Eric and his friend Chad became friends in high school by sharing a love of music. They eventually discovered they shared a love of firearms as well. In 2008, Eric and Chad began to record their reloading days and trips to the range on a little Sony point and shoot camera – just for fun. Eric uploaded these videos to YouTube and noticed that he started gaining subscribers. He would receive an email for each new subscriber and one day woke up to over 300 email notifications at which point he had to disable those notifications! YouTube invited Iraqveteran8888 to become one of the first 50 channels to become part of their new "partners" program – they wanted to place ads on the content. Today Iraqveteran8888 has over 2.4 million subscribers and over 498 million video views.