Chris Cathers looks a little nervous in the photograph, which, say the people who knew him, was not typical for the former Green Beret and veterans advocate.
Robert Vaughn met Cathers when the two were young soldiers suffering together through the Army’s Special Forces selection course at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. They both became Green Berets, and through 30 years of friendship that included war and cancer, Vaughn said he never knew Cathers to be scared of much.
Cathers spent his career in Special Forces and, later, as a CIA ground officer, deploying to the post-9/11 wars. Off-duty, he was a fearless prankster who once tricked Vaughn into holding fireworks while Vaughn was recovering from knee surgery.
“He said he needed me to hold one,” Vaughn said, who was walking with crutches. “He lights it, and it had a short fuse, and he yells, ‘Run!’ I was like, ‘you motherfucker.’”
But though fearless when pranking Army buddies, Cathers looks anxious in the photo. Perhaps because the man next to him, giving a ‘you da man’ finger point and putting his arm around Cathers, is Chris Pratt, the actor who has made a career in the last decade making military fare like “Zero Dark Thirty” and Amazon’s “The Terminal List.”
Cathers might be nervous because, having blown a previous chance to get a photo with Pratt, this moment would be his last.
After a multi-year battle with cancer, Cathers died in February in North Carolina.
A fatal diagnosis leads to a new mission
In 2018, Cathers received a terminal cancer diagnosis and was told he should expect six months to live. The news drove him to alcohol and a suicide attempt, but he fought through the turmoil
For him it was alcohol,” Vaughn said. “But he got clean and sober, basically.”
In 2022, he asked Vaughn and a third friend from Green Beret selection, Ron Griffin, to come by his house to talk about something by the fire pit.
“We thought this was gonna be some bad news, ya know,” Vaughn recalls. “That’s when he said he wanted to start Brothers Keeper.”
Under the mantra, “Connection is prevention,” Cathers launched the Brothers Keeper Veteran Foundation, whose goal is to connect veterans in mental crisis with survivors like him who have been there. The foundation became the focus of his final years. One vet the foundation works closely with is Christian Brunetti, a former Army Psychological Operations soldier turned Hollywood stuntman and filmmaker, struggling with his own mental health.
With shared backgrounds in Army special operations, Brunetti and Cathers became friends, as Brunetti picked up work on Amazon Studio’s “The Terminal List,” starring Pratt.
Cathers loved the show and Pratt, in particular, Brunetti said. In 2025, as his cancer worsened, he called Brunetti.
“He knew he was dying,” Brunetti said. “He literally called me up and said, ‘Hey, I don’t know if I’ll be around next year. I know you’re working. I’d love to just come see you.’”
A missed photo and immediate regrets
Brunetti enlisted the show’s David DiGilio.
“And as soon as Dave DiGilio and everybody heard Chris’s story, they’re like, ‘We want him to come to the [filming of the] finale.’”
Catchers joined Brunetti in Toronto for the final days of shooting the second season of “The Terminal List.” Cathers made fast friends on the crew, which included 17 veterans.
“He said, ‘I’m coming as your friend. I’m not even going to take a single picture,’” Brunetti recalls. “‘I don’t want to get you in trouble.’ I was like, ‘You’re not going to get me in trouble. You’re fine.’ But he was paranoid about getting me in trouble.”
The two found Pratt after the final scene.
“They start talking,” Brunetti recalled. “They have a quick 10, 15 minute conversation. They’re laughing, and Chris turns to Cathers and says, ‘Hey, man, you want to take a picture?’ And Cathers froze.”
Pratt, in an interview with Task & Purpose ahead of the season two debut of “The Terminal List,” recalled their first meeting.
“I think everyone had been told, like, ‘Hey, listen, we’re not doing photos, no one’s doing photos,’” Pratt said. “I was like, ‘Are you kidding, of course we’re gonna take a picture.’ What kind of an asshole would be like, ‘I can’t believe he asked me for a picture.’”
“He goes, ‘No, man, I’m good,” Brunetti said. “And I just die laughing because I know, immediately, what was going on in his head, because he wanted to take a picture.”
With that, the two left.
“Chris kind of gave him a hug and said, ‘Well, it was nice to meet you,’ and walked on,” Brunetti said. “And Cathers, as soon as he walks off, he goes, ‘What did I just say?’”
Brunetti teased his friend relentlessly in the coming days. But within a week, the two would have another chance at the August 2025 premiere party for an earlier season in New York.
In a boozy ballroom filled with other special ops vets involved in the production, Catheres grabbed Pratt as Sarah Schmiedeknecht, Brothers Keeper’s executive director, snapped a picture. Pratt gave him the pointed finger.
Cathers passed away six months later in February. Vaughn now runs Brothers Keeper, raising funds and looking for outreach opportunities. Though he runs the operation, he says the non-profit will never name another formal CEO.
“Chris will always be the CEO,” he said.
At the core of the foundation, said Vaughn, is connecting an active network of veterans in various stages of recovery and treatment. The foundation breaks its programs into three phases: survive, stabilize, and thrive. That begins, he said, with connecting vets to each other.
“It’s a brotherhood, and you want to feel that camaraderie again,” said Vaughn. “They want to connect to that feeling, and it’s gone.”
The “survive” stage, he said, is the most urgent.
“It’s the most dangerous time,” Vaughn said. “They have such a short window. Usually the suicide idiation comes with some kind of substance abuse, and you might have a window of an hour.”
The foundation runs clinical programs, from group sessions connecting veterans, to programs for caregivers and family, to financial literacy classes.
“Sometimes you go back on the wagon or fall off the wagon and have to get back on,” he said. “Sometimes those categories go back and forth.”
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