Hey friends, welcome, always delighted that you're with me and my goodness.

Have we got a story for you today?

It is based on the life of a man named Nicholas Said who lived such an extraordinary existence.

I think you would be very hard-pressed to come up with one other person on planet Earth who has a story like his.

Today we're chatting with author Dean Calbreath, who's new book The Sargent Details History.

So let's start it.

I'm Sharon McMahon and here's where it gets interesting.

Thank you for joining me today. I am always excited to chat with other people who love hidden history as much as I do.

So thanks for being here.

Absolutely.

Okay, you have a new book out called The Sargent.

And I would first of all love to have you tell us who is the Sargent.

The Sargent is a soldier in the Civil War called Nicholas Said.

Although he was born as Muhammad Ali Ben Said who was born in a Muslim kingdom in the center of Africa.

A thousand year old kingdom. His father was a general of that kingdom.

A guy who wrote into battle wearing a coat of chain mail wearing an iron helmet and clothes within his turbine fighting with swords and spears kind of like he wrote out of the Arabian nights.

I mean, this was a kind of a medieval kingdom in the early 1800s.

So Dickel Said left Africa under circumstances we can talk about went through Europe and arrived in the United States right on the eve of the Civil War.

He tried joining the army at that time just weeks after the first shots were fired up for some dirt.

At that time the army was for whites only.

So he was he was barred from joining. He ended up being a French teacher at a private African American school in Detroit.

But as soon as Abraham Lincoln opened the army up, then he went to Boston to join the army became a Sargent, which is about as high as you could get as an African in the army at that time and served in the Carolina is Georgia and Florida.

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