Barrett was commissioned through Navy ROTC in 2000 and spent four years leading infantry and scout sniper Marines from 2000 to 2004.

When most of his platoon headed to sniper school, he went with them.

It was a “pretty unusual” move for a Marine officer, he told Military Times.

The Marine Corps has since trained its final scout snipers and moved sniper training into reconnaissance and Raider units under Force Design 2030.

After the Marines, Barrett built a business, sold it and started farming. When a friend asked him to join an aid convoy to Ukraine, he had four kids in school and a harvest underway. His first answer was no.

That night, he read about pastors killed and churches destroyed by Russian forces. As a Christian, he wondered how he’d missed it. He made the trip, then kept going back.

Now, despite declaring that he is “not a filmmaker,” Barrett has produced two series on the war in Ukraine: A Faith Under Siege and Faith in War. Within that series is Safe Ground, the story of a Green Beret who removes landmines in Ukraine.

During those trips, Barrett heard about a sniper with the call sign of Lektor, a special forces sniper from the Department of Active Measures with Ukraine’s Defence Intelligence, who, in December 2024, hit a moving Russian soldier at 2,069 meters using a single .338 Lapua Magnum round from a Sako TRG M10. He fired standing in a trench, nearly level with his target, and hit on the first shot.

Lektor is still running missions and only reluctantly agreed to press, Barrett said. Soon, however, Barrett’s time with Lektor will become a short documentary.

Barrett’s crew spent a morning on the range with his unit testing whether American M118 ammunition could match its costly hand-loaded rounds. Lektor said there was “practically no difference,” so the unit stuck with the M118 it already had.

“I was struck by just his humility,” Barrett said.

Lektor, a former gamekeeper, waved off the praise.

“Honestly, I don’t consider myself a super expert,” he told Barrett’s crew in an interview translated from Ukrainian. “This is my job for the duration of the war.”

Before the shot, his team had spent two weeks on the zero line watching for a Russian assault, under orders not to fire. When the situation changed and the team was set to move, Lektor asked for one more chance.

“So I simply begged the commander: give us a day or two for free hunting,” he said.

He spotted a soldier whose gear set him apart from ordinary infantry. The man was walking a tree line at a steady pace and a workable angle. As Lektor prepared to fire, his partner called a wind correction in the wrong direction.

“I managed to shout: recalculate, something’s wrong,” Lektor said. They fixed it in seconds while the target was still moving.

Barrett pointed to the longest confirmed .338 Lapua kill — British Cpl. Craig Harrison’s 2,475-meter shot in Afghanistan in 2009 — which came after several sighting rounds. Shots like that, he said, are “really more like competition shooting.” Lektor is skeptical of the rankings for the same reason.

“Two shots maximum: if you didn’t hit, that’s it,” he said. “That’s how you should compare.”

Within half an hour of the shot, drones were overhead.

“The only thing that saved us was that the enemy didn’t expect a shot from such a distance,” Lektor said. The Russians shelled an area about 500 meters out. His team waited a full day in a dugout before slipping out.

Now, thermal cameras hunt for heat.

“After a shot, a simple suppressor can give you away, because it’s hot, it glows,” Lektor said.

Early in the war, Lektor said, the walk to a firing position was about a kilometer. He now walks eight.

Barrett asked him whether snipers were even relevant anymore. Lektor admitted the role is “a little outdated” but not finished.

“Snipers, in my opinion, are the neurosurgeons,” he said. A sniper team can watch a sector almost continuously, he explained. “Drones have to return to recharge, they get shot down.”

Near Bakhmut, Lektor’s team killed a Russian sniper. A neighboring unit then told them he was the fifth one killed at that position.

“They have absolutely no regard for the lives of their own men,” Lektor said.

Barrett sees Ukraine’s regard for its own people as an advantage, along with its speed in adapting to new technology. Russia, he said, treats the war like a meat grinder: “If I just put so much meat into it, that it breaks the grinder, then we’ll win.”

Lektor’s son enlisted first, and the two have served together most of the war.

“He’s my child, I have to be there,” Lektor said.

Once, while Lektor was hospitalized with wounds, his son was fighting with another team in Chasiv Yar. He was the only one of four men in his group to come out unharmed.

On his own team, Lektor keeps one rule.

“I [am] the first to go in and the last to come out,” he said. “That’s our unwritten rule.”

That is, at least, the proper terminology in this great American age of rebrands, one that has borne witness to such seismic overhauls as the Gulf of Mexico becoming the Gulf of America, Lake Ontario becoming Lake America, and a push to call New Mexico … New America.

U.S. President Donald Trump announced on Sept. 29 the term “artificial intelligence” would henceforth be retired in favor of “super intelligence.”

“As these capabilities continue to improve, they increasingly represent not merely artificial intelligence, but a new era of Super Intelligence,” the executive order stated.

The president followed that “SI” declaration up with an Oct. 8 Truth Social post asserting that anyone who uses the previous moniker would be branded “THE ENEMY!”

The U.S. Navy this week became one of the first services to avoid that traitorous designation, cementing the super initiative and calling on “all Navy echelons, commands, activities, and personnel [to] use ‘Super Intelligence’ and ‘SI’ in place of ‘Artificial Intelligence’ and ‘AI,’” a service memo stated.

“This policy applies effective immediately across all official Navy correspondence, flag letters, OPORDs, wargame documentation, instructional material, fleet advisories, public communications, official websites, strategic assessments, congressional reports, and non-statutory internal and external policy documents,” the memo continued.

As part of the super overhaul, echelon II commanders, type commanders and systems commanders will be required to review all “public releases, intranet portals, and external presentations for compliance” no later than 30 days after the release of the super memo. These personnel will then be required to submit a super report on completing the task.

The directive does not require retroactively amending previously published documentation or contracts, the message noted, while existing laws and statutes “will continue to be cited as statutorily required until conforming congressional amendments are enacted.”

A Military Times request for comment from the sea service regarding what consequences might result should “artificial intelligence” be used was not returned as of press time.

Ryan Hendrickson spent 22 years in uniform learning to find the things buried in the dirt that are meant to kill people. When the U.S. left Afghanistan, he discovered he no longer knew who he was without that work.

“I had no identity anymore, because my entire military career had been wrapped up in Afghanistan or Iraq,” the retired Green Beret told Military Times.

That void, and what he eventually filled it with, is at the heart of “Safe Ground: A Green Beret’s Mission to Remove Ukraine’s Landmines,” a documentary now streaming on Prime Video in the U.S. and U.K.

The film debuted Sept. 12, the anniversary of the day in 2010 when Hendrickson stepped on an improvised explosive device in Afghanistan while trying to rescue an Afghan soldier.

The Special Forces engineer sergeant recovered and deployed to Afghanistan seven more times.

In 2016, he earned a Silver Star for leading an IED-clearing team through a Taliban ambush in Baghlan Province. After retiring from the 7th Special Forces Group, he went back as a contractor, leaving in July 2021, shortly before the final U.S. withdrawal.

He came home hurt, confused and drinking heavily.

When Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Hendrickson felt a pull he couldn’t shake. He had no ties to the country. What he did have was his father’s longtime warning that regret is a miserable way to finish a life.

“I knew if I got to be an old man, and I didn’t at least go and try, I would regret it,” he said.

He flew into Poland in March 2022 with roughly 10 bags of donated humanitarian supplies.

Contacts on a Ukrainian missionary team asked him to bring body armor if he had it, plus two less tactical items: American Reese’s cups and beef jerky. Passing between drivers and safehouses, he reached Kyiv about three days later.

The process felt familiar. Hendrickson compared it to Robin Sage, the final exercise of Special Forces training, set in a fictional country at war.

“Well, everything went back to my training. It’s like, this is Robin Sage,” he said.

Volunteering with the missionary group Youth With A Mission, he was driving a bus into threatened areas the day he arrived, evacuating women, children and the elderly.

After Russian forces pulled back from around Kyiv, the team moved into newly liberated towns such as Bucha with food, medical supplies and shelter materials. He said the work “completely rewired my brain after Afghanistan, and now I had my purpose, and I had an identity back.”

As residents returned home, they began hitting landmines, booby traps and other explosive remnants left in the war’s wake.

Hendrickson started working with Ukrainian territorial defense units, doing what Green Berets do: train, advise and equip. He would fly home, raise money for detectors and safety gear, donate it to a unit and move on to the next one.

In October 2022, that cycle became Tip of the Spear Landmine Removal, a nonprofit he says has since carried him back to Ukraine 13 times.

Along the way, he came to believe the mission could help other veterans, arguing that “a lot of veterans’ mental health revolved around lack of purpose, service, and identity.” He began bringing veterans over as funding allowed.

At the organization’s recent gala, he announced an expansion, the Tip of the Spear Veterans Humanitarian Corps, which is meant to cover everything from mine clearance to reconstruction, agriculture, teaching and medical work.

“In the military we were trained to protect the people of America and our way of life through war. But now, we’re utilizing these same skills, but for saving lives and rebuilding. So you go from killing to healing,” he said.

When producer Colby Barrett, a former Marine captain, first pitched a documentary, Hendrickson said no. They talked for more than a year before he agreed, and Hendrickson said Barrett funded the production himself.

“Safe Ground” is part of Faith in War, a documentary series from the creators of “A Faith Under Siege.”

Hendrickson credits his faith as a huge driving force in his life and his work.

He added that Europeans often tell him he isn’t like a normal American. He pushes back. “I’m extremely normal. I am your normal American,” he said. “There’s Americans that are so much better than I am, and this is what we do as Americans, and this is what we do as veterans.”

The mission also gave him the courage to confront his own wounds. Hendrickson said suicide was once “on the table for me. I had that line in the sand that if things got worse than this, then I had my out.”

He later underwent ibogaine and 5-MeO-DMT treatment at a clinic in Mexico, the same psychedelic therapy explored in the veteran documentary “In Waves and War.”

“But the fighting inside myself has stopped,” he said, adding that he isn’t sure whether he has reached a peace agreement with himself or just a cease-fire.

As a Green Beret, Hendrickson said, “I would have a very hard time looking in the mirror because all I would see is failure.” That has changed.

“I’m proud, you know, of the man that’s staring back at me in the mirror,” he said.

Now almost 50, he is exploring similar work in Nigeria and Burma. His final objective is the country where his story began.

“Before I’m finished with my mission, I will be back in Afghanistan, and we will be helping the people of Afghanistan,” he said.

For veterans who have drawn their own line in the sand, his offer is simple: “Let me take you on a mission.”

The sarcophagus of Grand Prince Dmitry Donskoy, who died in 1389 and is revered by Russian nationalists for defeating the Mongol Golden Horde at the 1380 Battle of Kulikovo, was uncovered this summer during restoration work at Moscow’s Cathedral of the Archangel inside the Kremlin.

Putin personally inspected what experts said were the prince’s well-preserved remains in August, hailing them as “an absolutely unique and marvellous discovery” which reinforced the foundations of Russian history.

The Russian Orthodox Church, which has backed Putin throughout the conflict, said it had dispatched a fragment of Donskoy’s right hand to Donetsk, one of four Ukrainian regions Putin said he had incorporated into Russia in 2022, a move Kyiv rejected as an illegal land grab.

Referring to Donskoy as “the holy commander,” the Moscow Patriarchate of the Russian Orthodox Church said part of his remains had been sent to the front to stand invisibly shoulder-to-shoulder with Russian troops.

“A fragment of the Grand Prince’s right hand – the very same right hand with which he wielded his sword on Kulikovo Field – has been sent to the front to strengthen the soldiers’ spirits,” it said in a statement.

The relic, held in a small ornate casket beneath toughened glass, will be shown to Russian combat units along the more than 1,000-km front line, it said.

Donskoy, whose name was given to a Soviet tank column funded by the church in World War Two, was declared a saint by the Russian Orthodox Church in 1988.

Patriotic push

The carefully choreographed effort to use his remains in a public relations exercise to boost patriotism and morale comes ahead of a parliamentary election later this month.

Russian military and church officials have presented the discovery as a fortuitous find that could help Russian forces prevail in Ukraine, now in the fifth year of a grinding war.

The tour also comes as Russian forces seek full control of the Donetsk region in eastern Ukraine and as diplomatic efforts to end the war have yet to yield a breakthrough.

Donskoy’s relics were carried through the streets of Moscow at the weekend in a huge Orthodox procession.

At a ceremony at a World War Two memorial in Donetsk on Tuesday, Sergei Kiriyenko, Putin’s first deputy Kremlin chief of staff, joined military commanders and the Russian-installed regional head in kissing the relic and making the sign of the cross as a priest read a prayer.

“Both our military personnel and the people who live in Donbas need strengthening from above, need God’s help and the blessing of our saints,” Metropolitan Vladimir of Donetsk and Mariupol, a senior Moscow-appointed cleric, said. Donbas is a broader area incorporating Donetsk and neighbouring Luhansk which Russia controls almost in its entirety.

Elsewhere, commanders have presented Donskoy’s remains as evidence that God is on Russia’s side.

The Defence Ministry on Wednesday released footage of troops in the Sverdlovsk region attending a church service carrying icons and Orthodox flags, alongside an interview with a commander who said the relics would support Russia’s victory.

Critics, however, have accused the Church of breaking with religious protocol to please the Kremlin. They have also questioned why Donskoy’s remains, whose location was broadly known for decades, were recovered and venerated only now, 38 years after he was declared a saint.

“By the fifth year of war, the Church leadership in Moscow began to wonder what else it could do to show its support for what Russia terms its ‘special military operation’,” Alexander Zanemonets, an Orthodox priest and historian based outside Russia, wrote in a note for the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center whose director Russia has designated a “foreign agent.”

“It had already sent priests to the front lines, instituted mandatory prayers for Russian victory in every church, and flown icons over cities. A state embroiled in war will try to compel all institutions, including religious ones, to participate in it.”

According to a memorandum that circulated on social media, eligible soldiers in the 9th Engineer Battalion at Fort Stewart who reenlist by Nov. 14 will be authorized a four-day pass that aligns with the release of Grand Theft Auto VI, or GTA 6, at the end of November.

An Army official confirmed that the document, signed by the unit’s commander, Lt. Col. Ryan D. Hodgson, was authentic.

“The battalion has a new career counselor who approached unit leadership with an idea for an updated creative incentives program to reach FY27 reenlistment goals,” said Lt. Col. Angel Tomko, with the 3rd Infantry Division’s public affairs office.

To qualify for the video game spree, soldiers must re-up for at least two years, Tomko said. So far, 20 out of 130 eligible soldiers have given Uncle Sam a few more years in exchange for 96 hours of simulated criminal bliss.

The video game franchise, which allows players to roam through cityscapes as criminal masterminds, has been a cornerstone of gaming culture for decades. The upcoming edition is highly anticipated, and according to the game’s publisher, Rockstar Games, it will feature an Army veteran named Jason Duval who “grew up around grifters and crooks” and has now “found himself in the Keys doing what he knows best, working for local drug runners.”

First reported by Task & Purpose, the July 28 memorandum says the incentive is for eligible soldiers who sign a reenlistment contract between Aug. 1 and Nov. 14.

“This special pass is specifically designated to coincide with the highly anticipated release of the video game Grand Theft Auto VI (GTA 6),” it reads. Soldiers who acquire the reward will coordinate days off with their individual unit leadership.

Unfortunately for uniformed GTA fans interested in extended carjacking opportunities, the pass cannot be combined with any other passes to give the soldier an absence of more than four days.

The unconventional incentive comes as the Army becomes more selective with traditional reenlistment incentives, with new guidance tying cash bonuses to soldiers’ physical fitness, job proficiency and command assessments.

Elmore has been drawing for as long as he can remember, but growing up in a family with limited means meant his family had to ration paper, he said in a conversation with Fort Knox Public Affairs Office reporter Savannah Baird.

When Elmore was drafted into the Army after graduating with a fine arts degree from Western Kentucky University, the service gave him the resources to hone his craft, he told Baird.

“Once I got assigned, the Army saw my portfolio and realized I could draw just about anything from memory, so they put me on illustration work,” Elmore said in the release.

The Army changed the look of its field manuals in the 1970s to include more illustrations, and Elmore’s talents were put to use. After studying objects, Elmore could retain their images and draw them from memory, including tanks and rifles, he told Baird.

“It was a God-given gift and I used it,” he said.

Elmore went to basic training and was stationed at Fort Knox. During his time there, he developed skills he had not learned in college.

“Illustrations in the ’70s were just line work, pure ink — white and black, no grays — and they didn’t teach you that in college. I developed those skills at Fort Knox,” he said in the release.

After completing his two-year obligation, Elmore decided to stay on as a contractor, Baird reported. Around that time, a new employee joined the staff and introduced the team to Dungeons & Dragons, changing Elmore’s life.

Despite his initial hesitation, he began playing the game with his coworkers and quickly became hooked, calling it “the king of all games.”

Dungeons & Dragons was relatively new at the time, and its art was elementary, Elmore told Baird. He recalled that a fellow artist said he was going to submit his artwork to Tactical Studies Rules, or TSR, the company behind Dungeons & Dragons, because “our art is much better than this.”

Elmore then decided to submit his own portfolio to TSR, which included drawings he had produced for the Army. Soon after, TSR offered to double his salary, hire his wife and move them to Wisconsin, the release stated.

Elmore said he immediately shook the company representative’s hand and told him, “you just bought yourself an artist.”

He went on to create one of the most recognizable images in the game’s history: the cover art for the famous “Red Box” set, which featured a warrior in combat with a red dragon.

After six years at TSR, Elmore decided to move back to Central Kentucky and pursue freelance work for another 40 years, according to the Army’s release.

He recognizes the impact the Army had on his career as an artist.

“I was very lucky,” he said in the release. “Sometimes, I think to be successful you have to be good, but you got to have some of those weird breaks in life — and I got two or three.”

Roll Tide.

The inert cannonballs, which were — naturally — wrapped in paper towels, were discovered during the baggage screening process at Alabama’s Gulf Shores International Airport and later determined by police to have been stolen from the nearby coastal stronghold Fort Morgan.

“My first thought was, ‘I couldn’t see a fuse and need to get some help quick,’” TSA officer Justin Dupree recalled in a release. “I couldn’t see the entire item but was scared I might have been holding a live explosive.”

Dupree noted the antique artillery projectiles ranged in size, with the largest comparable to a grapefruit.

“I had never seen anything quite this unique,” Dupree said. “I’ve seen inert grenades and training munitions but never an Indiana Jones-esque stolen artifact-type situation.”

A TSA explosives specialist and the Baldwin County Sheriff’s Office were subsequently notified and determined that the cannonballs posed no threat.

Law enforcement investigating the incident stated the passenger claimed to be unaware of how the projectiles were acquired. The cannonballs were later returned to Fort Morgan, the release added.

Passenger attempts to transport illegal items, including outlandish weaponry, through the screening process are, of course, nothing new.

In a more glaring example from 2019, a Florida man traveling through Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley International Airport set off alarms after his bag was found to contain a disassembled rocket-propelled grenade.

The individual was subsequently taken into an inspection area, where he told airport security he was under the impression he could bring the checked RPG on the plane, CBS Philadelphia reported.

Inspection of the weapon itself revealed that the launcher was not in working order, and the grenade was a realistic replica.

The items were confiscated by security, and, miraculously, the individual boarded his flight on time.

Joseph Lavar Davis, 47, was convicted of stealing over $1.1 million worth of the military’s pre-packaged Meals-Ready-to-Eat, or MREs, in El Paso, Texas, the U.S. Attorney’s Office, Western District of Texas, said Tuesday, in a scheme involving three other co-defendants and more than 200 pallets of the shelf-stable rations.

MREs, typically sealed in distinctive brown branding, are used to feed troops basic nutrients in austere situations and training exercises.

Known for their energy content as opposed to their taste, the emergency rations can be eaten hot or cold and are notorious for producing foul flatulence and blocked bowels — oftentimes contributing to the MRE’s other moniker of Meal, Refusing to Exit.

According to a statement from the office, the group used false paperwork to acquire MREs from Fort Bliss and Davis created false requests, rented vehicles to move the calorically dense provisions, fixed prices and collected compensation in the operation.

The FBI and Army Criminal Investigation Division agents executed a search warrant on a civilian warehouse in August 2020 and found scores of pallets of MREs that an investigation showed was a holding facility for a company that purchased the rations from people who had pillaged them from Fort Bliss, the statement said.

Davis was named in the February 2025 indictment — along with the three others — for conspiracy to commit theft of government property and a substantive count of theft of government property between Feb. 4, 2020, and Aug. 12, 2020.

The office said that Davis learned the Army’s food procurement process while working in food service supply in the service. When he retired, the statements said, he got a job as a civilian contractor in a similar position.

“Joseph Davis betrayed the very country he once swore to protect in an effort to satisfy his own selfish ambition and a jury of his peers held him accountable for it,” said U.S. Attorney Justin R. Simmons.

Davis served as a culinary specialist in the Army from May 1998 to May 2018, according to an Army spokesperson. He left the service at the rank of sergeant first class.

Forty-year-old goalie Josimar “Vozinha” Dias recently earned a certificate from the Guinness World Records book as “the oldest goalkeeper to keep a clean sheet” in a World Cup debut with his acrobatic play on June 15 for the Tubarões Azuis — Blue Sharks — of Cape Verde, turning away shot after shot to hold powerhouse Spain to 0-0 draw.

Cape Verde again produced a stunner on Sunday, coming from behind to earn a 2-2 draw with heavily favored Uruguay, a score that featured the tiny island nation’s first-ever goal in a World Cup.

“This means everything for our country,” Cape Verde coach Pedro Leitão Brito told the Associated Press. “We have always said that we wanted everybody to see our country, our team and we have shown organization and braveness and this is proof of what our country is about — resilience and to try to overcome hardships.”

Vozinha, however, was in tears after the June 15 match over the money and red tape for a visa that kept his mother from attending her son’s shutout of Spain.

“I cried after the game because I grew up with my grandparents when I was a kid, and they could not be there,” he told reporters. “They passed away a few years ago. My mum could not be here either for a visa issue, and the money we had to pay for it. We did not manage to do this in time.”

House Minority Leader Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.), the only member of Congress of Cape Verdean descent, then worked with Secretary of State Marco Rubio to clear up the $15,000 visa issue.

“No mother should miss the chance to see her child make history,” Jeffries said in a statement. All fees were subsequently waived, Jeffries added.

Vozinha’s mother was in attendance on Sunday to watch her son against Uruguay. Cape Verde next plays on June 26 against Saudi Arabia, with a possible chance to punch their ticket to the elimination round on the line.

The goalie’s heroics and the flap over the visa, meanwhile, drew attention to the long history of the U.S. connection to Cape Verde, sometimes called Cabo Verde, an island chain and former Portuguese possession about 350 miles off the west coast of Africa.

In comments for a Smithsonian Magazine article, Donald Heflin, the former U.S ambassador to Cape Verde, noted, “Cabo Verdean Americans are one of [the U.S.’s] oldest immigrant communities, going back to the colonial whaling days.”

“We have the names of five Cabo Verdeans who fought in the American Revolution,” Heflin continued. “And their proud military tradition grows from there, with the numbers of Cabo Verdean Americans in uniform getting larger with each of America’s wars.”

One of those Cape Verdeans was Joachim Pease, who served aboard the Union sloop of war Kearsarge during the June 19, 1864, epic battle against the Confederate raider Alabama off the French port of Cherbourg.

The Union Army was segregated at the time — the Navy was not. Aboard Kearsarge, Pease served as the loader on a 32-pounder gun that helped sink the Alabama, according to the Smithsonian article.

His Medal of Honor citation — considered by many to be the first for an African-born service member — said that he “exhibited marked coolness and good conduct and was highly recommended by the divisional officer for gallantry under fire.”

Pease disappeared after the Kearsarge returned to Boston. He was never located.

The Navy was unable to present him with the medal, which is now on display at the National Museum of the United States Navy in the Washington Navy Yard in Washington.

What most players sprinting across the map won’t know is that three of those characters are built from real Marines, and that the men behind the motion capture have spent the years since their service trying to keep other veterans alive.

Prime Hall, Don Tran and Rick Briere served together in the 1st Marine Raider Battalion. In the game, they appear as Rob Brooke, Douglas Pham and Atticus Moore. Out of it, they are business partners, nonprofit founders and, by their own account, brothers who have buried too many friends.

For Hall, the throughline from combat to civilian life is simple to name. “It takes a village,” he said. He frames it the way a Raider would. In a fight, you want 360-degree security. After service, he said, that security becomes “your perimeter of the relationships and the people that you have in your life.”

That perimeter matters because the landing is rough.

Hall enlisted in 2005 and was medically retired in 2017 after an insider attack years earlier left damage that finally surfaced.

Stacked with prescriptions, he said he began to feel like he was “in the passenger seat of life.” A holistic-healing retreat in late 2019 turned things around, and the lesson stuck. “You can only do so much on your own,” he said. “At a certain point, you know, you gotta tap into something bigger than yourself.”

The three built that something. Deep End Fitness, their underwater training program, started the year the trio got out and now coaches athletes and civilians nationwide.

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Hall ran a nonprofit, Marine Raider Challenge, until the unit relocated to North Carolina. Tran helped start another, Operation Resilience. The mission Hall keeps returning to, though, is grimmer. He has lost roughly 10 friends to suicide — part of a toll that still claims an average of about 17 veterans a day. The work, he said, is about turning each loss into a chance “to create a positive shift somehow in the community.”

His guiding phrase: “Be what’s missing.”

Tran describes the transition trap in operational terms. In the military, the stakes were high but the problem was simple. “Now it’s like, when you’re out [the problem] became extremely complex.”

Money, school, family and a young business all competed at once. What got them through was dropping the act they had all learned to wear.

“In the Raiders you’re this super tough guy,” Tran said. Out of uniform, that facade has a short shelf life. He and his teammates learned to say the thing operators rarely say: “I need some help, dude. Like, this is not working.”

That honesty, he added, is also what reaches the veterans they mentor. “That humanizes you.”

Briere, who admits he still questions whether he belongs in a mentor’s chair, landed on the same point. “It’s okay to drop the armor,” he said.

He describes a bond that no longer requires performance. “There’s no animosity, there’s only transparency.” Months can pass without the three talking, he said, and they pick back up like no time has passed.

None of them set out to be in a video game. The opportunity came through their Deep End Fitness work, and the developers’ focus on authenticity meant the men actually played the parts in motion-capture suits.

Briere, a lifelong gamer, still can’t quite believe it. Seeing the characters come to life, he said, “it’s surreal to me.”

Tran’s reaction was more practical. “My character doesn’t die,” he said.

The three are clear about what they hope the game does beyond entertain. Hall sees the characters as a doorway, “an access point for people to look into what we’re up to” and the work they have done since getting out, he says. For Tran, it is also a chance to put the Raider legacy alongside the units that already have their movies and books.

Asked what they would tell a struggling veteran, the answers came easily.

“Find your next North Star, dude, and navigate towards that,” Tran said. “You’ve done it before, probably in a way harder world.”

Hall offered a message of hope, the kind he says he is living proof of.

“If I can do it, anybody can do it,” he said. “Give yourself some grace.” Even a broken clock, he likes to remind himself, is right twice a day.

Veterans and service members in crisis can reach the Veterans Crisis Line by dialing 988 and pressing 1, or by texting 838255.