The Vanguard Wall Podcast

Youngstown, Ohio was a genuine mob town when Allison Brager was growing up. A man put a gun to her dad's stomach and locked him in the meat freezer at the shop where he worked. She went on to Brown as a first-generation college student, a PhD in biology (neuropsychopharmacology), two CrossFit Games, and a career as an active-duty Army neuroscientist studying sleep in soldiers and athletes.We cover the caffeine research driven by a real operational need, after Ranger Instructors died when one fell asleep at the wheel driving down from the mountain phase of Ranger School, why 200 mg is the ceiling, what a single concussion does to sleep, why women sleep deeper than men, and what your wearable can't see. She takes us inside the Army's COVID field hospital at the Javits Center in April 2020, the day 70% of the samples exploded on the plane, her first NCO and the 2 a.m. call every leader needs to answer, Ambien, melatonin, naps, energy drinks, alcohol, applying to be a NASA astronaut, and her book Meathead.#Sleep #Army #PodcastDr. Allison Brager is an active-duty U.S. Army Major and neuroscientist who studies sleep, circadian rhythms and performance in soldiers and athletes, and the author of "Meathead: Unraveling the Athletic Brain." Follow her work:📸 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/docjockzzz/📖 Her book, Meathead: https://www.amazon.com/dp/149086444XSponsors:Serious supplements "For Those that Run Towards"https://go.thevanguardwall.com/hoplite-brager-podUse Code VANGUARD15 for 15% off🔗Connect with The Vanguard Wall Podcast🏪Merch: https://go.thevanguardwall.com/merch📰 Free Weekly Intel Brief: https://intel.thevanguardwall.com⚔️Join The Wall → https://youtube.com/channel/UCJ8K3O-n9Mdcxv0mtV4xdCw/join🎥 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@TheVanguardWall⚔️Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/c/TheVanguardWall📸 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thevanguardwallpodcast/📘 Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61569106772297📧 Connect/Sponsor: [email protected]

On the night of 5 October 2013, outside Kandahar, a Ranger strike force walked onto Objective Ares. Somewhere between 40 and 60 IEDs were buried across 100 meters of ground. Army EOD tech Jeff Dawson was the bomb tech on the ground with them.In this episode, SFC (Ret.) Jeff Dawson tells the whole story: growing up, picking EOD, EOD school, deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan, and going to work with the Ranger Regiment. He walks through the night of Objective Ares, the four who were killed, and the Distinguished Service Cross he says can't bring them back.Then the years after: the TBI he hid, the drinking between deployments, and the 2019 Ghazni deployment where a 5.56 round from his own side left him paralyzed. He talks about Walter Reed, the toe that moved, walking again, the article he asked them to change, and the ketamine and ayahuasca that helped him heal.🎖️ In memory of 1st Lt. Jennifer M. Moreno, Sgt. Patrick C. Hawkins, Sgt. Joseph M. Peters and Pfc. Cody J. Patterson, killed at Objective Ares, Zhari District, Afghanistan, on 6 October 2013.SFC (Ret.) Jeff Dawson is a U.S. Army EOD technician who supported the 75th Ranger Regiment, earned the Distinguished Service Cross for Objective Ares in 2013, was paralyzed from the chest down by a gunshot in 2019 and walked again. His story:🎖️ Army Ordnance Corps Hall of Fame: https://goordnance.army.mil/HallOfFame/2020/2022/dawson.html📰 Task & Purpose profile: https://taskandpurpose.com/news/army-eod-tech-jeffrey-dawson/📸 Jeff on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jeffreak86/🎥 Watch the full video on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n9FVi8n_TGgSponsors:Serious supplements "For Those that Run Towards"https://go.thevanguardwall.com/hoplite-dawson-podUse Code VANGUARD15 for 15% off🔗Connect with The Vanguard Wall Podcast🏪Merch: https://go.thevanguardwall.com/merch📰 Free Weekly Intel Brief: https://intel.thevanguardwall.com⚔️Join The Wall → https://youtube.com/channel/UCJ8K3O-n9Mdcxv0mtV4xdCw/join🎥 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@TheVanguardWall⚔️Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/c/TheVanguardWall📸 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thevanguardwallpodcast/📘 Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61569106772297📧 Connect/Sponsor: [email protected]:00:00:00 Cold open00:05:04 Meet SFC (Ret.) Jeff Dawson00:13:56 Growing up00:26:36 High school00:43:42 Before the Army00:55:13 Picking EOD01:02:42 Knowing what he was signing up for01:10:49 EOD school01:42:59 First assignment and Iraq01:59:36 Working for the State Department02:05:10 Going to work with the Rangers02:30:29 Military working dogs02:41:33 Objective Ares02:47:26 In the wrong place02:59:55 Everyone frozen on the objective03:08:04 Clearing the objective03:20:07 1st Lt. Jennifer Moreno and the Cultural Support Team03:27:33 Could he have done more?03:37:44 Back on target after two blasts03:42:54 Advanced Leader Course and the first signs of TBI03:51:51 The Distinguished Service Cross03:57:41 Ordnance Corps Hall of Fame and the Ranger Regiment04:08:06 More deployments with the Rangers04:35:41 Drinking between deployments04:56:31 To the man he used to be05:00:14 The Ghazni deployment05:05:44 The night he was shot05:26:03 His toe moved05:35:00 Walter Reed05:42:16 Who shot him05:46:44 The article05:58:53 Ketamine and plant medicine06:11:05 Ayahuasca in Peru06:37:44 Walking doesn't mean healed06:49:02 To the man still in the bottle

Nick Laidlaw enlisted in the Marine Corps to go to war. The war never came for him. So he spent the years after collecting other men's: over 1,100 first-hand accounts from more than 20 armies, both sides of nearly every war since 1939, including a Taliban fighter who later apologized to him.Then he stopped collecting from a distance and went himself. In 2022 he was talking into encircled Mariupol over Starlink, interviewing a 22-year-old Azov soldier named Anton "Pazman" Krill almost every day until Anton was killed. Nick holds his last words: "When we are relieved from here I will immediately marry my girlfriend and everything will be Ukraine." Two and a half years later, a man Nick was certain had died in Russian captivity messaged him. They met in a tea shop: "Thank you for giving me Anton back."In 2025 he rode into Pokrovsk at one in the morning in a soft-skin pickup, after a brigade deputy commander told him it was 50-50 he'd be hit going in or coming out. He went. Seven hours: the wound that started it, and the work that came out of it.▶ Watch on YouTube: youtube.com/watch?v=JNZvkcO3fsECHAPTERS0:00:00 Cold open0:04:04 Eight months in the making0:09:51 Adopted at birth, and the half of his life he knew nothing about0:19:21 He found his biological family in six days0:37:13 Growing up on the GWOT, and why the Marine Corps0:47:10 Boot camp, SOI, and FAST company0:58:07 He enlisted to have his metal tested. The war never came.1:03:43 Getting out, and the transition nobody prepares you for1:08:29 A Glock in the car door, and the song that stopped him1:16:02 Battles and Beers begins1:28:06 Kabul falls, and the people he tried to get out1:39:14 "You are the target audience" - how propaganda really works1:46:32 He interviewed a member of the Taliban2:03:43 Maidan, Crimea and the Donbas: how this war started2:27:14 What Azov actually is2:33:02 Russia's justification, and what he says is the truth2:53:22 Into encircled Mariupol on Starlink2:59:01 Anton "Pazman" Krill, 22 years old3:15:52 Standing at Anton's memorial wall with his brother3:26:36 "What right do you have to take these stories?"3:30:37 Bucha, from a man who lived through it3:40:26 The Coke can in the Walmart parking lot3:56:27 Artillery down the road. The waiter offered a refill.4:08:51 Why he calls himself a coward4:13:02 Ukraine's prison-release soldiers4:41:13 The third trip: full access with the 25th Airborne5:01:56 How an FPV strike actually happens5:03:29 Mercy kills, and the wounded nobody comes for5:15:14 Pokrovsk: 110,000 Russians5:17:33 Hearing became survival5:30:47 A mine went off next door5:40:17 He strained drinking water through his underwear5:58:01 The truck he was supposed to be in6:00:29 From atheist to something else6:27:23 American aid to Ukraine6:52:20 What years of this has done to him6:59:01 CloseFollow Nick: Battles and Beers battlesandbeers.org · IG @nicklaidthelaw · @battles_and_beers · @zero.line.dispatch⚔️ Hoplite Nutrition — serious supplements for those that run towards: go.thevanguardwall.com/hoplite-ep46-audio — code VANGUARD15📰 Free Weekly Intel Brief: intel.thevanguardwall.com🏪 Merch: go.thevanguardwall.com/merch · 📸 IG: @thevanguardwallpodcast · 🎥 YouTube: @TheVanguardWall

Ten years on the busiest ambulance in the City of Dallas. A downtown building that came down behind him with a mayday on the radio, and the smoke that dropped him to his knees. A New Year's Eve call in a barbershop where the crowd turned on the medics. A full cardiac code run on the floor of an airplane at 35,000 feet — the night he flew home from winning the Arnold Classic Brazil. Steve Kuclo is the first firefighter-paramedic in 45 episodes of this show. He quit automotive engineering when the industry collapsed, did two fire academies and two medic schools to get to Dallas, and spent a decade running the calls that don't leave — the pediatric ones, the ones where you did everything right and it didn't matter — while building himself into an IFBB Pro who stood on the Olympia stage at 26. Then 2020 took the identity he'd spent twenty years on, and the rebuild ran through the back row of a Dallas church, a marriage, and the regenerative-medicine clinic he runs today. He covers the firehouse — the kitchen table, the probie year, what brotherhood actually means, and the PTSD, divorce, addiction and suicide numbers the fire service doesn't talk about — and then opens the knowledge base: what steroids and TRT actually do to your blood, what actually kills bodybuilders, peptides in plain English, and the stem-cell treatment the host went through on camera.▶ Watch on YouTube: youtube.com/watch?v=ULu2tjb6QjM🎬 The stem-cell film: youtube.com/watch?v=AeJY1uJH6BECHAPTERS0:00:00 How they met — one call about BPC-1570:01:55 Ten years on the ambulance, and the Olympia stage0:13:57 Age 14 at his first Arnold Classic0:27:33 30,000 applicants for a couple hundred Dallas fire spots0:35:23 The busiest ambulance in Dallas: seven calls in two hours0:59:32 The building collapse — mayday on the radio1:10:08 The kitchen table1:22:28 What brotherhood actually means1:25:50 New Year's Eve in the barbershop1:30:55 Running a full code on a plane at 35,000 feet2:09:02 First Olympia stage at 262:22:38 What steroids and TRT do to your blood2:47:17 2020 rock bottom2:58:33 Crying in the back row of a Dallas church3:24:17 Stem cells 101 — where the cells come from3:37:28 What the stem cells did — the host's own account3:45:15 Peptides — what they are and aren't3:53:31 BPC-157 and TB-5004:11:26 GLPs — Ozempic, tirzepatide, retatrutide4:40:17 TRT — what it is and isn't4:53:14 Why "my testosterone was normal" means nothing5:07:02 The offer — a landing page for TVW listeners🧬 STEM CELLS · PEPTIDES · TRT — Steve's door for Vanguard Wall listeners. Fill out the intake, his clinical team reviews it, and you get a straight answer on whether it's right for you: go.thevanguardwall.com/regenx📸 Steve: @stevekuclo · ReGenX: @regenx_⚔️ Hoplite Nutrition — serious supplements for those that run towards: go.thevanguardwall.com/hoplite-ep45-audio — code VANGUARD15📰 Free Weekly Intel Brief: intel.thevanguardwall.com🏪 Merch: go.thevanguardwall.com/merch · 📸 IG: @thevanguardwallpodcast · 🎥 YouTube: @TheVanguardWallThe medical portions of this conversation document personal experience and are for informational purposes only. Not medical advice; no outcome is claimed or guaranteed. Therapies discussed are not FDA-approved. Consult a licensed physician.Disclosure: Upgraded Human ReGenX provided the host's stem-cell treatment (discussed in this episode) at no cost. This is not a paid sponsorship. The Vanguard Wall earns a referral benefit through the clinic link above. Opinions are our own.

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.CHAPTERS0:00:00 Cold Open: Wanat, July 20080:04:03 Growing Up on Virginia's Eastern Shore0:12:02 September 11th in the School Hallway0:24:47 What a Mortarman Actually Does0:30:29 Fort Drum: The Helicopter Crash0:41:40 French Commando School in Djibouti0:49:09 The Smart Bomb That Hit the Helicopter1:08:51 Route Tampa: IEDs and Complacency1:18:01 Reenlisting for Italy and the 173rd1:40:13 Ranch House at 3,300 Meters1:55:32 Ranch House Overrun on the Radio2:06:56 The Order to Build Wanat2:14:55 Building the Outpost by Hand2:25:34 Stand-To on 13 July 20082:35:26 The First RPG Hits the TOW Truck2:42:05 Weapons Seize, Firing the AT42:48:32 Sergio Abad Is Hit2:56:04 Abad's Guardian and Forgiveness3:15:42 Volunteering to Reinforce OP Topside3:22:11 Reaching OP Topside3:32:31 Jonathan Ayers on the 2403:39:25 The RPG That Wounded Him3:49:42 The Medevac Pilots3:58:46 Landstuhl, Vicodin, and Coming Home4:02:35 Saying Their Names4:14:24 Drill Sergeant: Visualizing the Range4:31:31 Lewis-McChord and Spin Boldak4:39:12 Ranger School at Twenty-Nine4:53:41 Fixing a Broken Tank Company5:08:26 Observer-Controller at the National Training Center5:21:51 COVID, Isolation, and Drinking5:33:03 Losing Stratton Hall5:44:30 The Meadows and Getting Sober6:00:07 Bob Starr and Learning Business6:06:08 Farm Bureau and Serving Clients6:17:40 A Message to His Kids⚔️ Hoplite Nutrition — serious supplements for those that run towards: go.thevanguardwall.com/hoplite-ep44-audio — code VANGUARD15📰 Free Weekly Intel Brief: intel.thevanguardwall.com🏪 Merch: go.thevanguardwall.com/merch · 📸 IG: @thevanguardwallpodcast · 🎥 YouTube: @TheVanguardWall