Help for drone operators and other military personnel:
If you are in the U.S. drone war program, or any other military work, and you are struggling with issues of conscience or other stress, you can find help, in English or Spanish, at GI Rights Hotline, 1-877-447-4487
GI Rights Hotline, Military Discharges and Military Counseling
You can also find help with applying for conscientious objector status at the Center on Conscience War: (202) 483-2220.
Helpful Videos
GI Resistance Panel at Veterans For Peace Convention 2022.
Starting at 22:46 in this video, veterans discuss their personal paths away from military service.
Moral Injury and Communal Intervention – presented at the Veterans For Peace Convention 2022.
Veterans For Peace member Rachel Clark opens this remarkable presentation with a video of a Japanese actor performing a portion of drone whistle-blower Daniel Hale’s letter to federal court Judge Liam O’Grady. Rachel explains how this extraordinary performance came to be and her hope that it will help open minds and hearts to questions about moral injury, through theater.
Then, Chris Antal, a chaplain at the Philadelphia VA hospital, a member of Veterans For Peace and a former Army chaplain who was stationed in Afghanistan, gives an overview of VA efforts to understand and treat moral injury.
Chris discusses the program to address moral injury that he has developed, based on communal intervention. This involves not only veterans exchanging their experiences, much as the actor did in Rachel’s video, but, very importantly, on veterans sharing their experiences in a communal way with family, friends, and their community, so that these people can help bear the weight of the burden of moral injury.
Who is Martin Sheen, and how did he come to do the voice-over for these spots?
Martin Sheen, born (and still is) Ramon Antonio Gerardo Estevez, is a renowned actor known for his performances in Badlands, Apocalypse Now, Wall Street, and as President Josiah Bartlet on television’s The West Wing and as Robert Hanson in the Netflix series Grace and Frankie.
The London Daily Mail notes that Martin Sheen has been arrested 66 times. No other celebrity comes close to the level of civil disobedience. His determination to stand tall for justice started with opposing civil rights crimes against people of color and U.S. war crimes in crimes in Vietnam. He has also protested the U.S. nuclear weapons program and the U.S. training of members of the militaries of Latin American nations in assassination and torture, to be used against their own people, at the School of the Americas (SOA), now called the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, at Fort Benning, Georgia.
Jack Gilroy, a member of Veterans For Peace, and a friend of Martin’s, says:
“So many people of justice say: ‘I was once arrested with Martin Sheen’. And, of course, the arrests were always acts of nonviolence to expose the real crimes of our nation.
1999 SOA Rally photo by Linda Panetta
Martin was moved to do the voice-over for the video spots on this website after reading a New York Times report entitled: “The Unseen Scars of Those Who Kill Via Remote Control”.
Personally, I was only arrested once with Martin, and it was 1999 at Ft. Benning, Georgia. The event was the annual gathering of thousands to protest the United States School of the Americas (SOA). A supporter of the infamous SOA, named by many as the School of Assassins, rushed toward Martin as Martin was entering the base to deliver petitions calling for closure of the SOA. The crazed man threw blood and human feces on Martin’s face. Martin recently said that he can still smell the stench.