The Vanguard Wall Podcast

Eleven days from going home. Fourteen months in eastern Afghanistan already behind them, bags half packed — and the order came down to build a brand-new combat outpost on the valley floor, in the low ground, in the middle of fighting season, surrounded by high ground they were forbidden to occupy. Three days later, at dawn on 13 July 2008, roughly 160 fighters hit Combat Outpost Kahler from every direction at once. Nine American paratroopers did not come home. 1SG(r) Jesse Queck was an 11 Charlie mortarman with Chosen Company at the Battle of Wanat. In six and a half hours he walks through the whole of it: a kid from a town of 8,000 on Virginia's Eastern Shore who watched the towers fall from a high school hallway and went looking for the war; four deployments; the helicopter crash that took his roommate and his mentor; and then the morning the mountain opened up. The mortar pit flooded with fire until the tube was useless. His weapons failed in his hands, so he picked up an AT4 he had never fired in his life, stepped into the open so the backblast wouldn't catch his own men, and put it into the treeline. His soldier Sergio Abad died on the ground beside him. When word came down that OP Topside had one man left alive on the radio — Ryan Pitts, who would later receive the Medal of Honor — Jesse said two words: I'm going. He climbed toward the fight everyone else was trying to survive, became the medic for the dying, and called in a B-1 by ear when he could no longer hear his own radio. That is the half of the story people tell. The other half is what happened when he came home to a dark place with no enemy in it — the drinking, the night his wife called him frantic, the survivor's guilt he carried for years over Abad, and the day the woman who raised Sergio told him: I don't blame you. I forgive you. I love you. Because Jesse will tell you a soldier dies twice — once when he falls, and again when no one says his name. Today he says those names.
1SG(r) Jesse Queck survived the Battle of Wanat, 13 July 2008 — one of the fiercest small-unit fights of the Afghan war, where nine American paratroopers were killed. This is the full conversation.
CHAPTERS
0:00:00 Cold Open: Wanat, July 2008
0:04:03 Growing Up on Virginia's Eastern Shore
0:12:02 September 11th in the School Hallway
0:24:47 What a Mortarman Actually Does
0:30:29 Fort Drum: The Helicopter Crash
0:41:40 French Commando School in Djibouti
0:49:09 The Smart Bomb That Hit the Helicopter
1:08:51 Route Tampa: IEDs and Complacency
1:18:01 Reenlisting for Italy and the 173rd
1:40:13 Ranch House at 3,300 Meters
1:55:32 Ranch House Overrun on the Radio
2:06:56 The Order to Build Wanat
2:14:55 Building the Outpost by Hand
2:25:34 Stand-To on 13 July 2008
2:35:26 The First RPG Hits the TOW Truck
2:42:05 Weapons Seize, Firing the AT4
2:48:32 Sergio Abad Is Hit
2:56:04 Abad's Guardian and Forgiveness
3:15:42 Volunteering to Reinforce OP Topside
3:22:11 Reaching OP Topside
3:32:31 Jonathan Ayers on the 240
3:39:25 The RPG That Wounded Him
3:49:42 The Medevac Pilots
3:58:46 Landstuhl, Vicodin, and Coming Home
4:02:35 Saying Their Names
4:14:24 Drill Sergeant: Visualizing the Range
4:31:31 Lewis-McChord and Spin Boldak
4:39:12 Ranger School at Twenty-Nine
4:53:41 Fixing a Broken Tank Company
5:08:26 Observer-Controller at the National Training Center
5:21:51 COVID, Isolation, and Drinking
5:33:03 Losing Stratton Hall
5:44:30 The Meadows and Getting Sober
6:00:07 Bob Starr and Learning Business
6:06:08 Farm Bureau and Serving Clients
6:17:40 A Message to His Kids
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If you’ve read the news in the last three years, you’ve been handed two stories about AI — and they can’t both be true. Story one: the machines are coming for your job, your kid’s job, your retirement, your privacy. Story two: it’s all hype, a bubble about to pop and take your 401(k) with it. Shawn Ennis — 25 years in technology, an Auburn-trained engineer with a dozen patents, who built three companies and sold one to Oracle — sits down to take the scariest, most hyped subject on Earth and make it make sense in plain English. What AI actually is, how it works, where it’s real and where it’s a lie — then through the four doors it’s already come through in your life: your home, your privacy, your paycheck, and the battlefield. No hype, no doom. Just the truth, slow enough to use.
▶ Watch the full conversation on YouTube: https://youtu.be/EbM4-LJSd4Y
Follow Shawn Ennis — YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@ennissh · LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shawnennis
Tech executive Shawn Ennis sits down with The Vanguard Wall for a full-length conversation that takes artificial intelligence out of the headlines and puts it in plain English: what AI actually is and what really happens when you hit enter, whether it can take your job and the work it will never touch, the AI already running in your house, deepfakes and scams and how to protect your family, the data centers going up down the road, the AI bubble and what a pop would mean for your 401(k), what it offers a small business owner, and the machines already deciding who lives and dies on battlefields in Ukraine — plus the military AI story that never makes the news: the one that brings everybody home. A plain-English guide to the most hyped subject on Earth, from a man who spent 25 years building it.
CHAPTERS
0:00 Welcome + Why This Conversation
2:02 The Two Stories You've Been Told About AI
4:05 Who Is Shawn Ennis? Before AI
7:40 The Why Guy: Where Problem-Solving Was Born
9:24 Patents, Companies, and Selling to Oracle
16:53 The Caterpillar Lesson That Changed Everything
22:07 Planting the AI Seed in a Beginner
30:38 Both Camps Have It Wrong
37:45 The Chatbot Better Than the Call Center
48:15 How AI Actually Works — No Math Degree Required
58:41 ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok — Are They the Same?
1:07:15 Data Centers: Myths and Realities
1:14:03 Where Does Your Data Actually Live?
1:16:46 AI Is Already in Your House
1:19:34 Using It More, Trusting It Less
1:25:17 The ER Story: AI and Your Health
1:40:25 Why Grown Adults Are Mean to a Machine
1:53:32 Kids, Cheating, and School in the AI Age
1:58:22 Personas, Data Brokers, and Who's Watching
2:02:32 AI Fakes, Deepfakes, and Guardrails
2:11:08 Take Your Privacy Back This Week
2:16:52 The Question That Keeps Parents Up
2:19:51 The AI Bubble and Your 401(k)
2:25:45 Data Centers, Round Two: The Backlash
2:31:10 AI for the Small Business Owner
2:40:56 Machines That Decide Who Lives and Dies
2:43:59 The Moral Floor
2:45:28 The Military AI Nobody Talks About
2:49:10 Bringing Everybody Home
2:54:29 AI Doesn't Know What's True
3:07:25 Inside Shawn's Businesses
3:26:05 Talk to It Like a Consultant
3:28:23 When AI Is the Wrong Tool
3:29:44 The Honest Reason for Hope
3:30:52 The Luckiest Moment in History
3:34:18 Shawn's Dream + Close
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Colonel (r) Max Krupp will be the first to tell you he doesn’t tell war stories — you have to pull them out of him. Over 28 years he became the first Texas Army National Guardsman in history to earn the Green Beret, wore a Bronze Star with Valor for a single day in Kandahar Province that by rights should have killed him and the Afghan company he was advising, and was on the Army’s fast track to general — then walked away from all of it to raise cattle in Texas. This is the full conversation: the kid nobody bet on who did the hardest thing on offer every single time, then chose the quiet work.
▶ Watch the full conversation on YouTube: https://youtu.be/Nsg0OY-8RhY
Retired U.S. Army Colonel Max Krupp sits down with The Vanguard Wall for a full-length interview spanning 28 years of service: enlisting in the New Mexico Army National Guard at 17, Ranger School, Long Range Surveillance, and becoming the first Texas Army National Guardsman to earn the Green Beret and Special Forces tab. He walks through a 13-month Afghanistan deployment as a combat advisor embedded with an Afghan National Army company, the day in Kandahar Province that earned him a Bronze Star with Valor, the Special Forces Q Course and SERE school, commanding the only airborne infantry battalion in the Texas National Guard, and why he traded a general’s track for a one-man cattle ranch raising black Angus beef. A rare, honest veteran story about leadership, service, and the quiet work after the uniform comes off.
CHAPTERS
0:00 Cold open
2:22 Meet Max Krupp
4:36 Growing up on the El Paso border
16:03 Where the military got in his blood
19:44 Military school in Roswell
26:00 Enlisting in the National Guard at 17
40:58 Long Range Surveillance & G Company
1:07:33 Ranger School
1:17:13 The Army kills the LRS program
1:38:52 Afghanistan: the advise-and-assist mission
1:44:08 Riding with the 82nd Airborne
2:13:27 The day in Kandahar
2:26:00 Aftermath, medevac & the Apache pilots
3:05:52 The Green Beret Q Course
3:11:09 SERE school
3:46:14 ODA life: the Guam jump mission
4:34:04 Walking away from a general's star
5:19:02 Raising the beef: grass vs. grain
5:56:48 Inside the cattle business
6:28:24 Leadership: the best and the worst
6:45:11 His kids, and the through line
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The Marine Corps turned him down at eighteen. Twenty-four years later, CSM (Ret.) Donald "Mac" McAlister retired at the very top of the enlisted ranks — a Legion of Merit, two Bronze Stars, and a Purple Heart, with five combat tours behind him: two in Iraq, three in Afghanistan.
This is one of the most honest conversations we've ever recorded. Mac takes us from a self-described "heathen redneck" childhood in Hammond, Louisiana to carrying caskets at Arlington with The Old Guard — where he learned the lesson that made him: "none of the honors are for you; they're for the family." From the invasion of Iraq and the 82nd's biggest firefight since WWII, to October 8th, 2003 — the roadside bomb that nearly killed him, and the medical retirement he refused so he could fight his way back to war. Into the Arghandab, the valley no army in history ever held, and the men he lost pieces of himself beside. And through all of it, the demons he still carries — and the wife and daughters who saved his life.
A warrior, a philosopher, and a wild card — metalhead, horror-film actor, and one of the few senior leaders of his generation still reaching back to the soldiers who once feared him and now line up to hug him.
Follow Mac: Instagram @don_mcalister_aka_mac
⏱️ CHAPTERS
0:00:00 Cold Open
0:04:17 Meet CSM "Mac" McAlister
0:04:40 Growing Up a "Heathen Redneck" in Hammond, Louisiana
0:07:50 The Father Who Rode a Kid's Bike 15 Miles to Work
0:09:52 Expelled — and the Lesson That Made Him
0:15:24 Metallica, Metal, and Music as Therapy
0:22:49 The Warrior Bloodline — and an Uncle Lost to War
0:25:45 Suicide, Reframed
0:44:44 Basic, Airborne School & the Road to the Old Guard
0:45:35 The Old Guard — Carrying Caskets at Arlington
1:00:33 "The Funeral Isn't for the Soldier"
1:22:49 The Colonial Musket That Blew Apart
1:34:57 Hawaii and the 25th Infantry
1:59:53 9/11, Re-Enlisting for the 82nd, and Going to War
2:16:44 As Samawah — the 82nd's Biggest Firefight Since WWII
2:33:03 "I Think They're Shooting at Us"
2:52:54 Clearing the City
3:29:03 The Metallica Hat They Found in Iraq
3:32:23 October 8, 2003 — the Day That Changed Everything
3:47:21 The Photo He Posts Every October 8th
4:14:16 Coming Home — Reunited With His Unit
4:30:00 Rules of Engagement and Real Leadership
5:00:45 Into the Arghandab — the Valley No Army Could Hold
5:20:50 98 IEDs, 11 Amputees, One Company
5:50:55 Losing SSG Brunkhorst
6:27:27 Leadership Lessons Forged in Combat
7:00:00 Retirement and the Hardest Transition
7:11:06 The Intervention That Saved His Life
7:22:13 Diane — 33 Years, and the Family That Saved Him
7:27:01 His Daughters, His Grandbaby & Who He Is Now
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#82ndAirborne #CombatVeteran #Army #MilitaryPodcast #Afghanistan
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Chris McCoy served in the 75th Ranger Regiment alongside Pat Tillman and speaks plainly to the cover-up of how Tillman died. He recovered bodies inside the Pentagon after 9/11, fought through the high mountains of Afghanistan, then walked off the battlefield and onto a Bering Sea crab boat — one of the deadliest jobs on Earth. He returns to The Vanguard Wall for Part 2: the war stories he’s never told, the modern face of drone combat almost no one understands, and what it actually costs to come home.
His first appearance became the most-watched episode this show has ever released. This one goes further.
▶️ Watch the full episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/S5H_9VieDH0
CHAPTERS
00:00 Chris Is Back — The Most-Viral Guest Returns
08:06 Recognized in the Wild — Life After the First Episode
22:06 The Pentagon After 9/11 — 28 Days at the Hole
36:22 He Stood Next to Pat Tillman
43:13 The Truth About the Cover-Up
1:09:40 Mourning Their Own — What Really Happened in the Platoon
1:24:29 Winter Strike 2003 — Sent Into the High Mountains
1:43:51 Living at Altitude — The Body Breaks Down
1:53:20 Honoring the Ones Who Didn’t Come Home
2:09:07 The First Time He Got Shot At
2:19:04 John Owens — The Hardest Man He Ever Served With
2:49:01 Do We Even Need Navy SEALs? — Redundancy in Special Ops
3:06:21 An E-4 Ranger vs. SEAL Team Six — The Warlord Capture
3:24:48 The Car Bomb — When the CNS Burns Out
3:36:32 The Book “Unseen Worlds” — Why He Wrote It
3:50:10 What a Team Actually Costs the Men In It
4:06:49 Onto a Bering Sea Crab Boat — The Deadliest Job on Earth
4:53:04 The High Seas, the Money, and the Men Who Break
5:05:20 Things You Only See at Sea — The Jellyfish Bloom
5:27:38 Becoming a Master of the Craft — Competitive Shooting
5:58:58 Six Years Inside a Drone Program — The Department of War
6:10:53 The $400 Drone That Kills a Tank — Where War Is Headed
6:27:01 Leadership, Recovery, and Coming Home
6:43:26 Why He Keeps Telling These Stories
🔗 More from Chris McCoy
📖 Book — “Unseen Worlds” (Amazon): https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0H7Z6JMWP
🌐 Website: https://chrismccoyauthor.com
📰 Substack: https://chrismccoyauthor.substack.com
📸 Instagram: @rok275
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