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Colonel (r) Max Krupp will be the first to tell you he doesn’t tell war stories — you have to pull them out of him. Over 28 years he became the first Texas Army National Guardsman in history to earn the Green Beret, wore a Bronze Star with Valor for a single day in Kandahar Province that by rights should have killed him and the Afghan company he was advising, and was on the Army’s fast track to general — then walked away from all of it to raise cattle in Texas. This is the full conversation: the kid nobody bet on who did the hardest thing on offer every single time, then chose the quiet work.
▶ Watch the full conversation on YouTube: https://youtu.be/Nsg0OY-8RhY
Retired U.S. Army Colonel Max Krupp sits down with The Vanguard Wall for a full-length interview spanning 28 years of service: enlisting in the New Mexico Army National Guard at 17, Ranger School, Long Range Surveillance, and becoming the first Texas Army National Guardsman to earn the Green Beret and Special Forces tab. He walks through a 13-month Afghanistan deployment as a combat advisor embedded with an Afghan National Army company, the day in Kandahar Province that earned him a Bronze Star with Valor, the Special Forces Q Course and SERE school, commanding the only airborne infantry battalion in the Texas National Guard, and why he traded a general’s track for a one-man cattle ranch raising black Angus beef. A rare, honest veteran story about leadership, service, and the quiet work after the uniform comes off.
CHAPTERS
0:00 Cold open
2:22 Meet Max Krupp
4:36 Growing up on the El Paso border
16:03 Where the military got in his blood
19:44 Military school in Roswell
26:00 Enlisting in the National Guard at 17
40:58 Long Range Surveillance & G Company
1:07:33 Ranger School
1:17:13 The Army kills the LRS program
1:38:52 Afghanistan: the advise-and-assist mission
1:44:08 Riding with the 82nd Airborne
2:13:27 The day in Kandahar
2:26:00 Aftermath, medevac & the Apache pilots
3:05:52 The Green Beret Q Course
3:11:09 SERE school
3:46:14 ODA life: the Guam jump mission
4:34:04 Walking away from a general's star
5:19:02 Raising the beef: grass vs. grain
5:56:48 Inside the cattle business
6:28:24 Leadership: the best and the worst
6:45:11 His kids, and the through line
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