At the Veterans Breakfast Club,
Stories Unite Us.
Check out our online & in-person veterans storytelling programs and see our full event schedule below. All are welcome to join us!
Millions of viewers know NCIS as one of television’s most successful dramas. But what is the real Naval Criminal Investigative Service—and how closely does the show reflect it?
Join the Veterans Breakfast Club for a fascinating conversation with Leon Carroll Jr., Marine veteran, retired NCIS Special Agent, bestselling author, and the longtime technical advisor to the hit CBS series NCIS.
After serving in the U.S. Marine Corps, Carroll spent more than twenty years investigating crimes involving the Navy and Marine Corps before helping bring the world of military criminal investigations to television audiences around the globe.
Leon will share stories from his career, explain what NCIS agents actually do, and pull back the curtain on more than two decades behind the scenes of one of America’s most enduring TV shows. How much of NCIS is real? Which details matter most? What does Hollywood get right—and what can never quite capture the reality of military investigations?
We’ll also discuss Carroll’s work as co-author, with actor Mark Harmon, of the bestselling books Ghosts of Honolulu and Ghosts of Sicily, which uncover remarkable true stories of Naval Intelligence, espionage, and World War II.
Whether you’re a veteran, an NCIS fan, a military history enthusiast, or simply curious about the intersection of military service, criminal investigation, and popular culture, this promises to be an engaging evening of stories and conversation.
Bring your questions—and join us live.
We’re grateful to our sponsor, Claim Raven, and encourage anyone building a VA Claim to check them out!
The Allied invasion of Sicily in July 1943 helped trigger the collapse of Benito Mussolini’s government and, within weeks, Italy’s surrender to the Allies. But the surrender of Italy did not mean the end of the war there. German forces quickly moved to occupy key areas of the country and began a determined defense that would turn the Italian Campaign into one of the longest and hardest-fought campaigns in Western Europe.
Military historian Colin Heaton joins Veterans Breakfast Club to examine German military strategy in Sicily and Italy in 1943–1944. What did German leaders hope to accomplish as the Allies pushed onto the Italian mainland? How did their strategy change after Italy left the Axis? And how did disagreements among senior German commanders shape the defense of the peninsula?
We’ll look at the men who developed and carried out that strategy—from senior commanders such as Albert Kesselring to the army, corps, and division commanders fighting on the ground—and explore how German tactical decisions affected major battles including Salerno, Monte Cassino, and Anzio.
We’ll also ask why German forces, despite repeatedly slowing and frustrating the Allied advance, ultimately could not hold Italy.
Join us for a close look at command, strategy, and battlefield decision-making in the German defense of Italy during World War II.
Our Veterans Breakfast Club’s Open Conversation gathers veterans, military family members, history buffs, and interested people of all sorts together in a Zoom room without an agenda. We then talk for 90 minutes.
Once a month, we dispense with the scheduled guest and prepared program and turn the microphone over to the people who show up. Bring a story, a question, a memory, something you’ve been thinking about, or simply your curiosity. You never quite know where the conversation will go.
A question about a veteran’s hat might lead to a discussion about coming home from Vietnam and what “thank you for your service” means. A conversation about flying drones can become a debate about technology, combat, and moral responsibility. Someone might introduce a veteran we’ve never met before, pull out an old photograph, remember a friend who has died, recommend a book, ask how things were done in the military 50 years ago, or raise a question that sends the whole group down an unexpected historical rabbit hole.
There is no featured guest and no predetermined topic. We all create the program as we go. Veterans from different branches, generations, ranks, specialties, and eras compare experiences and discover where they overlap—and where they don’t. Non-veterans ask the questions they’ve always wanted to ask. Sometimes the conversation is serious. Sometimes it’s funny. Often one story triggers another, and we wind up someplace none of us expected when the evening began.
You don’t need to be a veteran to participate, and you don’t need to have a story ready. Some people come to talk. Others come to ask questions. And some simply come to listen.
Join us Monday, November 2 at 7:00pm ET on Zoom, Facebook, or YouTube and be part of the conversation!
Maurice L. “Chipp” Naylon IV served nine years as a U.S. Marine Corps infantry officer. In 2014–2015, he deployed to Afghanistan as a combat advisor and operations officer working with soldiers from the Republic of Georgia assigned to help defend Bagram Airfield. By then, America had been at war in Afghanistan for more than thirteen years, and Washington was preparing to declare an “end to combat operations.” On the ground, however, Naylon and his Marines were still leaving the wire, hunting for rocket teams and bomb makers, encountering IEDs, and trying to protect one of the largest American bases in the country.
Naylon tells that story in his book The New Ministry of Truth: Combat Advisors in Afghanistan and America’s Great Betrayal. It is less a conventional combat memoir than an account of the widening gap he saw between policy and reality—and of what that gap meant for the servicemembers ordered to carry out the mission.
Naylon’s deployment also offers an unusual window into the complicated coalition war in Afghanistan. His small team of Marines advised a Georgian infantry battalion whose soldiers had their own reasons for being there, while working alongside Afghan National Army forces and operating under an American chain of command. Success depended not simply on firepower but on relationships, trust, cultural understanding, intelligence, and rules of engagement that Naylon increasingly believed prevented his Marines from confronting threats before those threats confronted them.
One phrase captures his larger criticism of the war: “We weren’t in Afghanistan for 20 years. We were in Afghanistan for one year, 20 times.” Units rotated in and out, knowledge disappeared, missions changed, and the people arriving often had to rediscover lessons learned by those who had come before them.
Yet Naylon’s story isn’t simply one of anger or disillusionment. He remains intensely proud of the Marines he served with and of the Georgian soldiers they trained and advised. During seven months in Afghanistan, he watched their combined force develop from struggling with basic patrols into conducting complex nighttime operations with Afghan and American forces. That pride in what servicemembers accomplished at the tactical level exists alongside a much harder question about the larger war: What did those accomplishments ultimately add up to?
Join the Veterans Breakfast Club for a candid conversation with Chipp Naylon about advising foreign troops, defending Bagram, restrictive rules of engagement, leadership and loyalty, the frustrations of coalition warfare, and the strange experience of fighting a war that officials back home were declaring over. We’ll also talk about the fall of Afghanistan in 2021 and the question that runs throughout Naylon’s book and the experiences of so many Afghanistan veterans: What did our service there mean?
Our Veterans Breakfast Club’s Open Conversation gathers veterans, military family members, history buffs, and interested people of all sorts together in a Zoom room without an agenda. We then talk for 90 minutes.
Once a month, we dispense with the scheduled guest and prepared program and turn the microphone over to the people who show up. Bring a story, a question, a memory, something you’ve been thinking about, or simply your curiosity. You never quite know where the conversation will go.
A question about a veteran’s hat might lead to a discussion about coming home from Vietnam and what “thank you for your service” means. A conversation about flying drones can become a debate about technology, combat, and moral responsibility. Someone might introduce a veteran we’ve never met before, pull out an old photograph, remember a friend who has died, recommend a book, ask how things were done in the military 50 years ago, or raise a question that sends the whole group down an unexpected historical rabbit hole.
There is no featured guest and no predetermined topic. We all create the program as we go. Veterans from different branches, generations, ranks, specialties, and eras compare experiences and discover where they overlap—and where they don’t. Non-veterans ask the questions they’ve always wanted to ask. Sometimes the conversation is serious. Sometimes it’s funny. Often one story triggers another, and we wind up someplace none of us expected when the evening began.
You don’t need to be a veteran to participate, and you don’t need to have a story ready. Some people come to talk. Others come to ask questions. And some simply come to listen.
Join us Monday, November 2 at 7:00pm ET on Zoom, Facebook, or YouTube and be part of the conversation!
Join the Veterans Breakfast Club for a special Book Release Edition of VBC Live celebrating the publication of the new, updated edition of Consequences: An Intelligence Officer’s War by former Air Force counterintelligence officer David Grantham.
This event also marks the launch of VBC Books, the Veterans Breakfast Club’s new publishing imprint created in partnership with Blue Ear Books. We couldn’t imagine a more fitting first title.
In 2006, David Grantham entered Iraq as a young counterintelligence officer with the elite Air Force Office of Special Investigations (OSI). Fresh out of training, he found himself operating in Kuwait, Afghanistan, and eventually at Camp Bucca—the sprawling American detention facility that would later become known as the incubator of ISIS. His mission was not to fight on the front lines, but to gather intelligence, recruit sources, protect American forces, and understand an increasingly chaotic battlefield where every decision carried unforeseen consequences.
Written as narrative nonfiction, Consequences offers a rare, ground-level view of intelligence work during the Iraq War. Rather than focusing on secret gadgets or Hollywood-style espionage, Grantham reveals the patient, uncertain, and deeply human work of earning trust, weighing evidence, and making decisions when lives—and history—hang in the balance. Reviewers have praised the book for opening a window into a world few Americans ever see and for exploring how choices made during wartime can echo for decades.
During this special conversation, David will discuss:
- What counterintelligence officers actually do in wartime
- The hidden intelligence battle behind the Iraq War
- Camp Bucca, Iran’s growing influence, and the rise of ISIS
- The burden of making life-and-death decisions with incomplete information
- Why he decided to tell this story—and what he learned by writing it
We’ll also celebrate the beginning of VBC Books and discuss why preserving veterans’ stories in print remains one of the Veterans Breakfast Club’s most important missions.
Whether you’re interested in military history, intelligence, the Global War on Terror, or simply a remarkable personal story told with honesty and humility, this promises to be an unforgettable evening.
Come help us celebrate the launch of a new book—and a new chapter in the Veterans Breakfast Club’s mission to preserve, publish, and share veterans’ stories.
