Called the grower and he said I could cut at 18 inches even though there are no buds. But suggested to use the bottom branches and save some time.

Here are photos of the two trunks.

The basis for your dilemma is that these specimens have already been pruned and trained to some extent by the grower. It sounds like the directions you are trying to follow are intended for smaller, less developed plants, that have not been pruned yet. So the grower is basically telling you to cancel what he has done to them already and start over with your own pruning and training. As long as this hard cutting back down does not effectively destroy them the only problem with this is that you will have paid for the time and work that went into producing their existing size and shape. Only to now be taking most of that away.

You may have planted that tree way too close to the wall. The wall will heat up and may burn the tree. Also, the roots will be restricted somewhat.

One of them I can live with training the existing lower branches. The other has bottom branches which are too high (closer to 3 ft than 2) so I made the hard cut at 18 inches today. Hope it comes back to keep the other company.

There is 6 inches between the wall and trunk.