You're listening to software, radio, special operations, military news and straight talk with the guys in the community.

Hey, what's going on? It's me, Rad, and you are listening to another awesome episode of Soft Rep Radio.

But before I get into my next guest today, who you can already see on the screen if you're watching on the YouTube's,

is I want to talk to you about my merch store, okay? We have a merch store for Soft Rep. It helps keep the lights on.

A little bit goes a long way for us. I love doing this show, and I really appreciate Brandon and everybody, you know, keeping the merch store open.

So go support that. And then also we have a book club. It's Soft Rep dot com forward slash book hyphen club.

Go check it out, get involved. If you want to learn about some books that we talk about to the authors, you can get into the book club.

Brandon Web's books are in there. John David Mann. Hopefully we can get my next guest, Robert Spangle of a thousand yard style and his book into our book club.

And let's welcome him to our show. Welcome, Robert. Well, very, very happy to be here and re honored. So thanks for having me, Rad.

Well, you know, today's special guest, kids is Robert Spangle, and he's a photographer, and he's a veteran of the United States Marine Corps.

Can you tell us a little bit about the Marine Corps and what you, how old were you when you enlisted?

Kind of the timeline of I went through boot camp and I got into this other thing, and then I went here.

Oh boy, that whole blur. It doesn't have to be that big though. You can do it right to it.

So I joined in 2017 about out in 2011. I actually I signed up when I was 17 and a half.

My parents like signed off on me. So I left right after high school. Basically, this is still kind of like the pre internet military, you know, the internet existed.

But social media and all that stuff wasn't really there. And the whole structure of the military wasn't online transparent.

I wanted to go infantry. I was told that I should go recon because I was good at swimming. But I want recon.

That was like after boot camp and infantry school, that was like a six month, five, six month training cycle.

It was pretty, pretty arduous and familiar to many people. I want to get in second, sent to second recon battalion.

And this is an interesting period in the battalion history and also in forced recon history.

forced recon had essentially been dissolved. I think about three years before.

You had debt one guys who'd kind of like gone away and then set up like MSOB.

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