That's your attention now, don't I?

This is the Black Rifle Coffee Podcast.

Welcome to the Black Rifle Coffee podcast.

I'm particularly excited about this one.

We've got a fellow 3-5 Marine across from me and Jericho Denman laid back berserker.

How you doing?

I'm super duper.

I'm glad to be in the presence of so much Marine.

Are you?

I am.

It's always good.

Always a good time.

Tom is still active duty.

He recently wrote a new book called Always Faithful, which chronicles his interactions with

Afghanistan interpreter in the process of getting him to the United States after the disaster

in Kabul.

And so before we get into the story of the book, give us like your quick rundown on your

background, kind of the life so far, just like, you know, bullet points. Yep. This is always the worst part. Uh, but, uh, I'll, I'll give it a stab here. So, uh, grew up in Chicago. Um, my mom was Chicago cop, uh, single mom grew up on the south side. Uh, 9-11 happened while I was in high school.

I said I should go do something about that.

But I went to college first and I commissioned our ROTC, became an infantry marine,

tuned commander with 3-5, went to Sengen, got back, went to recon, became a J-TAC,

went back to Afghanistan in 2012, school of infantry, company commander out in 29 poems. Then I got paid to teach at the Nail Academy. So I went out and I got a degree, master's degree in English, taught the Naval Academy for a couple of years, and I'm headed back to the fleet to be the operations officer at 35. Oh, yeah.

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