In this episode of Veteran Led, John Berry sits down with JT Taylor, CEO of the USMC Scout Sniper Association, to explore the vital work of building support networks for veterans and their families.​
JT shares his journey from Marine Scout Sniper to veteran advocate, highlighting the challenges and triumphs of leading a nonprofit dedicated to empowering veterans. Learn how the USMC Scout Sniper Association provides mentorship, financial assistance, and critical resources while preserving the legacy of Marine Scout Snipers.​
Learn more about the USMC Scout Sniper Association at scoutsniper.org and the Marine Scout Sniper Heritage Foundation at scoutsniperheritagefoundation.org.​
The shot was 2,426 meters with the Barrett 50 cal, the SASR we call it. When you’re in, you don’t really think about it. You don’t really think about it being historical or being the longest shot. It’s just another day for you. It’s another mission.
Today’s guest is JT Taylor, a former Marine Scout sniper team leader and Chief Scout with five combat deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan. JT currently serves as the CEO and President of the USMC Scout Sniper Association. After retiring from the military due to medical issues related to his service, JT made the professional transition into the government workforce through the Warrior to Workforce VA Acquisition Internship program. JT now specializes in acquisition and government lease procurement for the US Department of Veterans Affairs. Welcome, JT. Thanks so much for coming on to the Veteran Led show today.
Thanks a lot. I’m very happy to be here.
You are actually part of an investigation now, but a good investigation because you may possibly have the longest confirmed kill ever a Marine sniper. Is that correct?
That is correct.
Now, how far was the shot and what’s going on? How do you confirm that?
Well, the shot was 2,426 meters with the Barrett 50 cal, the SASR, we call it. When you’re in, you don’t really think about it. You don’t really think about it being historical or being the longest shot. It’s just another day for you. It’s another mission. You move on the next day and you talk about it, but it never really comes up. I did a podcast a while back, and we started telling some sniper stories, and that story came up. When that story came up and the number came out, people started asking questions and thinking, Hey, my marketing social media guy for the Scott Sniper Association started saying, Hey, as a matter of fact, what is the furthest ever killed by a Marine sniper? He starts looking it up and googling it. The furthest we could find is Carlos Hathcock at 2,286 or something like that. He’s like, I don’t see anything close to yours. He’s like, I don’t see anything. He’s like, You might actually…
Not even Chesty Puller?
No. I’m like, Well, what do we do? He’s like, I don’t know. Let me make some calls. He contacted one of his guys through an army recruiting command, media people, and he was like, Apparently, there’s a Marine Corps history division.
You can reach out to them and submit things like this, and they’ll do an investigation and be recorded as official Marine Corps history. I was like, What do they require? He’s like, You need signs, you need statements from people, signed and notarized, that basically verify your story. All right, cool. Easy. I called a couple of guys that were with me on that mission, said, Hey, can you write a statement about that day that we killed those five guys and make sure you put the distance in there, 2,426? They’re like, Yeah, no problem. They wrote the statements, got them notarized, sent them to me. Then I found my old company commander who was there during that mission, who was the one that actually documented me for having five enemy KA on that operation. He put that in my fit rep. Your fit rep is like a performance appraisal, and it’s written right there in my fit rep, five enemy KA, Operation Samson. I reached out to him. I found him on LinkedIn, and he’s still in active duty, and he’s a Lieutenant Colonel now at Quantico. He’s running the officer basic course. I called him.
He’s like, Yeah, sounds great. Send me… I’ll write up a statement, and he’s like, I’ll push it for you on my end. I know the guy’s here. I’m right here in Quantico. I’ll go take it over there and push it to him myself. That’s currently what’s about to happen, and we’ll see what happens. If it comes back as official Marine Corps history, great. If not, it’s still a fact to me. We’re going to just get the story out.
Awesome. That’s such a great thing for your association, the USMC Scout Sniper Association. The CEO has the furthest or longest confirmed kill. What a great story. How long will the investigation take? Do you know?
They say about four to six months. I think that just depends on who’s working on it and what they want to know. I’m not sure, but we’ll see. But yeah, what a storybook, right? The President of SSA also has the long… It’s crazy, right? Then they just did away with the Marine Scout Sniper program. December of 2023 was the last graduating course. We no longer have Marine snipers in infantry battalions anymore. We still have the capability to create Marine Snipers, but it’s in Recon and MARSOC only. No more battalion-level Scout snipers. This is just something else that helps bring eyes back to the Marine Scout Snipers and our legacy and how important we were to all the conflicts we’ve had.
JT, could you take us back to that mission?
I’ll give you just a brief rundown of exactly what’s going on, so I can paint the picture for you. We were doing a battalion clearing operation, and we were clearing an area of two villages that were out past our area of operation to the east. A lot of enemy activity in this area. What we’re doing is a combined mission with the Afghani police, Afghani Army, and my Infantry Battalion. The mission was the Afghani Army and Afghan police, we’re going to start from north to south, clearing through this area of villages, doing poppy and marijuana eradication. So they would burn poppy fields, burn marijuana fields, and move their way south. As they were moving from north to south, clearing these areas out, my Infantry Battalion would be moving from west to east and pushing. It’s sandwiching these guys into these villages, and then we’re going to clear through the villages and push them out further east. My sniper team was tasked with sitting in place in a observation position from a building two or three days ahead of this operation to gage a pattern of life for what’s going on in the villages. As soon as the battalion main effort started to step off the morning of the mission, we would already be in place to see if we could see the pattern of life start to change, start to see shops closed down, start to see people start coming in on motorcycles, military-age males, or car loads of military-age males.
Because usually what would happen when the operation would kick off, these guys would come in from other villages and start setting up their fighting positions. Sometimes you could see them coming in on motorcycles, coming in on cars, jumping out of cars. That was the whole point of my sniper team being there, so we could get eyes on these guys, report that, and be in a position to maybe engage them when they started taking their positions. That’s exactly what happened. As the main effort came to our building, our building was going used as the actual command post for the operation. The Company Commander, Battalion Sergeant Major, Battalion Commander all came into our compound that we already had cleared and we’re sitting in for three days. My team is up on the roof and we’re observing out east. As the Afghan army and police start pushing south, we start seeing these guys start popping up on roofs with wearing all black. We’re reporting on them. We start lazing them and trying to get the distance and they’re all out over 2,000 meters. Well, the max effective of our gun is about 1,800 meters with the Barrett 50 cal.
It’s really past the max effective. We were going to get eyes on these guys and try to see if we could get air on them or get some asset to watch them. But at this point, we couldn’t see weapons. So, all of a sudden, a guy pops up on a burm with a RPG and launches it, fires at the Afghani police to the north, and we could see that clear as day. And once that happened, I called in the radio and said, Hey, we got an RPG. We got a whole team of guys behind this building. That’s their staging point. There’s five guys. They’ve got weapons. They’ve got RPGs. They just launched another RPG, so we saw them launch, two. So, we laze the area where they’re at, and they were right behind a little busted down wall. It’s probably five feet tall, six feet tall. You could almost see their heads peeking out on top of the wall. And I wasn’t on the gun at the time, my spotter was, and he was not a school-trained sniper. So he was like, Can I take the shot? I was like, Yeah, take the shot. Just max the scope out, the elevation, hole with the top mill dot, and fire, and we’ll see where you’re at.
So he took a shot, and he was about 300 yards short. So short, they didn’t even know they’re being shot at yet. You just seen the dust come up in the desert. And he was like, Well, I can’t hit them JT. I don’t know how to use the gun that well at this point. So I’m like, All right, let me get on the gun. So I jumped on the gun. I’m like, Okay, watch that wall. I’m going to fire a shot. Tell me how close I am. So I fired a shot, boom, hit the wall, dead hit right in the middle of the wall. You know those guys, buttholes, puckered. What was that? So I’m like, All right, I’m on them. At this point, I’m holding on a cloud. I can’t see the building. I can’t see those guys. I can’t see anything. My crosshairs are up in the sky. I’m holding on a specific cloud, specific area. That’s my basically staging point. And I’m holding there waiting for these guys to step out from the wall. And when they step out, I know I’m going to drop a full magazine, 10 rounds of the Barrett 50 Cal, right on their location and hopefully take them all out.
So Nixon is reporting. He’s like, All right, the first guy stepping out of the wall, we let him walk. Let him walk across. That gave him a little confidence. Then the next four guys started walking. As soon as they stepped out from the wall and started walking, they were all walking the line together. I dropped the whole mag, and all you’ve seen was just… It was about a six-second time of flight, so that’s a long time when you’re waiting for a kill shot, and it seemed like forever. But all of a sudden, you’ve seen all those impacts hit on those guys’ bodies, and you see…Boom, boom, boom. It was just flashes and dust and flashes everywhere, because we shoot a round called the Raufoss round, and it’s like a Tungsten steel penetrator with Zirconium particles around it. Zirconium particles is basically like incendiary. So these rounds are meant to go into a engine block and light on fire. So when they hit a person, it makes a big flash.
So that was it. So it hit all five of them. Then we shortly after, sent out an infantry squad to go across and do a battle damage assessment. They called me on the radio and like, There is stuff everywhere. You got blood everywhere, there’s clothes everywhere, bloody rags, bloody blankets. These guys definitely didn’t survive. But of course, they grabbed their dead and get them out of there very quickly. Right after that mission, my Company Commander, who was there on the radio, awarded me the five enemy KA for that day. Then, of course, we’ve seen the funerals a couple of days later. That’s basically what led to that. And that was like a storybook mission that right place, right time. But I was glad I was there.
Now, you do a couple of great things. One of them I’m really interested in is the USMC Scout Sniper Association. You’ve basically taken a nonnonprofit and said, I know who I want to be a hero to. I want to be a hero to a specific group. To be fair, with five combat deployments, you’re no stranger to this group of combat snipers. Tell me a little bit about the organization, and how did you come to make the decision that this is what you wanted to do?
Well, thanks for asking that. The USMC Scout Sniper Association is exactly that. It’s the only nonprofit association, membership association for Marine Scout Snipers in the world. It came into existence in the ’90s, late ’90s, basically because there’s a lot of different associations and groups out there that take care of veterans and serve veterans and all the different aspects. But there was never anybody that did serve just Scout Snipers. They wanted to create something like that so the Marine Scout Snipers and their families would have support. It started out with the program called the Adopt a Sniper. Basically, your unit, before they deployed, could request an Adopt a Sniper request through the Scout Sniper Association. The Scout Sniper Association will procure and gather items and send to your platoon, whether it be gear that you needed to deploy with, scopes, packs, different things like that, socks, care packages, but mostly extra tactical gear that a Scout Sniper platoon or team may need that’s not issued. That’s how it started, and then it just morphed into a association that takes care of snipers after their transition. We do a myriad of things now. From helping people with budgets and finances, helping people pay childcare for their family if they’re going through hard times.
We do a little bit of everything. We try to never say no if we can find a way to help. A lot of times, it’s not just monetary. A lot of times, it’s just having another sniper that’s near that guy, come out and meet up with them and give them some mentorship or get their head straight. Sometimes it is monetary that they need some help financially or they need something to get them through the hard times. We use our network and our sources to take care of all those different issues.
What I really like about your association is you get involved with active-duty Marines and with veterans. The reason why that’s so important is because a lot of times once we transition out, it’s like, Where do I find the services? Where do I find the help? You’re already entrenched at that point. They already know that you are a resource. For those of us that have deployed and had multiple deployments, my first deployment was in ’99 to Bosnia. This is what they call Clinton era. There wasn’t a lot of money in the budget for the things that we needed on that deployment. And then fast forward to my next deployment in 2005, and there was everything we could want. We were getting the bench-made knives, we were getting all the cool stuff. But you would deploy before, it was like, you couldn’t get anything. And then the way the budgets work and the pendulum swings back, we could get everything we wanted. And so I think some people forget that coming off of a very long, two decades of OIF and OEF, they forget how austere it was in the beginning when, I suppose by your fifth deployment, you got the nice chow halls and all these great things, this great infrastructure there that wasn’t there the first time you deployed.
Yeah, exactly. A Marine Scout Sniper mission is very different and specialized, but we belong to the Infantry Battalions. You’re limited to what gear and SOPs and things that are issued for the Infantry Battalion. But those types of things and those types of gear loadouts don’t really necessarily transfer over to a Scout Sniper’s mission because a lot of times you need extra gear, you need different things… You’re like a Special Forces team. You need more different types of tactical gear that aren’t issued. A lot of times you come out of pocket for that. That’s one of the things that when you go to the Marine, the Scout Sniper endock and you make it in the platoon, that’s one of the things that most people have to do is go get a star card on base, the credit card from the PX, and go start spending money to buy all this extra gear because they just don’t have it. That Adopt a Sniper program was really beneficial for these platoons to do that, to get the gear they needed. Because even to get the gear list to show up at sniper school, you’re going to have to spend $400 or $500 there out of your own pocket just to make sure you have everything that’s on that gear list. For a young Lance Corporal that’s making $800 a month, that’s a big hit.
Absolutely. When you go to schools, you expect you’re going to spend your money to bring gear. But on deployments, that seems ridiculous. I had no idea that a lot of that gear was stuff that you had to come up with. You’re right, for a junior enlisted soldier, how do you come up with that money?
Star card. You get the credit card on base and you just go do it. But a lot of times, too. But exactly like that, the SSA, Scout Sniper Association, that was how you got a lot of it, is you reached out to them and you asked for help. We also had platoon funds that came down, issued through the battalion, and we would take a list and use those platoon funds to purchase a lot of those items, especially to help guys get ready to have the gear list to go to school, to sniper school. That was some of the headaches that came with being a scout sniper in a platoon like that, is you had to come out of pocket or somebody had to come out of pocket a lot of times.
And so you found people that wanted to support that mission, that critical mission. This is pretty important stuff when you’re talking about taking out high-value targets. It seems to me that there would be a budget within the military for that, and yet there isn’t. And so the Adopt a Sniper program is formed, and you have been able to take that beyond active-duty service. Once again, now they’re used to your organization helping. How do you continue with that transition when you know that Marine snipers are going to become civilians, they’re now veterans? How do you maintain that relationship through their transition?
One big thing that we do is we try to focus on the guys that are active duty. Before I came on as the President over the last few years, or over the last decade, there hasn’t been as much focus on the active-duty guys and bringing them into the fold with this association. I think it’s like that with most associations like VFW, American Legion, Marine Corps League, all these things, you find that the population of those clubs and those associations are mostly retirees and your older generation guys, which is fine. But it’s because when you’re active duty, you don’t realize the importance the importance of these types of associations and the importance of keeping that continuity and that brotherhood alive once you transition out, because it doesn’t really mean too much to you at that point, because your brothers are around you all day. They’re around you every… You’re going to be with them 24 hours a day. It hasn’t really impacted you at that transition phase. Then once you hit that transition phase and you get out, that’s when you start really realizing, Man, I miss being around snipers. I miss being around infantry guys.
Because we are alike who we relate. We relate with who we’re like. It’s just really difficult to relate with a lot of the civilian population when you’ve done something like that for so long and been in such a tight-knit community. That’s what we’re trying to do now is preach that to the guys that are active duty to let them know like, Hey, we need you guys to be involved now so that you guys can spread the word and start building the community now for when you get out so you help take care of each other.
Yeah, I think one of the great things about transitioning to your veteran status is finding that tribe because you get away from a lot of things you hate in the military, like CIF and some of the time-wasting things. But the most important thing is the people. The mission is great, but when the mission’s over, what do you have left but your team? And so I love what you’ve built because you have that tight knit group and you don’t let it fall apart. Then when you service your members, you have this great saying it’s, It’s not one size fits all. You are looking to narrowly tailor a solution to that sniper’s problem. How do you go about doing that when there’s a bunch of problems and you don’t have a cookie cutter solution, you’re going to find the right solution for that veteran, for that sniper. How do you go about doing that?
Well, one thing that we do is we build a very diverse board of directors. We’ve got 14 board of directors in our association and our staff. Throughout those board of directors, we try to bring guys in that have different backgrounds and different types of resources to help those things. Some guy may be a lawyer. We may have a lawyer on there. We may have a physician on the board. We may have a retired general, a retired lieutenant colonel. We may have an active-duty sergeant major, insurance salesman. You name it. We try to fill our board with people that have the skills to bring to the table. Another one of the things we do is we don’t have set operating procedures on how we provide assistance and care. We do that for a reason because every case is different, and we don’t want to set too many parameters on how we will help. As every request comes in, we share it with the board, we discuss it, and we have a policy, basically, we’ve developed within 72 hours, we provide an answer, a response of how we’re going to do that. We send an email out, say, Hey, this is a request that came in, and then everybody gets on board.
If somebody has something to add, they jump on and say, Hey, JT, I got this. I know somebody can help. Boom, I’ll take care of it. I’ll reach out to the guy. That’s how we do it. We’ve been very successful this year doing that in the last two years. The association has grown because of it, because the guys love the responsiveness from us. They love that… For instance, I got one story. This guy reached out, a sniper reached out, and his wife needed emergency dental surgery. A lot of people know that you don’t have dental, Tricare doesn’t really cover dental and different things like that. He’d reached out to numerous associations, but they wouldn’t provide support because she was not the service member. She was a spouse of a service member. As soon as that came to us, we’re like, Yeah, of course. Yeah, we’ll help with that. The spouse and the family is just as much important to that service member as a service member himself. That’s one thing that makes us a little different is that we provide support for the families also.
Yeah, and you have a great statement that you say, Our job is to remove barriers. I love the story because there’s the barrier a lot of times is, Well, we’ll take care of the veteran, but we’re not going to take care of the family. But how do you take care of the veteran if you don’t take care of their family?
Exactly. That’s one thing that we pride ourselves in is being able to come up with ways to make things happen like that and to support those families any way we can. Sometimes we’ll help support GoFundMe’s for people. There’s just all things that you can do if you’re motivated and just willing to say yes and try to make it work. That’s what we try to do.
You’re staying agile. That’s the thing. It’s not much different than your mission as a sniper. You got a mission, and all you know is you got to accomplish the mission, and there’s not going to be a whole lot of boundaries around that. No one’s going to tell you how to do it, but you got to figure out a way to do it. I love the initiative. I love the way that you do remove barriers for veterans and their families. What has been one of your biggest challenges? There’s a lot of veteran service organizations out there, and there’s a lot of noise. But what’s your biggest challenge in getting the right people in your organization and keeping them?
The challenge of bringing the right people into the association, is just the fact that we’re a nonprofit, a 501(c)(3), fully nonprofit. It’s really hard to find people nowadays that have the time, effort, and energy to do something for free. I think that’s the limitation with a lot of nonprofits is your board of directors is completely voluntary, so you’re limited to their bandwidth. As a president, you have to be somebody that’s willing to take on a lot of load for not a lot of return on investment and just be willing to really just be there, just be a conduit for service. If you’re not willing to do that, being on the board of directors for a nonprofit may not be for you, because you got to realize it’s not about you, it’s about the people you’re serving, and sometimes it’s a thankless job. But every time we see these emails come back from people that are thanking us for what we’ve done and how we’ve changed their lives, every time we see these new membership requests come in, that makes it all worthwhile to me because that’s exactly why we’re here. I want these guys to know that they have somewhere to turn.
And we’re coming to the after-action review. What were the three great examples of leadership you’ve learned and the three horrible examples of leadership that you experienced? We’ll start with the three good ones.
To me, and I believe most people in the military will probably tell you about the same thing, I had very, very few good leaders that I came across in my military career. I didn’t know that until I became a leader myself. You look back and you think about, Man, that guy really did suck. Man, that leadership style really didn’t work. But you take all the negatives and all the positives that you came across in your career, and you pick and choose, and you put together your own leadership style based off of that. That’s what I’ve done throughout my career. I’ve taken the goods from people, the bads, and I know exactly what I want it to be, and I’ve been able to use that to become the person that I am today. It was not easy because, like I said, I feel like I didn’t have a lot of good leaders. But the ones that you do have that are good, sometimes you don’t realize it until they’re already gone or until you’ve moved on from them. You’re like, Man, you know what? He was actually a pretty good leader. It’s just the leadership styles, and everybody’s different with their leadership style. I can’t really put a finger on anybody, really off the top of my head.
Yeah, I don’t want you to name names, but you’re right. It is so situational. Leadership is situational. People get into all these debates about, Well, what is leadership? It’s about consensus building. I’ve always said, No, no, no, it’s about getting results. I’ve had leaders that I hated them at the time. I mean, they pushed me so hard. They were always on me. Some of them were my NCOs, and I was an officer, but they were leaders who were really pushing me. I didn’t appreciate it at the time. But then I saw the results. I’m like, wow, they knew what they were doing. I may have hated them while they were the leader that I was stuck with. When I had the opportunity to reflect, I’m like, wow, this person really helped me, even though I hated them. I don’t know if you’ve had similar experiences.
Yeah, exactly. Currently, my current supervisor in the government right now is one of the best examples that I can think of a good leader in my mind. It takes a lot for me to say that somebody is a good leader, that I feel somebody is a good leader. One thing that he does that’s very impactful is he really cares about your success, your development, and your future. Almost every conversation I have with him, it’s, What do you want to do next? How can we get you to the next level? What can I do to help you get to the next level? What can I do to keep you here? Do you have any recommendations? That just makes me want to work for him. It makes me want to come to work every day. It makes want to be proactive and not reactive. That’s the type of leaders that I think I like that really invest in your future and your career.
It’s great when you see them. I’ve been on the other side of that where it seems like sometimes as a leader, you can care more about the success of your subordinate than the subordinate. You’re like, I’m here to help you. I want you to grow. I want you to have these opportunities, and they pay lip service to it. But once they show you who they are, believe them. I think that can be frustrating as well when you’re trying to lead others, and you really want… Like your supervisor who really wants you to be successful and is willing to do what it takes, you’re the reward. He’s like, Hey, JT gets it done and he’s improving, and I get to see the benefit. But it’s when you get someone other than JT and you’re pouring into them and they’re not getting results, as a leader, that can be frustrating as well. I’m sure you’ve seen that as well as you’ve developed leaders.
Yeah, exactly. Even in the Marine Corps, the same thing. Sometimes you end up caring about people’s future and success more than they care about it. That comes with being a leader. I’ve had that also. My current supervisor now, he’s very good. He’s a very good guy. I had a first sergeant in the Marine Corps that was probably my first ever example of being a good leader. He was a lead by example. He was the first one there, the last one to leave. If he’s going to tell you to do something, he’s doing it himself. He’s police calling the grass with you. He’s doing the ranges with you. But like I said, that’s a different type of leadership. Some people react to different types of leadership, and some don’t. Some people hated that that first sergeant was like that. They thought he was trying to show off. Then some people just really loved it and were able to identify with it. Everybody’s different on how they see leadership.
The level really matters. I can think of, and I’m sure you were exposed to this when you were deployed, the top brass comes in, and they think it’s a big morale boost because they’re showing up, this general or this command sergeant major, and it’s like, look, we just had to clean everything for 48 hours for you to show up, and then you didn’t show up, or you showed up, and then we had to sit through your two-hour talk. For me, that was always like the whole dog and pony show. People think, well, you should be so excited because this leader is here. But it was about the leader and not about the team or the mission. And to me, I always hated that. And so I never wanted to be around the brass, and I hated when the brass came to visit because it always seemed like… Because I think leaders would freak out, right? Everybody would be in formation two hours early. It just was nonsense because we had real mission and we had real training to do, and here we are, standing in formation. I bet you remember that.
Yeah, of course. But I actually want to talk to you about one of your other episodes you did. You had a great guy on great guest, Chris Lefebvre. We’ve supported each other. He supported the VA with his company. That guy is a good leader. He’s a good guy.
ISI professional services. Yeah, Chris is great. I know him through Bunker Labs CEO circle, so I’ve known him for about a year now, and we’re going to be together for another year. Really looking forward to that, but I think he’s highly intelligent. He cares about his team, and he’s hyper mission focused.
Yeah, I’ve seen his episode. I know Chris, and he’s a good guy. He’s building something great with that company.
Yeah, no doubt. I think he’d build something great wherever he goes. I think that’s the one thing that I really appreciate about the good military leaders is they can leave the military when they come out and they will seek bigger opportunities and they will continue to serve. Very similar to what you’ve done with your work as a contractor with the VA, you’ve built that bigger future, but you’re still the CEO of the USMC Scout Sniper Association. You continue to give back, continue to serve, and continue to develop other leaders. That’s what we expect from leaders, isn’t it?
Yeah, you got to want to do it. Some people are just built to take on that responsibility and to take it on themselves and do it. I guess it can be taught, but you really have to want to do it, especially when there’s no monetary benefits. But I love it. I love helping snipers out. We host events all over the U.S. We do sniper challenges. We do a yearly, we call it the grudge match, army versus Marines. We’ll do five army teams versus five marine teams. We have a trophy that we pass back and forth every year between the winner. But one of our big initiatives that I want to talk about, if you don’t mind, is we started a separate foundation. It’s like a sister association of the Scout Sniper Association. It’s called the Marine Scout Sniper Heritage Foundation. The Heritage Foundation’s mission is basically to build the first ever Fallen Scout Sniper War Memorial. There’s no fallen war memorials for Scout Snipers in existence, and we want to build the first one. We’ve got our spot located at Quantico, the Memorial Park outside of Quantico at the Marine Corps Museum. We’re trying to fundraise for that right now.
That’s the Marine Scout Sniper Heritage Foundation. We’ve already got our sculpture, we’ve got the design, we’ve got the architect team, we’ve got everybody in place. We’re just trying to get the funds to get the ball rolling. That’s one big mission of the Heritage Foundation. Another mission is to do a comprehensive history of all Marine Scout snipers that ever serve since World War I and to document those and to also document all of our fallen scout sniper dead. Because with the records, you might not have actually officially been listed in a scout sniper billet when you deployed in World War I, World War II, those types of things. So trying to go through and dig through the archives and find out everybody was ever actually a scout sniper in the Marine Corps and that died in combat so that we can memorialize them properly with this new war memorial.
JT, where can listeners learn more about the Heritage Foundation?
Scoutsniperheritagefoundation.org.
Great. Then as far as any Scout Snipers out there, USMC Scout Snipers, who are interested in your organization, how do they find you?
Scoutsniper.org. If you ever served as a Marine Scout sniper, like you actually went to school, you’re a school-trained sniper, or you served in the Scout Sniper platoon for at least one year, or you went to combat with the platoon at all, you qualify for membership into our association. You just go to our website, scoutsniper.org. You fill the membership application. Our membership guy will get right on it, respond back to you, ask you if you need to provide some more information, he’ll let you know. Then after that, we’ll send you a certificate in the mail, and you’ll be added to our email list and all of our things. We’re about to have a new chat, a new site called the Hogs Den that members will have access to. On that Hogs Den, they’ll have different chat boards, and it’ll also be links to discounts that we’ve got from different tactical companies things to support the SSA, as well as an open job board with job vacancies around the U.S. that other scout snipers are sent to us from security jobs to any type of job that we want to hire scout snipers. That’s going to be a big benefit for our membership coming soon. We’re trying to launch that now.
Is there a cost for application or membership?
Right now, there’s not. We are about to bring back paid memberships. In 2015, it was voted away but the rate that our association is growing now, and with all the initiatives that we’ve got going on, we have to bring back the paid memberships to be able to survive. Working on that now, I like to I like to put out… Anything that we’re going to do for the association, I like to put out polls, like an email poll to the whole membership, and have them provide their feedback. We just did that a couple of months ago, and overwhelmingly, they said, Yeah, we support bringing back the paid memberships. We’re going to try to get that going soon.
Scout Snipers, if you’re listening, get in now.
Yeah, get in now before we start charging.
Before you have to pay. Well, JT, thank you so much for your time, and thank you for all that you do for our veterans and what you continue to do for our country through your work with the VA. Obviously, you’ve been around some great leaders like Chris Lefebvre. For veterans out there struggling and wondering, Can I do this? I’ve been out for a while. I need the support. What do you say to them?
Man, nobody makes it anywhere by themself. You got to remember that, first off. Everybody needs help at some point. I can guarantee you you’re not doing this today by yourself either. If I didn’t have the board of directors helping me, I wouldn’t be able to be the CEO of this company and manage a full-time job. I wouldn’t be able to do any of those things unless I have my wife’s support who’s helping take care of the family and support me with all the time that I have to be away from home. I say, don’t be afraid to reach out for help and network, because networking is key in life. That the old saying, it’s not about what you know, it’s who you know, is very true. Most of all the positions that I’m in now and the things that I’ve done with my life are because I’ve networked and was able to build good relationships and keep a good reputation. Your reputation is everything. It will follow you forever, whether it’s negative or positive. So that’s a big thing.
Yeah, absolutely. I love the point you said. It’s about knowing who, not necessarily knowing how. Because the army mission statement, you would get the who, what, when, the where, and the why. You would never get the how, but it always started with who. You got to figure, if you’re going to get something done, it starts with who. I think you bring up a great point. If you’re going to get anything done in life, whether it’s be the CEO of a nonprofit, be a contractor, it is about who you know and who can help you, and more importantly, who you can help and who you can give back to and who you want to help. That’s the great thing about being an adult, is you get to choose who you’re going to help, and you’ve obviously got to choose to help your heroes. So, JT, thanks again so much for coming on to Veteran Led, and we appreciate the mission that you’re doing to continue to serve America’s heroes.
Thank you for joining us today on Veteran Led, where we pursue our mission of promoting veteran leadership in business, strengthening the veteran community, and getting veterans all of the benefits that they earned. If you know a leader who should be on the Veteran Led podcast, report to our online community by searching @VeteranLed on your favorite social channels and posting in the comments. We want to hear how your military challenges prepared you to lead your industry or community, and we will let the world know. And of course, hit subscribe and join me next time on Veteran Led.
Our monthly newsletter features about important and up-to-date veterans' law news, keeping you informed about the changes that matter.
