Chris Cathers

Chris Cathers was an Army Green Beret who went back to Iraq and Afghanistan for another government agency, then built a foundation whose only job was keeping veterans alive.

A mutual friend, Nick Carlson, put him and Brad Banyas together, and Cathers came in for the SALTYmf GOAT Podcast having met Brad only briefly before that. Brad said what pulled at him was the gap between the version of that life everybody pictures, the James Bond version, and what it costs to live it for twenty years. Cathers did not argue with the premise. He said the last thing he ever wants to do is talk somebody out of the job.

Brother's Keeper Veteran Foundation assesses a veteran, connects him to treatment and funds it for as long as it takes, which Cathers said is sometimes more than a year or two. He took no salary for the first three years and put everything back in. He called it post-traumatic stress injury rather than disorder, because a man who will not admit to a disorder will accept a broken bone, and the brain is a physical injury like any other. His board was four Green Berets, a Tier One operator and an Army veteran, and he was blunt that the group is not special operations only. The year is anchored by five or six events: a black tie gala at City Winery in Nashville, a golf fundraiser at Traditions in Jefferson, Georgia, a live fire day in Clarksville, Tennessee capped at thirty people, and a ruck he had a trademark pending on called Just Ruck It.

Cathers was suicidal on and off for twelve years while, from the outside, everything looked handled. He has said he had a gun in his mouth over a hundred times a year. He tried to outrun it first, three workouts a day, redlining an Airdyne bike, down to 170 pounds, until his recovery got so quick it stopped working. Then alcohol, half a fifth and sometimes a whole one, skipping beer because it was not efficient. His line for that stretch is that his vanity kept his sanity. In 2019 he came back from a trip overseas with a headache he blamed on jiu-jitsu. The first diagnosis was a 26 percent chance of living five years, then it shifted to stage four and 8 percent over ten. A surgeon took out three quarters of his femur in what he warned would be a brutal and radical operation, done with hammers. Cathers asked to keep the bone so he could have knife handles carved for his buddies.

He stayed off politics on social media and he did not rank people by their deployments. When a veteran told him he had not earned the help, Cathers handed him a line he had picked up somewhere: comparison is the thief of joy. A ten dollar donor and a hundred thousand dollar donor got the same treatment, because you never know what anyone's position is. The bar to get through the door was deliberately low. All a man had to be, he said, was strong enough to type an email. Cathers died after a long fight with cancer. His wife and his board kept the foundation running, and Brad has said since that the cause has only grown in his name.