This past week on You Served Radio, our guests were rock band Black Sunshine and Veterans Social Justice Founder BriGette McKoy.
Unfortunately, Black Sunshine was on the road and wasn’t able to call in. Lead singer, Matt Reardon, was otherwise busy but we’re working on booking them for a future date. Black Sunshine is opening for another great band we’ve had on You Served Radio, Smile Empty Soul, and has roots in the military. Check out their single “Once In My Life” with an intro by Matt:
Since the band wasn’t able to make it, Marcus and I discussed some current military news and we also asked the HeroMaker, Clayton Murwin, to update us on his project “Untold Stories of Iraq and Afghanistan”. He gave us some VERY good news about the project and even announced the no later than release date of the comic book. To find out when that is, you’ll have to listen to the show! In the meantime, though, PLEASE check him out on Facebook and his blog.
For the second hour, we were privileged to have BriGette McKoy on to talk about her organization, Veterans Social Justice. BriGette and I met at a Vets4Vets event this past weekend and shared contact information. I was so intrigued by what she’s doing, I asked her to come on the show and we were all lucky to have her.
Veterans Social Justice is a peer support group utilizing social media and education to inform, support, and advocate on behalf of veteran women. As we discussed, women are an underrepresented and misrepresented minority in the veteran culture and society. All too often, they are forgotten about and services and benefits aren’t provided to them based on their unique needs. BriGette was a well-informed guest with a heart of gold trying to close that gap and provide a support network for female veterans who may feel like they are suffering alone.
For this week’s You Served charity auction, we have a hardcopy of the new book Rage Company by Thomas P. Daly. The starting bid is only $4.99 and 100% of the proceeds this week and for the foreseeable future are going to Vets4Vets.
In November 2006, then First Lieutenant Thomas Daly arrived as part of the “surge” in Ramadi, to take part in Operation Squeeze Play, a division-size effort to remove al Qaeda from Anbar province. In this powerful memoir, he describes the successful clearing of southern Ramadi’s Second Officer’s district, the Qatana, and the uprising of local citizens against al Qaeda on the eastern edge of the city (the result of an unlikely alliance between Daly’s company and Thawar al Anbar). From the first patrol to the last in the spring of 2007, he takes you inside the daily successes and struggles of the operation and the stressful challenge of trying to discern who was a terrorist and who was a civilian. He tells the powerful and very human story of a people who want to free their country, yet have no basis on which to trust the American forces in helping them succeed.
Please go and bid on this book, which retails for $25.95 in stores (on Amazon for $17). This is must-have book for anyone interested in reading a first hand account of REAL combat (not that hokey, third person crap from bystanders and observers like Michael Yon) from someone who actually survived it. As of this writing, there is only one bid on this book at $4.99, so you can still get it cheap. Again, 100% of proceeds go to a military charity (in this case Vets4Vets). Check out a video from the author HERE about the book.
If you don’t win the auction, you can buy the book through Amazon, where a portion of sales through this site also go to charity.
