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Badlands is a true crime podcast about the famous at their most infamous.

This season we dive deep into some of the most notorious and controversial all-stars,

featuring the insane true stories of Ray Lewis, Michael Vick, Paul Gascoin, Andre Cescovar, and many more.

Listen to Badlands on Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcasts.

You're listening to the Men in Blazers media network. Suboptimal Radio.

It's rogge, it's Friday, and it's a little something different for Men in Blazers World Headquarters today

because it's July 1st, and we know what you're thinking. July 1st, what?

It's the 106th anniversary of the Battle of the Somme, and you are correct.

The truth is, the First World War is not taught in America the same way the stories of these men were beaten into us in England,

tales from the trenches at the Somme,

e-Pra, passion, Dale, they have lived inside generations of Britain's, the sheer horror of what these soldiers endured

has stayed with us since we first encountered them in school.

And if you've listened to Men in Blazers for any period of time, you know that the literature,

the poetry, the storytelling from this era has been incredibly formative in my life, in my education.

And one tale that's always fascinated me is that of the football battalion at British unit who kicked off the Battle of the Somme

by punting footballs out of their trench before chasing them and charging into a hail of German machine gun fire in the process,

just the incongruence of the joyful act of kicking a football, the one thing that tethers a human being today,

youth to their innocence before being sent to an almost certain death on that bloodstained canvas in the middle of France is truly haunting.

And so what you're about to hear is that unique story told in a unique way it comes from

Ah, producer J. Dubbs, Jonathan Williamson, who created an audio play that is essentially the fictitious oral history of four football loving friends from that unit,

the eight-theeseries, very much a work of fiction that J. Dubbs created, created these characters,

...