The ability to wire explosives would turn one sergeant’s injury from a cottage industry to mainstream business, with just a little bit of inspiration and a lot of hard work. 

SFC Brent Verdialez was a Special Forces Engineer Sergeant with the 1st Special Forces Group (Airborne), at Joint Base Lewis-McChord, Washington. He’d been in the Army for 16 years and with Special Forces for most of that time. 

Growing up in Fresno, California, he was interested in different types of fighting. He learned boxing and Wing Chun, a style of Kung Fu. Later, he began training in a lesser-known fighting style known as Sanda, which was formerly known as Sanshou or Chinese Kick Boxing and is a blend of traditional Kung Fu and modern fighting techniques. (The Chinese military uses a variation of it, called Junshi Sanda to train its own Special Operations Forces in unarmed combat techniques.)

Verdialez and many of his fellow Green Berets would train in a variety of martial arts to keep themselves to a sharp edge both physically and mentally. However, when he suffered what he believed to be a minor injury during combatives training, everything changed for him.