The record

This is my account of my military service, the circumstances surrounding my separation from the U.S. Army, what happened afterward, my experience working through the Department of Veterans Affairs, and how those experiences shaped the work I later built in artificial intelligence.

It also records the work I built before I enlisted, the work I have built since, and the civilian animal-rescue work that comes from the same ethical commitment. I want those histories in one place rather than in separate documents that have to be reconciled by whoever is reading them.

I am for the United States of America. I love the United States Army. I consider myself part of the military. I did not walk away, and I am not an opponent of the force. The Soldier’s Creed has a line I keep: I serve the people of the United States. I did not finish the school. I still keep the line. I will continue to serve in the domain where I am most effective, in a way that lets me stay true to my beliefs about animal liberation and welfare.

If I lived it, I say I lived it. If it is on a form, I say it is on a form. I do not turn one into the other.

I am an entrepreneur and technology builder. Before joining the military I spent years building businesses in Chicago.

I studied business at Joliet Junior College from 2016 to 2017, then entrepreneurship at the University of Chicago from 2017 to 2018 through the Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation. Concept-to-product venture development, including CAD 3D design.

I began my sales career at Tesla in Westmont, Illinois, as a Product Specialist from November 2017 and a Tesla Advisor through April 2019. I guided customers through the full sales cycle, managed pipelines in CRM tools, and consistently met or exceeded monthly sales targets.

In November 2018 I founded Culturally Beautiful, an online fashion storefront built on custom web design. In April 2019 I joined Healthy Substance as Chief Marketing Officer. I ran the marketing that grew the brand’s visibility and lead generation, built its Instagram audience past 12,000 followers, and drove the company to number 57 on Yelp’s Top 100 Places to Eat in the U.S. in 2020, the largest recognition the company received.

I became Chief Executive Officer in January 2021 and led the company until April 2024. In that period the restaurant was named an Iconic Chicago vegan restaurant by Eater, was selected for Taste of Chicago, participated at Lollapalooza 2023, and was covered by the Chicago Sun-Times, WGN Radio 720, and South Side Weekly. I stepped out of the chief executive role in April 2024 and have advised the company since.

My ethical opposition to the exploitation and use of animals was already a longstanding part of my life. Veganism was not a diet I adopted during basic training for convenience. For the five years before I enlisted, my professional identity was built on that commitment, in public, under my own name. That record exists outside my own testimony and it predates my enlistment by years.

I enlisted as an 18X Special Forces candidate. The path I was on ran through Basic Combat Training as an 11B infantryman. I entered active-duty service in the United States Army on August 19, 2024 and was sent to Fort Moore, Georgia. My period of active service lasted approximately 96 days, from August 19 through November 22, 2024.

I did not sign up for an office. I signed a contract for the tip of the spear and I got on the plane. I trained and prepared myself for lethal combat in the most advanced army on earth. Whether I deployed or not does not change what I signed and what I was willing to do.

I entered intending to complete that pipeline. I did not enter with the intention of quitting basic training. I do not describe myself as Special Forces. I did not finish Basic Combat Training, and I will not let a contract option stand in for a qualification I did not earn.

Most people treat vegan and lethal as if they cannot sit in the same person. They can. I do not eat animals, wear them, or treat their suffering as a training prop. I also signed a contract to fight, and if required, to kill. Those are not opposites. They are the same rule applied to two different things.

I abstain from harming animals because they are not oppressors. They are victims. That is why a rabbit in a survival lane is not the same thing as surviving, and why leather on my feet was never a small ask.

A terrorist does not get that restraint. Neither does anyone who preys on the defenseless and calls it strength. I hate oppressors. I will always fight them. I signed up to do that in the uniform of the United States, against enemies of this country. I know the difference between a victim and an enemy. I did not sign up to treat them as the same.

People ask how I shipped without knowing the boots were leather. The honest answer is I do not have a cleaner one than this: I missed it.

I trained. I researched. I prepared for August. I thought about ruck weight, run times, the 18X pipeline, whether I could stay vegan on an Army tray. I did not think about what the boots were made of. I did not think I would be required to wear leather gloves to get up the rappel tower. I later understood that the Special Forces path I had contracted for included killing a rabbit in survival training to prove I could live in the wilderness. I do not accept that killing a rabbit is the same thing as surviving. I also do not pretend I had clocked any of that before I raised my hand.

That miss is mine. I will not dress it up as the Army hiding a secret. I wanted a serious combat role. I wanted the hard job. I live with what that cost. I do not ask anyone to feel sorry for it.

The Army did not provide me with a fully vegan food option during basic training. Because I needed to eat, I ate available vegetarian foods despite normally following a vegan lifestyle. A nutritionist later ordered double rations to help address my nutritional needs. Food was one part of the accommodation problem. Food was not the issue that ultimately prevented me from continuing training.

The boots were. I put the leather on for one day. That was the day I left reception and reported to my basic company and platoon at Fort Moore, now called Fort Benning again. I did it because I wanted to keep trying to figure it out. If I had refused at reception they would have held me there and processed me out. I was there to get the job.

As soon as I arrived at the platoon I told the drill sergeants what I was dealing with on the boots. They said they would try to help.

Department of the Army Pamphlet 670-1, the guide to the wear and appearance of Army uniforms, specifies combat boots as cattlehide leather. Paragraph 20-5 describes the issue boot as coyote-colored, flesh-side out cattlehide leather. Optional commercial boots still have to be leather, or leather and nonmesh fabric. That is the rule that sat on the table.

When the commander, the chaplain, and the drill sergeants saw there was no alternative that met that requirement, there was no path left inside the pamphlet. I do not blame them for applying the rule they were given. I think the rule left no room for a soldier who would otherwise have been useful. That is a bureaucratic gap. It is not a reason to oppose the Army. I had wanted an alternative that would let me keep training. I remained willing to train if one existed. It did not.

The underlying accommodation issue remained unresolved. Without an acceptable alternative to the animal-derived equipment required for training, I was unable to complete Basic Combat Training. I was processed for separation. My active-duty service ended on November 22, 2024.

My service was characterized as Uncharacterized. My DD-214 used the description Entry Level Performance and Conduct. Because the separation occurred while I remained in entry-level status, the DD-214 did not give me a traditional honorable or general characterization of service.

The word uncharacterized later created its own difficulty, because someone reading the DD-214 without knowing the events behind it could easily misunderstand what happened. My service was brief. The events and their consequences were not.

Leaving Fort Moore did not end the work. I continued trying to understand the military administrative process, obtain records, and determine what options existed after separation. I also explored legal assistance regarding my military record and potential discharge-related remedies.

At points when I sought veteran legal assistance, I did not receive the assistance I had hoped for. This became important to what happened next because I found myself dealing with complicated military and veterans systems largely on my own.

I eventually pursued disability compensation through the Department of Veterans Affairs for disabilities I believed resulted from events connected to my military service. I handled the VA process myself. I did not have a veterans attorney building the case for me.

I had to understand the claims process, determine what evidence mattered, work through records, understand government terminology, respond to requirements, organize my case, and advocate for myself. Artificial intelligence became an important tool during that process.

AI helped me research regulations and procedures, interpret documents, organize timelines, analyze records, identify issues requiring evidence, prepare written material, understand government correspondence, and think through how different pieces of information related to one another. AI did not create the underlying evidence. AI did not decide my VA claim. I remained responsible for the facts I submitted and for the decisions I made throughout the process.

What AI gave me was access to research, organization, analysis, and language assistance at a time when I did not have the professional legal assistance I had sought. That experience fundamentally changed the way I thought about artificial intelligence. For me, AI stopped being an abstract technology. I had personally experienced what access to an AI assistant meant when one person had to deal with a large institution, unfamiliar regulations, complicated records, government terminology, and decisions carrying major consequences.

The Department of Veterans Affairs later granted service connection for disabilities arising from my military service. That is a determination about my file. I needed it because an uncharacterized DD-214, standing alone, does not explain the period. I do not need it as a story about being owed. I needed the record to be complete.

I went back to building while the VA process was still open. In February 2025 I founded RFP Analyzer, an AI platform that automates the analysis of RFPs and government solicitations. It extracts requirements, checks compliance, and performs gap analysis. I did not plan the connection between that product and what I had just been through. I had spent the preceding period reading regulations, tracking what a decision maker required, determining what evidence mattered, and finding the gaps in my own file. RFP Analyzer performs that same class of work on a different body of documents.

In November 2025 I joined TackleAI in Schaumburg, Illinois as an Operations Specialist. In January 2026, three months after joining, I was promoted to AI Software Developer. I built production AI there. I left in July 2026 to found Longrifle.

In April 2026 I volunteered at the Ridglan Farms open rescue in Blue Mounds, Wisconsin. Ridglan was a commercial beagle breeding and research facility. Hundreds of civilians went there that weekend in an attempt to get the dogs out. I went as one of them, not as an organizer.

What follows is my account of what happened to me there. I was struck in the face and back by rubber bullets. I was tear-gassed and sprayed with pepper spray while attempting to help rescue the beagles. I published clips from that day so I would not have to reconstruct it from memory later.

News organizations independently reported that police used rubber bullets and pepper spray as hundreds of people tried to enter the facility that weekend. I do not claim I closed the farm. I do not claim a formal role. I was there because the same ethical commitment that made leather boots impossible for me is not a diet and is not a phase.

After that weekend I stayed in the work. When Big Dog Ranch Rescue finalized a deal to get dogs out of Ridglan, I worked with Lauree Simmons, the CEO, and other board members on the volunteer signup for the extraction. I had met them in the Blue Mounds area after showing up to do manual labor. I was not on staff. I offered the build for free.

The extraction was two days out. I drove from that area to Schaumburg, got in around midnight, and built the site that night. Operation Beagle is a volunteer intake for Big Dog Ranch Rescue, for the people needed to receive those beagles. I shipped it because getting them out mattered more than sleep.

I do not claim I negotiated the deal or ran the rescue. I built the tool they needed, in time. That is the part that is mine.

I went on to found Longrifle AI LLC, operating at Longrifle.ai. My path to the company did not begin solely with my Army experience. I had already spent years as an entrepreneur and had experience building technology and businesses. My experience after military service gave AI a different personal meaning.

I had used AI while trying to advocate for myself inside systems where professional assistance was difficult to obtain and where the volume of regulations, records, terminology, and procedure created a major imbalance between an individual and an institution. I knew firsthand what access to capable AI assistance had meant for me.

Longrifle AI is a service-disabled veteran-owned company. I am the founder and lead engineer. We turn high-friction workflows into secure AI systems: assess the mission, make a fit/no-fit call, then build and sustain. Language models, machine vision, and agent workflows go into the applications the client already runs. The systems stay on infrastructure they control, including disconnected rooms.

Document and data intelligence is one competency. So are claims and correspondence triage, analyst support, compliance, field capture, and anything else with a workflow and a boundary. I am not building a one-trick product. A person approves consequential actions. Outputs are traceable. Client data never trains an outside model.

That architecture is meant for Department of Defense, DHS including CISA, GSA, and Department of Energy work that cannot leave the room. Those are the rooms it is built to enter. They are not a client list.

I am a veteran, and I own the company. That is not a substitute for wearing the uniform. It is the work I can do now without abandoning the institution I still consider myself part of, and without abandoning the animals I will not exploit.

I served for only a short period. My service was uncharacterized. I did not graduate from Basic Combat Training. I enlisted as an 18X candidate and did not become Special Forces. Those facts are true. They are not the complete story.

I entered the Army intending to serve. I put the leather on for one day to get out of reception and into a platoon. I told the drill sergeants the day I arrived. They said they would try to help. DA PAM 670-1 requires combat boots to be leather. I do not blame the commander, the chaplain, or the drills for applying that rule. The accommodation issue remained unresolved. I was unable to complete training and was separated on November 22, 2024.

After separation I continued pursuing records and answers. I sought outside assistance and ultimately had to handle much of the process myself. I later worked a VA claim without a veterans attorney. I used AI to help me understand and work through that system. The VA granted service connection.

I love the United States Army. I consider myself part of the military. I am for the United States of America. I did not walk away, and I am not an opponent of the force. I will continue to serve in the domain where I am most effective, building for people who still have to go forward, in a way that lets me stay true to animal liberation and welfare.

Years from now, if I read this and no longer remember every detail, I want to remember one thing clearly: I did not walk away. I missed the leather. I put it on for one day so they would not process me out of reception. I told the drills the day I hit the platoon. The pamphlet requires leather. I do not blame command for applying it. I wanted the hard job and I did not get it. I kept serving in the place where I can still be effective without betraying what I believe.