The Scuttlebutt: Understanding Military Culture

Desert Shield/Desert Storm Open Conversation

We invite all Persian Gulf War veterans to join us and share their stories. After our recent VBC Live conversation marking Desert Shield and Desert Storm (1990–1991), we heard from many of you: Thank you for doing this. I don’t often get to speak about it. People forget we were there. The First Gulf War often slips between the memory of Vietnam and the long shadow of 9/11.

So on Monday, April 6, we’re offering an Open Mic and Open Conversation focused on Gulf War-era service. We have no agenda or presentation, just casual and focused conversation from those who served in 1990-1991. Please join us to connect, compare notes, swap stories, ask questions, and remember what this moment in history felt like from the inside.

In August 1990, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq invaded Kuwait. The U.S. and a broad international coalition responded first with Operation Desert Shield, which was a massive buildup to defend Saudi Arabia and deter further Iraqi advances. It was followed in January 1991 by Operation Desert Storm, the air campaign and then the ground offensive that liberated Kuwait in just 100 hours.

The war was large and fast. It involved hundreds of thousands of service members fighting the war through logistics, maintenance, intelligence, medical care, transportation, communications, air defense, and a thousand other jobs that made everything else possible.

Some deployed to Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the Gulf, Turkey, the Red Sea. Others served stateside or in Europe working supply, airlift/sealift, vehicle maintenance, air defense, communications, or medical operations.

Wherever you served, please join us to talk about what you were doing, thinking, and feeling 35 years ago.

Veterans Advocate and USMC Veteran Cyla Srna

We welcome Major Cyla Srna of the Texas State Guard, who will tell us about her Marine Corps service as an Aviation Structural Mechanic and her decision to join Texas’s State Defense Force, where she’s served for the past 12 years. Cyla is also an advocate for women veterans. In 2020, she agreed to enter the Ms. Veteran America competition in order to call attention to the problem of women veterans’ homelessness.

Cyla has a deep understanding of the problem, as she’s experienced it herself. We’ll talk about that and about her unique posts in the Texas State Guard, including Emergency Operations during Hurricane Harvey and COVID-19.

Cyla will educate us about the Texas State Guard, one of twenty examples of a little-known part of America’s military system: the State Defense Forces (SDFs). Authorized under Title 32 of the U.S. Code and grounded in states’ constitutional authority to maintain militias, SDFs exist alongside the National Guard but cannot be federalized. Their mission is strictly state-focused—responding to natural disasters, public health emergencies, border and infrastructure security, logistics, communications, and community support when governors call.

These units are volunteer, uniformed, and trained, often composed of prior-service veterans as well as civilians who want to serve close to home.

Veterans Open Conversation

Join the Veterans Breakfast Club for an open and wide-ranging virtual conversation about the military experience, past and present. We believe every veteran has a story to tell and wisdom to share.

This event is a chance to listen, learn, and connect with others who understand the unique bonds and challenges of military service. If you have something on your mind—whether a personal memory, a question, or a topic you think deserves attention—we encourage you to bring it to the conversation. Veterans are also invited to email Shaun Hall at shaun@veteransbreakfastclub.org with any specific topics or issues they’d like to discuss.

The Veterans Breakfast Club’s mission is to create communities of listening around veterans and their stories, and our Open Conversations are one of the most dynamic ways we do that. These sessions are often wide-ranging, emotional, funny, and thought-provoking, providing a welcoming space where everyone’s voice is valued.

This event is free and open to all. To join the conversation live on Zoom, please use this link: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/6402618738.

Or tune in on Facebook or YouTube at 7:00pm ET. Whether you have something to share or simply want to listen and learn, we welcome you to be part of the conversation!

Army Intelligence Veteran Bethany Redmond

We welcome Army intelligence veteran Bethany Redmond to share her story. She didn’t grow up aiming for the military. She was a language and humanities student from Los Alamos, New Mexico — not the stereotypical path into national security — until an Army recruiter’s call at the end of high school nudged her into service. From there she found herself in Army intelligence, where listening, pattern recognition, and human judgment mattered more than guns or glory.

After her military service, Bethany continued on a path that few Americans ever see up close: counterintelligence. She worked protecting critical research and personnel at Los Alamos National Laboratory, one of the nation’s premier science and national security institutions. Today she is a leader in protective intelligence, helping organizations understand how ordinary activities — travel, publication histories, personnel movements — can create vulnerabilities exploited by foreign actors and insider threats.

In this Veterans Breakfast Club conversation we’ll explore the real work behind national security “behind the scenes,” what counterintelligence looks like in the 21st century, and how the habits veterans learn in uniform translate to protecting the nation in new arenas.

Army Security Agency (ASA) Veterans

In September 2025, we welcomed a group of Army Security Agency (ASA) veterans — including John Peart, Gerry Freed, Brian Harrison, Lonnie Long, Bill Mears, Vernon Greunke, Phil Rutherford, Joe Adams, and several others — to talk about a service many Americans have never heard of but that shaped U.S. intelligence through the early Cold War, Korea, Vietnam, and into the 1970s.

We’re bringing them back and adding more voices for a deeper conversation about who the ASA was, what its mission meant in their lives, and how their work echoes into the present.

Founded on 15 September 1945, the ASA grew out of a long Army lineage of signals intelligence and communications security work that traced back through the World Wars. Its mission was straightforward in purpose, if cryptic in practice: intercept enemy communications, decode them, analyze them, and keep Army communications secure. ASA soldiers didn’t march down Main Street in uniform with medals — they lived at listening posts, in fixed field stations from Turkey to Japan, in remote hilltops in Southeast Asia, and in tactical units alongside fighting forces. The motto Semper Vigiles — Vigilant Always — wasn’t just ceremonial, it was their lived reality.

What made ASA service different was not just the technical intensity of the work — signals intelligence, direction finding, cryptography, electronic warfare — but the culture of compartmented secrecy. ASA soldiers often knew only the fragment of a mission they were assigned; they could not speak about their work, even to fellow veterans outside secure channels, for decades after service. Yet the intelligence they pulled from ether and wire was woven into strategic decisions, operational planning, and battlefield support from Korea to Vietnam.

In Vietnam, ASA personnel served under the cover name Radio Research. The first unit sent — the 3rd Radio Research Unit at Tan Son Nhut in May 1961 — marked the earliest sustained Army presence there, four years before conventional ground forces arrived. Specialist 4 James T. Davis, a direction-finding operator, was killed in an ambush in December 1961 and is remembered as the first American combat casualty recognized by the Department of Defense in that war. The ASA compound at Tan Son Nhut was later named Davis Station in his honor.

Last year’s conversation with Peart and others — veterans whose names and faces many in the audience had never heard before — revealed the depth of this hidden service: long nights at intercept consoles, the strange beauty and loneliness of bivouac hilltop stations, the thrill when a cryptic net “went hot,” and the frustration of having to keep the story locked away long after returning home.

For this follow-up program, Peart and several of his fellow ASA veterans will return to share more of their experiences. They’ll be joined by additional ASA veterans — some you’ve heard before in conversation with VBC and some who are joining this community for the first time — to talk about the human side of intelligence service: the friendships forged under strict secrecy, the challenges of reintegrating into civilian life with stories they couldn’t tell, and the pride they felt in work that, for decades, almost no one outside the classified world understood.

We’ll also trace the ASA’s broader arc: its growth as a SIGINT and COMSEC force during the early Cold War, its expansion through Korea and Vietnam, and its eventual absorption into the U.S. Army Intelligence and Security Command (INSCOM) in 1977, when Army intelligence reorganized into multi-discipline formations. Though the ASA name disappeared, its legacy survives in today’s Army intelligence and electronic warfare units.

35th Anniversary of Desert Storm with Jim Blackwell

Army veterans and military analyst Jim Blackwell marks the 35th anniversary of the launch of the ground offensive in Operation Desert Storm.

The ground war of Desert Storm was short, violent, and decisive. After weeks of air attacks, coalition ground forces surged into southern Iraq and Kuwait in late February 1991. U.S. Army and Marine units executed a sweeping left-hook maneuver across the desert, shattering Iraqi defensive lines, destroying Republican Guard units, and cutting off retreat routes. In just 100 hours, coalition forces liberated Kuwait, overwhelmed a large enemy army, and brought the campaign to a sudden end. For those who were there, the experience was defined by speed, dust, night movement, overwhelming firepower—and the strange, unfinished feeling that followed such a rapid victory.

Jim Blackwell served during this period and has spent decades studying, writing, and thinking critically about modern warfare, the Gulf War, and what Desert Storm revealed—and concealed—about American military power. In this conversation, we’ll talk not only about tactics and outcomes, but about what the ground war felt like to the people who fought it and how its legacy still shapes military thinking today.

If you served in Desert Storm—especially in the ground offensive—we invite you to join us. This is a chance to listen, reflect, and add your own voice to the record. Whether you crossed the berm, supported the advance, or watched it unfold from another role, your experience matters.

Vietnam and Black America

Join us for a compelling conversation with award-winning journalist and bestselling writer Wil Haygood (author of The Butler) as he discusses his latest book, The War Within a War: The Black Struggle in Vietnam and at Home (out February 10, 2026).

Haygood reframes the Vietnam War not simply as a foreign conflict, but as a crucible in which the fight for civil rights followed Black Americans from the streets of the United States into the jungles of Southeast Asia. Drawing on deep research and vivid personal stories, he traces the lives of Black soldiers, airmen, doctors, nurses, journalists, and activists who fought simultaneously against enemy forces abroad and systemic racism at home.

In The War Within a War, readers encounter figures both famous and obscure: from an Air Force pilot POW and a frontline surgeon to Marvin Gaye and Martin Luther King, Jr. The goal is to illuminate how this dual struggle reshaped both the war and the American conscience.

This book goes beyond military history to explore how race and war intersected in ways that still echo in American life. Haygood’s narrative brings urgency and humanity to a chapter of the Vietnam era that reshapes our understanding of service, sacrifice, and the unfinished fight for equality.

Join us to hear from one of America’s most insightful chroniclers of Black experience and national history, and to engage with the stories that still reverberate a half-century later.

We’re grateful to UPMC for Life  for sponsoring this event!

Veterans Open Conversation

Join the Veterans Breakfast Club for an open and wide-ranging virtual conversation about the military experience, past and present.

We believe every veteran has a story to tell and wisdom to share. This event is a chance to listen, learn, and connect with others who understand the unique bonds and challenges of military service. If you have something on your mind—whether a personal memory, a question, or a topic you think deserves attention—we encourage you to bring it to the conversation. Veterans are also invited to email Shaun Hall at shaun@veteransbreakfastclub.org with any specific topics or issues they’d like to discuss.

The Veterans Breakfast Club’s mission is to create communities of listening around veterans and their stories, and our Open Conversations are one of the most dynamic ways we do that. These sessions are often wide-ranging, emotional, funny, and thought-provoking, providing a welcoming space where everyone’s voice is valued.

This event is free and open to all. To join the conversation live on Zoom, please use this link: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/6402618738. Or tune in on Facebook or YouTube at 7:00pm ET on February 2. Whether you have something to share or simply want to listen and learn, we welcome you to be part of the conversation!

We’re grateful to UPMC for Life  for sponsoring this event!

Marine Veteran Michael Archer Remembers Khe Sanh

Join the Veterans Breakfast Club for a powerful livestream conversation with Michael Archer, U.S. Marine Corps veteran and author of A Patch of Ground: Khe Sanh, a firsthand account of one of the most intense and contested battles of the Vietnam War.

Michael Archer is not writing as a distant historian or outside observer. He was a Marine at Khe Sanh. He lived on that patch of ground, endured the siege, and carried its weight with him long after leaving Vietnam. His book is rooted in direct experience—what it meant to be young, scared, exhausted, and determined, holding a remote combat base under constant artillery fire while the world debated whether Khe Sanh would become another Dien Bien Phu.

A Patch of Ground is spare, unsentimental, and deeply personal. Archer writes about daily life under siege: patrols, bunkers, incoming rounds, boredom and terror existing side by side, and the bonds formed among Marines who depended on one another to survive. He also writes about memory—how Khe Sanh stayed with him, how veterans carry places like that inside them, and why telling the story matters decades later.

In this conversation, we’ll focus squarely on Archer’s Marine Corps service and his experience at Khe Sanh: what he remembers, what surprised him looking back, and what gets lost when battles are reduced to maps, timelines, and strategic arguments. We’ll talk about why Khe Sanh became such a symbol during the war, what it felt like on the ground to be part of that symbol, and how writing the book helped Archer make sense of an experience that never really ends.

This is a conversation about combat, memory, and bearing witness—told by a Marine who was there, on that ground, and who has spent years finding the words to describe it.

We’re grateful to UPMC for Life  for sponsoring this event!

Steven Grayhm on Making Sheepdog, the Movie

In this Veterans Breakfast Club livestream, we sit down with filmmaker Steven Grayhm to talk about Sheepdog, an independent feature film that takes a hard, honest look at combat trauma, recovery, and the long road home. Grayhm not only stars in the film, but also wrote, produced, and directed it—an unusual level of authorship that reflects how personal the project is.

Sheepdog centers on Calvin Cole (Grayhm), a decorated U.S. Army combat veteran who is court-ordered into treatment and placed under the care of a VA trauma therapist-in-training (played by Madsen), who is juggling her clinical work with night shifts at a diner to pay for school. Calvin’s fragile attempt to hold himself together is further tested when his father-in-law, a retired Vietnam veteran (Curtis Hall), appears at his door fresh out of prison. As Calvin’s instinct to run from his past collapses, the film traces how accountability, compassion, and hard-earned trust can open a path toward healing.

Shot on location in Western Massachusetts, Sheepdog aims to lift the veil on post-traumatic stress and the veteran suicide crisis, while also focusing on the often-overlooked idea of post-traumatic growth. Rather than offering easy answers, the film shows the physical and psychological consequences of trauma—and the slow, uneven work of recovery—through grounded performances and lived-in settings. Film critic Tony Toscana called it “one of the best films of the year.”

We’ll ask Grayhm about how Sheepdog came to be: years spent listening to veterans’ stories, studying trauma and VA treatment models, and working closely with veterans and clinicians to get the details right. He’ll reflect on why he felt compelled to tell this story himself, why authenticity matters more than spectacle, and what it takes to bring an independently made, veteran-centered film from script to screen.

This livestream will explore the making of Sheepdog, the responsibilities of telling veterans’ stories on film, and what cinema can—and cannot—do when it comes to understanding trauma, recovery, and the complicated work of coming home.

We’re grateful to UPMC for Life  for sponsoring this event!