By Larry Woods

War is the evil opposite of voluntaryism. Coercion, destruction, and hatred vs. mutual respect, productive exchange, and toleration. Lying is the foundation of war, alignment with reality is the foundation of Voluntaryism.

Often overlooked is the internal damage to warfighters. Daniel Hale’s letter illustrates this better than anything I could compose – https://couragetoresist.org/hale-letter/. In the month following his writing of that letter, he received the Sam Adams Award for Integrity in Intelligence, eponymously named for a Vietnam War-era whistleblower, for “performing a vital public service at great personal cost—imprisonment for truth-telling.”

Dear Judge O’Grady,

It is not a secret that I struggle to live with depression and post traumatic stress disorder. Both stem from my childhood experience growing up in a rural mountain community and were compounded by exposure to combat during military service. Depression is a constant. Though stress, particularly stress caused by war, can manifest itself at different times and in different ways. The tell-tale signs of a person afflicted by PTSD and depression can often be outwardly observed and are practically universally recognizable. Hard lines about the face and jaw. Eyes, once bright and wide, now deepset and fearful. And an inexplicably sudden loss of interest in things that used to spark joy. These are the noticeable changes in my demeanor marked by those who knew me before and after military service. To say that the period of my life spent serving in the United States Air Force had an impression on me would be an understatement. It is more accurate to say that it irreversibly transformed my identity as an American. Having forever altered the thread of my life’s story, weaved into the fabric of our nation’s history. To better appreciate the significance of how this came to pass, I would like to explain my experience deployed to Afghanistan as it was in 2012 and how it is I came to violate the Espionage Act, as a result.

Read the rest here.