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Hey, welcome to another episode of Soft Rep Radio. I am your host, Rad, and I have a very special guest today, Ranger Hall of Fame inducted in 2013, Max Molen. Welcome to the show, Max.

Well, thank you for the invite. I'm glad to be here.

You know, I really appreciate having you on the show. We tried to get you back on a few months back, and there were some technical issues, and we were able to circle around and bring you back on the show.

So again, thanks for taking the time out of your busy day. I know just off the top of my head, you just got done with speaking at the Ranger graduation recently. Is that right?

Friday was the Rangers, Ranger School graduation for class seven dash 22, and it was, it was really good. I believe was, they start out with 300 and 30 original Rangers and they graduated 162.

So it was pretty fast, you know, it's made it through. Yeah. And so, you know, it was so 162 plus you have Rangers who had to be recycled through the different phases that helped make it up the class.

It was quite a few, they would drop from that, you know, three and some people. It was something else.

Right, because you may have Rangers that were in training that may have received, you know, some type of, you know, go back a week or two and then join this group, and they would fall in with this.

Yeah, you know, as they go through, like Rangers have to, you know, you get injured and he'd be held over to the next class and catch it with them. They may be hit with, you know, injuries or peers, or they fill patrols.

And they go before board and the board, you know, evaluates their infractions. And so they may be picked up the next classes that come through, but a lot of them are like injuries.

Somebody get, you know, empatigo or something like that. They hold them over to the next class catches up and they move on to the course.

Well, that's amazing. So you see this younger generation taking your slot when you were that younger generation. You were enduring like the 80s, early 90s. Am I right? What year did you serve?

I joined the Army back in 1976. And so basically the Vietnam War was just winding down. The war officially ended that I believe in was in 75.

And I remember, I finally remember it. All the church bells and everything were going off in a, in my town I lived in. I said, what's going to say? Well, the Vietnam wars are officially ended.

So when I joined Army in 76, it was different. The war just ended. And the army at that time was really, really in bad shape.

And you know, you'd be a young 18 year old kid coming off the block, you know, joining and you want to do the right thing.

So my first duty station was Korean. It was a, it was an eye opener.

Yeah, a lot of most of the in sales of Vietnam vets. Then a lot of officers were, you know, just didn't serve because you know, after they move up through the chain and stuff like that.

So the company commander and all the opportunities are just, you know, they never served in combat.

And so you had a lot of racial stuff going on during the late 70s. But so this president Reagan took over when he, you know, when he became president, the Army transformed just about overnight. It was unbelievable. The transformation.

Oh, yeah, and you appreciated that is that what I'm understanding. Oh, yeah, heck yeah, big time. I mean, so you kind of see things like that going on now. Yeah, yeah, that's crazy, right?

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