Since 2002, graduates of the U.S. Army Special Forces Qualification Course have been awarded the Yarborough Knife; an elite symbol of distinction, identity, and mission.
Named after LTG William P. Yarborough, who was instrumental in solidifying President John F. Kennedy’s support of Special Forces, the blade was forged to mark the moment a soldier became a Green Beret. Each knife was engraved with a serial number, connecting it to the operator who earned it.
But in 2015, that tradition ended. Budget cuts discontinued the official presentation, and for nearly a decade, new Green Berets have crossed the stage without a blade in hand; without that powerful, tangible connection to the generations who came before.
Now, Chris Stroup and the Green Beret Foundation are bringing it back. A former Army Special Operations soldier, Chris, like so many who serve in the elite ranks, battled loss of identity and purpose when he transitioned to civilian life. On came a new mission. He founded Stroup Knives; an American-made, family-run company dedicated to building rugged, high-quality blades for hard use.
Fran Racioppi sat down with Chris at his shop in Fayetteville, North Carolina to learn just how he started Stroup Knives, why every part of the process is done in-house, and how his military values of precision, discipline, and purpose now shape every product he makes.
We spoke about his commitment to quality over quantity, employing veterans, and his newest creation: the Green Beret Dagger; a modern descendant of the Yarborough, designed to once again be fielded as a symbol of elite service and brotherhood.
This is about more than a knife. It’s about restoring a tradition, honoring sacrifice, and forging identity through craftsmanship. Watch, listen, or read our conversation from the floor of a veteran-owned shop where steel meets legacy and where a mark of distinction is being brought back.
Head over to greenberetfoundation.org today to get yours.
The Jedburgh Podcast is brought to you by University of Health & Performance, providing our Veterans world-class education and training as fitness and nutrition entrepreneurs.
Follow the Jedburgh Podcast and the Green Beret Foundation on social media. Listen on your favorite podcast platform, read on our website, and watch the full video version on YouTube as we show why America must continue to lead from the front, no matter the challenge.
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Chris, welcome to The Jedburgh Podcast.
Thanks for having me.
Thanks for having us in the shop. This place is pretty impressive. There are multiple buildings. We’re here in what appears to be the final production area. You already took us through a tour of the other side. We’re going to go back and look again, but there are a lot of knives in these buildings.
I would hope so, being a knife company and all. This is the building we call corporate.
It’s very formal in this. We’re going to talk all about Stroup Knives. We’re going to talk about your journey in the Army and post-Army transition. Before we get to any of that, we have to talk about the partnership with the Green Beret Foundation. For a long time, for decades, when you graduate the Special Forces Qualification Course, you are given a knife, and that knife was the Yarborough knife. Years ago, the decision was made to no longer field that knife to everybody who graduates from the course.
It is a big source of discussion and valid arguments on all sides when you look at why that process and that practice stopped. Over the last couple of years, there has been a lot of discussion about how we’re going to get that back. How are we going to take these guys that we invest millions of dollars into their assessment and their development there? How do we recruit them and then train them to be Green Berets and put something in their hands that binds and bonds them together, that they can carry forward with them?
You have answered that call. You and your team have developed the Green Beret knife in conjunction with the Green Beret Foundation. This one here, 202, might be coming with me because this was my Ranger School roster number. I’m not sure I could, in good faith, leave this behind. Talk about the knife. Let’s talk about the partnership with the Green Beret Foundation. Why did you answer the call on this one?
It’s a huge honor to be able to do this. When I started this knife company, who would have ever imagined this is where it would lead? I get to make knives for the most elite. It is freaking cool, so it’s a huge honor. Our friend Doug, who’s still in the army, came up to me with this idea at a dinner randomly. I didn’t even know him at the time. “Would you be willing to make a dagger for everybody who graduates the Q course?” “We have course, but I don’t know you.” He came up to me at the SHOT Show and said, “I talked to the Green Beret Foundation.”
He talked to me.
Doug got a mustache.
He came and talked to Jenna and me, and then we passed him off to Charlie.
It all happened. It seemed like one of those things that are such a far-off giant idea. “Will you make these for every Green Beret?” “Yes, I would. Who wouldn’t?” It happened. It was almost like a fairy tale to me.
It wasn’t that long ago. The SHOT Show was at the end of January. We’re sitting here, and now we’re almost at the end of May. Here it is. It’s in production. These got fielded to the whole class of the Regimental First Formation. We’ve got a whole bunch over here in the shop, and you’ve got people producing hundreds more and getting ready for the next graduating class. Talk about the knife. Let’s talk about the construct and the design of it. Why is it a dagger?
We wanted to go with something similar to what’s in the crest, the heritage behind that. It is naturally a dagger. It’s also a great combat knife. It’s a slim package. It’s secure. This can get put on your vest, on your battle belt, or anywhere you can tuck it. It’s a perfect addition for your combat kit, but it’s also got the heritage and the shape of what’s in the crest. That’s why we went with this profile. We wanted our modern take on this. It’s Cerakoted to prevent corrosion and rust. It looks cool. It’s fun. You hold this thing. You’re like, “This is cool.”
Some of the generals had input on this. We made some prototypes, and everybody had a little bit of input. This is what we came up with. There is the Kydex sheath because of the retention and all the different mounting options. There are so many different belt clips and attachments you can mount on here, or you can zip tie it or Velcro it. We wanted something with all of the flexibility and things that you would want to be able to mount it for combat.
Understanding where Special Forces comes from is something that’s inherently in your nature. You spent eleven years in the Army, the majority of that time being in a Special Operations unit. You spend time in the 160th, and then you spend time across the field, across Bragg in Delta, supporting operations over there. Talk for a minute about why you wanted to go in the Army and why you chose the route that you did in Special Operations.
I was doing construction. I was young, and I was already in charge of the construction teams. “This is boring. I go to different houses and do the same thing. Let’s go find something hard.” I joined the Army. I went to a Cav Scout unit. It wasn’t hard. I was like, “There has to be something cooler, or I’m going to get out.” I wasn’t yet eligible to go to the unit because I was still too junior. I applied for the 160th and went there. That was so cool working with all of the different units and traveling everywhere, but then that got boring.
All I did was go to a hangar, set up a talk, coordinate all the communications, but then when they were doing operations, I was in the talk or not even because I wasn’t the one talking on the radios. As soon as I could, I applied to go to the unit, and that was challenging. That’s what I was looking for. Working with the best there is. Every day, I was trying to keep up. Everybody wanted to be there. It was so cool.
We look at elite performance. We always put our special operators at the top of the list when we look at the military. Even when you look at professional athletes and Olympic athletes, they have a mindset. I’m thinking about this because you said you were a Cav Scout, and it wasn’t hard. You wanted to chase the thing that was hard. When you look back at that decision and think about the things that drive you, that make you want to go and be elite, how do you develop that mentality, and then how do you maintain it over a long time?
You develop it. You just do it. I hate that the guy next to me is better than me. I’ve got to keep up with him. “He’s having fun. This is fun, but I have to be good at what I do to do the fun things.” I always believe in doing the best that you can at everything. That’s what I tell my kids to do. A big choice for when I applied to go to the unit was also my kids. If I’m telling my kids they have to do the best that they can, I have to. I can’t tell them to do their best, so I was like, “They used to tell me that I was the big fish in a little pond. I aced the fitness test. Everything was not that challenging.” If I’m telling my kids to go do something hard, I have to go do something hard. It was hard.
Why did you get out?
I got hurt. This knee has a giant hole in the cartilage. It has a chronically torn meniscus. Because of that, you can imagine it messes up your hips, ankles, shoulders, and back. I couldn’t run anymore. I couldn’t put on a kit like an idiot. They offered me admin positions. I was like, “You can’t lock me in an office for ten years. We’re going to drive each other nuts.” It was time. It was probably one of the hardest choices I ever made. I was also going through a nasty divorce while making that choice. All of my life was changing at once, but I just went for it. It worked out. We have this amazing business. My wife is cool. My kids are awesome. I’m pretty stoked with how everything is going.
Let’s talk about that transition process. We talked about doing hard things and serving in Special Operations, by far, one of the hardest things all of us who serve in the community have gone through. My list is being a collegiate rower, physically and mentally, a lot, probably the hardest thing I’ve ever done. It prepared me extremely well for going to Ranger School and Special Forces Qualification Course, understanding that you have to embrace the suck. It’s nothing as bad as a 2,000-meter race in rowing. You can grit and bear it when you’re cold, tired, wet, and hungry.
There’s a transition. Often when I look back at my career, I’m like, “That was hard.” Transition was hard in a lot of ways that I never expected it to be. Talk about your transition process when you were getting out. You were trying to figure out, “What do I want to be when I grow up?” How do you go from serving at that elite level to making the decision to come out and then saying, “I’m going to go build a knife company?”
I got out during COVID, which made everything a million times harder. On my last day in the Army, we met down in the Human Resources troop. I think it was 7:30 in the morning. “Sign your leave form.” I signed my leave form, and then I handed in my badge. They escorted me out of the building. That was my goodbye ceremony. I didn’t get to say bye to anybody. Nobody even knew I left. “That’s it. Eleven years in the Army, and that’s how it ends.” I don’t even have one of my plaques. My troop Sergeant Major said, “It is coming tomorrow.”
I got out in 2020 or 2021. It’s been years, and I still don’t have my gift. There was no ceremony. It was in the Army, out of the Army. That was rough. All the crazy stuff was going on in Afghanistan. I was like, “I got friends over there, and I’m stuck here.” That was a little hard to get through, but then we started this knife company. We started hiring veterans and supporting our community. Being able to have a lot of like-minded people here and help them through all of that has been cool.
The three guys who help run the production of the shop, John, Mikey, and Roy, were all interns as they transitioned out. For their last 6 to 8 months, they were in the Army, but coming here, which was cool because they didn’t have to go to PT or put up with any of the nonsense, they got to slowly figure out how to be a normal human again. We hired them, which was the best. We gave them a place to land, a place to be part of a team again.
What we’re trying to build here is a place to build a community. “You’re not in the Army anymore. Now, you’re a part of our family.” We took our whole shop for the whole day out to a range. We had this whole range complex, and we all spread out. We shot all the long-range and short-range pistols. It was great. It’s team building. It’s a lot more than just making knives. We’re building a community here.
How many people do you have working in the company now?
We have about twenty.
That’s not a small company.
We’re trying to hire more. We can’t keep up, which is amazing. Who would have thought this would have happened a couple of years ago?
Did you know anything about knives?
YouTube does. My oldest son was seven. I just wanted a hobby. I needed something to do with my free time. We started making knives. We got a little piece of steel off the internet and some hand tools. My ex-wife told me I was an idiot. She was like, “You’ll never be any good at this.” “No, I’m going to try anyway. Why not?” We started filing a piece of metal. I was like, “That’s cool.” We made a few more, and they started looking and functioning like real knives. We took them into the team room, and the guys bought them faster than I could make them. “There’s something to this. This is fun, making something cool. I could do it with my family.” It’s about as cool as it gets.
Your family is involved in the business. One of the first things you said to me when we showed up here was that your sons and your daughter are fully involved in the business. They have to work here for a certain number of hours every day. They get paid. They’re on the payroll. Some of that money gets invested. You’re spending a lot of time developing a work ethic in them. Why is having the family involved in the business so important to you?
A lot of it is when I was in the Army, I was gone all the time. You know how it is. We’re never home. Now, I have this chance to be around my kids all the time and my wife. Normally, when we travel, we all go together. I never have to be away from them, which is cool. They’re learning all of these skills. They can stand at a trade show booth, talk to a thousand grown-ups in a day, hold conversations, and eloquently talk about our knives and all the processes. They know the prices. They can negotiate pricing, and they can walk around the show floor and haggle with people, “I got this thing. I want that thing. You want to trade?”
They go back and forth. It’s the coolest thing in the world to see. They can walk around the shop and work with grown-ups. I see so many kids. We see them here. Sometimes, they come to try and work here. They can’t put their phone down. They’re like, “It’s on my phone.” “Time to work. Let’s go.” We’re trying to teach our kids. “Here’s all the tools to create whatever life you want.” They’re on the payroll, and at least 70% of their paycheck goes to our investment accounts.
Can you imagine being a ten-year-old and already having an investment account going? By the time you’re our age, you can be filthy rich, but we’re trying to build those good habits from the beginning. That way, you don’t have to break bad habits. You start with good ones. They work two hours a day. They want to work more. We don’t let them work over a certain number of hours a day. They would work here all day because they find tasks they like doing.
Try to build good habits from the beginning so you don’t have to break bad ones.
They like being here, but we tell them to go be kids. Go be shut up on the jujitsu mats in the garage. They like to dry fire. We have one of those ACE virtual trainers. Those things are cool. Go draw and do kid things, but they’re learning. They’re learning photography, how to run a business, and how to deal with people. It’s super cool having them here as a part of all of this.
They’re well-versed in the business. As we were setting up here, we’re talking to them. They can talk about every aspect of the production cycle and why that happens. It was amazing to see how much detail they knew about the whole process, how involved they are, and how excited to do so.
Honestly, it’s so cool that they’re interested in it because if they didn’t want to work, I wouldn’t force them to, but they want to. That’s cool to me. They know how to do almost everything. They can’t run the CNC machine for the handles, but they can sharpen knives, and they can probably do between them 80% of a knife. It’s pretty crazy.
How hard is that entrepreneurism?
I don’t know. It depends. Ask me in an hour.
I live it every day. It’s true. We’re laughing because I know exactly what you’re talking about. You wake up in the morning, and you’re like, “I run the best business in the world.” By lunch, you’re poor. You’ve got to shut it down. By dinner, we’re crushing it, and we’re going to take this thing to the next level.
That’s about it. I wouldn’t trade it for anything. There’s always a new challenge. A new thing to learn is what I like about it. “I finally got this invoicing system to work. Now, I’ve got to figure out how the next thing works. That did not work. Let’s retry that.” Dealing with people is hard. It’s not like in the Army, you can fire people. It took me a while to learn that. You have to give them a million chances. I am learning how to navigate people and how to build a team. Every person on our team is amazing. We have a really strict interview process and culture. You have to fit in with the people. We can teach you how to make a knife, but I can’t teach you how to be a good human and fit in with our team because we’ve learned the hard way. It takes one person to ruin the whole culture. That’s a nightmare.
People are the most challenging thing we do every single day, not only as leaders, but certainly as entrepreneurs and as business owners. Almost every day, I get to get up between 3:30 and 5:00 in the morning because that’s the time until about 7:00, when the kids start getting up, where it’s protected time. I can get my work done. I have three kids. You got four, so you got 25% more problems than I do. It’s a lot of problems once that gets going, and then you’ve got to worry about running the business. Once everyone starts showing up in the business, you’re now in people management. Your ability to do your thing starts to become more and more difficult throughout the day.
Often what happens to me is, even when we got here into Fayetteville at about 9:30, I was still doing the thing that I was doing at 3:15 in the morning because I had dealt with so many other things that came up during the day. What I think is important for special operators to know when they are preparing to transition is that you are well-suited as a special operator to run a business. It doesn’t mean, though, that you’ve got to have some great idea, be the next Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk, and come up with some idea that nobody has ever heard of.
You’re making knives. Knives have been around for thousands of years. We used to use rocks until we started calling them knives. We were in a security business, and there are a tremendous number of what I call non-sexy businesses that are critical to make the world run, that people are interested in, that can do well. You don’t have to go create the next software that’s going to change the way people play on their phones.
Learning in the military, everything is a problem. We’re professional problem solvers. That’s what being an entrepreneur is. Everything is a problem. What’s the solution? There is a solution. There’s always one. Look at it from a different angle. Go around and look at it from the bottom. How do I look at it from a different angle? We’re going to find the solution. It doesn’t matter what the problem is. Making a knife is just a thing. How many different ways can we make a knife? How many different ways can we sell a knife? Everything is a problem. How do you solve it? Being an entrepreneur is not easy, but you’ve done harder things.
How many SKUs do you have?
We’re at about 160. That’s all the different models and all their different color variations. We have seven colors per model.
Who has designed all those?
We have a couple of partners who designed a few of them, but overall, I’ve designed almost all of them.
Talk about the materials that you use. One of the things that has been important to you is to maintain quality. If we look back at the Special Operations Forces truths, people are more important than hardware. Quality is better than quantity, number two on that list of five. How are you maintaining quality through this process?
We start with known good materials. We use 1095 high-carbon steel for all of our knives. It’s been around forever. It’s going to take an absolute beating and hold an edge. It’s easy to sharpen. It’s also in the lower price point of steel. We can work hard to keep our prices where we can afford them. We want to be able to afford our own knives. We don’t want to charge $500 for one of our knives, but we have quality control checks all the way along the way. Before they come from the building where they’re all made and come over here, they go through a QC where somebody goes through every step of it. As we oil, the knives are getting checked, looked over, and checked for sharpness again.
We take a lot of steps to make sure everything’s perfect. We have no issues kicking it back to like, “This isn’t good.” The culture we’re creating is, “If this knife isn’t sharp, it’s not an emotional event. It’s either sharp or it’s not sharp. If it’s not sharp, we redo it.” There’s no finger-pointing. If somebody makes a mistake, we find out what happened. We don’t make fun of you for it. How do we solve it? How do we prevent it from the next time? You have to take the emotions out of it. “The knife isn’t sharp.”
We had one guy get mad because we kicked back some of the knives. He flipped out and quit. “They’re not sharp. It’s either sharp or it is not sharp.” That’s it. That culture that we’ve worked hard to build is that everybody wants the best knife possible to come out of here. If a knife gets kicked back to you to fix it, “Cool. No big deal. I know how to fix this.” It is what we work hard for.
This industry, too, is very competitive. I went to the SHOT Show. I have never been in a show that big. I never saw more knives. I never saw more guns. That is saying a lot, considering some of the places that we’ve been. How do you maintain a competitive advantage in a very dominated market?
I would say relationships. I’m big about helping everybody we meet and being a good human. By creating relationships, like with the Green Beret Foundation, there are a million knives, and our knife isn’t necessarily better than anybody else’s, but we were able to make friends with everybody. Our friend connected us to Doug, who connected us to you. It’s helping people. We’re helping solve people’s problems. We make friends with everybody.
If I meet people who are starting a business, I connect them to anybody that I know. That always ends up connecting to somebody else. By helping people, it always comes back around. We’re big fans of being good humans. It always works out that way. Sometimes, I look at that. “If the knife industry is down 35%, why are we up a whole lot over that? What are we doing differently?” I don’t know. Being nice to people is what it has come down to.
Just helping people always comes back around. We’re big fans of being a good human, and it always works out that way.
What’s next for you? Where do you go from here? The Green Beret dagger is coming out for release here. There’s going to be two versions. We got the one version, which is being fielded to the graduating classes from the Special Forces Qualification Course, but also can be bought by anyone who can prove that they are, or were, a Green Beret. They can go to the Green Beret Foundation, which is working with you to field and get these out to them. There’s going to be another version of this for the civilian market.
It’s the same profile. It’s not going to be Cerakoted. It’s going to be our normal acid-etched finish. It’s going to have a Ranger green handle, which is the color of the Green Beret. It’s going to be very similar, just different colors, and that’ll be available for purchase by civilians or anybody. Most of the money from that’s going to go to support the Green Beret Foundation. Those are going to be available through all of our distributors, all of our dealers on our website, and on the Green Beret Foundation’s website. Those will be easy to find, hopefully. We’re hoping to sell a whole bunch of those to raise a lot of money for you guys.
Whatever we can do to help support that, we’re all in on that effort. Where do you want to be with the company in five years?
Right here still, having fun, making knives, and hiring as many veterans and people from our community as we can. By continuing to collaborate with different companies and grow what we’re doing, we’re going to make it quite far. We’re just getting started. I don’t have a big five-year picture. It’s hard to forecast that. We’re doing well, so we want to keep the momentum we have and continue to support our community.
I love what you guys are doing and bringing veterans in. One of the biggest differentiators we have in my security company is that we’re very veteran-centric, and we bring in veterans. The majority of our team are veterans, mostly out of Special Operations, because you’ve got this mindset of, “Whatever it takes, we’re going to get the job done.” That’s evident when you walk around here, when you see the quality of what you guys are producing, and when we look at the fact that they’re already fielded and in the hands of folks who are coming out of the course. It is all about the willingness to solve the complex challenges and get that job done.
They changed the design on us about four weeks before the graduation, and on the day they finalized the design, they said, “The next graduation is in less than four weeks. Good luck.”
What did you do? Rally a team, put in the work, and get going.
We made it happen.
It was super successful. We had folks who attended the event. Everyone we talked to who went said it was awesome. It brought back a very important aspect of what it means to be a Green Beret and closed that chapter of the Special Forces Qualification Course. Just because you graduate from the course doesn’t mean that you’re going to be a great Green Beret.
We tell those guys all the time, “You’ve got a seat at the table now, but you’ve got to earn it every single day.”
You look back at your time in the course and what you’ve learned, how you’ve grown, how you’ve matured, and how you start to embrace the ethos of the Special Forces Regiment, having this in your hand when you walk away and walk out of that Regimental First Formation. You look around, and everyone’s got it. It’s numbered, and you signed for it. There are many like it, but this will always be theirs. It’s impactful and sits with you for the rest of your career and the rest of your life.
Chris, I appreciate you spending some time with us. I appreciate what you’ve done for the regiment, what you’ve done for our fellow Green Berets, and what you’re doing for the Green Beret Foundation. We talk about leading the way and how Special Operations is the tip of the spear. You’re setting the example for all of us.
I am trying to. Thank you. It’s a huge honor to be doing this. We’ve got great things to come. Thanks.
Green Beret Foundation
P.O. Box 25138
New York, NY 10087-5138
Note: Please use USPS mail or priority mail. Do not use FedEx.
15618 Summit Park Drive, Suite 801 Montgomery, TX 77356
Call: at: (844) 287-7133
