Veterans Breakfast Club

Our Veterans Breakfast Club’s Open Conversation gathers veterans, military family members, history buffs, and interested people of all sorts together in a Zoom room without an agenda. We then talk for 90 minutes. Once a month, we dispense with the scheduled guest and prepared program and turn the microphone over to the people who show up. Bring a story, a question, a memory, something you’ve been...

Maurice L. “Chipp” Naylon IV served nine years as a U.S. Marine Corps infantry officer. In 2014–2015, he deployed to Afghanistan as a combat advisor and operations officer working with soldiers from the Republic of Georgia assigned to help defend Bagram Airfield. By then, America had been at war in Afghanistan for more than thirteen years, and Washington was preparing to declare an “end to combat...

Our Veterans Breakfast Club’s Open Conversation gathers veterans, military family members, history buffs, and interested people of all sorts together in a Zoom room without an agenda. We then talk for 90 minutes. Once a month, we dispense with the scheduled guest and prepared program and turn the microphone over to the people who show up. Bring a story, a question, a memory, something you’ve been...

Join us Monday, October 12, for VBC Live with retired U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel Joe Finch, a decorated Vietnam War helicopter pilot and author of *Angel’s Wing: A Year in the Skies of Vietnam.”   Finch arrived in Vietnam in 1969 as a young lieutenant assigned to A Company, 25th Aviation Battalion—the “Little Bears”—of the 25th Infantry Division. Based at Cu Chi and flying the UH-1 Huey, Finch a...

The Allied invasion of Sicily in July 1943 helped trigger the collapse of Benito Mussolini’s government and, within weeks, Italy’s surrender to the Allies. But the surrender of Italy did not mean the end of the war there. German forces quickly moved to occupy key areas of the country and began a determined defense that would turn the Italian Campaign into one of the longest and hardest-fought camp...

General Mark Clark remains one of the more debated American commanders of World War II. As commander of the U.S. Fifth Army during the Italian Campaign, he led Allied forces through some of the hardest fighting in Europe, from the landings at Salerno through the long advance toward Rome. Join the Veterans Breakfast Club for a conversation with military historian Roger Cirillo, who will look at Cla...

Millions of viewers know NCIS as one of television’s most successful dramas. But what is the real Naval Criminal Investigative Service—and how closely does the show reflect it? Join the Veterans Breakfast Club for a fascinating conversation with Leon Carroll Jr., Marine veteran, retired NCIS Special Agent, bestselling author, and the longtime technical advisor to the hit CBS series NCIS. After ser...

Every family has its own connection to World War II, whether through a parent, grandparent, spouse, sibling, or another loved one whose experiences became part of the family story.  Many World War II veterans did not speak of the war or their experience in it until many years later, some never did. Join the Veterans Breakfast Club for an open conversation about the World War II experiences passed...

As a young teenager, Adais A. “Tony” Garcia, Jr., was running with gangs and headed down a dangerous road. After becoming involved in a crime, Tony found himself in court facing a grim and possible short future. Instead, a deal was worked out with a judge: when Tony was old enough, he would join the United States Army. And that deal put Adais on a whole different path. Adais went on to serve an ex...

The Guadalcanal campaign was America’s first major ground offensive of World War II in the Pacific, but some of its most important fighting took place along a relatively small stretch of ground west of Henderson Field: the Matanikau River. Author and Guadalcanal battlefield expert Dave Holland joins Veterans Breakfast Club to explore the repeated battles fought along the Matanikau front. Over seve...

Lt. Col. Frederick C. Brems carried a camera throughout his World War II service with the 2nd Armored Division, preserving an extraordinary visual record of the war as he experienced it. Brems enlisted before the attack on Pearl Harbor and eventually served in Europe with the famed “Hell on Wheels” division. From the fall of 1944 through the end of the war, he photographed the soldiers, vehicles,...

Join the Veterans Breakfast Club for an open conversation with veterans of the Army Security Agency (ASA), the once-secretive U.S. Army intelligence organization whose soldiers served around the world during the Cold War. Created on September 15, 1945, the ASA grew out of the Army’s wartime signals intelligence and communications security operations. Its mission included intercepting and analyzing...

In July 1943, General George S. Patton led the U.S. Seventh Army into Sicily in Operation Husky, the first major Allied assault on Axis-held Europe. What followed was a fast-moving campaign that showcased Patton’s aggressiveness, ambition, and battlefield leadership—and also revealed the controversies that would come to define his wartime reputation. Historian and Patton expert Kevin Hymel, author...

Helicopters played an indispensable role in the Vietnam War, carrying troops and supplies, scouting enemy positions, providing fire support, evacuating the wounded, and giving commanders unprecedented mobility over some of the most difficult terrain in the world. For Helicopter Pilots in Vietnam, Part II, we welcome back Gil Ferrey along with four more Army aviation veterans whose experiences span...

Where were you on September 11, 2001? Most of us who were alive that day remember exactly where we were when we saw images of smoke pouring from the North Tower of the World Trade Center. We remember the second plane striking the South Tower live on television. And then, 56 minutes later, that tower collapsed, followed by its North twin at 10:28am. Meanwhile, another hijacked airplane hit the Pent...

Is China already a great power—or still becoming one? And if it is, what does that mean for the United States, the Navy, and the balance of power at sea? Dr. Bernard “Bud” Cole is a 30-year U.S. Navy veteran, former warship commander, and one of America’s leading experts on China’s military and maritime strategy. Bud Cole has spent a lifetime in the Pacific—at sea, in uniform, and in the classroom...

The Baghdad Shuffle is a crime thriller set against the 2003 invasion of Iraq, but much of the world behind it comes directly from author Josh Bates’s own experience as a Marine. Bates was serving as a Marine infantry officer when his unit pushed north from Kuwait into Iraq and eventually into Baghdad. What stayed with him was not only the combat, but the chaos that followed the collapse of Saddam...

We welcome helicopter pilots in Vietnam to VBC LIVE to discuss their service with these iconic machines. Nothing, in fact, is more closely associated with the Vietnam War than the helicopter. More than 12,000 helicopters served in Southeast Asia, carrying troops into battle, evacuating the wounded, escorting convoys, directing artillery, scouting enemy positions, and providing close air support. F...

During World War II, the United States built 2,710 Liberty ships to move the cargo needed to fight a global war. They were plain, inexpensive, and often called “ugly ducklings,” but without them the Allied victory would have been impossible. Join the Veterans Breakfast Club as Glenn Flickinger welcomes award-winning journalist and author Doug Most to discuss his acclaimed new book, Launching Liber...

We celebrate the U.S. Coast Guard’s birthday with an Open Conversation with USCG veterans on Monday, August 3 at 7:00pm ET. Join us as we talk with Coast Guard veterans about what makes their service so distinct—and so essential to the nation’s security and safety. Founded on August 4, 1790, the Coast Guard is the oldest continuous seagoing service in the United States. Unlike other branches, the...

The Holocaust did not begin with Auschwitz. Before the gas chambers became instruments of industrialized murder, mobile SS killing squads known as the Einsatzgruppen followed the German army into Eastern Europe, massacring more than a million Jews, Roma, Soviet prisoners, and civilians in forests, ravines, villages, and fields. After the war, a young American Army investigator named Benjamin “Ben”...

During the Vietnam War, amid the chaos of Saigon in 1968, a young American actor made an unusual decision. Rather than serve in the U.S. military, 24-year-old Pittsburgh native Richard Hughes traveled to Vietnam on his own, determined to find some way to help civilians caught in the conflict. What he encountered were homeless street children—boys who survived by shining shoes for American GIs, sle...

Greatest Generation Live welcomes one of the last surviving Canadian veterans of D-Day, Jim Parks, for a conversation about his extraordinary journey from the beaches of Normandy to the final victory over Nazi Germany. Jim enlisted in the Canadian Army while still underage and spent nearly three years training in Britain before landing with the Royal Winnipeg Rifles on Juno Beach on June 6, 1944....

Did one decision in Washington change the course of the Vietnam War? Join the Veterans Breakfast Club for a conversation with award-winning historian and former Los Angeles Times reporter Jack Cheevers about his powerful new book, Kennedy’s Coup: A White House Plot, a Saigon Murder, and America’s Descent into Vietnam. In November 1963, South Vietnamese President Ngô Đình Diệm was overthrown and as...

Six Marines raising the American flag atop Mount Suribachi on February 23, 1945, became one of the most enduring images in American history. But what about the company behind the flag? Join the Veterans Breakfast Club for a conversation with Marine veteran and author Billy Myers, who has spent years researching the remarkable story of Easy Company, 2nd Battalion, 28th Marines—the unit whose men cl...