The Scuttlebutt: Understanding Military Culture

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Welcome to The Scuttlebutt, a weekly pre-recorded program presented by The Veterans Breakfast Club. “Scuttlebutt” is a military term (specifically Navy) for talk or gossip around the watercooler below decks. And this is what our program is all about: we have informed conversations about the military experience, past and present. We want to bridge the divide between those who serve and those who don’t. We look at headlines, we tackle important topics, and we ask questions. Join us on this journey of spreading the Scuttlebutt!

Episodes

Monday Apr 01, 2024

What Traveling in Vietnam is Like Today

Monday Apr 01, 2024

In November and December last year, 21 of us—including five veterans who had served in-country during the war—traveled to Vietnam, from Hanoi and Halong Bay in the North to Saigon and the Mekong Delta in the South. Vietnam is a beautiful and often bewildering place, ancient in history and now yoked to American culture and memory. The country presents to the traveler more than can be absorbed. Tonight, we’ll talk with those who traveled with us and gather their impressions of the country, the people, and what they’ve learned from the trip.

One of our travelers was Vietnam veteran Jerry Augustine who remembers almost every aspect of his harrowing service. Jerry captured his story in his memoir, Vietnam Beyond. Jerry served in 1966-1967 with B Company, 3rd Battalion, 21st Infantry Regiment, 196th Light Infantry Brigade in Vietnam. We’ll hear from Jerry what he thought of Vietnam and how it may have changed his view and understanding of his service.

Thank you to Tobacco Free Adagio Health and UPMC for Life for sponsoring this event!

Monday Mar 25, 2024

Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus

Monday Mar 25, 2024

Ray Mabus served as the 75th United States Secretary of the Navy, the longest to serve as leader of the Navy and Marine Corps since World War I. Secretary Mabus is a Navy veteran himself, having served two years in the Navy as a surface warfare officer from 1970 to 1972 aboard the cruiser USS Little Rock (CLG-4), achieving the rank of Lieutenant Junior Grade.

Ray Mabus has been Secretary of the US Navy, Governor, Ambassador and CEO.

As Secretary during President Obama’s Administration, he revolutionized the Navy and Marine Corps, opening all jobs to women, aggressively moving to alternative energy as a warfighting measure, building more than twice as many ships during his term than in the preceding eight years and developing the Gulf Coast Restoration Plan after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. It was during his watch that Navy SEALs killed Osama bin Laden. Among many awards, he received the Martin Luther King, Jr. Social Responsibility Award and was chosen as one of the top fifty CEOs in America by GlassDoor, the only government person picked.

From 1988 to 1992, Mabus served as Governor of Mississippi, the youngest elected to that office in more than 150 years. Mississippi experienced record growth in jobs, education, tourism and exports.

Mabus was United States Ambassador to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia from 1994-1996. He was CEO of a public company from 2006-2007 leading it out of bankruptcy in less than a year while paying all creditors in full and saving equity.

Today, Mabus is on the board of two public companies, Hilton and Virgin Galactic, where he is Chair. In addition, he is a board member of InStride, a public benefit education company, the founder of Mabus Group, a consulting organization, and a board member or advisor to several other companies. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the Explorers Club, and the Screen Actors Guild. He serves on the boards of the Environmental Defense Fund and Jose Andreas’ World Central Kitchen and the advisory board for the National Medal of Honor Museum. He has thrown out the first pitch at all 30 major league ballparks. He has stood on both poles and, during his life, has traveled to more than 190 countries and territories.

Secretary Mabus is a native of Ackerman, Mississippi, and received a Bachelor’s Degree, summa cum laude, from the University of Mississippi, a Master’s Degree from Johns Hopkins University, and a Law Degree, magna cum laude, from Harvard Law School. Mabus served in the Navy as an officer aboard the cruiser USS Little Rock.

Thank you to Tobacco Free Adagio Health and UPMC for Life for sponsoring this event!

#podcast #zoom #scuttlebutt #thescuttlebutt #humor #storytelling #headlines #news #oralhistory #militaryhistory #roundtable #navy #army #airforce #marinecorps #marines #military #coastguard #veteran #veterans #veteransbreakfastclub #vbc #nonprofit #501c3
#virtualevents #veteran #veterans #veteransbreakfastclub #war #army #navy #marines #marinecorps #airforce #coastguard #history #americanhistory #zoomevents #liveevent #virtual #webinar #interview #oralhistory #militaryhistory #vbc #nonprofit #501c3 #coffeehour #breakfast

Monday Mar 18, 2024

The Tragic Failure of the M-16 in Vietnam

Monday Mar 18, 2024

Author and Vietnam veteran Bob Orkand discusses what he calls the “tragic failure” of the M16 rifle in Vietnam, a story captured in his book, Misfire.

The M16 rifle in the Vietnam War was marred by a series of critical problems that severely undermined its effectiveness and tarnished its reputation among soldiers. Initially introduced as a replacement for the M14, the M16 faced immediate challenges in the harsh and demanding conditions of the Vietnamese jungles.

One of the primary issues stemmed from insufficient training and maintenance procedures. Soldiers were often ill-prepared to properly care for the M16, with some even being misled into believing that the rifle was “self-cleaning.” Lack of cleaning supplies and instructions further compounded this problem, leading to increased vulnerability in combat situations.

The intricate components of the rifle required meticulous maintenance, a task many soldiers found themselves untrained for.

Thank you to Tobacco Free Adagio Health and UPMC for Life for sponsoring this event!

Monday Mar 11, 2024

War Movie – The American Battle in Cinema

Monday Mar 11, 2024

War Movie is a five-part documentary series that examines not only the history of war in American cinema but how this medium has shaped our country's perspective on conflict, foreign policy, race, masculinity, and national identity.

Cinematic depictions of military conflict have been common since the first crank of a shutter. From early films like The Birth of a Nation to recent entries The Hurt Locker and Dunkirk, the atrocities of war have never strayed far from the silver screen. Whether praised by critics or criticized by veterans who were there, war films play an integral part of our cultural understanding. War Movie looks at the history of these films and attempts to understand why we're compelled to experience and re-imagine our own violence on screen. Rather than a simple survey, War Movie examines our complex psychological relationship with the genre. By interviewing cinema studies scholars, creatives that bring these films to life and veteran perspectives, War Movie unpacks the over one-hundred-year history of military conflict on screen.

Join Shaun Hall, Documentarian Evan Mulgrave, and WAR MOVIE Director, Producer, Editor, Cinematographer, and Writer Steve Summers as we discuss his incredible series.

IMDB - https://www.imdb.com/title/tt28633748/

War Movie on Amazon Prime – https://bit.ly/3P59DNi

Purchase on Blu-ray - https://www.amazon.com/War-Movie-American-Battle-Blu-Ray/dp/B0CNKT9CVC

Thank you to our sponsors:

UPMC for Life: http://upmchealthplan.com/medicare

Tobacco Free Adagio Health: https://tobaccofree.adagiohealth.org/

To find out more information about the Veterans Breakfast Club and view our upcoming schedule of online and in-person events, visit our website at: http://www.veteransbreakfastclub.org/

#veteransstories #veteranshistory #veteranshistoryproject #veteranstravel #veteranstrips #veteranshistoricaltours #veteransoralhistory #militaryretirees #armyretirees #navyretirees #warstories #airforce #vietnamwar #veteraninterview

Monday Mar 04, 2024

Dogs For Our Brave

Monday Mar 04, 2024

Dogs for Our Brave’s mission is to provide professionally trained service dogs at no cost to veterans who have suffered debilitating injury or illness while in service to our country. Their goal is to use rescue dogs at every opportunity, thus saving two lives at once. In order to fully realize their mission without adding financial burden, they also provide a continuum of free support that covers all food, veterinary care, and pharmaceuticals for the life of the dog.

Bryan Pieschel has joined the DFOB Team as the first Director of Veteran Services. Bryan served as an active-duty US Army medic from 2004-2009. During his time in service, Bryan served as both a lead company medic and lead battalion medic attached to a mechanized engineer unit. His unit deployed to Iraq in October 2005 with the purpose of conducting and training Route Clearance missions (IED hunters). The battalion saw significant action in combat which led to multiple KIA’s and numerous significantly injured soldiers. Bryan was one of the injured, during a night mission in Sept 2006 his vehicle was struck by an EFP (explosively formed projectile) that threw him into the back of the vehicle rendering him unconscious for several minutes, which resulted in him being awarded a Purple Heart. Upon returning to the states in Nov 2006, Bryan began to experience significant symptoms of PTSD and despite receiving great care, the symptoms would ultimately lead to him being medically retired in 2009. Despite his Retirement from active duty, the mission to serve his brothers and sisters in arms remains.

After being medically retired from the Army, Bryan returned to St. Louis and began working with his other passion in life, coaching kids, and teenagers in the sport of volleyball.

Listen to the Scuttlebutt this week to hear Bryan’s story firsthand and how Dogs for Our Brave is serving veterans in need.

Dogs for Our Brave - https://www.dfob.org/about/our-story/

Bryan Pieschel - https://www.dfob.org/team/bryan-pieschel/

Thank you to our sponsors:

UPMC for Life: http://upmchealthplan.com/medicare

Tobacco Free Adagio Health: https://tobaccofree.adagiohealth.org/

To find out more information about the Veterans Breakfast Club and view our upcoming schedule of online and in-person events, visit our website at: http://www.veteransbreakfastclub.org/

Monday Feb 26, 2024

Author and Poet Victoria Kelly

Monday Feb 26, 2024

Victoria Kelly is the author of Homefront, Mrs. Houdini, and When the Men Go Off to War.

Victoria graduated Summa Cum Laude from Harvard University. She received her M.F.A. in Creative Writing from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and her M.Phil. in Creative Writing from Trinity College Dublin, where she was a U.S. Mitchell Scholar.

Her fiction and poetry have appeared in Best American Poetry, The Autumn House Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry, Prairie Schooner, Southwest Review and dozens of other journals and anthologies. Her novel Mrs. Houdini was a People Magazine Best New Book, a USA Today New and Noteworthy Book, a Jeopardy Pick and a Publishers Weekly Starred Debut.

Her new book HOMEFRONT is inspired by her experiences as the wife of a fighter pilot during three wartime deployments, this collection follows women whose lives have been impacted by war and military service as they struggle with their fragile ideas of home.

In “Prayers of an American Wife,” a Navy wife grapples with loneliness when she discovers that her neighbor, also a Navy wife, is having an affair while their husbands are deployed on the same aircraft carrier. Tensions rise in “The Strangers of Dubai” as a soldier on leave tries to buy his wife a souvenir from an Afghan vendor. After attending eight funerals with fellow military wives whose husbands died in the Iraq war, the protagonist in “Finding the Good Light” divorces her Navy husband and tries to start a new life as a movie star. These, along with the eleven other stories in this collection, explore the emotional landscape of the resilient women who remain on the homefront.

Kelly’s stories offer readers an intimate, eye-opening look into the sacrifices and steadfastness of military family members.

https://www.victoria-kelly.com/

Homefront - https://bit.ly/49im7cD

Thank you to our sponsors:

UPMC for Life: http://upmchealthplan.com/medicare

Tobacco Free Adagio Health: https://tobaccofree.adagiohealth.org/

To find out more information about the Veterans Breakfast Club and view our upcoming schedule of online and in-person events, visit our website at: http://www.veteransbreakfastclub.org/

Monday Feb 19, 2024

Veteran and Social Anthropologist - Charles Warner III

Monday Feb 19, 2024

Charles Warner is a veteran and social anthropologist studying at the University of Leuven, Belgium.

His research interests primarily revolve around war veterans (a.k.a. the emerging field of “Veterans Studies”), strategic peacebuilding, and post-conflict dialogue/resolution in Southeast Europe. Within this research, he incorporates or centers visual art and poetry/prose-poetry/narrative nonfiction to express ethnographic engagements, research insights, temporality and polyvocal (re)presentation. His PhD project, tentatively titled "The Veterans Eclectic: Engaging voices of past war & visions of future peace in Former Yugoslavia," is guided by two research questions:

1) Do former combatants embrace the identity of "veteran," maintain veteran-oriented organizations, and connect internationally after the battlefields have gone silent? If yes, how?

2) How might mapping and understanding cross-border veteran relationships influence current or new approaches to peace and stability between former battlefield foes?

In pursuit of these questions, Charlie conducted two+ years of relational ethnographic fieldwork and participant observation alongside war veterans in Bosnia, Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia and Kosovo. This fieldwork has generated new insights into veteran culture and relations, their social visibility (or lack thereof), transnational relations, performative materiality, and veteran considerations of the future. Speaking more broadly, this research seeks to strengthen collaborations between social anthropology and the political sciences while contributing to Veterans Studies (thus challenging North Atlantic-centric narratives and hegemony within an emerging field) and informing new paradigms of peacebuilding in former Yugoslavia and beyond.

The research shared by Charlie Warner with the Scuttlebutt podcast is supported by the Research Foundation – Flanders (FWO) and the University of Leuven, Belgium.

The Veterans Eclectic - https://theveteranseclectic.wordpress.com/

Ku Leuven - https://soc.kuleuven.be/anthropology/staff/00122596

Thank you to our sponsors:

UPMC for Life: http://upmchealthplan.com/medicare

Tobacco Free Adagio Health: https://tobaccofree.adagiohealth.org/

To find out more information about the Veterans Breakfast Club and view our upcoming schedule of online and in-person events, visit our website at: http://www.veteransbreakfastclub.org/

Monday Feb 12, 2024

US Armed Forces Chess Championship

Monday Feb 12, 2024

This week on The Scuttlebutt we talk with the Chair of the Military Chess Committee and Navy veteran, Rob Getty about the upcoming 65th Annual US Armed Forces Chess Championship.

Rob talks about his service, how chess launched his military career, beginner tips, and lessons learned.

https://www.facebook.com/usafochess/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Armed_Forces_Chess_Championship

Thank you to our sponsors:

UPMC for Life: http://upmchealthplan.com/medicare

Tobacco Free Adagio Health: https://tobaccofree.adagiohealth.org/

To find out more information about the Veterans Breakfast Club and view our upcoming schedule of online and in-person events, visit our website at: http://www.veteransbreakfastclub.org/

Monday Jan 29, 2024

What Happened to Japanese Americans During WWII

Monday Jan 29, 2024

Dr. Mitchell T. Maki is the President and CEO of the Go For Broke National Education Center, a non-profit organization dedicated to preserving the legacy and lessons of the Nisei (a person born in the US whose parents were immigrants from Japan) World War II veterans. The mission of GO FOR BROKE is to educate and inspire character and equality through the virtue and valor of our World War II American veterans of Japanese ancestry.

Dr. Maki is also the lead author of the award-winning book, Achieving the Impossible Dream: How Japanese Americans Obtained Redress, a detailed case study of the 1988 Civil Liberties Act. Nearly fifty years after being incarcerated by their own government, Japanese American concentration camp survivors succeeded in obtaining redress for the personal humiliation, family dislocation, and economic ruin caused by their ordeal. An inspiring story of wrongs made right as well as a practical guide to getting legislation through Congress, Achieving the Impossible Dream documents the redress movement from its earliest roots during World War II, the formal introduction of the idea in the 1970s, the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians, the judicial battles during the 1980s, and the lobbying of the legislative and executive branches in the 1980s and 1990s. In 2000, the book received the Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Award which is given to books addressing bigotry and human rights in North America.

Dr. Maki has held the positions of acting Provost and Vice president of Academic Affairs, Vice Provost of Student Academic Success, dean of the Colleges of Professional Studies and Health and Human Services (CSUDH), acting dean of the College of Health and Human Services at CSU Los Angeles and assistant professor in the Department of Social Welfare at UCLA. As acting Provost, Dr. Maki provided academic and strategic leadership for CSUDH's five academic colleges which served over fifteen thousand students.

Go For Broke - https://goforbroke.org/

Achieving the Impossible Dream - https://bit.ly/3H36KIm

Thank you to our sponsors:

UPMC for Life: http://upmchealthplan.com/medicare

Tobacco Free Adagio Health: https://tobaccofree.adagiohealth.org/ T

o find out more information about the Veterans Breakfast Club and view our upcoming schedule of online and in-person events, visit our website at: http://www.veteransbreakfastclub.org/

#podcast #zoom #scuttlebutt #thescuttlebutt #humor #storytelling #headlines #news #oralhistory #militaryhistory #roundtable #navy #army #airforce #marinecorps #marines #military #coastguard #veteran #veterans #veteransbreakfastclub #vbc #nonprofit #501c3 #veterans #veteran #vet #militaryhistory #usarmy #army #vietnam #usnavy #navy #pilot #airforce #veteranowned #coastguard #aviators #militaryveterans #Iraq #vietnamveterans #veteransstories #veteranshistory #veteranshistoryproject #veteranstravel #veteranstrips #veteranshistoricaltours #veteransoralhistory #militaryretirees #armyretirees #navyretirees #warstories #airforce #vietnamwar #veteraninterview

Monday Jan 22, 2024

History and Stories of the Challenge Coin

Monday Jan 22, 2024

Have you ever received a challenge coin and thought about its history? Who started this tradition? What is the etiquette of keeping them on hand? How are they made? Who designs them?

The Scuttlebutt attempts to answer these questions and more with Vietnam Navy Veteran Donn Nemchick and longtime VBC member Henry Schoepke. We dive into the history and hear stories of the challenge coins Henry and Donn have received over the years.

Henry also dives into his vast collection of signatures and stories he’s received from WWII veterans.

Henry’s letter in VBC Magazine - https://bit.ly/421Tw8v

Henry’s appearance on 15WMTV - https://bit.ly/48WZKbS

Challenge Coins Wiki - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Challenge_coin

44-year veteran creates challenge coins to honor military members - https://youtu.be/Na2-PPT5xXI?si=R0VKPUAtUWGuaqr_

Thrift Store Finds Military Challenge Coins Large Lot Any Good Ones? - https://youtu.be/N-5mKIkZNms?si=-cmxEew4UvS2HNF5

How to Practice Military Challenge Coin Etiquette - https://youtu.be/zc6_9TqmOfA?si=Hgx2JUEdcXzGZZRY

Order your own Challenge Coin from a Veteran-owned Business - Www.medalsofamerica.com

Support this podcast:

Thank you to our sponsor: Tobacco Free Adagio Health: https://tobaccofree.adagiohealth.org/

To find out more information about the Veterans Breakfast Club and view our upcoming schedule of online and in-person events, visit our website at: http://www.veteransbreakfastclub.org/