Among Heroes by Brandon Webb

Author:Brandon Webb
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2015-04-29T04:00:00+00:00

I just wanted to write to thank you guys at Indigen Armor. I was on a mission today in the streets of the city where I’m stationed and our convoy was ambushed. The only reason I’m alive today is that I was driving one of your vehicles when it happened.

By 2008, John and his partners realized they had outrun their capacity to generate the kind of capital it would take to tool up to the full scope of operation John had in mind. It was time to sell. They shopped around and found a New York private-equity firm with a strong background in military and aerospace. They sold a majority interest in the business for a sizable sum, with John retained as president and CEO, in 2009—by which time I was already hip-deep in my own entrepreneurial deployment and being shot at from all sides.

• • •

When I left the service in mid-2006, Indigen Armor was already in full production and doing well, and I was inspired by John’s example. But I didn’t want to build vehicles; I wanted to train the guys who drove them.

John had wanted to build something. Me, I’d always been into real estate, even had my real estate license. My idea was to create a training facility somewhere in southern California that would serve both military and law enforcement personnel. I called it Wind Zero, named after a precision shooting term.

I had been thinking about this idea for years. I’d been out to Blackwater and other dedicated training facilities on the East Coast, and I knew from experience that there was nothing comparable on the West Coast. In fact, southern California was desperate for a solid, reliable training facility. At the sniper course we constantly had problems finding usable venues for our training. I would call units from other branches of the military and even local law enforcement units and ask, “Where are you guys going when you train?” Invariably the answer was, “We don’t really know. We’re doing our best to find whatever we can.” The problem was systemic, and we were constantly having to ship guys out to other locations to train, which was both expensive and time-consuming.

There was a human cost, too: Sending people out of state for weeks and even months at a time was tough on their families. I’d experienced this myself. The strain those long stretches of absence had put on my own marriage was one of the driving reasons I’d made the decision to leave the teams. If we could provide a place where these young men and women could train during the day and be back home with their families at night, we’d be doing them a huge service.

I started developing the idea along with a fellow former SEAL, a Team Five guy named Randy Kelley, who had gotten out a year before me and started his own business training people in advanced security and surveillance techniques and technologies—something like Q in the James Bond movies (only with a North Carolina accent).

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