Funding for this program provided by Foco Cafe, socially conscious dining where all guests are welcome regardless of their ability to pay and Dad's Handyman Colorado Springs, the local Veteran-owned handyman that treats every customer like family.

When you're deployed, you need to have some sort of hobbies to take your mind off of what's going on around you.

You can't just absorb yourself with everything that's going on 24/7.

So while guys were playing games and things like that, I was, I was experimenting with moonshine, I guess.

Fire in the hole!

Fire in the hole!

Fire in the hole!

EOD tech is Explosive Ordnance Disposal and our job is to dispose of explosive hazards on the battlefield.

Explosive Ordnance Disposal, bomb squad of the Army.

When Mike decided to switch to EOD, my thoughts were ‘No.

What are you thinking?

Are you crazy?

Who wants to play with bombs?

When we set up training, you're gonna have a buzzer or something energetic that tells you that you messed up.

As many as I walked downrange on and as many incidents as I did, I do always remember the very first one.

I remember putting on the bomb suit.

Halfway down range, cause you're walking by yourself now, it dawned on me that there's no buzzer on this.

There's no telltale beep that's gonna tell me I messed up, you know.

That had me pause for just a second and then the adrenaline kicked in and I was like ‘this, this is kick ass what I'm about to go down here and do.

From there on every incident after that, I couldn't wait to get in the bomb suit.

My name is Mike Girard.

I'm the owner and founder of 3 Hundred Days Distilling.

I like the fact that we are, were nontraditional.

You know, we make stuff that is off the wall.

Its different.

I think I have a little bit of credibility when it comes to moonshine.

I spent about ten years in Alabama, and so I've definitely had some true back water moonshine before.

And Mike's blew them all out of the water.

There's not a lot of corn being grown here, but theres a lot of beet sugar.

So that's what moonshiners here in Colorado used to make what they called Sugar Moon.

If I was gonna do something that had Colorado on it, I wanted it to be Colorado from the name on the wall to what went into the jar and what I was selling.

You know, Monuments distillery is 3 Hundred Days.

We hear that all the time.

Locals don't want us to go anywhere.

Coloradans love Colorado.

I mean, you can go into a store and see ‘Colorado Proud, ‘Colorado Made.

All this stuff is Colorado.

They take that seriously.

I know Mike from when we were in EOD together.

As soon as I met him, we kind of hit it off and we got along really well.

um And he was also making moonshine in his garage, so that was fun.

He was doing his thing in the basement, in the garage.

I knew it smelt terrible.

Once that smell starts seeping up, youre like ‘okay what exactly is happening here?

I was under the assumption he was just learning how to brew beer and everything, but I showed up to his little, his basement and he had a bar and there's a bunch of mason jars on his barstool.

And I was like ‘I know what those are.

We had one good friend come from Washington and she was like ‘this is something, this is a business waiting to happen.

And we kind of brushed it off.

We were at a Broncos game and my brother's coworker had some moonshine.

We were like ‘okay, we'll do a shot of moonshine and, you know, make the face and everybodyll laugh.

But it was actually an enjoyable experience.

My investors have been pretty good because they just kind of like handed the keys over to me and say ‘you do you.

Weve been fairly successful over the last seven years.

When I first met Mike, I was blown away by how much he works.

Then I met Jenn and realized that she's also constantly working behind the scenes.

My girlfriend took me to a beer festival.

I kept seeing all these booths around beer, beer, beer, moonshine.

I told her ‘I'm gonna go talk to that guy and I met Mike and Jenn and he asked me, ‘do you have any distilling experience?

And I said ‘well my college roommate and I built a still in our dorm room with borrowed equipment from the physics lab.

But he said ‘yeah that, that works.

So and I've been with him ever since.

It just brings me beyond joy and happiness to see how well he's taken a hobby into a full business.

His passion for this, I guess, so to speak, started in Afghanistan.

I went active duty and I joined the Army to basically get out of Montana and kind of take my own path.

The number one threat in Iraq and Afghanistan were the IEDs and roadside bombs.

When you're going downrange as a team leader and you're responsible for, you know, removing that hazard downrange and knowing that you're walking up on something that can end your life, that could be the end of you right there.

We always joke that you would never know if it happens.

You know, you joke about the pink mist and all that kind of stuff.

I was that guy on the team where Mike and his guys would go down on, on an object.

And I was their safety and their guys are calling back commands to me that I'm telling headquarters.

But if that bomb went off, I'm going with them.

So you just learn to kind of don't take life and don't take stuff so serious.

They're made out of pressure cookers in Iraq and Afghanistan.

So what they'll do is theyll pack them full of homemade explosives, they'll bury them in the ground and then somebody will come along and there's a mechanism in place to set them off, essentially.

We have ways of defeating that and rendering it safe.

We'll collect that as evidence and then after the evidence process is over, we'll keep them for training aids.

They also happen to make good stills if you know how to set up a still, because you can heat them up and you can put a mash in them and they're pretty, pretty straight forward.

Your guys are always trying to get over on the rules.

You had General Order Number 1 which says you can't drink alcohol, you cant consume, can't purchase alcohol while you're deployed.

You know, you overhear your guys talking about, you know, making beer.

And one of the guys started talking about moonshine and he was like ‘oh, we can make moonshine.

We could just make a still and we can, you know, use, we can use Coke cause its got sugar in it to ferment and then we can run that.

I just started researching a little bit to see if it was plausible.

And as a good leader does, if I can do it, they can do it, so.

So I made my first run using a gutted out old IED that we were using as a training aid, Root Beer, and made my first batch of shine.

A couple of people knew what I'd done.

Some of them have stories that are not true.

I wasn't making it and distributing it.

I wasn't, you know, running liquor all over Afghanistan and bootlegging it, you know.

I'm by the book.

I'm rules.

Im regulations.

So I was like ‘you were doing what?

I can't believe you were the First Sergeant, and you did what?

It didn't surprise me that his first still came from an IED that his guys had disarmed.

It didn't surprise me.

That's, thats the EOD guys, right?

That's the EOD way, right?

I was able to bring that pressure cooker back with me and its kind of a showcase piece here now as my first still.

Transitioning out of the military was actually, wasn't as hard for me as some go through.

I keep myself busy.

When I was putting this, this place together, that was my transition.

It was probably five years later my wife noticed that I hadn't transition out as well as I could have.

Just bottling things up.

Because we started building a bigger staff and a lot of my responsibilities were taken by other people, I was giving them more responsibility.

Things were starting to creep back in that didn't need to be there.

There's things that I just, I'd prefer to forget.

We were entering a compound, so we were using breaching charges and a commando jumped the gun and went to run towards the door and I saw it happening so I grabbed this individual and threw them back behind a wall as the explosion went off.

And the rest of that mission is pretty much a blur.

I remember thinking to myself ‘okay, you are dazed, you are concussed, but you have to move forward and then I'll deal with my problems later.

Well, guess what?

Later never comes.

So we go through a whole deployment, many more explosions and similar things and then I get home and, and things are different.

So it was April 15, 2012.

It was a Sunday afternoon.

We had only been in country 45 days and it was just right around lunchtime.

I had just, you know, grabbed my lunch and just this, just this boom, big boom.

And our trailer shifted and we all kind of just paused for a second like, what just happened?

Next thing you know, we just, we threw on our gear.

And as we started to make our way down, we started hearing gunfire.

And we just see some insurgents just coming over the wall.

My commander went to cross a road down by the barracks, and he was shot in the ankle.

But as we went down to go try to help my commander, myself and two others were crossing that same road and as we were crossing that road just kind of happened to look up and just see four or five grenades just come flying over the wall.

A kill radius for a grenade is about 50 meters, right, where you're gonna really get messed up.

We were within 25 meters of these grenades going off.

When the blast just went off and just see a flash of white light and wake up and realize that you'd been thrown, I'd been thrown, 15 feet into a, into a metal building.

I can remember just looking at my guys saying ‘that hurt.

Then you get up and you just, you know, you continue to fight, make sure your commander was okay, and then we just continued to, to fight until the fighting was done.

Once the firefight had stopped, I took my gear off.

The adrenaline started to come down and I realized that I was, like, I had no feeling on my whole left side of my body.

Next thing you know, they're putting myself and three others on gurneys, got wheeled into the emergency room, got checked out, and when they had me in the room, I was able to tell one of the nurses, I said ‘I need you to run over to the EOD compound and I need you to go get First Sergeant Girard.

I can remember saying that.

It was, it seemed like a long time, I'm sure it wasn't.

I don't know.

Once Mike showed up, um all I could hear was the beeping on the heart monitor, and I'm trying to tell him that I have no feeling.

um But the only thing I could think of was trying to get ahold of my family.

Mike called my, my wife and all all I could tell her was how I was blown up, I was injured and I had no feeling on my left side.

And then I gave the phone back to Mike.

I was checked out that night and immediately put it into into the TBI ward.

But they pretty much kind of kept us drugged because the best treatment for a TBI injury is you just need complete rest.

So we made it through the end of the deployment, we get back, but I was not the same.

When I came back from Afghanistan one of my soldiers commented that, he asked what happened to me.

I was always the happy go lucky, nothing could touch me, the Teflon officer essentially.

But post-deployment people noticed things were getting to me.

And that's kind of where I started recognizing that maybe there might be something wrong.

I experienced Vertigo symptoms.

It looks as though you're looking through water like you've opened your eyes in a bathtub or something or in a pool.

The doctors, there was a really bad habit of just with drugs, anti-depressants, and then they'll give you something like Adderall or Concerta to combat, you know, the feeling of basically walking through water or mud all the time.

And then if you've got a lot of pain and injuries, which I've had, then you're on muscle relaxers, you're on pain meds, opioids, right.

I don't think we realize how we impact the people around us.

And so when you're living with the negative effects and you're really kind of focused on, like, how you're feeling in that moment, you have to realize that the people around you, they're not completely unaware of that.

Theyre not completely oblivious to it, it affects them too, and sometimes very drastically, you know, it can be in a negative way.

I have had several friends at this point, which is sad to say, but several friends that have committed suicide.

Friends or acquaintances, even people that I've just been stationed with.

um and it's its the most destructive thing you can possibly do.

A few years ago we had a bartender that we, we had hired on her name was Brook.

Um, she was, she's just this amazing personality.

Always, always happy.

Brought a smile on your face, you know, you hear that about a lot of people.

But she truly was.

Brook was, uh, she was a spirit.

She was a real, um wonderful spirit.

Who was Brook.

Brook, uh, To me, Brook was, she was like a daughter.

She was, she was fun.

She was energetic.

She loved life, and she wanted nothing more than people to be happy, for everyone to be happy.

She met her husband through a church group.

uh They started hanging out and before we knew it, we were being introduced to Caleb and the relationship started out very happy, very fun and she felt like she met her Prince Charming.

Brook had gone through a series of, um started not happy in her relationship.

She wanted to leave Caleb because she was extremely scared of his attacks, is what we would call those.

I do feel that the attacks and issues that he was having were tied to some of the things that he may have experienced while he was in the military.

He threatened every time that she was going to leave, that he was going to commit suicide.

So she felt, um while she was obviously in love with him, she was scared of him and was afraid to leave him due to the threats of suicide.

They had promised each other that if he ever were to become violent, that she was allowed to leave their marriage.

Apparently, he had one of his fits of rage.

He became extremely violent and they ended up ultimately having to call, call the cops during one of his attacks.

And she decided at that point in time, because of his promise, that she would leave.

I want to say it was probably the next morning we got the phone call that he had committed suicide.

And then five weeks later, she did the same.

I know it impacted me uh tragically.

I had such a hard time with it, coming into work, knowing that she was no longer gonna be here.

She held it all in, she held a lot of it in, and I had no idea that that, uh she had already pretty much made plans.

I think she thought the easiest way to deal with everything was what she did.

I dont think she actually thought it would affect any of us the way that it did.

I don't think she could see past that.

I think we could, we could all see how six months to a year, to two or three years, how her life was gonna be way different.

But she could see it.

It's not just Veterans who are going through these issues.

It is directly influencing their loved ones.

Cause what I didn't know is she was battling her own depression, her own demons, you know, from years of trying to be there and support her husband, who was not getting any help.

And, you know, I look back, if I would have known the things I know now, maybe I could have got him the help he needed.

But, you know, are you gonna sit back and just dwell on that or are you going to do something about it?

And that's kind of why we push what we do with Veterans mental health.

My really good friend, Ben Nelson, he went through the Marcus Institute and I saw the dramatic change in his life.

I saw Ben go from this crusty, angry recluse to a much more calm and welcoming individual.

And that's what I wanted for me.

I knew I wasn't who I used to be.

So the Marcus Institute for Brain Health is primarily a mild to moderate TBI, Traumatic Brain Injury, treatment facility that also recognizes that TBIs carried some, some traumas, not just physical but mental and emotional.

That level of treatment was the single greatest level of medical care I have ever received in my life.

It legitimately saved my life, it gave me my life back, it gave me control again.

So at the Marcus, they have this platform that you'll stand on, you know, you close your eyes and they'll move it, I mean, its slight movements like this, but they have to actually tie you in and sometimes theyll hold on to you because for Veterans with TBI, you'll just fall off of this thing.

Not everyone is going to be as open to some of those things, whether it's, you know, meditation or there's a little bit of talk therapy involved, you know, if that's ideal for you but they won't, they don't make you do certain things if it's just not helpful for you.

I went through the Invictus Project.

They do a CereScan to see exactl how much damage you have in your brain.

It shows you all the areas that have a lack of blood flow and then areas that are over stimulated, which is, a lot of times the fight or flight portion of your brain.

Then I went through this nasal, stem cell nasal infusion.

They extract your stem cells from your blood and then they infuse it into your nasal cavity and those stem cells go into your brain and start repairing some of the damage.

Then ketamine infusions.

There's a lot of studies out there about ketamine, whether it's good or bad or anything like that, but it's a very clinical setting where you actually slowly have ketamine pushed into your system.

You basically go under into this trance.

It's almost like you're the center of your own universe.

It's, I cannot explain what you go through.

It basically like resets your brain and puts those things that are most important in your life to the forefront and then the rest of the stuff doesn't matter.

It seemed like he had a shorter fuze prior to treatments and little things would make him just a little bit more irritated, I mean nothing terrible, but just agitated.

And after it seemed like he was, he was calmer.

If you were to look at me on the street, youd see a large male individual with all my fingers and toes and you wouldn't assume that there's anything wrong.

You wouldn't know that this was an individual that used to drive to Fort Carson every day hoping a semi truck would come across the median so that I didn't have to go to work that day.

You wouldn't see the individual who after Marcus Institute, which would be five years post-deployment, whose closest family was like ‘oh, it's nice to finally see you again.

The doctors always ask ‘are you, are you having suicidal thoughts?

And my response got to the point where I would say ‘I'm not gonna kill myself, but I understand why people do, right?

So if you're getting to that point, you have to reach out to a loved one, call somebody, do something, because there's programs out there that can help you.

There's ways to get through it.

Don't just try to live with it and endure it, because one day you might wake up and think ‘I'm done.

And I've had a couple of friends that have done that.

Just all of a sudden ‘I'm done.

Suicide ideology isnt just, you know, me saying Im gonna take my life.

Its also where youre comfortab with the end of your life.

Driving home and that thought goes through your head ‘I'd be very comfortable with just driving off this overpass right now, you know, picturing those things and being completely fine with it is not a quality way of life either and those are things that I lived with.

I just kind of figured that's, that's everyday life now.

That's who I am.

I have to live with it.

But I found out going through a couple of these programs that I didn't have to live with it and that I could get help that I needed that made, you know, my family life better.

The advice that I would give a Veteran if they feel their loved one or themselves are struggling is to do anything and everything it takes to seek the help that you or your loved one needs because it could mean them ultimately maybe in the end, losing their life and their loved ones having to suffer from that.

So for Veterans, I think a lot of them at the beginning feel like there's no help, nobody is gonna understand what I'm going through, there's no programs out there that, you know, that would understand, you know, even talking to a counselor who's not been through, you know, a combat zone or have been through what Veterans go through, you kind of sit there and you feel like there's no help.

And I think that's where a lot of Veterans, you know, turn to alcohol, turn to drugs, ultimately turn to, to suicide because they feel there's no help.

There are a lot of programs out there.

If we can help get resources out to Veterans and help them understand that, yes, there is help, you know, hear from people like, you know, like hear my story, hear other stories, to let them know that there's resources out there, I wish I had that at the beginning of my journey.

We wanted to come up with an event where we brought people together and bring organizations who are focused on Veterans mental health to provide information and contacts so that they can get, we can get people directly in contact with organizations that are actually doing things to help you get your mind straight again, to live a quality life.

You know, a person and a number means a hell of a lot more than going out and doing a fun run.

We sat down and we were like, we wanted to figure out what we were going to name it and we kept seeing all these, you know, 4Ks, 5Ks for this and, and all that, and I was like ‘let's just, why dont we call it a ZeroK?

We don't run at all, but we give you a marathon of information.

There's a lot of good resources out there.

There's a lot of good information out there.

Don't let one bad experience with a program turn you off from looking for further help Your mental health is important and it's something that, you know, we're getting better in the world about, but it's still something that people don't like to talk about.

So I think it's important that people talk about it and, and seek help when they need it, or even if they don't think they need it, but question it.

Somebody's gonna tell you about a program and it may take several times, you may not fit into the first group.

Come here to 3 Hundred Days of Shine, you know, there's always a Veteran in here, always.

I love what Mike is doing.

He's doing something constructive, not just for himself in terms of providing for his family financially.

He's also using it as a platform to lift up others and, and to make this a space for people like myself to come and speak at, or other programs to come here and speak and share our stories, our experiences, our resources with our brothers and sisters and help them move up.

I truly believe he's trying to be a tide that rises all ships, instead of just putting money in his pocket and it makes it super easy for me to answer any calls or texts.

I always know I can come out here and I can have a good time.

If I'm having a bad day, I can just show up out here and if he's here, we're going to end up having fun.

It's almost like an escape from reality.

Not a lot of people get to do this, and I think it's easy to take it for granted.

Obviously, my sister worked here, so I feel a strong bond here and sometimes when I'm here it just brings back great memories.

But this is a place where I know I can come, this is where she was happy.

Yeah, just being here is, it's calming, it's just, you know, just, you know, you don't have to worry about anything while you're here.

Mike and Jenn make this very much a family oriented place, you just feel comfortable here, you know?

Whats next for 3 Hundred Days of Shine?

We're just gonna keep doing what we do.

You know, whatever you, whatever you guys want.

You guys want other flavors?

You want a bigger footprint?

Well we'll work on it, well do what we can.

yeah, that's pretty much it, I'm just gonna keep making shine and hope people keep buying it.

Funding for this program provided by Foco Cafe, socially conscious dining where all guests are welcome regardless of their ability to pay and Dad's Handyman Colorado Springs, the local Veteran-owned handyman that treats every customer like family.