Blogger’s note: Today, you’ll hear from Victor Chavez, Butch’s best guy friend. Learn about what makes him tick and what his worries are in Operation Silver Star.

Tell me a little about yourself.

That’s a tall order. I’m the owner of Sentry Securities, a private security company, and Last Chance Ranch, where I live with my wife and five kids. Four of them came with my wife when I remarried, and the other is my goddaughter who lost her dad in 2016. I used to command a team called Shadow Box. We were disbanded in the summer of 2014, but everyone stuck around. We’ve been through some adventures together since then. That’s for sure.

Name three significant events that have happened to you.

Wow. That’s huge. I lost my fiancée in 2012. For a while, I didn’t want to live because I thought my life had ended, to be honest. My career certainly did. It set me on a long course of questioning everything. Long story very short, I came to know Jesus as my Lord and Savior through all that happened.

The second one is that I married Deborah Fields in 2015. I met Deb when we were the team Operation Shadow Box. She’d been an FBI Web hunter, and when her anonymity got blown, she came under our protection. During that time, Deb, who’s a counselor, listened and helped me through the crisis of grieving for my fiancée. And in time, we fell in love. Best decision I ever made. She balances me so well.

Third? I’ll jump back to being a Green Beret in Iraq. Gary Walton, who was my best friend and handler for Operation Shadow Box, was on a team that got ambushed in the desert near Iran. They were taken captive. One by one, we found every team member dead until Gary finally turned up alive six months later. But for that one event so long ago, I wouldn’t be sitting here with you. Why is because the man who turned my best friend into a mole who betrayed me. He’s one of the men you’ll read about in Operation Silver Star.

What blind spot do you have?

What did Butch say? Trust? True, but not in the way you think. I’ve got a good crew. But Butch, when he gets a burr under his saddle, can be rather persistent. Ninety-nine percent of the time, I trust him completely. And ninety-nine percent of the time, I can trust my own instincts. Yet there comes a time in in Operation Silver Star when both of those come off the rails.

What do you want us to learn from Operation Silver Star?

I don’t have a huge part in this one, but I’m definitely the leader of my team. I think that it’s really easy to distrust our instincts. If I haven’t, maybe we wouldn’t have encountered what we did.