Nick Laidlaw enlisted in the Marine Corps to go to war. The war never came for him. So he spent the years after collecting other men's: over 1,100 first-hand accounts from more than 20 armies, both sides of nearly every war since 1939, including a Taliban fighter who later apologized to him.

Then he stopped collecting from a distance and went himself. In 2022 he was talking into encircled Mariupol over Starlink, interviewing a 22-year-old Azov soldier named Anton "Pazman" Krill almost every day until Anton was killed. Nick holds his last words: "When we are relieved from here I will immediately marry my girlfriend and everything will be Ukraine." Two and a half years later, a man Nick was certain had died in Russian captivity messaged him. They met in a tea shop: "Thank you for giving me Anton back."

In 2025 he rode into Pokrovsk at one in the morning in a soft-skin pickup, after a brigade deputy commander told him it was 50-50 he'd be hit going in or coming out. He went. Seven hours: the wound that started it, and the work that came out of it.

▶ Watch on YouTube: youtube.com/watch?v=JNZvkcO3fsE

CHAPTERS

0:00:00 Cold open

0:04:04 Eight months in the making

0:09:51 Adopted at birth, and the half of his life he knew nothing about

0:19:21 He found his biological family in six days

0:37:13 Growing up on the GWOT, and why the Marine Corps

0:47:10 Boot camp, SOI, and FAST company

0:58:07 He enlisted to have his metal tested. The war never came.

1:03:43 Getting out, and the transition nobody prepares you for

1:08:29 A Glock in the car door, and the song that stopped him

1:16:02 Battles and Beers begins

1:28:06 Kabul falls, and the people he tried to get out

1:39:14 "You are the target audience" - how propaganda really works

1:46:32 He interviewed a member of the Taliban

2:03:43 Maidan, Crimea and the Donbas: how this war started

2:27:14 What Azov actually is

2:33:02 Russia's justification, and what he says is the truth

2:53:22 Into encircled Mariupol on Starlink

2:59:01 Anton "Pazman" Krill, 22 years old

3:15:52 Standing at Anton's memorial wall with his brother

3:26:36 "What right do you have to take these stories?"

3:30:37 Bucha, from a man who lived through it

3:40:26 The Coke can in the Walmart parking lot

3:56:27 Artillery down the road. The waiter offered a refill.

4:08:51 Why he calls himself a coward

4:13:02 Ukraine's prison-release soldiers

4:41:13 The third trip: full access with the 25th Airborne

5:01:56 How an FPV strike actually happens

5:03:29 Mercy kills, and the wounded nobody comes for

5:15:14 Pokrovsk: 110,000 Russians

5:17:33 Hearing became survival

5:30:47 A mine went off next door

5:40:17 He strained drinking water through his underwear

5:58:01 The truck he was supposed to be in

6:00:29 From atheist to something else

6:27:23 American aid to Ukraine

6:52:20 What years of this has done to him

6:59:01 Close

Follow Nick: Battles and Beers battlesandbeers.org · IG @nicklaidthelaw · @battles_and_beers · @zero.line.dispatch

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Ten years on the busiest ambulance in the City of Dallas. A downtown building that came down behind him with a mayday on the radio, and the smoke that dropped him to his knees. A New Year's Eve call in a barbershop where the crowd turned on the medics. A full cardiac code run on the floor of an airplane at 35,000 feet — the night he flew home from winning the Arnold Classic Brazil. Steve Kuclo is the first firefighter-paramedic in 45 episodes of this show. He quit automotive engineering when the industry collapsed, did two fire academies and two medic schools to get to Dallas, and spent a decade running the calls that don't leave — the pediatric ones, the ones where you did everything right and it didn't matter — while building himself into an IFBB Pro who stood on the Olympia stage at 26. Then 2020 took the identity he'd spent twenty years on, and the rebuild ran through the back row of a Dallas church, a marriage, and the regenerative-medicine clinic he runs today. He covers the firehouse — the kitchen table, the probie year, what brotherhood actually means, and the PTSD, divorce, addiction and suicide numbers the fire service doesn't talk about — and then opens the knowledge base: what steroids and TRT actually do to your blood, what actually kills bodybuilders, peptides in plain English, and the stem-cell treatment the host went through on camera.

▶ Watch on YouTube: youtube.com/watch?v=ULu2tjb6QjM

🎬 The stem-cell film: youtube.com/watch?v=AeJY1uJH6BE

CHAPTERS

0:00:00 How they met — one call about BPC-157

0:01:55 Ten years on the ambulance, and the Olympia stage

0:13:57 Age 14 at his first Arnold Classic

0:27:33 30,000 applicants for a couple hundred Dallas fire spots

0:35:23 The busiest ambulance in Dallas: seven calls in two hours

0:59:32 The building collapse — mayday on the radio

1:10:08 The kitchen table

1:22:28 What brotherhood actually means

1:25:50 New Year's Eve in the barbershop

1:30:55 Running a full code on a plane at 35,000 feet

2:09:02 First Olympia stage at 26

2:22:38 What steroids and TRT do to your blood

2:47:17 2020 rock bottom

2:58:33 Crying in the back row of a Dallas church

3:24:17 Stem cells 101 — where the cells come from

3:37:28 What the stem cells did — the host's own account

3:45:15 Peptides — what they are and aren't

3:53:31 BPC-157 and TB-500

4:11:26 GLPs — Ozempic, tirzepatide, retatrutide

4:40:17 TRT — what it is and isn't

4:53:14 Why "my testosterone was normal" means nothing

5:07:02 The offer — a landing page for TVW listeners

🧬 STEM CELLS · PEPTIDES · TRT — Steve's door for Vanguard Wall listeners. Fill out the intake, his clinical team reviews it, and you get a straight answer on whether it's right for you: go.thevanguardwall.com/regenx

📸 Steve: @stevekuclo · ReGenX: @regenx_

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The medical portions of this conversation document personal experience and are for informational purposes only. Not medical advice; no outcome is claimed or guaranteed. Therapies discussed are not FDA-approved. Consult a licensed physician.

Disclosure: Upgraded Human ReGenX provided the host's stem-cell treatment (discussed in this episode) at no cost. This is not a paid sponsorship. The Vanguard Wall earns a referral benefit through the clinic link above. Opinions are our own.

Eleven days from going home. Fourteen months in eastern Afghanistan already behind them, bags half packed — and the order came down to build a brand-new combat outpost on the valley floor, in the low ground, in the middle of fighting season, surrounded by high ground they were forbidden to occupy. Three days later, at dawn on 13 July 2008, roughly 160 fighters hit Combat Outpost Kahler from every direction at once. Nine American paratroopers did not come home. 1SG(r) Jesse Queck was an 11 Charlie mortarman with Chosen Company at the Battle of Wanat. In six and a half hours he walks through the whole of it: a kid from a town of 8,000 on Virginia's Eastern Shore who watched the towers fall from a high school hallway and went looking for the war; four deployments; the helicopter crash that took his roommate and his mentor; and then the morning the mountain opened up. The mortar pit flooded with fire until the tube was useless. His weapons failed in his hands, so he picked up an AT4 he had never fired in his life, stepped into the open so the backblast wouldn't catch his own men, and put it into the treeline. His soldier Sergio Abad died on the ground beside him. When word came down that OP Topside had one man left alive on the radio — Ryan Pitts, who would later receive the Medal of Honor — Jesse said two words: I'm going. He climbed toward the fight everyone else was trying to survive, became the medic for the dying, and called in a B-1 by ear when he could no longer hear his own radio. That is the half of the story people tell. The other half is what happened when he came home to a dark place with no enemy in it — the drinking, the night his wife called him frantic, the survivor's guilt he carried for years over Abad, and the day the woman who raised Sergio told him: I don't blame you. I forgive you. I love you. Because Jesse will tell you a soldier dies twice — once when he falls, and again when no one says his name. Today he says those names.

1SG(r) Jesse Queck survived the Battle of Wanat, 13 July 2008 — one of the fiercest small-unit fights of the Afghan war, where nine American paratroopers were killed. This is the full conversation.

CHAPTERS

0:00:00 Cold Open: Wanat, July 2008

0:04:03 Growing Up on Virginia's Eastern Shore

0:12:02 September 11th in the School Hallway

0:24:47 What a Mortarman Actually Does

0:30:29 Fort Drum: The Helicopter Crash

0:41:40 French Commando School in Djibouti

0:49:09 The Smart Bomb That Hit the Helicopter

1:08:51 Route Tampa: IEDs and Complacency

1:18:01 Reenlisting for Italy and the 173rd

1:40:13 Ranch House at 3,300 Meters

1:55:32 Ranch House Overrun on the Radio

2:06:56 The Order to Build Wanat

2:14:55 Building the Outpost by Hand

2:25:34 Stand-To on 13 July 2008

2:35:26 The First RPG Hits the TOW Truck

2:42:05 Weapons Seize, Firing the AT4

2:48:32 Sergio Abad Is Hit

2:56:04 Abad's Guardian and Forgiveness

3:15:42 Volunteering to Reinforce OP Topside

3:22:11 Reaching OP Topside

3:32:31 Jonathan Ayers on the 240

3:39:25 The RPG That Wounded Him

3:49:42 The Medevac Pilots

3:58:46 Landstuhl, Vicodin, and Coming Home

4:02:35 Saying Their Names

4:14:24 Drill Sergeant: Visualizing the Range

4:31:31 Lewis-McChord and Spin Boldak

4:39:12 Ranger School at Twenty-Nine

4:53:41 Fixing a Broken Tank Company

5:08:26 Observer-Controller at the National Training Center

5:21:51 COVID, Isolation, and Drinking

5:33:03 Losing Stratton Hall

5:44:30 The Meadows and Getting Sober

6:00:07 Bob Starr and Learning Business

6:06:08 Farm Bureau and Serving Clients

6:17:40 A Message to His Kids

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