Hooten & Young: Made to remember

By Jennifer Williams

We meet Norm Hooten and Tim Young on the hazy back porch of the Ashburn Hill Plantation in South Georgia one rainy afternoon in September, ready to talk about Hooten Young.

Smoking cigars and sipping whiskey with a small group of friends, they exude a casual confidence, but their body language and strategic placement of seats hint at combined experiences that helped shape the company we hope to discuss, which was created as a brotherhood bonded by the love of freedom, family and honor. 

A brotherhood bonded by the love of freedom, family and honor.

Established in 2018 by these two great men and their friends pursing the American Dream, Hooten Young is a brand dedicated to providing fine cigars and smooth spirits as a tribute to the brave men and women of the armed forces who have gone above and beyond the call of duty. Rooted in the belief that anything worth doing should be done with excellence, Hooten Young maintains that only when done at the highest standard can it truly honor those who are expected to give nothing less, and only then can the stories live on. 

And boy, do these guys have stories …

HOOTEN YOUNG IS A BRAND DEDICATED TO PROVIDING FINE CIGARS AND SMOOTH SPIRITS AS A TRIBUTE TO THE BRAVE MEN AND WOMEN OF THE ARMED FORCES WHO HAVE GONE ABOVE AND BEYOND THE CALL OF DUTY.

Former Delta Force Master Sergeant Norm Hooten tends not to talk much about his years in the Army and its Special Forces community, but he is most famous for being a part of the 1993 military operation depicted in the movie Black Hawk Down, in which he was portrayed by Eric Bana. 

Tim Young, a successful and dynamic individual with a long career in business is a longtime friend and Norm’s business partner in this venture. Like many good pairings, you wouldn’t think they belong together until you see them interact … and it all makes sense.

It is clear in our meeting that Norm is fearless — not in a reckless or a thoughtless way, but rather highly calculated without the fear of making a mistake. We joke that this is Norm’s “third life” following his career in the Special Forces community, then his earning a PhD in Pharmacology and continuing to serve with the Veteran’s Administration in units primarily focused on PTSD, and now his latest chapter, in which he and Tim started and grew an amazing line of American Whiskey and premium cigars — without really intending to do so.

Neither he or Tim had a background or any experience other than being consumers in this trade, but that didn’t stop them from hatching an idea that became Hooten Young on a night much like this one while sitting around with friends, smoking cigars, sipping whiskey and reminiscing about days gone by and friends made and lost along the way. 

Today, on that back porch, nearly 30 years after the incident that has defined much of his life, Norm joins Tim in reflecting back to another back porch where the idea for Hooten Young was born. That night brought memories of the past into the thoughts of the future. They realized that one of the best ways to honor those gone before was to keep their stories alive. Stories they found easier to tell as the nights went on. The question became how to make the most of those long nights. For these guys, it was a great cigar, a rich whiskey or a vintage red that stretched through the evening.

“God has a plan,” laughs Tim. “We still don’t understand how we did this.”

THE GIFT

Norm and Tim realized that the things that brought them together would do the same for others. Born from the stories they shared, Hooten Young was created to help people slow down, bond with the people around them, remember those that are no longer here and to celebrate the selfless acts of servicemen and servicewomen.

“It all started out as an idea for a gift,” adds Norm. “We enjoyed cigars and whiskey together and I believe we were sitting on my back porch when we decided to make some special cigars for my buddies at Bragg [to honor] a special anniversary on October 3 that was coming up…you gotta be careful what you say to Tim because he takes it and runs with it!”

“Tim had a buddy from Cuba who makes great cigars and before we knew it, we had 300 cigars that we self-banded,” says Norm. “We wanted to share the experience with [our buddies] and contribute to that big day for those guys. We came up with an off-the-cuff slogan, “Made to Remember” which is now the company slogan. We put that on our first band and never thought it would go anywhere from there, but we sent them up to Fort Bragg and before we knew it, we were getting orders for boxes of cigars. So many, in fact, we started selling them — you can only give away so many,” he laughs.

Now, Hooten Young not only sells cigars with names including Operation Gothic Serpent and Operation Neptune Spear — names for the missions of the October 3, 1993, Battle of Mogadishu in Somalia and the 2011 raid that killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan — but they also offer various American whiskeys.

NORM AND TIM

REALIZED THAT

THE THINGS THAT

BROUGHT THEM

TOGETHER WOULD

DO THE SAME FOR

OTHERS.

The original Hooten Young American Whiskey, made with a mash bill of 99% corn and 1% barley, aged 12 years and then bottled at 92 proof from second fill barrels, received Double Gold in the 2020 World Spirits Competition for Cigar and Spirits Magazine and the Double Gold in the 2022 SIP Awards for International Consumer Tasting. 

Hooten Young products can be ordered on their website, and can be found in stores from Georgia to California.

HUMBLE BEGINNINGS AND RITES OF PASSAGE

Norm grew up on a dusty farm in a small, West Texas community, as a “free-range kid,” playing football and getting into typical teenage trouble. His mother was the daughter of a Baptist preacher, he says, and his dad was a Hellraiser.

“There I was, a little kid, unsupervised at about seven years old, running around on a ranch in west Texas…”

“My family had every vice,” he says, recalling his first experience with alcohol. “My dad used to make moonshine in the barn, and I used to watch him go through the process. He called me over one day — I was about seven — and told me to take a little bit right off the still…I think he was doing it to basically break me of my curiosity. I took one sip and it was like liquid fire. I didn’t touch it again until I was like 12.”

Tobacco was another story. “Everyone in my family smoked,” said Norm. “I remember being young, playing in a plastic kiddie pool using a jump rope end tube as a makeshift snorkel when my grandfather came over while I was under water and blew smoke into [the tube] … another harsh experience, but I never smoked cigarettes or anything when I was a kid. I did enjoy chewing tobacco, and that continued through my time in the military.”

There, Norm says, they would always carry a cigar to enjoy after a mission or special events or a promotion or to have to smoke in honor of a buddy if he passed on.

Norm also recalls his first firearm — a model 64 Winchester 22 short. “There I was, a little kid, unsupervised at about seven years old, running around on a ranch in west Texas…today, that would be considered child abuse or something. We used to take firearms to school for show and tell — 'this is what I got for Christmas.’ We didn’t have school shootings. [Guns} were just a way of life.” Tim’s upbringing was also in Texas, although it was a bit different. His father served 34 years in the military. He recalls drinking beer as part of the football culture in the state and smoking his first cigar in a fraternity in college. “But I didn’t know you weren’t supposed to inhale,” he says. “That was the last cigar I smoked until I met Norm. He got me hooked up. I love cigars now.”

Tim got my first firearm at 16 — a Remington 870 pump. “My parents could only afford a shotgun,” he says. “My dad said I couldn’t use it until I learned how to clean it, so three months later, I learned how to shoot it. Ironically enough, every one of my teammates in Corpus (Christi) had a shotgun, so we would go shoot after school. It was an awesome life. I still enjoy shooting. That same shotgun — I still have it and it looks brand new. I still clean it just like my dad taught me.” 

After high school, Tim says his dad gave him the choice to go to college or join the military. “I told him I’d already served in the military — been to every post, even worked in the commissary, so I chose to go to Texas A&M,” he says.

There, he says he enjoyed a “free reign of drinking and smoking and having a good time.” He lasted two and a half years at A&M before transferring to Baylor, which “was the best thing that ever happened to me—the smaller campus and class sizes really set me in the right direction. And I met my wife at Baylor.” 

Tim flew to Boston to meet his future wife’s family, and they ended up spending the first five years of their marriage there. “I was so glad to get out of there,” he says. “We ended up in Florida. We love Florida, love Texas, we love the South: You can speak what you want to say. We all have an ingrained integrity level [and we] don’t have anything to hide. I feel like there’s always another agenda elsewhere. We’re good conservative guys and we do our thing.”

These things … memories of a first firearm, drink or smoke, served as symbols of manhood, as rites of passage in America. After high school, Norm worked in a Houston lumberyard for a while, but had always thought about joining the military. “At our local barber shop, there were these old guys coming in and we had WWI vets, a lot of WWII vets — who seemed so old at the time — and Vietnam was ongoing … in our little tiny town, most people didn’t have the means to go off to university, so many joined the military and came back home. They were very influential on me. I listened to their stories and those guys were my heroes.”

A few things contributed to Norm joining the Army at 18 — including getting stopped by police while he was bringing moonshine from his dad to his dad’s buddies in Houston. “I never thought anything of it, to be honest,” he says, “but the consequences of that helped me make up my mind.” 

“My first choice was the Marine Corps, since most of the guys I knew were in the Marines and I thought they were the toughest guys I ever met,” he says. “As I was on my way in to

take the oath, I met a Green Beret recruiter on temporary duty at the recruiting station, and the more I learned about the Army and all the things they offered — airborne school, shoot guns…it wasn’t money, I wanted to do the fun stuff — that appealed to me. It was the adventurous part of it.”

So Norm switched gears and found himself on a long, cold bus ride to Fort Sill, Oklahoma in January 1981. “It was a quiet, all-night bus ride,” he says. “I grew up as kind of a tough kid … played a lot of sports, so getting yelled at and stuff didn’t bother me. The hardest part was being told when I could go to the bathroom. Having every second of your day accounted for was an adjustment. The physical stuff and the shooting and the range was fun. I liked that. But the regimentation of your lifestyle was the hard part.”

SPECIAL FORCES TRACK

Norm was on an SF contract. “They had the ‘SF baby’ program at the time,” he says. “So I came straight off the block and went straight to basic, AIT, airborne school, and then straight into the Q course. First time I’d been on an airplane was when I took that flight from Oklahoma City to Georgia.”

“I got to learn

from some of

the best guys of

their generation ...

They didn’t have

a manual. They

were Writing the Manual.”

And then he soon found himself jumping out of airplanes. “My very first jump at Fort Benning,” he says, “I had an entanglement. It was a static line on a c130 and we were going out both sides. Me and this other guy wrapped around each other. Up to that point, we just had classroom and ground training. It happened so fast and we stayed tangled the whole way down. As we got closer to the ground, some guy with a bullhorn trying to tell us how to get untangled, but we didn’t do that. It all turned out OK, obviously,” he laughs.

After jump school, Norm headed to Fort Bragg, then was bused to Camp McCall. “I’ll never forget the first Special Forces soldier I remember meeting there — Major Bob Howard. He was a legendary medal of honor winner from the Vietnam era and was everything you could imagine in a Special Forces Soldier. To this day, he set the standard.” Retired Colonel Robert Howard served 36 years in the U.S. Army and died from pancreatic cancer in 2009. He is arguably the most decorated active-duty Solider to ever serve in the U.S. military.

Norm says he expected the Q Course to be relatively easy, as he had found basic at jump school, but he was mistaken. “As soon as I got off the bus, it hit the fan,” he says. “When I got off that bus at Camp McCall, I know it was going to be a ballbuster. And it didn’t stop for eight weeks.”

“It was very, very physical,” he says. “We did PT twice a day — a ruck in the morning and a run at night or vice versa, and everything in-between. You were patrolling, land navigating, learning all the things that were common skills for a Special Forces Solider at the time. This was 1981, and all our doctrine and training was based on what had happened in Vietnam. We spent a lot of time in the woods on tactics.” 

“It was no joke,” he continued. “I’d done a lot of walking around in the desert as a kid, but I’d never used a compass or a map and had to learn that on the fly. I just did everything they told me to do. To the letter.”

Roughly 200 people started that Q Course with Norm, but after all was said and done, only about 30 completed the training. “There was a high attrition rate because a lot of guys were like me — maybe not had much experience,” he says. “It seemed the course was designed more for an NCO, who had at least a basic understanding of what was going on. The kids that did finish that course — turned out to be some pretty good dudes.” 

The military has changed over the years, says Norm, and not all for the better. 

“It’s different now,” he says. “When I went in the army, they could still snatch you up and beat the hell out of you. It’s not like they could write you up on paper. Actually, I liked it better — that paper stays around forever … you take an ass-kicking and it’s over. I think some guys, if they had a chance to learn the hard way, could become amazing contributors — those real lessons. I prefer the hard way over the paperwork and stuff because you can’t recover from that. Somebody kicks your butt or makes you walk 40 miles with a ruck, that may be brutal, but it’s over with and it’s a lesson.”

At this point, Norm was a hard, 21-year-old who was assigned to the 5th Group. “I was super pumped. It was such an honor to one day be on one side of the fence, looking at these Green Berets, and then to be on the other side as one of them … it was the greatest achievement of my young life. I was lucky enough to be picked for an A team right off the bat.”

There were only a few Soldiers in the company who had not been in combat, says Norm. “These were different soldiers,” he says. “They were hunters. These guys went in for 30 days at a time and hunted in the jungle while they were being hunted. They had a different mindset. Still to this day, it gives me goosebumps thinking about the greatness that I walked among — at the time, I knew they were great, but now, looking back, they were even greater than I thought they were. I was very lucky.” 

Norm spent about five and a half years with 5th Group, including serving on a SADAM Team (Special Atomic Demolitions and Munitions), where as the young guy, he carried a 83-pound, onekiloton nuke in his rucksack, along with his regular gear “and a parachute, if we were jumping,” he says. 

“And that’s why they take you when you’re 21,” he says. Norm found himself wanting to be more involved in “the directaction stuff, and Delta Force seemed like the guys who were doing most of that,” he says. “Nobody really knew anything about them but there were rumors … and the rumor was probably more powerful than the truth. I wanted to be a part of that.” Norm discovered another side of the special forces trade. “It was a different process,” he says. “It was the hardest thing I did in the Army as far as performance on demand … you were out on your own, all year long, making decisions by yourself.” 

Norm made the selection process and transferred to Delta Force C Squadron in 1986-87. “It was a great call for me,” he says. “I got to learn from some of the best guys of their generation. An awesome experience. They didn’t have a manual. They were writing the manual. They were the ones developing the tactics, techniques and procedures for modern Special Forces Soldiers.”

With Delta Force, Norm found himself involved in various missions, from the Cuban prison riots in the late 1980s, Beruit, Lebanon, Panama and Somalia. “Each one was unique and you had to go back and start over each time,” he says. “It really taught you how to think about not only what you’re going to do but why you’re going to do it and more importantly, why not other options. So it made us smarter.”

All of his training led to that October day in Mogadishu. “It was the most highly publicized operation of the unit — may still be,” says Norm. “That was the beginning of the JORT Joint Operation Readiness Training Cycle — started working across service lines. We worked together with Seals, with Ranger battalions, so we became cohorts.”

The Delta Force Team deployed with a portion from each special operations group, pairing up with the same guys every time, but Somalia was the first time they operationally deployed together. “It was a little awkward to start with,” says Norm. “All of us were trying to make that work together. I don’t think any of us wanted to necessarily work together — just keep doing what we know and like to do …. But in 20/20 hindsight — it’s probably the best thing we ever did…that’s a very formidable package. There’s nothing you can’t do with that group.”

The 25th anniversary of that mission inspired Norm and Tim to create special cigars that can now be enjoyed nationwide, along with special spirits, through Hooten Young.

Visit hootenyoung.com for more information or follow @hooten.young on Instagram or @HootenYoungCigars on Facebook.