ROANOKE, Va. – Before the success of Black Dog Salvage, co-owners Mike Whiteside and Robert Kulp began their careers serving in the U.S. Navy.
Whiteside joined in 1976, at the end of the Vietnam era, working as a parachute rigger.
“I was trained for survival equipment,” said Whiteside. “So we took care of all the technical parachutes for the fighters, fighter jets, and also flotation. Any pilot, if you ever jumped out of an airplane or was ejected, was under our parachute.”
“I was in peacetime Navy, I called it. It was post-Vietnam, which was 1976, and pre-Gulf,” said Whiteside. “We were the first task group to go to the Gulf when they took the embassy in ‘79.”
Kulp served from 1985 to 1996.
“I was a ship driver on a 550-foot 1959 destroyer out of Charleston, South Carolina. And I was the communications officer. And then I was the damage control assistant to the chief engineer,” said Kulp. “And then I was in something called a special boat unit after that.”
Kulp was deployed three times.
“You know, that’s away for six months, sometimes eight months, sometimes at sea for a month-and-a-half at a time. And comparative to my buddies in the desert, we had it great,” said Kulp. “Anytime anybody’s in a real war, that’s a completely different thing than what Mike and I experienced.”
Today, Whiteside and Kulp carry the lessons learned from military service into their business.
“It’s the whole accountability thing,” said Whiteside. “You are held accountable in the service, no matter what your rank.”
“All that organization. All [the] systems that have been organized in the military, in general, in the Navy, and our particular experience, I mean, leaves a lasting impression on you,” said Kulp.
Whiteside also emphasized, “Freedom is not free. And the people who have served and protected the rights that we have under [the American] flag, deserve the respect of the time they spent. And a lot of them paid the price.”
This Veterans Day, Whiteside hopes Americans feel “pride in that we have people who serve our country and hold it with high esteem.”
Kulp stressed the importance of setting aside differences to honor those who served.
“It’s all types of people, you know? All politics. All different types of views. Same thing in the military. I mean there’s veterans that are liberals, left wing, right-wing, all these different things that we’re clashing over, especially right now in election season,” said Kulp. “None of that matters. We’re all there together, and it’s a good place to unite.”