Beyond the Uniform: William Yeske's Call to Veterans

Rich Bennett 0:00
My guests. Will Yassky is a U.S. Army combat veteran with 11 years of service and a dynamic entrepreneur skilled in marketing, I.T. and project management. He founded New Limits Marketing Group to support small businesses during the COVID 19 crisis, merging modern marketing with military strategies. I love that. A dedicated advocate for veterans. He also was instrumental in the foundation of Rally for Troops, Rally for the Troops, which is now part of Racing for Heroes as he pursues his education at Columbia Business School. Will remains active in business, explores new ventures and enjoys family life with his veteran wife and two children. And we're going to discuss his book, Damn the Valley and his call for veterans to engage more in their communities. How you doing, Will? 

William Yeske 0:51
I'm doing great. How about yourself? 

Rich Bennett 0:52
Oh, man. Just. Yeah. Same old shit. Like chicken. My head cut off. 

Rich and Will 0:57
Oh. 

William Yeske 0:58
What has been nice? 

Rich Bennett 0:59
Let's stop. That's why you don't have anything on the top anymore. Sure. One of the things I like to ask everybody before we get into it is because I want to find out more about you and. Yeah. Back in high school. Back in high school? Well, I wasn't that way when I was in high school, but in high school nowadays they're always pushing college. I want you to set a career path because for some reason, they think when you get to high school, you're going to know what you want to do for the rest of your life. They think when you finish, when you start college, you think, you know you're going to want what you want to do for the rest of your life. So where did you when you were in high school, what was it that you wanted to actually do? 

William Yeske 1:41
So this is actually crazy enough. You're going to and you're going to think I'm nuts for this. But so by the time high school came around, I had actually wanted to join the Marines. 

Rich Bennett 1:52
Wait a minute. What? I'm sorry, right? 

William Yeske 1:54
That's right. I did. I said it. I know this. This book is about the army end of things. But at the end of hell is wrong. 

Rich and Will 2:00
With you a. 

William Yeske 2:02
Lot. Apparently. 

Rich Bennett 2:05
No shit. You really okay? 

William Yeske 2:07
Yeah. I took the ASVAB and everything. They wanted me as a satellite technician operator, which as I know now, and go back and look at everything. I'm like, Oh, that was probably just some grunt in the battlefield with the SAT can like. Yeah, trying to get combat. 

Rich and Will 2:20
We need help. 

Rich Bennett 2:23
Yeah, probably. No shit then that's pretty cool. Yeah. So we are cool. Yeah. Well, you're a lot younger than me. So back at school, did they have the recruiters come in and talking to you guys? 

William Yeske 2:36
Oh, yeah. Yeah, they had a Oh, because. Yeah, this was prior 911 because so 911 happened when I was in college. I actually was like in the college cafeteria at UConn because I grew up in Connecticut. 

Rich Bennett 2:50
Right. 

William Yeske 2:50
And everybody started crowding around as there was this little tube T.V. I'm not that old. I'm 41, but there's. This little tube T.V.. 

Rich Bennett 2:59
Sitting up here. Are you really? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. Right. I for some reason I figured you're like early thirties. 

William Yeske 3:08
Early thirties. 

Rich Bennett 3:09
Early thirties. 

William Yeske 3:10
See it here? 

Rich Bennett 3:11
Yeah, 

that's right. I'm only 25. I dye my hair. 

William Yeske 3:18
Thanks for showing me that block. Hey, early thirties. I'll take it. I'll take Will. But yeah, I mean, everybody started crowding around and I'm seeing what's going on and I was like, Why? And they cancel classes and everyone's getting sent home and you're kind of thinking, And here I was thinking like, Wow, you know, if I were, if I had joined, I'd be heading over there. And I kind of honestly thought that I had kind of missed out. 

Rich Bennett 3:42
Yeah. Not pissed. 

William Yeske 3:45
Yeah. Yeah. I know a lot of people that, like, either served and never got that chance. That's actually a lot of what you're hearing right now. And what I've been hearing from different veteran organizations and stuff. They're like a lot of the newer people that are coming out there, they feel like they're marginalized because they never served in a combat deployment. I'm like, Quite honestly, if you've ever been there, count yourself lucky. 

Rich Bennett 4:07
You know? Yeah. 

William Yeske 4:08
Quite honestly. 

Rich Bennett 4:10
Yeah. When that happened, I'll never forget. Cause even though I was married and, you know, had had a kid, I just, you know, that, that, that, that military comes out. Yeah. And I called the re-enlist and they told me I was too old. And then I think later on, they raised the age and I was still too old. And I got pissed because they brought some guy out of retirement who was in his fifties to write about it. And over there, like, you're giving him a frickin pen. I want a rifle. Come on. 

William Yeske 4:42
And to say, That's wild. 

Rich Bennett 4:43
All right, But. And but I didn't, would they? And I didn't realize this until later. Now I kick myself in the ass for getting out. 

So 

however many years you served, they would deduct that from the maximum age they were allowed? Yes. Yeah. Yeah, I did. Ten years. I was 50. They would looked at me like I was 40. 

William Yeske 5:05
Well, they came around and they asked me about it, you know, and I was like, well, the only way I'd ever go back in as an officer. Yeah. And they were like, well, you know, we could do that. And I was like, What? And they're like, Yeah, you subtract 11 from this and that and we frigging move things around. I'm like, You just need someone who's got combat experience for us. Yeah. 

Rich and Will 5:23
Hi. 

William Yeske 5:26
I know what you're trying to do now. 

Rich Bennett 5:28
So. Ah, you said you wanted to go into the Marine Corps. Yeah. 

911 happened. I was doing high school. But you went off to college? 

William Yeske 5:38
No, no, I was in college. 

Rich Bennett 5:39
Oh, you're in college? You're in college. 

William Yeske 5:40
In the fall. Yeah. So. 

Rich Bennett 5:42
Okay, So what made you decide to go to college? You said the Marine Corps. 

William Yeske 5:45
And that was. I was set up ready to go, and my parents did not want me to go. And I'm like, okay, well, so what? You know? And they were like, Well, we'll pay for your college. They know the full, full ride. Get your bachelor's. And and then after after you're done with that, you know, you kind of have our blessing to go into the service as an officer if you want. Then I fell for it hook, line and sinker. 

Rich Bennett 6:14
And your parents are good recruiters. 

William Yeske 6:16
I know, right? They got they got me over the Marines. So they need to contact. Them, I guess, about hey. 

Rich Bennett 6:23
Hey, you know what? The thing is, you served. I don't care what branch anybody serves. If you serve, you got my respect automatically, man. Even your wife. Because, you know, even though I don't know her, but she got good food wise in the Air Force furnace. Yeah, I know, right? Air Force veteran. 

William Yeske 6:40
During a time of war, though, you know, I mean, so, like, so my cousin was a marine. So when I actually had signed on the dotted line, he he kind of was like, man, like you signed up to go right at the height of this thing. Like, what's wrong with you? 

Rich and Will 6:55
Yeah. 

Rich Bennett 6:55
Yeah. So would you do finish college and then go to decide to go into the Army? You said the Marine Corps. 

William Yeske 7:03
So my nickname is a lot of the guys I know with is Wild Bill. But they gave okay on deployment. I guess I. Let a little of the wild bill out in college and the the parents were. 

Rich Bennett 7:17
Like your course was going to be a six year. 

Rich and Will 7:19
Course. Yeah. 

William Yeske 7:20
A year three. My parents are like, you know what? I'm I had good grades. I just never showed up to class. I just take the, the stuff and I was just doing my thing. 

Rich Bennett 7:29
Wait a minute. They had to help you get good grades and not show up to class. 

William Yeske 7:33
I do the work behind the scenes. A serious, like, a lot. A lot of it. I just never. I was just like I and it was weird because, like, nowadays it's pretty common for kids to do that because, like, so I finished up college in Towson. 

Rich Bennett 7:47
And it was really. 

William Yeske 7:48
Weird because, like, you'd get, you know, a third to half the class. And then on Tuesday, everybody shows up and you're like, Who are all these people? 

Rich Bennett 7:57
Okay, wait a minute, now. I'm okay. I'm getting completely lost here. 

William Yeske 8:00
All right? I'm sorry. I need to bring you on a timeline. 

Rich Bennett 8:03
You can. Yup. What the hell brought you to town? 

William Yeske 8:07
So, I mean, like I said, I never finished. And then after after my time in service was, ah, here I am, you know, back, back on the street. And I decided that education was the way to go, right? So I was like, All right, let's let's go go into town and nail up the business track. Finished it in two and a half years. I got my bachelor's over in business over there and then. Nice. Oh, yeah. And then went for it. I did saw a certificate program with Cornell and then so I actually just finished up the other day with the classes from Columbia. So I'll be alumni status coming up soon. 

Rich Bennett 8:44
Oh nice. 

William Yeske 8:45
So yeah, but why? 

Rich Bennett 8:49
Because you're from Connecticut. So what brought you to Maryland to go to. 

William Yeske 8:53
Where it is? Where do you think my wife is from? 

Rich Bennett 8:56
Oh, she's from here. 

William Yeske 8:57
Oh, God. How? Family's important, you know. 

Rich Bennett 9:00
Oh, wait a minute now, because you're. She's Air Force. Yeah, you're Army. 

William Yeske 9:04
All right. He started put two and two together. 

Rich Bennett 9:07
How did you guys meet? 

William Yeske 9:08
So on a little corner of Fort Bragg, North Carolina, there's also an Air Force base called Pope. Air Force Base. 

And. 

Rich Bennett 9:18
Yeah, I should have known that. Damn. 

William Yeske 9:21
So you got the smart guy. And I'm like, you know what? I'm on the Army side. I think. I think I need to cross the fence 

there. 

Rich Bennett 9:29
So you guys both met while you're while you were serving? Yeah, I'll be them. Yeah, That's pretty damn cool. Oh, yeah. How long has been married now? 

William Yeske 9:39
So, 2015. So that's, what, eight years? 

Rich Bennett 9:42
Oh, Kirsten asked me to do. 

William Yeske 9:43
Math and that's what they said on the other one. So I had a pre prepared in my head. I'm like, okay, here's how. 

Rich Bennett 9:49
You long time. So. Well, not a long time. Oh, it's been a great time. Yeah. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. I'd say yeah, marriage is great man. It's, it's, that's a, that's a. 

William Yeske 10:00
That can be you got to be the right person. Yeah. 

Rich Bennett 10:03
Yeah. Okay. So you did your time in, you went to college, you got your degrees and then I take it from theirs when you started your business. 

William Yeske 10:12
No. So the business was started after I got out of 2000. 

Rich Bennett 10:17
Okay. As I met. Yeah. 

William Yeske 10:18
So COVID hit. And. Kind of I mean, you had with the whole business shut down and everything, I'm like, All right, so how can we kind of assist small businesses? You know, I have to I'm going to be here with my kids. My wife's a nurse at this point, so she's combating the COVID end of things. And I'm like, how can I use my skills to help out in the community, You know, while giving myself time with kids, I was like, Hey, give some of the smaller businesses that digital footprint, that larger businesses have and kind of use that military framework of a force multiplier, too, where you look at a situation and you boil it down and you say, Hey, what what small effect is it going to have the largest overall effect on everything? And you kind of start hitting those little small, small cracks in there. And by giving a small business that doesn't normally have access to someone who can write, you know, professional copy like that, or do your AdWords campaign for them, that fits into like an omnichannel marketing campaign, like a full out one. You give them the strategies and you give them that ability, and it's crazy to see what can happen. 

Rich Bennett 11:26
Yeah, and the good thing is with and I still think especially for businesses, a lot of business owners I've talked to, myself included as bad as it sounds, COVID 19 was a blessing for some of us. Some of and I think with your with your military background and I've said this to a lot of people I've had on 

the businesses that survived it and are still surviving, I think use that military strategy, which was they learned how to over how to adapt and overcome. 

William Yeske 12:02
You have to have resilience. And I swear, I tell everyone, the guys that I was in with, like the military has given you the ability for resilience and they've shown you those successful like framework habits if you boil it down. So some of them is really just showing them how to translate that into their everyday lives as opposed to, you know, how it was in the military. You have to have the self-discipline to put that stuff into play. 

Rich Bennett 12:28
Yeah, it just it's smart on your end to do that. And you still have the business, right? 

William Yeske 12:34
I do, yeah. 

Rich Bennett 12:35
All right. So real quick, because I want to get to the book soon, but tell everybody the website for your business. 

William Yeske 12:42
Oh, Lord, that's no market, no limits marketing group dot com. 

Rich Bennett 12:47
I was going to say, do tell me you were about to forget that all. 

William Yeske 12:51
No, I literally I actually I caught some of the clientele during this I actually handed them off kind of I was like, hey look, I wrote some extra ad copy for you. Quite honestly, you don't need to touch it for a while. I feel bad, but I don't feel like I'm going to have the capacity with some of the some of the traction that's happening with this book. It's it's been incredible. So the ones that were sort of ready to move on to that next step, I sort of showed them the way put that path work in, and they couldn't wait. So I'm one of them. Actually said, we want to stay with you. What's going on Like so I. Actually I kind of left them on and. 

Rich Bennett 13:31
Well, you were like being a consultant in a way, I guess. Yeah. I was just trying to be considerate it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that which I mean, that's just more power to you because that shows that you're loyal to them. 

William Yeske 13:43
Well, and it's the same thing that I'm trying to do with this book is like build in as much value for them and for the customer so that, you know, that's my client. That's my customer. Same thing with this book. Like, so I built in and I'm sure you've seen because I saw you on earlier, the social media campaign for this thing. Like what author goes out there and is posting daily scenes and captions from, you know, the experience they had on the battlefield. And that's been for I think it's over 200 days now. And that's all stuff that the guys that I was with sent to me. I had zero photos. Wow. I started this. I had nothing. 

Rich Bennett 14:20
So you got a lot of the photos are in the book. 

William Yeske 14:23
There's a photo section in the middle. So did 34 color. But I also wanted the I took all of the other pictures that aren't in the book, although some do overlap. Right. But the social media campaign is all the other stuff that wasn't in the book. And there's a story behind the cover photo that we'll get to. But really, I was trying to create an inclusive experience. It kind of gives everybody a view of like the stuff you don't normally see, the stuff that is glorified, but also the stuff behind the scenes that you don't. You know, guys, there were guys over there that were just snapping pictures of everything and anything. And so it's a side that you don't normally get to see. Yeah, And it's really about sharing those stories with everybody else. And on top of that, you know, there's a museum event that goes with it because the the flag that's on the front cover was actually recovered by one of the men that was there. 

Rich Bennett 15:21
Really? 

William Yeske 15:22
That's what makes this thing exciting. Yes. 

Rich Bennett 15:25
There's a and a flashbacks of Reggie, but not that I'm that old. I mean. 

Rich and Will 15:30
I. 

William Yeske 15:31
Know it was. Like a really moving that when that picture so it's this whole the cover photo of the book showed up first as a Facebook picture and I was like, man, that's that's really powerful, you know, and stuff. So the years down the road, when I started looking into starting the project, 

it came back into play and I'm like, I just feel that that's if it's it's right. Yeah. You know, there were so many things that clicked. Even the saying, Damn, The Valley was actually a phrase used by the guys that were in the Arghandab River Valley in any reference to either events that had happened over there or someone who had been, you know, killed or injured. And it got to a point to where the effigy groups and stuff were like it got controversial. They were like, Hey, stop posting stuff with them. The valley you're you're bringing up, you know, these feelings and stuff. And it's like, yeah, what about these guys feelings? You know? And it's so it's almost also a yell for like, Hey, look, this, this story needs to be told. It's not something you forget and put in the closet. Like you need to be able to talk about it with your friends and your guys that you were there with. 

Rich Bennett 16:45
How long before you started actually working on the book named The Valley after you got out of the military? 

William Yeske 16:51
It's a little weird. So I got out of active duty in 2015 and I did three years in the reserves. So 18 is when I got out of that. I had my hands full with school and everything, and there was another book that came up. There was another book project by a Wall Street Journal writer by the name of Ben Castling. Okay. And he wrote about events that happened over there with the company, but it was very narrow scope and it just due to the amount of things that happened, I mean, what you saw, there's a there's not a normal deployment these days in a modern day battlefield deployment, where you have a 52% casualty rate is unheard of. Yeah, and these were good guys. Like these were not, you know, bottom of the barrel soldiers like these guys were disciplined, well-honed out there every day. And it was like, you can take cut those numbers in half. Half you all are coming back, you know, physically affected. All of you are coming back affected in one way or another. 

Rich Bennett 18:00
Yeah, man. So how long did it actually take you to write it? 

William Yeske 18:06
So, Rach, this is this is this is where you're going to be. Like, you've got to be kidding me. So the original manuscript this now I'm going to remind you, I mean, this story's been ruminating for ten years in the back of my head. Okay? Right. Like there is so on deployment, there was one of the guys, Sergeant Robert Muscle and Bobby, and he said, you know, ten years from now, there's going to be a book with Yasuke's name on the cover as the author. And I was like, No way. It's going to. Be it's going to be you know, it's going to be you. You know, referring to SA Muscle or Doc Doc Schultz. 

Rich Bennett 18:44
Okay. 

William Yeske 18:45
And which is funny because Doc Schultz is actually I got to see him graduate from Columbia with a master's in in, in writing. Oh nice. Just recently. So it's sort of some of this is coming to fruition right now. It's like. The universe is saying, hey, there's this story. That needs to be told. And you guys talked about it because you knew, you know, and here it is. It's just it's so weird. On how it works. So it took me two weeks to put the original manuscript together. 

Rich Bennett 19:15
Get the hell. 

William Yeske 19:16
60,000 words in two weeks. I sat down and I mean, some of those days even I was with the kid. So some of the days I didn't. 

Rich Bennett 19:22
Write, I was going to ask you if you got any sleep in. 

William Yeske 19:24
There's two weeks. I haven't got the proper amount of sleep since the Arghandab River Valley. 

Rich and Will 19:29
Wow. 

Rich Bennett 19:30
Yeah, that's understating. 

William Yeske 19:31
I mean, I literally have a my platoon sergeant in the story, Sergeant Matthew Hill, he we talked more recently. He actually handed me some of his leadership books. Oh, he's from the valley with, like, grid coordinates in it. And there was actually he handed me a platoon book. And the funniest thing is an essay that I wrote about in the book. There was a kid who had an OPSEC violation. He was talking with one of the locals and he can get into it. But we took him in and we sat him down and kind of showed him what had happened and showed him the recordings. He freaked out. He like he literally like I didn't know until more recently how badly that affected him. And we thought we were trying to show him, like, open his eyes. Like we weren't we were a little bit rough about it, but not to the extent on how he took it. Yeah, and it kind of took us back like we were like, Whoa. But we ended up I was like, Hey, man, like, you're going to write an essay about it. Well, Sergeant Acker's was the one who imposed the the punishment, but it was an essay involved, and it's like a ten page essay on OPSEC. And it was in this platoon book. So I have the essay from, like, 15, you know, that was written on the battlefield, like a stain with coffee stains on it. And this like, oh, my gosh. Like. Well, so it's why. 

Rich Bennett 20:55
Was your that was your punishment? 

William Yeske 20:57
No, no, that was. Oh, this kid's okay. Yeah, I just I'm so involved. 

Oh, it involved a machine that, like, where we pulled the cell phone data. Yeah. Off of we imposed a new policy to where the people that were doing any work on the compound, which we supplied, we were supplied with some funds to, to get some local contractors for base improvements. So we had a few of them working with us. And the interpreter was actually Taliban. 

So we put this thing in place to where, hey, when you come in to work here for the day, you have to give your phones up because some of them, as you're leaving on a patrol, they'd get on their phones and you wonder, Oh, is this guy calling? And hey, the Americans are leaving, they're going this way. So you have to watch your back. So you're like, how can we rectify this? And we took the phones and one day we were like, Hey, I wonder. And we went through them. And the numbers started coming up as, Hey, this is a person of interest. 

Rich Bennett 22:00
No shit. 

William Yeske 22:01
Yeah. And so we were like, Oh, you got to report this stuff. And we sent everything up and they built a whole target package. And the guy, we never saw him again, but he was so good in talking with this kid like you wouldn't unless you knew what you were looking for, you wouldn't understand like what he was doing. He was actually gauging the capabilities of our night vision on the conversation, on how well we could see at night, because they knew we could. Yeah, but they didn't know the effectiveness and how well we move through the night because that's what sets it up, you know, sets it apart on the battlefield. 

Rich Bennett 22:39
Yeah. Damn. Wow. So. 

All right, wait a minute. Were you actually 

I mean, you mentioned because you do ad copy, but were you ever writing, like, in high school or anything? 

William Yeske 22:58
I was heavily into books growing up. 

Rich Bennett 23:02
Okay? 

William Yeske 23:02
I, I had a very structured religious family. 

Rich Bennett 23:08
Okay. 

William Yeske 23:09
That's 

you had to kind of have your own escape. And my escape was books. Okay. So as long as you were pulled apart somewhere else, yeah, you weren't in the crosshairs. 

Rich Bennett 23:23
So a lot of books, even after I read this book, the thing that's going to stand out to me more than anything is the fact that you wrote it in two freaking weeks. 

William Yeske 23:35
So and I kind of I mean, I have another book already written that I never published. I never got. Yeah. So the follow on. So this is kind of like something that came along, but I didn't know why I wrote it until now. And I'm like, Oh, because the follow on to this actually works on creating, you know, using these successful paths. A lot of the same stuff that I did in business, like creating frameworks to show people how to dumb down the process and to make it a framework so anybody can do it almost like an online education program. Well, guess what? I was like, Oh, you know what? I can kind of put this in something easier to understand for veterans and base this towards that. That's what the entire book is about. And I'm like, this is just naturally flowing right into it. I just wrote it backwards. That's how I work sometimes. 

Rich Bennett 24:18
Yeah, sometimes that's what you got to do, right? So damn the valley. Who who's this book for? Who would you who would you say your audience is? 

William Yeske 24:29
So originally this is really for the men that were there. 

Rich Bennett 24:35
Mm. 

William Yeske 24:36
I know it started off, you know, the two weeks was really my own story written down. I asked 

someone else who knew the story. I matter of fact, the author of that other book, I was like, Hey, you've heard my end. Like, what do you think? And he encouraged me. He's like, Put it down, get it down. It's got to be something. Yeah, Just make sure you get you know, your timeline is kind of all over the place from what I've heard and all that. And that's where it started, you know, delving into after I got a notification of a deal back from a publisher, which quite honestly was very surprising because that doesn't happen. 

I submitted the manuscript in as an unfinished 60,000 words. It was more of a I'm going to hold my toes to the fire. I've had a lot of the you know what? Don't worry about what people are going to think. Just do it. So I'm like, you know, what? Could it hurt? Let's throw this thing out there. Nobody else is going to see this. Let's toss it out to a few of the military history publishers. And I got a note back after sending a message out to one of the editors at Case-Mate Publishing. And they're like, Hey, I see what you mean. This kind of does fit into this style of writing here that I like and that we worked with with this other book. I want to bring it to the roundtable in two weeks. What do you think? And I was like, Wow, okay. And then two weeks later it comes back. And then here we are a year later with with the full on book. Wow. So I definitely put them on the airborne Twilight timeline. We almost because Barnes Noble picked it up, we almost didn't have we didn't have enough copies ordered previously. They were like, They're not going to be here in time. I don't think we're going to make the date. And I was like, All right, we're making the date. 

And we figured it out. I mean, well, I'm I'm also problem solver, you know, it's after yeah, some words were had and we kind of went back and forth. We realized, like, this is unproductive, like, where's the disconnect? And it was that they were coming in from overseas. And I'm like, you realize I haven't even started pushing out all the media stuff yet. Like, we need to have a U.S. printer and I just I kind of promised them we were going to make up on volume. So here we are 

then. 

Rich Bennett 26:54
So with this, when you got another one in the works, what you just mentioned and probably another one after that, did you ever think you were going to become a full time author? 

William Yeske 27:05
I never really thought of it. 

Rich Bennett 27:08
I think you are now author printer right? 

William Yeske 27:13
I mean, it really what it quite honestly is, is that built in sense of purpose to help people and I saw that need with the other guys with this book is yeah a lot of them with the other book that was put out by the name of Bravo Company there by Ben Castling, he a lot of them felt like that they weren't heard. And I think some of the issue there too, was that they they didn't talk to the journalists. They saw him as a journalist as opposed to you know, he's also a veteran. He was a marine, you know, Marine officer. But, you know, he was in Iraq during Fallujah. 

Rich Bennett 27:51
So damned the Valley is. That's people you served with. It's their stories that you're telling. 

William Yeske 27:57
It's my own kind of is the is the the baseline. But okay. I jump to some of theirs in some of the situations that either I didn't have the proper iron or what I kind of found was that a lot of times when I started triangulating a situation and making sure I found almost that some of the other views that were out there came across better. So, I mean, there's some of these stories were written from three or four different viewpoints, and then I sort of chose like, this is the one that belongs in the book. This one feels right. 

Like if you go into the story of when Jason Specialist Jason Johnson was killed, he died the day after Christmas hit an IED. And I had actually just I had stepped over the initiating IED maybe 30 seconds prior. Wow. Yeah. And so him and Specialist Wil Ross were thrown over the wall of the compound and they were the only ones on the other side. So it's like, what is happening on the other side? I don't know. I can hear. I can hear Ross screaming for help. I can hear Johnston's moans. 

But what I'm taking care of is inside the compound. The situation was really a what's called a mass cow, which is a mass casualty. It was meant the bomb was meant to take out the entire squad town. Yeah, it was a big one. 

Rich Bennett 29:31
I got to ask you this, and if you don't want to answer it, I understand. 

William Yeske 29:34
Okay? 

Rich Bennett 29:37
But I mean, writing it in two weeks, I mean, I can understand because you just had the flow going, but after reading it, because I'm sure you read it afterwards, 

how did it affect your mental health? 

William Yeske 29:54
Oh, man. So I've always been able to talk about it, which is weird. Like, I think that there's been a few aspects. It's good learned. Yeah. And that's the thing is I so I talked to a you know I have multiple people, great people that I work with through the VA. And you know, I have my VA psychologist and I've kind of asked them that. I was like, Why does it seem like I can talk about these things without any issue? You know, it always seems, you know, there's there's got to be a reason for it, you know, whether it's now to tell the story to other people, other people know or you know, and this is the other possibility is that I was a little older when I was there. Yeah. So I was 26 when I joined and 28 in Afghanistan. And you have your prefrontal cortex at that point is already fused to where a lot of these guys are between 18 and 21. And that's not fully developed there. So I mean, you have we had bombs like the amount of so you're thinking like, like a like a football injury where you have Tbis and stuff. Yeah. You have multiple bomb concussions like during this deployment. You know, I was actually checked out by neurology to more recently to make sure they were like I was like hey you know I'm I'm curious. A lot of these guys, almost everybody are coming up with issues. Yeah. I want to know And you know, as far as the head MRI, they're like nothing exists. So, I mean, I, I got lucky on that and that's. Yeah, wild to me. 

Rich Bennett 31:29
Wow. Now, do you talk to anybody that you served with? 

William Yeske 31:34
Yes, I do. That we actually try to maintain a good communication channel. 

Rich Bennett 31:39
Yeah, because it's like family, man. It really I'm sorry to interrupt you, but I have to say this because and this is something in a way that pisses me off. Yeah. Because the Marine Corps were always big on celebrating our birthday. We say it's a brotherhood, but to me, the military in general is a brotherhood. And this is everybody. It's great when you can talk to people that you served with. And I'm the same way. I still talk to some of them. It's family and a lot I think a lot of people, a lot of civilians don't understand that. You know, when when we say, you know, we got your back, we mean we got your back. 

William Yeske 32:20
I mean, hard times tend to press people together. So this type of situation that these guys were in, I mean, quite honestly, you have a lifelong support group and they've they've shown that before. 

Rich Bennett 32:32
I know. Oh, yeah, absolutely. But were any of these guys that you talked to against were any of them against what you wrote in the book? 

William Yeske 32:39
Oh, I had some angry ones. 

Rich Bennett 32:41
Okay. 

William Yeske 32:42
Yeah, they are. Well, I mean, not against anything I wrote in the book, but in the in the very beginning of the project, there was one in particular that, 

you know, he knew that I started writing and he was kind of like it was I wouldn't get like a letter of support or anything, But then all of a sudden out of nowhere came this like, if you like, just a stream of, you know, And I sent something back saying, Hey, look, man, like, I don't know what you're going through, and I don't know what the problem is, but this story I want to get right and you're integral. You've seen some of the stuff that I didn't have eyes on, and I want to make sure it's accurate. And my goal here and I was doing this the entire time. My goal here is to have the most accurate picture of what happened, whether I look good or bad or not, because I have instances that I put in there to where I trust me, I don't look like the greatest of soldiers. Yeah, but I was like, If you can't put that mirror on yourself, then what good are you? Because every single one of those or learning instances that shaped me into who I am now. 

Rich Bennett 33:52
Mm. And now I'm just because the book hasn't come out yet, right as of the time of this. 

William Yeske 33:59
October 31st is going to be the release. So Halloween. 

Rich Bennett 34:03
Halloween. 

William Yeske 34:04
And you're going to be like that is the weirdest thing in the world, Halloween for a veterans book. 

Rich Bennett 34:08
Why so? I mean, it's an awesome freaking holiday. 

Rich and Will 34:12
Oh. 

William Yeske 34:12
Well, hold on. It gets it gets better. It gets. 

Rich Bennett 34:15
Okay. 

William Yeske 34:16
So the and where I was talking about historical historical accuracy and, just all these little nuggets built into this book. So October 31st is the first firefight that first platoon was in in Helmand Province, Afghanistan, in out of Lashkar Gah. 

Rich Bennett 34:36
Oh. 

William Yeske 34:38
And they let me choose that. And I've held them to it ever since, because I'm like, there's just so many things throughout this. It was a Tuesday and I'm like, You got to be That's book day. You got to be kidding me. Yeah. Tuesdays are book launch days. 

Rich Bennett 34:52
So Halloween's I know that just like with record albums and Halloween falls on a Tuesday, it's just. 

William Yeske 34:57
Yes, sir. Wow. And that so that that firefight, that was probably the highest that was the high point of deployment. Like we our our battalion commander was actually trying to get us into the fight with the Marines at Marjah because they were getting ready to go into Marjah. 

Rich Bennett 35:17
Right. 

William Yeske 35:17
So this is 2009. And so the Brits and, the U.S. Marines were working out of Lashkar Gah in Helmand Province, and we got sent over as an advise and assist bomb by President Obama of, the executive orders. We were supposed to go to Iraq, but we got switched to Afghanistan. And then when we got there, they were like, well, we got nothing for you. I'm like, What? Yeah. So here we. Are, like rolling up and down in Helmand Province to where, you know, we're trying to get into the fight and we're training Afghan police. And I mean, really, quite honestly, it was a very boring I mean, very reborn. We always I mean, we would find IEDs, but we would go up and down the highway in trucks doing these training missions along the way at the different outposts. And you'd have to clear every single drainpipe underneath the highway because every single one of them had a bomb in it. She's so you'd make the call to EOD when you found one, and they'd fly him out from wherever and they blow it up and then your roll pass and like 2 hours later you'd find another one. It was just pain. Stay achingly slow. 

Rich Bennett 36:34
Yeah. Yeah. I can see how that'd be boring as shit. 

William Yeske 36:36
Yeah. So it was actually on one of those days. So is Halloween. We're coming back. I want to say it was a five day, so a five day mission set and we're coming back. And we had a group of Afghan counterparts that we always worked with. Whenever we did these things, they were kind of like an escort. They so-called it it was just a pickup truck with two or three of these guys in front of us, a little Toyota Hilux or a Ford Ranger. And they're about a mile away from their little, 

you know, outpost that's out there. They have them all over the highway. 

Rich Bennett 37:09
Little right. 

William Yeske 37:10
Little spots. And they decided we don't we don't need the Americans anymore. Like, take it easy. We're just going to fly it on the road. We're like, all right, well, we're just going. To keep going. Slow and. 

Rich Bennett 37:21
Clear. HIGHWAY Yeah. 

William Yeske 37:22
Yeah. Well, no more like clearing out. Clearing out for IEDs. They just burn. 

Rich Bennett 37:27
Them. 

William Yeske 37:27
You know, They just hit the pedal and go. They didn't care. Life is different over there. It's weird. 

Rich Bennett 37:33
Wow. Yeah. 

William Yeske 37:34
And 

so about I want to say it was like, right in between. There's about a half mile down the road and you see their truck off the side of the road smashed into like, this little ditch into the side of one of the village houses that's on the upper side of the road. So this are. 

Rich Bennett 37:51
Blown up, though? 

William Yeske 37:52
Not blown up. So it's weird. Like it's kind of a strange thing we're coming up on and all of a sudden you hear the tank. Popping bang, you know, and you have whizzes with. 

Rich Bennett 38:02
Fire. 

William Yeske 38:03
And you're like, Oh, we're under fire, You know, the guy in the turret. So we're the second truck and I'm in a in a Humvee up armored, and we have a Mach 19 grenade launcher on top. 

Rich Bennett 38:17
Okay. 

William Yeske 38:17
And we're dual mounted with a 240 machine gun up there. We rolled heavy and the truck in front of us is what's known as a it was known as a cougar. So it's a style MRAP that was some of the original vehicles. Okay. You'll see those longer ones. They hold, I think, six people in the back or something like that, and they're in farm. So these trucks are massive. And this thing's got a 50 cal on the on the front. 50 cows are great for armor. But when you're looking at attacking a maneuvering squad element, they're scary. I wouldn't want to be a squad on the other side. But he they were so close he couldn't traverse the 50 cal down. Oh and the 240. Was also. Wouldn't move. Down far enough because we were on a raised road. So as I'm behind this truck, okay, And I can't see into the village and I'm thinking in my head, we need to get this going into the fight. Yeah. So I turn to the L.T. and I'm like, Hey, permission to go around the car in front of us so we can get into the fight? And he looks at me is, Are you kidding me? I was like, We need to get out there. And he's like, Just don't get us. Killed or crashes. All right? So I tell him, you know. Because you're going past another one and there's a firefight going on. So you got to tell your gunner, you know, you might have them fire into the other vehicle. And I go, you know, collared, watch out. We're going to be crossing across paths. And I start going around behind them to bring us out into, you know, into fire. But where we can get the gun on to their support by fire. Yeah. So as we're passing, this is a squad sized foot element that's a maneuver like actually using us maneuver techniques that we taught them to maneuver up on what was essentially. These two guys in. A truck that are now saved. They must've been overjoyed to see us. And we're rolling around and I see Afghan come around the corner, the like village corner of this mud building that's there. And you could instantly you could tell he had no clue that we were there. His eyes guys were the biggest I've ever seen. Here's his like 

and the gunner in the turret 

reached down underneath. And I know the guy that tossed it up to him, Sergeant Rush. He was one of the scouts that was attached to us at the time. He tossed one of the saws. So the two four, nine machine. Guns. From the back to him. And this guy jumped. Up into the. Turret and like, smoked three Talibs, like, right there just cut him down. Yeah. And then it was, you know. It around and into the fight. And we started pounding the wood line with our grenade launcher and they dismounted and I mean, just in a whole like what was like the perfect L-shape ambush with the car or the trucks as the support by fire, the dismounts rolled through, 

you know? No, none of our guys was hit. I mean, it was just it was a good day. 

Rich Bennett 41:33
You know, how many of them were out there shooting? 

William Yeske 41:36
So it was a squad sized arm. It was about 14 guys that we could see. 

Rich Bennett 41:40
Okay. 

William Yeske 41:41
I know. So one of the guys aren't Thomas. He dumped a 30 round mag into him. Sergeant Muscle and Specialist Colt. They were maneuvering one of my old team leaders, Sergeant Tyler Anderson. He was moving with Doc pants. Our was crazy. So Doc Potts is, like, literally assaulting with these guys, you know? And they came up on a on a wounded Taliban. It was actually a kid, you know, like a 16 year old kid. And he'd been shot through the hands. And when they're clearing through his and this is going to get kind of graphic, so it's okay. 

Rich Bennett 42:22
Go ahead. 

William Yeske 42:23
All right. So someone had as they're clearing through, like his testicles were splayed out, open, so his actual scrotum had split open. Oh, yeah. And so, I mean, there's like, this guy's, like, shot up, He's got a pelvic wound and Anderson, like, grabs Doc and he's like, Hey, doc, save him. He's like, This guy is just shooting at us, like, And they're still taking fire. Like, from what? Yeah, they're still. Taking fire from the tree line. And he's like, Doc, we need to interrogate him. Like, get on it. And here. Yeah, yeah. Doc, Rudy, pass out. They're treating the enemy at the same time, you know, as under fire and stuff. And like, this is actually some of the things that happened and these guys never got recognized for due to some of the nature of what happened later on in deployment. Yeah. And, you know, just phenomenal group of guys. Through end of the. Day. And then you remember at the end of the day, it's Halloween. And so we go through and we pick up, you know, a few of the bodies and we toss them in the back of the truck. We roll down the road to the next. 

Rich Bennett 43:29
Stop, the Afghan. 

William Yeske 43:30
Bodies. Yeah, so the Taliban. But yeah, the enemy guys that were just shooting at us, we took that. So we took you got to take battlefield pictures for biometrics and then you run them into the system and. Okay. And then, you know, you load them up in body bags and we dropped them off at the next Afghan checkpoint and like maybe 3 hours after that firefight, we were sitting around a fire with our British counterparts telling war stories and eating burgers and hot dogs. It was an insane night and it was like just the perfect day for launch. So that's the date for the launch story right there. 

Rich Bennett 44:08
So that gets me off that because, ah, you say you bring the bodies back, the enemies. Bodies? Mm hmm. Does the enemy do the same thing with us? 

William Yeske 44:17
Oh, man, it's scary what the enemy does with us. 

Rich Bennett 44:21
I mean, with the dead bodies. 

William Yeske 44:23
Yeah, that's. I mean, there's been, like, there's they. They use them for propaganda. If they we try to get to these bodies beforehand, but if they get a hold of them like we've had things such as later on in the Arghandab, they strung up pieces of people's body armor and stuff like that, like, hey, this is what happens, just mind game stuff, sick, sick, sick stuff. And when you know, when you see that and you know what you're dealing with, you kind of you're very tempted to move from that line of, you know, the honorable in that moral thing to do. Yeah. And that's really the difference between, you know, an American fighter versus someone else out there. 

Rich Bennett 45:04
Yeah. Because I know your your blood would start to boil and everything and it's. 

William Yeske 45:09
There's a chapter about that. 

Rich Bennett 45:10
Oh really. 

William Yeske 45:11
Yeah. There's so actually after Specialist Johnson there was killed. Well Ross talked about it and 

the mosque there was playing music, the morning music, but then it kept going and the music was different. And then, you know, we all kind of grabbed one of the interpreters and he's like, What are they playing? And he didn't want to tell them. He knew. And he's like, What are they playing? And he broke it down. And he's like, They're celebrating. Like they're celebrating that your buddy died. 

Yeah, man. Yeah. He equated it to that feeling too, where you read about the Vietnam Village burnings and stuff. And he's like, That's how I felt at the time. I wanted to just go through and, you know, pull a scene like that. 

Rich Bennett 46:06
Yeah. 

William Yeske 46:07
I mean, he held his composure and stuff, but that feeling inside of you, you know, he definitely hit that wall and took the look at it. 

Rich Bennett 46:15
I don't know how 

how you guys 

didn't at times just go off. I don't want to see go off the deep end because to me wouldn't be going off the deep end to me or 

you're going to. 

William Yeske 46:34
You're talking about justifying something. 

Rich Bennett 46:36
Yes. Thank you. Yeah. I wanted to be careful the way I said that, because, you know, the higher ups are not going to allow that. 

William Yeske 46:43
Well, so the unit that was there before us, when we got to the Arghandab, we actually replaced a unit 117 Stryker Battalion and that you can you can go and look it up. There's an article out there that was written known as, ah, Colonel Harry Tunnels, ill fated Stryker Brigade. And they tried to drive Strykers into this valley. And if you know anything about history in the eighties, the Russians had a heck of a time. Back in that exact same valley. There's the battle of the Arghandab I can't remember. Was 84, 87, something like that. 

But to where they tried, they lost a either battalion or brigade sized element. And there was still it was like weird because there was still like heavy drop parachute that people were using as tents or awnings and stuff out there. So old Russian stuff. Or you'd see, you know, old man wearing a belt, a Russian officer's belt. There's only one way you're getting a hold of one of those. 

Rich Bennett 47:47
Yeah. Wow. 

William Yeske 47:50
But if you look at our Strykers and you look at Russian bumpers, they kind of look like a modern version of a Russian BMP. So they literally thought the Russians were back, Huh? And it didn't work out to their favor at all. They were doing things. I mean, they blew a striker and half a double stacked tank mines and, like, completely vaporized everything inside. 

Rich Bennett 48:16
Jesus. Yeah. 

William Yeske 48:19
So when we were doing that left seat right C in kind of what you do is you get there and you do something, you know, you do a patrol with the OR if you're supposed to do a few patrols with the people that were there previously. And during the patrol, you know, you could tell these guys were freaked out and they only did one. Yes. And there I talk about it in there. There was these they called in these helicopters that we would use the Kiowa is and they called in fire on these two guys that were digging in the river. And I kind of looked at my platoon sergeant and I was like, Did we just see them kill two people for no reason? Like and I asked someone and they're like, No, they're digging in. They were digging in IEDs. It was like they were digging the river in a riverbed. And I just kind of looked and everybody from our guys looked and we were just like, I don't think what we saw was right. 

Rich Bennett 49:20
Yeah. Wow. 

Hoo. Okay. So the title Day of the Valley. 

William Yeske 49:27
Is very well warranted. 

Rich Bennett 49:29
Yeah. How did you come up with the title? 

William Yeske 49:32
Oh, we talked about that. 

Rich Bennett 49:33
I have a funny feeling I know how, but tell the listeners how. 

William Yeske 49:36
Yeah, Did we talk about that before we got on here? 

Rich Bennett 49:39
I think we. I think before we started recording. 

William Yeske 49:41
We did. Yeah. I gotcha. 

Rich Bennett 49:42
I did. We. I can't remember. I said. 

William Yeske 49:44
I know there's a lot of. 

Rich and Will 49:46
Barry. 

Rich Bennett 49:47
Or not, no pun intended either but. Right. 

William Yeske 49:50
No, the guys. That were there would laugh. A lot of them. They have that dark veteran humor, right? So we're. 

Rich Bennett 49:55
Okay. Got to man. 

William Yeske 49:57
So damn the valleys. 

Rich Bennett 49:58
That's how you keep your sanity. 

Rich and Will 50:00
Yeah, right. 

William Yeske 50:01
So damn the valley was actually kind of a phrase that was come under question by the publisher. They were like, I don't know if we can give you that title, you know? And I. Well, I understand. I mean, I get it, you know, could be it could be considered a little controversial. And then I kind of discussed with them the the story behind it of it being a saying that the guys that were there, like whenever, you know, we caught wind of either somebody we had one guy Sergeant Jason spotted horse he passed away from Lou Gehrig's disease. Oh man. And it was due to exposure of things that we were exposed to over there. It just kind of activated whatever the disease was or the gene. Yeah. You know, I mean, you have a lot of this happen Vietnam veterans, same kind of thing. And whenever something like that would happen or if we caught wind of somebody committing suicide, you know, it would be damned. The valley was what was said and, you know, it's kind of something that's just stuck and how the guys feel about that particular time. Yeah. You know, whether there was I mean, of course, there's great memories that we have in here and stuff, but there's also those damning moments of, you know, your extreme lows. You have your extreme highs, but you also have your extreme lows. And you have those days where you you know, there was there was a time when and I, I remember I don't remember exactly when in the deployment, but I remember where I was. We were stepping off on to a patrol out of Johnston and I was like thinking to myself, well who's it going to be today? Mm. And I realized, Hey, you need to stop thinking like that because you're already dead. 

Really? And that's how you had to think out there. You had to kind of come to that realization of like, it's only a matter of time. So until then, do the best you can. And it's sort of something I've pulled forward from there. And that's been part of the motivator in a lot of what I do now. 

Rich Bennett 52:11
Do you think because I know this book is focused towards veterans, but there are a lot of people that never serve that love to read. 

William Yeske 52:21
And that that's the other end of things is like people are curious as to what these guys went through. Yeah, over there and that is this has been, I mean, the whole reason why I wrote it the way that I did in the voice that I did, I made it so that it was really a high school reading level. Okay? So that it's an easy read. I wanted it so that everybody could understand it, whether they were thinking about time in service to know what they were getting into, and to know that, hey, if other people have been through this and can hold a smile on their face or use it to motivate themselves in their life, like, okay, I can make through just about anything. 

Rich Bennett 53:02
And you said there's some good stories in there as well. 

William Yeske 53:05
Oh, there's some great ones. There's some memories. 

Rich Bennett 53:07
Share one. 

William Yeske 53:08
Yeah. Oh, man, let's think about there was there's one of them. We had this lieutenant, Lieutenant Demarest, a great guy, and he was always about the guys. But 

he would he there was the squad leader who noticed there was always pop and candy and stuff. You always had like, always was sucking on something like. 

Rich Bennett 53:31
Right. 

William Yeske 53:32
Would have candy in his mouth. We get he'd just dig through all the little NWR packages and stuff that was sent out to us. He does have some kind of sweets of some kind. And he he made a bet with them. He's like, Sir, you know, if you can stay off the sweets. I think it was a maybe it was a week, It might have been a month, but I think it was a week. 

You know, we'll help you out and everything like. But I want to. I want to see. If you can get rid of that vice. And I think it was because you want him to. He had gone through seminary. I can't remember the exact reason I probably wrote it in. There's some of this stuff is like memories that I put in and they're down in there. But there's so many that I've gone through. I don't even have them all fresh up there right now. Because there's just so much to I mean. 

Rich Bennett 54:20
You wrote it in two weeks, so everything. 

William Yeske 54:22
Oh, this part. No, this part was over. This part was over the next four or five months when it started compounding. 

Rich Bennett 54:28
Oh, okay. Gotcha. 

William Yeske 54:29
Yes. Yeah, yeah. That's when it really when I really. The original manuscript was two weeks. 

Rich Bennett 54:34
Okay. Okay. 

William Yeske 54:36
So this new tenant, you know, agreed to the bed and he is we're, I mean, just the pressures out there between you couldn't walk the same patrol twice because if you did, there'd be a landmine there. You had to constantly change paths. You had to adapt your techniques. We started walking instead of your normal wedge. We started walking like Ranger file so that we would minimize how many footprints, paths. We put down, which is I. Mean, it's a terrible way to walk if you're going to assault something. But yeah, but if you're not worried about that and you're trying to get to point A to point B without hitting a landmine, that's the way to do it. Walk, walking each other's footprints. Wow. Put the least amount of ground walked on. Yeah, it's scary. Holy crap. So he's. He's going over the maps, poring over them the night before, and he's on talk duty. So what talk duty is, is you have the communication center. All right. And cop Johnston. So we were the area was so saturated with the enemy, we were remote from the main body. They split everybody. We were three different platoons. So they split us up in like around roughly 30 man groups. And we're out at Camp Johnson at our own communications thing was myself, Lieutenant and Sergeant Hill, We'd rotate in between. We had a whole that was another things. You had to rotate schedules out there. And even then, like it was brutal. You would sleep whenever you could and you might, might get 2 to 3 hours. And that was it. Yeah. Like my sleep patterns have never been the same after that deployment. Nope. 

Rich Bennett 56:18
Ain't going to be for a while either. Now if they ever will. 

William Yeske 56:21
Never. Yeah. Yeah. And, and I was talking with my own platoon sergeant recently. He's now a sergeant major, and he's still in, and he's like, you know, never had the same sleep since. Oh, yeah, me neither. But wow, he's in. The talk and he's poring over this planning and certain spot. Spotted horse walks in, and he's these two cups. And we had just been given an ice cream cooler in the middle of the desert. All right. This is I think this is like the last month and a half we're there. Yeah, I told you there's some weird occurrences. And, well, the Seabees. Came in and they saw how we were living, and they were like, We have never seen somebody like this is like beginning the invasion, like austere type environment. Like you guys haven't had a shower in months. So they brought in, like all of a sudden. This hot shower in a canoe comes in and they built two or three things for us. And I was like, This is this is sweet. Like we love CB's. I'm all about the Navy now. 

Thank you. 

Rich Bennett 57:31
Oh, see, they are more than a taxi service for the Marine Corps. 

William Yeske 57:35
Yeah, right. That they are. At least these guys were anyway. But inside that they brought in this is called food storage clinics that ran off a mini generator. There was the cook that brought them in New kind of what we were going through and kind of gave us a wink and he was like, Hey, we got a little something extra in there for you. And there was three five gallon. Ben and Jerry's tubs of ice cream. Wow. And I was going to say myself and three guys and weapons squad actually cut the lock on the freezer that night. And went to town with some students. Oh, we got sick. We got sick of the dogs. 

Rich Bennett 58:18
But good thing you didn't have to go out on a mission, right? You grab you and your butt cheeks together and everything all day. Oh, we. 

William Yeske 58:26
Probably did have to go out on a mission after. That's that's part of it. That's part of it. I had the iron gut as it was, so I was all right. 

Rich Bennett 58:35
Man. So. Yeah. 

William Yeske 58:38
Well, well, I got to finish the story we got. Oh, I'm sorry. Go ahead. Yeah, that's all right. So we got a spot. 

Rich Bennett 58:45
I forgot all about that. 

William Yeske 58:46
The ice cream. Came out of the blue. I know. Somewhere out in Maryland you're thinking ice cream automatically. 

So Spock comes in with these two cups of ice cream, and he kind of gives the outer look, because he knows at this point the L.T. has had anything in a few days. And he's like, Sir, I got something for you. 

Oh, and the L.T. gives this. Look like, you know, I can't do that. And the way Spot was this. So Spot was this big barrel of a guy. He's this he actually was from the Kiowa tribe out in Oklahoma. 

Rich Bennett 59:26
Oh, wow. 

William Yeske 59:27
Okay. I think it was Kiowa tribal man. If his family hears this, I better get it right now. He's. He's a. Great guy, but I think like. Big. Big Native American. 

Rich Bennett 59:38
Build. Right. 

William Yeske 59:39
And just just a great guy like the sense of humor and stuff on them. And he just had this way about him and he I could see it in my like in my head. And he leans in and he goes, Sir, I won't tell nobody. 

And else he looks. At him and his eyes get big and he goes ahead and he takes a cup and, you know, he downs the ice cream and stuff and he's like, thanks. And he kind of squirrels it away. So they go off on this patrol the next day. And the our commanding officer, Captain Adam Armstrong, links up with a patrol and I mean it it was not the best of patrols. He kind of got in his boat about a few things and he got yelled at. And at one point he realized that he had lost his wallet while out on patrol through this combat area. 

Rich Bennett 1:00:39
Oh, shit. 

William Yeske 1:00:39
Oh, yeah. And he's just kind of like just everything went wrong that day. And then he comes back in. Okay, and they're coming back and you have to kind of you come in and we were doing a ah, so after action review after the patrol, what went good, one went bad and he's talking to the guys and he turns the corner to go up the hill back to where his bunk is and there's Sergeant Smallwood and Sergeant Hill with a cup of ice cream. Pointing fingers at him. Go, I You broke your promise, sir. You know, we got here. Oh, man. And he's just he. Hangs his head because it's like that. Icing on the cake, and he's taken his stuff. Off in his bunk and he realizes that his wallet is in the very bottom. Like this little cargo park on the very bottom by his calf. And he just he had put it in a different spot that day. And it was almost karma giving him the finger, saying. I told you, 

oh, God. 

Rich Bennett 1:01:47
Yeah, I can't wait for this to come out. And couple of things I want to go over real quick. First of all, the website Damn the Valley Booking.com, right? Yes, sir. And all right, go ahead. 

William Yeske 1:01:59
Through there. There is a little bit of a project involved there, too. But I mean, you can get to all the social media links and stuff. Yeah, but you you noticed. It too, didn't you? 

Rich Bennett 1:02:08
I want to ask you about you talking about all the stories. 

William Yeske 1:02:11
Oh, while the stories. Okay. I actually open up just the other day and I have to post some more stuff up on there because I have other people with poetry and stuff, but that is about getting out. You could submit your own stories from your own stuff and it's I want to go through them to make sure that it's not anything. You know, I can't just have it post up on there with it, right. Looking at it first and making sure I. 

Rich Bennett 1:02:36
Love the idea. 

William Yeske 1:02:37
Respectful. But yeah, it's all this whole thing has been about getting your story about out there, sharing the story with each other and like having that therapeutic effect of getting things off of your chest or letting other people know that, hey, like you can make it through this too. 

Rich Bennett 1:02:54
Yeah, you're already got reviews on there, which is good, but what would you say about a project? 

William Yeske 1:03:01
So there's a project built in behind this as well, and that has to do with the author's signed copies. I when I first started bringing this to the publisher, I told them like, Hey is there any possibility of me working in like another 150 or so books for the guys to get them a copy of this? And they're like, Yeah, that's a lot of books. I don't think we can do that. So being the marketer on like, All right, how can I afford, you know, 150 books for these guys? And I'm like, well, the margins on an author's signed copy are a little bit better, you know, if they can come through here. So I figured that I would offer up, you know, signed copies in order to be able to afford these copies for these guys. So that's basically anything that's sold on the website I need the profits from. They're going to go towards getting the 150 copies to the guys that fought in the Arghandab and anything that it goes over on that I want to use to fly them out to the Veterans Day 2023 event at the Airborne and Special Operations Museum that I have as a book launch coming in on November 11th down in Fayetteville, North Carolina, at the museum down there. 

Rich Bennett 1:04:19
November 11th. 

William Yeske 1:04:20
Yes, sir. 

Rich Bennett 1:04:21
Veterans Day, Veterans Day. 

William Yeske 1:04:22
And they actually that worked into the bigger scope overall, because I had said before the picture of the flag being pulled from the rubble that's on the cover. Mm hmm. So one of the guys, Brian Erickson, that had served there, he was an old first platoon or back when we were in Helmand, he got switched to second Platoon when we moved to the Arghandab. And he contacted me through social media after he saw the cover photo. And he's like, Bill, yeah, I have the flag. 

And I said, What do you mean you have the flag? And he's like, I recovered the flag, and the other unit switched their flag on to their before we left. I have the flag that's in that cover. Wow. So we, we started at first we started thinking that maybe this might be something good for the unit display case, you know, the unit history and the heritage behind it. And we couldn't get a hold of command. 

I just sometimes that happens through connections either like, who is this guy, you know, cold call in here or, you know, maybe it's just that sometimes people are when you hey, let me talk, Sergeant Major, they're like, Who are you? Like, there's no way. I can't. Talk to Sarge. I mean, there's no way you're getting there. 

Rich Bennett 1:05:40
Right? 

William Yeske 1:05:41
So we had a brick outside the airborne and Special Operations Museum in downtown Fayetteville that was dedicated to the guys that were killed in action over on that deployment. Specialist Jason Johnston. Sergeant Scott Bronckhorst was wasn't Scott Bronckhorst and 

especially Jason Karen or Joey. Karen I'm sorry, Joey. Karen And they dedicated a brick outside of the museum to those guys and and the unit and stuff. And I was like, Well, let me call the museum and see if maybe it's something they want. Yeah, because there's kind of history there. Yeah. And I called and the weirdest thing just again, another one of those strange occurrences. I got the curator on the phone 

and I'm describing the story and what I have, and he's like dead silent. 

Rich Bennett 1:06:38
Interesting. 

William Yeske 1:06:39
And I asked him, like, what? What's going on? And he's like, I've been waiting for this call. 

Rich Bennett 1:06:45
Really? 

William Yeske 1:06:46
Yeah. It was nuts. Wow. It was nuts. Wow. So this is rolled into something to where I brought down a bunch of my gear that I wore down there in order to kind of, like, encourage the other guys, like, look, we want this to be tangible for other people, too. So there's going to be other artifacts from these stories. Yeah, There's a story where a suicide bomber blew himself up and a guy had put his backpack down in the spot before he you know, he was kind of like just hanging out right there. Yeah, putting some stuff out of the bag When things started to escalate and he ran to contact and afterwards he came back and his bags full of holes. So where he had been just previously, seconds prior, if he had been there, he would have been, you know, very possibly dead. Wow. So. Wow. 

Rich Bennett 1:07:48
Yeah. Okay. All right. 

Rich and Will 1:07:49
All right. 

Rich Bennett 1:07:50
There you go. With this project because I love this 

150 bucks as you want to get out to that, you know, to your buddies, right? Yes. But the way the publisher's doing it, it's got to be through signed copies that people buy and the money gets donated. 

William Yeske 1:08:08
That's how I'm doing it. It's yeah, the publisher's not they don't really have a hand in that side. They're just like, hey you can, you can buy author copies. And I wrote it into the contract to where it's at cost. 

Rich Bennett 1:08:20
Okay. For the. 

William Yeske 1:08:20
Author copies. So I basically can afford for every two books bought. So I put a set number for every two books bought off that are author's signed. I can send one out to the guys. 

Rich Bennett 1:08:35
All right. Let me ask you this, because I've seen other authors do this shoot. But I want to get your okay, let's say that a business out that's listening is big on doing stuff for veterans. 

William Yeske 1:08:49
Yeah. 

Rich Bennett 1:08:51
And let's say they want to purchase like, I don't know, 20 of these books already, guys. Can they do that? 

William Yeske 1:08:58
Yes, they can. 

Rich Bennett 1:08:59
They can. 

William Yeske 1:09:00
Yeah. You can just get right on their purchase some. There's also. 

Rich Bennett 1:09:03
Through your website. 

William Yeske 1:09:04
A way that there's been a few people actually that have reached out and been like, I love this project and I want to donate to it, but I, I'm not a reader or I want to listen to the Audible and stuff like that. And it's I wasn't going to do it because I hate the fact of like, I don't want to just put a donate thing, but it's kind of spurred me to just the other night I opened up a donate tab to where you can get on there and donate towards the project and all of that. Right now I'm not like a registered 501 or anything, but all of that goes towards stuff for the guys, whether it's a block of rooms to get them out there or one of them that's flying in because they're all they started to buy this stuff and I told them all to get trip insurance because I am trying as hard as I can to get your way paid for. Yeah. So there's ways. And then the museum is also a501. So I mean, if they really wanted to do something like that, we could talk and I can set you up the right people to where that's going to get to the right place. And you know, this is for the right thing and it's not something that I would ever take advantage of. 

Rich Bennett 1:10:12
So all of you listening just go to Damn the Valley. BBC.com And if you want to do that, well, number one, you got to preorder the book. And then when it comes well, and you can get on Amazon. Brazil. Yeah, when this comes in the book will be out. So when October 30. 

William Yeske 1:10:28
First, October 31st, we're getting close a month and a half away. 

Rich Bennett 1:10:33
Oh, cow. Wow. 

William Yeske 1:10:34
Yeah. That's when you see the countdown. Yeah. On some of the stock, right? 

Rich Bennett 1:10:38
I got. All right. So I got to try to get this out before October 31st. You, sir. Either way, go to the website, purchase the book for yourself, and then purchase it for the guys, too. And if you want to purchase a bunch of them, 

Will's contact information is right there. Get in touch with him and. 

William Yeske 1:10:57
One of the others. 

Rich Bennett 1:10:58
I think it'd be. It'd be a great thing to do for these guys. For Veterans Day. Yeah. And that's my goal. My goal is to get 150 copies for the guys by Veterans Day. 

William Yeske 1:11:11
Yeah, Ditto, Sam. 

Rich Bennett 1:11:13
So that's 11 days. 

William Yeske 1:11:14
And if you have a bookstore, you know what else helps too is, I mean, yeah, Barnes Noble picked this thing up, but if, you know, I'm a really big supporter of independent bookstores. Yes. And any like. So I was down in Austin the other week recording a podcast down there. And any city that I go to, I go to the independent store that's in town, I'm like, Look, hey, I want this is where I'll hold an event. You know, Amazon's great. I love, you know, the books that sell on Amazon help the numbers and everything. But if you're ordering from your independent stores and stuff it's available on Ingram so they can get a hold of it But talk to your independent stores have them reach out. There's an ISBN number. You can either give them that or have them reach out to me, and that way I can try to set things up with them and and work things there as well. 

Rich Bennett 1:12:02
Well, well, before I let you go, is there anything you'd like to add? 

William Yeske 1:12:07
No, I think. 

Rich and Will 1:12:09
I think. 

William Yeske 1:12:10
This I mean, this has been an enjoyable time to. 

Rich Bennett 1:12:12
Sit here. I can sit here and talk to you about the whole book, but then people want to buy the book because they've already heard all the stories. And I don't want that to happen. 

William Yeske 1:12:20
Trust me, we scratched the surface. There is not even even on the page that I have for us. We didn't even get through half the content that I've got on there, so. 

Rich Bennett 1:12:31
Well, you know what that means. 

William Yeske 1:12:32
There's so much. 

Rich Bennett 1:12:33
Yeah, you know what that means? 

William Yeske 1:12:34
The Return of the Jedi. 

Rich Bennett 1:12:38
That actually what I would love for you to do is come back on whether it be six months or whatever. After the book's released and talk about how well the books do and also when to find out if, you know, the guys got their books and maybe even get. 

William Yeske 1:12:55
One of them channeled in that be awesome. 

Rich Bennett 1:12:57
That Oh yeah, I. 

William Yeske 1:12:59
Would love to. I would love to know there's another guy out there. You'd probably love to talk to another Marylander Southern Maryland, but by the name of Dave Harf that we worked on a project called the Veterans Peer Groups Project and other, in order to bring guys together, 

talking with one another in like zoom capacity and stuff. And this was all like, this is all stuff that veterans out there are doing and these guys are doing. They want to help their communities. I love promoting that type of stuff and what they're doing. That's just what it's all about. 

Rich Bennett 1:13:32
And you're not in Maryland anymore, right? 

William Yeske 1:13:34
I'm in Maryland. 

Rich Bennett 1:13:35
Oh, you are? 

William Yeske 1:13:36
So, yes, sir. That's why I contacted you. I'm up in Hartford County. 

Rich Bennett 1:13:39
Oh, for some reason, I was thinking that you were a dance down South somewhere. No, sir. Never mind. 

Rich and Will 1:13:46
Okay. 

William Yeske 1:13:47
There's also a ghost. 

Rich Bennett 1:13:49
Over to Lance. 

Rich and Will 1:13:50
Now. 

Rich Bennett 1:13:52
Hey, Will. Thanks a lot, brother. And thank you for your service. It's been a true pleasure to talk to you. And Sam can't wait to do it again. You know, we're rich. I mean, hell, since you're still up here, we're going to have to hook up one day and get some lunch or something. 

William Yeske 1:14:06
It sounds great. 

Rich Bennett 1:14:08
You got it, brother. Take care, you two.