The Veterans Breakfast Club (VBC) is the nation’s premier non-profit for connecting veterans with their fellow Americans through inspiring stories of service. We’re the place where veterans can share what they’ve seen and done—and where everyone can listen and learn.
UPCOMING EVENTS
Peter J. Ortiz may be the most remarkable American you’ve never heard of.
A Marine officer, OSS operative, and veteran of the French Foreign Legion, Ortiz led one of the most extraordinary military careers of World War II. Captured by the Germans more than once, he repeatedly escaped, returned to the fight, and eventually parachuted into occupied France to organize Resistance fighters, rescue downed Allied airmen, gather intelligence, and carry out sabotage missions behind enemy lines. His exploits became the stuff of legend, yet today his story remains surprisingly little known.
Join us as we talk with historian and former CIA officer Nicholas Reynolds and award-winning journalist Katie S. Sanders, authors of Ortiz’s War: The Allies’ Secret Weapon Against the Nazis in France, a new biography that reconstructs the life of this remarkable Marine and OSS officer from American and French archives. Along the way we’ll discuss the wartime OSS, the French Resistance, intelligence operations in occupied Europe, and the challenges of separating fact from myth when writing about someone whose life often seems almost too extraordinary to believe.
Nicholas Reynolds is the author of several acclaimed books on intelligence and World War II, including Writer, Sailor, Soldier, Spy and Need to Know. Katie Sanders is a journalist drawn to World War II stories about resistance and intergenerational connection. Together they have produced what is likely to become the definitive account of Peter Ortiz’s life.
We hope you’ll join us for what should be an engaging conversation about one of the most fascinating—and overlooked—figures of World War II.
The Baghdad Shuffle is a crime thriller set against the 2003 invasion of Iraq, but much of the world behind it comes directly from author Josh Bates’s own experience as a Marine.
Bates was serving as a Marine infantry officer when his unit pushed north from Kuwait into Iraq and eventually into Baghdad. What stayed with him was not only the combat, but the chaos that followed the collapse of Saddam Hussein’s regime—the looting, criminal activity, money left behind, and Marines suddenly dealing with situations far outside conventional warfare. One episode in particular, a Baghdad bank robbery involving thieves trying to breach a vault with RPGs, became part of the inspiration for the story he would eventually write.
Although the novel is fiction, Bates says much of the Iraq section grew out of things he actually experienced during the initial push to Baghdad and the period that followed. He estimates that roughly 85 to 90 percent of the events informing the first act happened to him in some form, then were condensed and reshaped for the story.
We’ll talk with Josh about his Marine Corps career, his experiences during the invasion of Iraq, and how those memories eventually became the foundation for a novel. We’ll also discuss the mix of military experience, crime, humor, and absurdity that shaped The Baghdad Shuffle, and why he wanted the book to reflect the perspective of the young Marines who actually lived through those early days of the war.
Josh Bates is a retired Marine infantry and intelligence officer, podcaster, and author. The Baghdad Shuffle is his first novel.
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educate and inspire.
Everyone is always welcome.
The Veterans Breakfast Club (VBC) is the nation’s premier non-profit for connecting veterans with their fellow Americans through inspiring stories of service.
Our goal is to build a nation that understands and values the experiences of our military veterans so that every day is Veterans Day.
We do this by bringing together–in-person and online–men and women from all walks of life, all ages and eras, and every branch of service to talk about what they’ve seen and done. We want to hear how people’s military service has shaped them. “Every Veteran Has a Story” is our slogan. We want to hear every one.
We share the stories we hear in our weekly VBC Bulletin email newsletter and our quarterly VBC Magazine. We also record a weekly podcast, The Scuttlebutt, about military culture from the people who lived it.
We do all this because we believe the best way to thank a Veteran is to listen.
Listening is what the VBC has been doing for the past 15 years, when we held our first small event outside of Pittsburgh. Since then, we’ve held over 1,000 programs in-person and online and have welcomed over 20,000 different people at our events, Veterans and non-Veterans coming together to listen.
We value every veteran’s experience, no matter who they are or when or how they served. We’ve seen up close the power of storytelling, as the memories shared at VBC events connect, heal, educate, and inspire an ever-expanding circle of listeners.
THE VETERANS HISTORY PROJECT
Preserving veterans’ stories so that this living history is never forgotten.
We pair passionate VBC volunteers with military veterans for one-on-one oral history interviews over Zoom. If you are a veteran, or you know a veteran, who would be interested in sharing his or her story with us, let us know. If you are someone interested in conducting these interviews, please reach out!
At any given event, you might hear from the newest members of Space Force to a 101-year-old World War II veteran.
We’ve welcomed Tin Can Sailors and Montford Point Marines, Vietnam Sky Soldiers and Cold War intelligence officers. We’ve heard stories from the Horn of Africa to Antarctica, the Bering Sea to Diego Garcia, and all points in between.
LORAN Coast Guardsmen and Radar Station Airmen have told us about serving in some of the most remote places on earth.
Korean War veterans have borne witness to their “forgotten war.”
Other “forgotten warriors” shared their memories of Beirut, Grenada, and Mogadishu.
Some of the first women authorized for combat shared stories of fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, and of the Purple Hearts they received.
