Vegas Veteran Voices

Every Marine defends their boot camp. Randall Parkes is one of the few alive who saw both sides of it, San Diego recruit, three years as a Parris Island drill instructor, then back to MCRD San Diego as a First Sergeant. Ronnie asks the question every Marine argues about, and for once the answer comes with full context. And that's just the warm-up. Twenty years from a founding MARSOC Raider: walkin...

Radio Battalion is chock full of nerds. Edward Haines would know. He led them. He signed an infantry contract in 1995. Somewhere in boot camp the Marine Corps pulled him out of his platoon, sat him in a back room, and had him do things with language and sound that nobody explained. He walked out of there a signals intelligence Marine and spent the next twenty years in rooms most people will never...

Bruce Cardenas grew up in a New Jersey steel mill town of 1,200 people. He wanted one thing: a badge. The police chief looked at him and said "you're young, dumb and immature." Then he told him exactly where to go instead. The Marine Corps. What happened after that doesn't make sense on paper. LAPD, January 1988, right before the most chaotic decade in the city's history. The riots. Rodney King. T...

Anyone in America can open a martial arts school today. No license. No background check. No training. Nothing. Rob Ingram has spent 13 years proving why that's a problem. He was born with a cleft lip, got jumped outside gym class at 11, and walked into his first dojo on his 12th birthday, because his mom had already signed the contract. Twenty-nine years later he's the industry's watchdog: McDojoL...

Tarek "Joey Nobody" Kadourah came to the U.S. as a Palestinian Muslim immigrant with no country to call his own, and America was the only one that took his family in. So he tried to give back the only way he knew how: by serving. What followed was one of the wildest careers you'll hear on a veteran podcast, Army interpreter, Contracting for : overseas intel work, a dark-web task force hunting ISIS...

Her Mom Died of Cancer When She Was 5. She Spent 13 Years Making Sure It Didn't Destroy Other Families. She grew up on 82 square miles of ocean in St. Croix, U.S. Virgin Islands. Her mom was 38 years young when the diagnosis came. Anisa was five. Her youngest sister was one. Her dad raised four girls and one boy alone. Nobody showed up for their family. Nobody paid the rent. Nobody filled the frid...

Senior Airman Nikki Kraus was a weather forecaster in the Air Force, embedded with Army battalions in Korea, briefing generals on fog and moon illumination while helicopters waited to fly. She graduated basic training with honors at 26. She earned Airman of the Year, two Army Achievement Medals, and three consecutive employee of the month awards in Korea. She was also, at the same time, fighting t...

Happy 250th, America. For our Fourth of July special, the table fills up: Ronnie, Ghost, Jimmy “Pew Pew” Depew, David Lonergan, and Jessica Jay Dee — all veterans, all entrepreneurs — for an unscripted conversation about what freedom actually means when you've seen the alternative. This one goes everywhere: Marine Corps ribbing and dark humor, the hard reality of veteran ho...

Lindsay Gutierrez thought joining the military meant going straight to Vietnam. She was wrong about that. She was also wrong about Qatar having pyramids. But she wasn't wrong about the thing that mattered most, that service doesn't end when you take the uniform off. Lindsay served six years as a Security Forces officer in the Air Force, deployed to Qatar and Djibouti, survived a vehicle rollover i...

She shot an entire season of Stranger Things with cancer. Nobody on set knew. Jennifer Marshall is a Navy veteran, actress, firefighter EMT, and cancer survivor who has spent her entire life showing up when every reasonable person would have stayed home. She joined the Navy at 17 out of a small mountain town in Colorado, her words: “poverty and bad decisions.” She deployed on the USS T...

2K Kenny didn't go viral in a studio. He's Petty and Second Class. He went viral on a Navy ship, after writing a love song during sweepers, recording the melody on Snapchat before he forgot it, and sneaking into the barbershop to lay it down because it was the only quiet room on the boat. The next day his LPO walked in singing it. That's when he knew. In this episode, Kenny breaks down what it act...

Two brothers. Same darkness. Only one walked away. Iraq combat veteran Raivadus Gill came home from war running at 110mph while the world had slowed to 15. He thought he was good. Then one afternoon, alone in a house, a heaviness hit him that he still can't fully explain, and he walked to his brother's room and picked up a gun. A flyer on a table is the only reason he's sitting in this chair. A ye...

Army veteran Steve Ulman shares one of the most raw and powerful veteran interviews we have filmed on Vegas Veteran Voices. In this episode, Steve opens up about his suicide attempt, addiction, recovery, ayahuasca, acting, trauma, off grid living, entrepreneurship, and how he rebuilt his life from rock bottom. He talks about putting a gun to his head, moving the pistol at the last second, and real...

If you've ever come home from a deployment and felt like a stranger in your own house — this episode is for you. Jamie and Cole Waterberry are an Air Force couple with 16 years of marriage, 9 moves, and 6 deployments between them. Stories they're only now comfortable telling out loud — like the time Cole casually drove through IED Alley and described it as "nothing to worry about." Or...

On this episode of Vegas Veteran Voices, we step aboard the historic USS Pampanito in San Francisco for a powerful conversation inside the submarine's mission control room about something a lot of veterans know too well but do not always talk about enough: life after service. LT. Emilio Mackie opens up about his time in the U.S. Navy, serving as a surface warfare officer, being stationed in Japan,...

Maximilian Uriarte, creator of Terminal Lance, joins Vegas Veteran Voices for a powerful conversation about the Marine Corps, infantry life, war, veteran identity, dark humor, storytelling, and life after service. In this episode, Max opens up about why he chose the infantry even though he had the scores to do almost anything else, how Iraq shaped him, and how humor became a way to process anger,...

This shouldn't have worked… but it did. At the Mint 400, one of the largest off-road races in North America, a veteran-led team from Green Beret Racing built their cars in just three weeks… then watched everything start to break in the middle of the desert. A steering failure mid-race should have ended it. Instead, they improvised. Using nothing but a cut-up energy drink can, duct ta...

Most people know Lucky Lopez as the car guy on YouTube. Breaking down the used car market, auto loans, dealerships, Turo, and how money really moves in the car business. What they don't know is… before all of that… he was a 63B mechanic in the Army National Guard. And the story is not what you think. In this episode of Vegas Veteran Voices, Lucky Lopez sits down with Ronnie Long and...

Most people think aggressive dogs are dangerous by nature. A Marine Corps veteran and professional dog trainer explains why that belief is often wrong. In this episode of Vegas Veteran Voices, we break down the real purpose of dog training and why structure, boundaries, and clear expectations are essential for powerful working breeds like German Shepherds and Belgian Malinois. Training is not crue...

What If Joining the Marine Corps Is the Fastest Way to Escape Being Stuck? In this episode of Vegas Veteran Voices, Ronald Long sits down with SSgt Nicholas Milsap, an active duty United States Marine Corps recruiter, for a brutally honest conversation about what the Marine Corps actually gives you and what people get completely wrong about military service. This episode covers everything from esc...

In this episode, we sit down with Gina Elise, founder of Pin Up for Vets, a nonprofit she started in 2006 to support veterans through hospital visits and fundraising that helps provide rehab equipment for veterans hospitals across the United States. Gina explains how classic World War II pin up art inspired a modern mission, including a pin up calendar fundraiser and a 50 state hospital tour where...

This episode shares a real veteran's personal story of transition, identity, and rebuilding after service, Brenton and Ronnie sit down with Jason Lee Morrison, a USMC veteran, writer, and poet, for a raw conversation about the one thing that keeps veterans alive after the uniform comes off: community. Jason talks about what it felt like to disappear from his Marine Recon world for years, then come...

On the anniversary of the day Ronnie Long survived an IED blast in Sangin, Afghanistan, we chose not to isolate. We turned it into an Alive Day. For many combat veterans, IED anniversaries and deployment dates can trigger survivor's guilt, PTSD symptoms, anxiety, and isolation. Instead of staying home and letting the weight of the date take over, we gathered at Adrenaline Mountain in Las Vegas to...

Afghanistan's deadliest fighting, Marines learned that survival depends on connection, purpose, and the people beside you. When service ends, many veterans lose that structure overnight and are expected to rebuild their lives alone. This episode shows how that loss of purpose can be just as dangerous as combat itself and how Race to Erase 22 is fighting back. In this Vegas Veteran Voices episode,...

In this episode of Vegas Veteran Voices, host Ronnie Long sits down with Greg Cope White, author of The Pink Marine and writer and executive producer on the Netflix series Boots. Boots is a military comedy-drama based on Greg's memoir, following a bullied teen who impulsively joins the U.S. Marine Corps and finds purpose, structure, and brotherhood in boot camp. Greg breaks down the real story beh...