War to Whiskey: How a Special Operations Warrior and Army Lawyer Joined Forces

Brad and Jessica Halling married on Veterans Day 2011. They were immediately a military power couple. He was a retired elite sniper who had lost a leg in combat in Somalia in 1993, while she was a serving Army lawyer providing critical advice to Special Operations commanders.

He had been an enlisted soldier while she, 13 years his junior, was on the way to becoming a colonel, retiring in 2020 as the Staff Judge Advocate for Joint Special Operations Command. They had met through the dating website Match.com.

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After Jessica’s retirement, inspired by time spent in Napa Valley and with a combined 49 years of Army service between them, the couple decided to open their own distillery, a path being chosen by an increasing number of veterans.

Due to open at the end of this year, Brad Halling American Whiskey Ko. — BHAWK for short — the name is a tribute to the crews of the Black Hawk helicopters Brad served with in the Battle of Mogadishu. Brad was in a Black Hawk when it was hit by an RPG, taking off his left leg. The fallen eagle feather in the company logo represents those killed.

“Ultimately, we wanted to do something together,” Brad, 62, told AARP Veteran Report. They knew that there was a long history connecting the military and whiskey.

“George Washington drove barrels of whiskey with his troops when they moved across the land,” Brad said. The first president of the U.S. was one of the largest whiskey makers in the country by 1799.

“Whiskey is served as a medium for celebration for memorializing and at promotions,” Brad explained. “In units I've been, any time that a soldier has passed, we usually will go to the memorial wall and we'll use whiskey as a medium to remember him and talk about him, tell his story and share it with anybody who didn't know him, to carry his name up.”

William Crooks

Drawing upon his tenacity and her organizational skills, Brad and Jessica began laying the groundwork for the distillery in 2019. On the business side, Jessica attended a distilling trade show and administration courses to learn how best to run their new business. They met with a firm that specialized in building and repairing craft distilleries.

They decided to make the distillery part of the community where they live in near Fort Liberty (formerly Fort Bragg) in North Carolina.

Then it was time for Brad to start learning about the distilling process. “We were doing a lot of this during COVID and everybody was available — they weren’t running their stills and they were giving us the time of day,” he said Brad.

“And then, even after things started getting up and running, we were invited back. I spent a week at a distillery called Smooth Ambler in West Virginia, working behind their distillers learning the whole process, and Jess did the same thing on the other side of the house.

“It’s been an amazing journey in that the people that we've contacted have all been very, very gracious and have opened their arms to us.”