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Lauryn Ritchie, the filmmaker behind Bombs to Booze, a 2025 Heartland Emmy nominee currently streaming on Prime Video, feels that Veterans Day should be about more than simply thanking vets for their time in uniform.
“To me, it’s such an important time to really celebrate our veterans and reflect on their sacrifices,” she notes. “But a lot of time, when people think about Veterans Day, they think it stops at their service. But we need to think about the unique issues they face when they transition back to civilian life.”
When Ritchie started the project, she had no idea how all-consuming it would be, or the ways it would change the trajectory of her life. A Colorado native raised in Colorado Springs, she majored in video production at Colorado State University, then moved to Denver after graduation without quite settling on a career direction.
“I didn’t know what kind of film I wanted to get into,” Ritchie concedes. “But my parents had heard about the person Bombs to Booze is about and told me I should check him out.”
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The broad outlines of the tale are told on the website of 3 Hundred Days Distilling, a brewpub in Monument. The blog “From Bomb Tech to Distiller” details 3 Hundred Days founder Mike Girard’s nearly 23 years in the Army, with more than half of it devoted to explosive ordnance disposal — “a special group of military men and women responsible for disarming and disposing of unexploded military ordnance or, for lack of a better word, bombs,” he wrote.
Rather than tossing out a particular device, however, Girard repurposed it in a unique way.
“Mike used a defused bomb to make moonshine, and then he brought it home to use in his distillery,” Ritchie explains.
Initially, Ritchie assumed a film about Girard wouldn’t go much beyond these basic facts. “It was supposed to be a little five-minute film that I would put on YouTube — something to keep me busy after graduating college,” she recalls.
Girard had other ideas.
“He essentially said that if I wanted to make a film only about him — like an ego-booster piece — he had no interest,” Ritchie reveals. “But he said if I wanted to use his story as a timeline in telling a greater story about veterans’ mental health and encouraging them to seek out help, he was all for it. And as soon as I heard that, I knew I had to take it on.”
The topic was hardly a tangent. After coming home, Girard became a vocal advocate for veterans, and to help them with their own transition, he created an event called the 0.K Run for Veteran Mental Health — and the zero in the name isn’t a typo. According to Ritchie, “Mike was tired of events that just raised awareness. So he came up with the idea of a marathon where you don’t actually run, but you get a marathon of information. You get to meet with people from different treatment facilities, who come out and give you direct information about who might be helpful to you. That way, people attending the event walk away with a name or a number, and not just some nebulous encouragement to reach out for help.”
Holly Lynch/Holly Lynch Photo
Before long, Ritchie found herself sitting down with a wide array of 0.K Run attendees, who shared their own combat experiences and the challenges they faced when returning home. Thanks to the richness of these conversations, Bombs to Booze morphed into something far beyond her original conception. “Everyone had amazing things to share and such incredible insights that the film kept growing until it ended up being a forty-minute documentary.”
The conclusion of the doc echoes the spirit of the 0.K event. “Our goal is that we want people to watch and, when it ends, feel encouraged to get help. And if they’re local to Colorado, there’s a list of organizations that they can reach out to,” Ritchie says. “There are a lot of nonprofits and organizations out there that want to help our veteran community, but so many of our vets just don’t know they exist.”
At present, Ritchie is hard at work on another documentary “with a slightly different subject matter. It focuses on food insecurity in our northern Colorado communities.” But, she adds, “I’m hoping to do more projects specifically related to mental health and our veterans.”
