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
⚠️ Mature conversation. Intended for adult audiences. Zoom only, registration required.
The Veterans Breakfast Club continues our adult-themed program — VBC After Dark — created for those who want a looser, more unfiltered conversation than our traditional programs. After Dark explores subjects that may be controversial, personal, or simply difficult to discuss elsewhere. We’ll meet in the closed Zoom environment without a livestream to Facebook or YouTube. Registration is required.
On this episode, we’ll discuss whether psychedelic medicine can help veterans heal from PTSD.
As research into psychedelic-assisted therapy expands, more veterans are exploring treatments involving substances such as psilocybin, MDMA, and ketamine for PTSD, traumatic brain injury (TBI), depression, anxiety, and moral injury. What does the research actually show? What remains uncertain? And why are so many veterans interested?
Joining us are representatives from the Three Rivers Psychedelic Society (TRiPS), a Pittsburgh nonprofit dedicated to education and public awareness about psychedelic research. Together we’ll discuss the current state of clinical research, how psychedelic-assisted therapy differs from conventional approaches, the legal and ethical questions surrounding these treatments, and why the topic has generated growing interest within the veteran community.
As always at VBC, our goal is not to persuade but to create an informed, respectful conversation around a topic many veterans are asking about.
Whether you’re curious, skeptical, hopeful, or simply looking to better understand this rapidly evolving field, we invite you to join the conversation.
⚠️ Please note: This is a Zoom-only program. Registration is required. It will not be livestreamed or publicly recorded. As with all VBC After Dark programs, mature language or sensitive topics may arise.
Register here: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/ILTyuARYThSeQrhWJk4QHg
In August 1969, nearly half a million Americans gathered at a farm in Upstate New York for what would become a defining moment of a generation: the Woodstock Music and Arts Festival. But Woodstock wasn’t really about music. In large part, it was about war. And the soundtrack it produced revealed the nation’s fault lines of protest, patriotism, grief, and defiance.
Join the Veterans Breakfast Club as we return to one of our most popular conversations: the music of the Vietnam War era. This time, we mark the 57th anniversary of Woodstock and add some new voices.
We’ll be joined by longtime VBC favorites Doug Bradley, Donn Nemchick, and Shaun Hall, along with two special guests who bring fresh perspective:
- Ron Farina, a U.S. Marine who lived the war these songs were trying to make sense of
- Mary Ellen Junda, a nationally recognized music historian, conductor, and educator whose work explores how song expresses social consciousness and binds communities together
Dr. Junda’s scholarship focuses on how music helps us process social change and conflict. She studies folk traditions and how music shapes as much as it represents the age.
We’ll talk about what troops in Vietnam actually listened to and what they knew about the changing music scene back home. We’ll also talk about Woodstock and what it meant.
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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.
