and cults in a 100% unregulated industry. When he exposed a gym owner who knowingly kept a sex offender teaching kids' classes, the owner sued him. Rob won. It still cost him $100,000, and the rematch is going in the documentary, executive produced by Jocko Willink.

Then Ronnie brings it home: purpose, brotherhood, hierarchy, the three things that make a dojo feel like family are exactly what cults sell veterans after the uniform comes off. Do your research. Check on your people.

Subject Matter Experts is where Vegas Veteran Voices hands the mic to advocates who never wore the uniform but live by what it teaches, discipline, accountability, and protecting the people next to you. Some fights don't require a DD-214.

Tarek "Joey Nobody" Kadourah came to the U.S. as a Palestinian Muslim immigrant with no country to call his own, and America was the only one that took his family in. So he tried to give back the only way he knew how: by serving. What followed was one of the wildest careers you'll hear on a veteran podcast, Army interpreter, Contracting for : overseas intel work, a dark-web task force hunting ISIS recruiters, U.S. Marshals fugitive transport, DHS intelligence, and finally the counter-child-trafficking work he now calls his life's calling.

In this Fourth of July weekend conversation with Marine combat veteran and host Ronnie Long, Joey opens up about being bullied and called a terrorist in the barracks, getting pushed out of the Army, landing on an ISIS kill list, what ICE work actually looks like as a Contractor versus the headlines, and the toll all of it takes. It's a raw, funny, and deeply human episode about identity, brotherhood across two very different worlds, mental health, and why, after everything, Joey still calls this the greatest country on earth.

Stories over Stigma. New episodes from Vegas Veteran Voices // a veteran-led media nonprofit telling the stories behind the service.

️ ABOUT THE GUEST

Tarek "Joey Nobody" Kadourah // Palestinian-American, former Army linguist, overseas contractor, and counter-human-trafficking operator.

Follow Joey: @joey.nobody

ABOUT VEGAS VETERAN VOICES

Vegas Veteran Voices is a Las Vegas–based, veteran-led 501(c)(3) media nonprofit sharing the real stories of those who served. Hosted by Ronnie Long, USMC combat veteran.

If you or someone you know is a veteran in crisis, dial 988 then press 1, or text 838255 for the Veterans Crisis Line.

Her Mom Died of Cancer When She Was 5. She Spent 13 Years Making Sure It Didn't Destroy Other Families.

She grew up on 82 square miles of ocean in St. Croix, U.S. Virgin Islands. Her mom was 38 years young when the diagnosis came. Anisa was five. Her youngest sister was one. Her dad raised four girls and one boy alone.

Nobody showed up for their family.

Nobody paid the rent. Nobody filled the fridge. Nobody walked through the door and said — we've got you while you fight this.

She never forgot that.

She shipped off at 21. Boot camp in South Carolina in the winter — hypothermia and pneumonia at the same time. Seven months later she was in Iraq with the 82nd Airborne. First mission she got pulled off. Everyone else died. She came home and couldn't watch fireworks for years. Opened a box of rock-hard pound cake her grandmother shipped from home just to smell it.

She got out. Drank a lot. Three months alone in a tiny apartment asking one question she couldn't stop: if I don't do this — what else am I gonna do?

So she built I Will Survive Inc.

Not an awareness campaign. Not a camera pointed at a kid with a fly on his face. A nonprofit that pays rent, fills fridges, and walks into homes where cancer has taken everything — because she knows exactly what that costs. She was five years old when it cost her everything.

Thirteen years later she's still walking through those doors.

In this episode Anisa talks about the mission she got pulled off and what she carried home from Iraq. The first patient she lost who didn't want to survive. The page in her book she couldn't write for seven years. What she told her sisters before she deployed. Why she became Miss January for Pin-Ups for Vets. And why the woman who has spent 13 years showing up for everyone else is still working on showing up for herself.

Not a single tear or scar is ever going to be wasted. It's going to be used to bless the world.

Vegas Veteran Voices is a veteran-led 501(c)(3) nonprofit media organization based in Las Vegas, Nevada. Every veteran's story is worth telling right.

Senior Airman Nikki Kraus was a weather forecaster in the Air Force, embedded with Army battalions in Korea, briefing generals on fog and moon illumination while helicopters waited to fly. She graduated basic training with honors at 26. She earned Airman of the Year, two Army Achievement Medals, and three consecutive employee of the month awards in Korea.

She was also, at the same time, fighting two military sexual trauma cases. Processing a marriage that was already dying. And in 2017, waking up on the floor next to a loaded gun she didn't remember putting down.

Nobody at her unit knew any of it.

Nikki grew up on the south side of Milwaukee, Chippewa, gang-adjacent, raised to not show weakness. The Air Force didn't change that. It reinforced it. She held it together through Korea, through the MST cases, through the Article 15 that got handed to the E7 who assaulted her, through the EPR that didn't reflect what she'd done, through moving to South Carolina and trying to act like none of it had happened.

The collapse came later. When the quiet did.

In this episode, Nikki talks about what it looked like to perform at the highest level while quietly unraveling, and how she eventually built her way out. She lost 100 pounds in nine months. She filed for divorce with $1,000 in her bank account and a 10-foot U-Haul. She got her life coaching certification in 2024 and turned everything she survived into a framework, the GLOW Method, for women stuck in the same patterns she couldn't escape.

Her book, Glow Anyway, is out now at glowanywaybook.com. Follow her @glowwithnikki88.

If you're struggling, you're not alone. Veterans Crisis Line: dial 988, then press 1. Or text 838255.

️ Vegas Veteran Voices Podcast — veteran-led, all-volunteer, nonprofit media. New episodes weekly.

Subscribe so you don't miss one.

#VegasVeteranVoices #veteranpodcast #AirForceveteran #MST #militarysexualtrauma #womenVeterans #veteranmentalhealth #PTSD #glowanywaybook #glowmethod #988 #veteranstories #lasvegas #nonprofit

Happy 250th, America. For our Fourth of July special, the table fills up: Ronnie, Ghost, Jimmy “Pew Pew” Depew, David Lonergan, and Jessica Jay Dee — all veterans, all entrepreneurs — for an unscripted conversation about what freedom actually means when you've seen the alternative.

This one goes everywhere: Marine Corps ribbing and dark humor, the hard reality of veteran homelessness and the work of pulling brothers and sisters off the street, why the anthem still hits, and an honest conversation about struggle, purpose, and choosing to keep going.

Featuring Jessica Jay Dee, David Lonergan (Triple Threat Transformation), and the Leatherneck Club in Las Vegas.

⚠️ This episode includes an honest discussion of suicide and mental health. If you're struggling, you're not alone. Veterans Crisis Line: dial 988, then press 1, or text 838255.

New episodes of the Vegas Veteran Voices Podcast weekly.