A Quaker Guide to Leaving the Military 

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1. Wayne Finegar points out that the Quaker belief in continuing revelation means having faith that another person’s answers are right for them, even if you disagree. How do you personally balance holding strongly to your own moral convictions while making space to respect the drastically different choices of those around you?
2. Lenore suggests that the individual actors holding the weapons and carrying out militaristic foreign policies are often, themselves, victims of war. How does expanding your definition of “victim” challenge or change the way you extend compassion to people who are actively causing harm?
3. A submarine worker discovered his conscientious objection not through theology or philosophy, but by identifying with the “bad guys” in an episode of Star Trek. What unexpected piece of pop culture, art, or fiction has profoundly shaped your own moral compass or forced you to confront a difficult truth?

Zack Jackson
They call it the ‘Center of the Universe.’ Or at least that’s what the brass says when they welcome you to Fort Bragg. But if you stand in the middle of these 250 square miles of sand and pine, it feels less like a center and more like a universe unto itself. 

It is a city of ghosts and gears. Of duty and expectations. It’s twice the size of Philadelphia, and houses a community of a quarter-million people. This isn’t just a military base; it is a machine. It is designed to intimidate, to crush opposition, to project power anywhere on the planet at a moment’s notice. And it works so long as everyone marches to the same rhythm. 

But what happens when a soldier’s conscience won’t let them be a part of the machine any longer?

Tai 

And that’s when it slammed into me. I don’t know if my heart and mind are capable of pulling that away to be able to harm somebody that’s going through that same exact thing, another human being, you know, another mother, daughter, father, sister, whatever, have you.

Zack Jackson
Welcome to Thee Quaker Podcast. I’m Zack Jackson. 

That voice you just heard belongs to a young man we are going to call Tai. He’s currently an active-duty soldier in the United States Army. I’m speaking to him from his barracks on a Sunday afternoon. And because of what he’s about to share with us, it’s important that we protect his identity.

Tai grew up in the military. Not serving in it but  living inside it, surrounded by it. Enlisting didn’t feel like a choice. It felt like gravity.

Tai 

My mom and dad, they were military. Aunts, uncles, grandparents. They all served, and so growing up, you know, I thought that was my hook. I thought that that was something that was kind of, you know, demanded.

Zack Jackson 

He ran away from that expectation, but eventually, the pull of family history was too strong. Tai signed his papers, went to basic training, and surprisingly found himself thriving.

Tai 

I was going through basic training, fine, you know, it was fun, the exercise, the discipline, the mind games that drill sergeant playing with you, and I was looking forward to it, and I was cruising through it. And then, about the firing—but when we went to the firing range, I was, you know, hitting my targets just fine, and then, all of a sudden, I started to picture—because they were human-shaped—the people that I could possibly be doing this to.

Zack Jackson 

That realization didn’t vanish when he left the range. During graduation, surrounded by the joyful tears of reunited families, Tai couldn’t shake the faces he’d seen in the silhouettes. He realized that somewhere else in the world, someone who was wearing a different uniform was also hugging their mother, missing their family, and feeling pride in their service.

Tai 

I don’t find it right within myself to be contributing to that on my path, and so that really racked me. That started the really started the pressure cooker of what ended up happening here recently.

Zack Jackson 

The conflict between the uniform he wore and the conviction blooming in his chest pushed Tai to a breaking point.

Tai 

There was a specific night where it kind of just all hit rock bottom for me, and so that night, this may sound a little weird. I kind of went into the restroom, and, man, I tell you, when I don’t really cry, but I was sobbing that night.

Zack Jackson 

With nowhere else to turn, Tai reached out in prayer to a God he had spent his whole life avoiding.

Tai 

He was like, “You know what? Okay, I’ll listen. Why not? I don’t have anything, I don’t have anything else, I lost, I’m so confused, I don’t feel, I don’t feel right, I’m, I’m disconnected, and so as soon as I handed it over to him, it was such a weird feeling, I remember specifically telling him, all right, Lord, this, I know I haven’t reached out to you in the past, I know I ran from you, but this moment, and we’ll see about the moments moving forward, but this moment I hand my life to you, Lord, and the moment that happened, it was just like all that weight came crashing down, and this kind of released itself.

Zack Jackson 

Tai’s life radically shifted that night on the cold tile floor. He woke up with a profound certainty that he could never take the life of another human being. But he was still a soldier, bound by a contract, living in the barracks, expected to follow orders. He was trapped. He needed to find a way out, but he had no idea where to start. So, he reached out again in prayer and asked for a sign.

Tai 

So I, when I really came to, and this was the exact moment I came around and felt this new change in my heart, and fully accepted it. I didn’t know what to do, and I reached out to the Lord. I was like, Lord, I don’t… I feel like I’m trapped here. I’ve accepted this. I want. I want to get to know you, and you get to know me. I want to truly love you in its essence, no doubts, full faith. Please send me something, send me a sign, so I can work towards doing that.

Zack Jackson 

Just hours later, a friend who knew nothing of his late night prayer sent him a document explaining the process of becoming a conscientious objector in the military.

Tai 

And so as soon as I looked into them and saw what it meant to be a conscientious objector in the military, I called the number right after I was done reading the article. 

Zack Jackson 

The number Tai dialed didn’t connect him to a military lawyer or a chaplain. It connected him to a small, unassuming house just outside Fort Bragg in Fayetteville, North Carolina.

Wayne Finegar 

We have T-shirts that say ” ‘A place of peace in a city of war’ “, which feels a little harsh in some ways to me, but it’s also so true.

Zack Jackson 

This is Wayne Finegar, the Executive Director of Quaker House. They have been helping people like Tai since the late 60’s when a group of young men walked out of Fort Bragg in search of people who could help them avoid Vietnam.

Wayne Finegar 

So, a small group of them went upstate to the Triangle area, specifically Chapel Hill Friends Meeting first, and said we need help down in Fayetteville. We hear Quakers are good on peace things. What can you do?

Zack Jackson 

The Quaker Peace testimony had gone out before them like a herald, declaring that peace was still possible, so despite having no real expertise, The Quakers in Chapel Hill pooled their money, rented a house in Fayetteville, and opened their doors.

Wayne Finegar 

But, you know, it was every stereotype of the late 1960s hangout place. It was the place that soldiers from the base could go and talk and figure out how do they feel about the war.

Zack Jackson 

There were other anti-war groups in those days, but what made Quaker House special, was that essential Quaker belief in the inner light and the authority of one’s own conscience. They were able to make a space in which soldiers could feel safe among pacifists, and no one had to be on the defense.

Wayne Finegar 

I mean, the whole point of continuing revelation is that it’s continuing, and that that is the most basic part to me of what being a Quaker is about. There’s no list. There’s no: ‘If you believe this, you’re in the club; but if you only got nine out of ten, then try the guys down the street.’ Your list is your list, and I have the faith that your answers are right for you, even if I don’t necessarily agree with them, and hopefully you have the faith that my answer or right answers are right for me, and neither of us is going to try to impose our understanding on the other. We can share, we can discuss, we can thresh, we can, you know, hold each other in the light, thinking, wow, he’s just wrong. But that’s not the job. That’s not the job of Quaker House to me, that’s not the job of anyone of faith. It is to have faith in the other person.

Zack Jackson 

Today, Quaker House doesn’t just operate as a hangout for soldiers. Over the decades, their mission expanded. There is the GI Rights hotline that Tai called, but sometimes, people aren’t just looking for advice. They’re looking for healing.

Wayne Finegar 

The Quaker House Counseling Service was originally founded back in the 2010s when the recognition of the amount of damage that PTSD and moral injury do to people’s lives and the destruction to not just the military participant, but their families, the community around them.

Zack Jackson 

It’s a completely free, entirely anonymous counseling service. And in a military town like Fayetteville, that anonymity is often a matter of professional survival.

Wayne Finegar 

There are a large number of people here who absolutely believe that if they have the word therapy, counseling, any of the associated words like that in their service jacket, that their career is done. The army has spent billions of dollars teaching these people how to react instinctively with violence in war situations. The army and the military have not spent billions of dollars teaching these people how to turn it off, and so we try to help them figure out how to do that.

Zack Jackson 

Between the counseling service and the GI Rights Hotline, Quaker House has become a desperately needed release valve. And depending on what the military is doing on any given day, the pressure on that valve can be overwhelming.

Wayne Finegar 

When the National Guard in California got federalized, call volume to the hotline shot up to the point where we were getting messages from people, so voicemails from people who we had not been able to pick up the call, and they were leaving the voicemails at the rate of one a minute.

Zack Jackson 

So, what happens when a soldier like Tai makes that call? And how does an organization grounded in peace survive sixty years in the shadow of one of the largest military installations in the world? We’ll find out, after a short break. Stay Tuned.

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Zack Jackson

This episode is sponsored by Quaker House.

If you are in the military right now, or if you love someone who is, I want to just take a second to speak directly to you. 

You do not have to navigate this alone.You can call the GI Rights Hotline anytime, day or night. It is completely free, and completely anonymous. The number is 877-447-4487. Again, that’s 877-447-4487. You can also go to QuakerHouse.org to explore all of your options. 

When you reach out to Quaker House, you aren’t just getting a sympathetic ear—you are getting a practical safety net. The team provides actionable, non-directive counseling to help you figure out your real-world options. They will help you explore alternatives like medical discharges, run practice interviews to help you figure out what to say, and even connect you with specialized defense attorneys if you are ready to refuse an official order.  

Beyond the hotline, Quaker House also employs a fully licensed social worker who provides free, totally anonymous therapy for service members and their families dealing with moral injury and PTSD. 

For almost 60 years, they have simply said ‘yes’ to anyone who comes to them for help. To learn more about everything they do, or to support this incredible mission, visit QuakerHouse.org.  

And now, back to the show.

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Zack Jackson
Welcome back. The number Tai dialed didn’t connect him to a military lawyer or a commanding officer. It connected him to the GI Rights Hotline, a global lifeline co-managed by Quaker House. Executive Director Wayne Finegar says that lifeline is open to anyone connected to the military.

Wayne Finegar 

So, it’s people who can call an 877 number from anywhere in the world, it’s people who can email, who can text, who can use social media, go to the website, but it’s still, you have something about your military participation that you’re struggling with. We will talk to you. We are not judgmental. 

Zack Jackson 

A soldier in crisis is usually surrounded by directives: do this, go here, assume this position. It’s an environment where your personal morality is often treated as a liability. But at the GI Rights hotline, that environment flips. Lenore Yarger and Steve Wolford simply listen to them and try to help them decipher the weight of the moral choice they’re struggling to make.

Steve Wolford  

So on any given day, we are getting calls from people in the military, sometimes family members, people in the military who are having serious issues with their being in the military, and they’re looking for answers and options and things they can do to resolve their situation. So, when a person calls, the first thing we do is just try to listen to them.

Lenore Yarger 

And the fundamental part of our work is that we are non-directive in our counseling. We’re not attorneys, so we’re not giving advice to the callers, even if they beg us to do that, which is sometimes the case. You know, the military is very much a top-down hierarchy, and once you join, all your decisions are made free for you by your superiors, and we feel like it’s very important to empower people to make the decisions for themselves, because they’re the best ones to do that, and I feel like that’s a, that’s a direct contradiction to the way the military functions, and in some ways it’s I feel like our counseling is definitely a form of resistance to that military culture, because we are all about empowering the individual instead of dictating to them what they should be doing.

Zack Jackson 

When a soldier calls about an order they believe is illegal, Steve and Lenore don’t give a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’, but they help them see their own role in the system. They map out the real-world consequences of refusing an order, help them hunt for legal alternatives like medical discharges, and even run practice interviews to prep them for the grueling pushback they are bound to face from the military if they choose to refuse orders. 

Steve Wolford 

So, we had a lot more calls about the issue of unlawful orders in the last year and when someone calls a lot of times they heard from people that oh, these are all unlawful orders and you can just refuse them, and it’s so when we start a conversation like that, part of what we share with people is the complexity involved in refusing an unlawful order. This is going to be surprising to a lot of people, but just because an order appears very unlawful doesn’t necessarily mean you’re not going to get punished if you refuse it.

Lenore Yarger

So I think, and one of the things we do is help people at least begin to think about what kind of risks they are willing to take, and and we, one of our strengths is we help them explore options that aren’t risky too, so if somebody doesn’t want to follow what they consider to be an illegal order, we will explore. Well, what are your options here? Do you meet the category of conscientious objection? Do you have any medical issues that need attention that are not, you know, that might lead to some kind of delay or exemption or even a discharge?

Zack Jackson 

But sometimes, the hardest part for a caller isn’t trying to figure out if an order is illegal. It’s coming to the crushing realization that the military might actually consider an action completely legal, even when their own conscience is screaming that it is deeply immoral.

Steve Wolford 

There might be a whole lot of things that turn out to be legal in this legal system that still feel completely immoral to someone, and sometimes people are stunned to believe, wait, actually there is a legal justification for that, and if you’ve tracked war and politics, the government’s pretty good at having its attorneys justify all kinds of things that to the everyday person would seem like, of course, that’s got to be illegal, you can’t torture people. Well, it turns out here they say in this context you can. Oh, you can’t just bomb a girls school somewhere. Well, it turns out you know they’re going to justify and say, well, you can under these circumstances, or if it’s, it wasn’t deliberate, or like there’s a whole lot of pieces to things, but what you come up against is a whole lot of, I don’t know if the word is talented attorneys working for the government are making a serious effort to say why you can, and so common sense is not always your best guide. For what’s actually going to be found legal or illegal, and your own sense of morality might determine how you act in a situation, but it doesn’t determine whether a court is going to say that thing that seems immoral to you and immoral to a whole bunch of other people is actually illegal.

Zack Jackson 

When a soldier is caught in that chasm between what the law allows and what their soul can bear, the psychological toll is devastating. And for Steve and Lenore, hearing these stories day in and day out fundamentally shifted how they view the people on the other end of the phone.

Lenore Yarger

And one of the things that we quickly learned when we started doing this 25 years ago was that people in the military are also suffer from from the military culture. It’s not, you know, we were accustomed to thinking of the victims of war as being the people on the other side of our bombs and our special operations, you know, interventions and our bullets, but we quickly learned that, you know, there are victims of war that are just part of the military culture who are performing those duties too. I feel a lot of compassion right now for people in the military in this moment, because of there are war crimes being threatened. There have been war crimes committed, at least by our allies. If you know, and, and I think that people are really struggling with their role in those operations, and it’s not there. There’s no really easy way for them to say, I don’t think I should have to do this, and they are the ones who are going to bear the burden of the consequences, at least for a while, and possibly forever, depending on what you know the courts eventually decide, or the next administration decides. So it’s just they’re in a really difficult situation, and I think that doing this work has really given us a lot of insight on as to the toll that takes on a human being when they’re, when they don’t have the power, and yet they’re being told that they have to go do something that they don’t, you know, that doesn’t sit well with them.

Zack Jackson 

Navigating a specific illegal order is complex enough. But what if the issue isn’t just one order? What if a soldier’s conscience simply won’t let them continue at all? How exactly do you get out of the military once you’re already locked in, like Tai? The process of becoming a conscientious objector can actually be fairly straightforward, as long as the soldier is completely honest about their convictions. And as Steve points out, that means bringing your own real story to the table, not looking for pat answers or regurgitating Quaker theology.

Steve Wolford 

And so our work with them is more about helping them tell their story and document their story and make sense of it and put it into words and navigate this process of getting it out, than it is trying to tell them what they should think or trying to get them to think something different than they already think.

Lenore Yarger

We let them tell their story and we just listen to them. What the most successful applications are the ones that people honestly talk about their own personal journey.

Zack Jackson 

The authentic journey rarely sounds like a textbook.

Steve Wolford 

And a lot of times when they start off explaining themselves, they think they’re supposed to talk about philosophy or they’re supposed to talk about the Bible, and then they tell a story that has almost nothing to do with that, and I say, like, wait, you’re saying this is all based on your faith. When did you even read this part? And then people will say, well, actually, that’s not really where it came from. And then they tell the real story, and one person that’s.. “I, I met these guys in the market in Afghanistan, and I would see them, you know, when I was there, I stopped by this one guy’s stall, and I got to be friends with him, and I started just realizing who we were targeting, and the humanity of these people, and it was just this personal relationship.” Another guy was on a submarine, a Navy nuclear submarine, so he had downloaded a whole bunch of episodes of Star Trek, and he was watching it and was saying, wait a minute, we’re not the guy solving this problem, we’re the bad guys they’re talking about here on our nuclear sub. Like, how can I keep doing this? And it took him a while before he believed that he could share that, that was what did it for him. I’ve seen it come from so many places for people, and I think. In a lot of ways, for me, that’s really exciting. I think that happens because there’s something very real in us as human beings that’s opposed to hurting other people and wants to see problems worked out in a loving way, where everyone’s respected, and I think Quakerism kind of comes from that same space of how people feel called to live together with other people at their best.

Zack Jackson 

It takes a lot of trust for a soldier to confess that an episode of Star Trek is what finally shifted their moral compass. Steve and Lenore are able to draw out those honest revelations because they have built an environment entirely free of judgment. They simply offer a safe harbor. And that radical act of hospitality isn’t limited to a small house in Fayetteville. It is a blueprint anyone can follow, especially for those living near military installations.

Wayne Finegar 

At a minimum, reach out to people who work at the base who are in services supporting those military participants. Talk to whoever is in the chaplain corps, talk to the people in mental health services, talk to the people in the sexual assault awareness programs to say our meeting has dedicated itself to providing a safe place that these people can just, just like Quaker House was on day one, it was just a place to go where they could know that they were safe and were not being judged. One of the elements of coming here to Fayetteville that never crossed my mind was the number of times we get contacted by active military or their families, saying I took one of those online surveys, and it says I’m Quaker, but I’m afraid that because I’m active military, because my spouse is active military, that you all wouldn’t want – I wouldn’t be welcome coming for meeting for worship.

Zack Jackson 

The nature of this work is that you are often meeting transient people in their lowest, most frightened moments, and you don’t always get to know it works out.

Wayne Finegar 

if you just believe that by trying to do good you will do good, and that that will have some end result that you never will know what it is. That’s all you can do. You just have to trust that you’ve done the best that you can do, and maybe two years later they’re going to have a friend who’s in their unit who’s really struggling with something, and they’ll say, you know, two years ago when I was still in basic, I called these people and I talked to them and they really helped me, and maybe that’s the person who needs help getting out, who you know needs something, and we’re not going to know unless they, unless the second person says I’m calling because my, you all helped my buddy two years ago, and they gave me, you know, your number, unless they actively tell us that, we don’t know that that’s how we got how they got to us, but we did something good. We helped somebody, and that made it possible for us to help somebody else. That’s where it becomes faith, instead of it’s just a job. It becomes a belief that you can make a difference even if you never know what it is.

Zack Jackson 

As of today, Tai’s case is moving through the system. It could take weeks or months, and the manner of his discharge could go any number of ways. But Quaker House is walking this path with him, helping him to understand the process and offering support in the many ways that they do. Tai is trying not to worry about the outcome of this process and is instead looking ahead, trying to make sense of this tuning point, and finding ways to bring the light that he has found to others as well.

Tai 

I’m honestly glad I hit rock bottom. That point in AIT, because rock bottom will teach you lessons that mountaintops were never meant to teach you, you know, and I truly believe in that. There’s people out there that have ran into so many dark times, and if I can just be that little minuscule piece that shows them love, kindness, and compassion in any aspect of their life, that’s what I want to be for them.

Zack Jackson 

Thank you for listening, and thank you to our guests Wayne Finegar, Steve Wolford, Lenore Yarger, and Tai. For discussion questions and a transcript of today’s episode, make sure you check out Quakerpodcast.com. 

If you or someone you love is in the military and needs help navigating a crisis of conscience, call the GI Rights Hotline at 877-447-4487 or go to QuakerHouse.org. 

This episode was hosted, produced and edited by me Zack Jackson, Jon Watts wrote and produced the music.

Thee Quaker Podcast is a part of Thee Quaker Project. We are a nonprofit Quaker media organization dedicated to giving Quakerism a platform for the 21st Century.

If you like what we’re up to, please consider becoming a monthly supporter. You can go to Quakerpodcast.com and click support in the top right window. Takes less than five minutes, and we really appreciate it. 

As we near the end of season 3, we want to hear from you, our listeners, about what resonated with you, what you’d like to hear more of, and what we can do better. So check out the link in the show notes to a quick, 5 minute survey. Thank you so much for helping us to tell these stories of spiritual courage in a world that so clearly needs to hear them. 

And now your daily Quaker message as read by Grace Gonglewski. 

Grace Gonglewski 

To the extent that the blessing of peace is achieved by humankind, it will not be achieved because people have outraced each other in the building of armaments, nor because we have outdebated each other with words, nor because we have outmaneuvered each other in political action, but because more and more people in a silent place in their hearts are turned to those eternal truths upon which all right living is based. It is on the inner drama of this search that the unfoldment of the outer drama of history ultimately depends. Dan Seeger, 1983

Zack Jackson 

To get Quaker wisdom in your inbox every day, go to Dailyquaker.com That’s Dailyquaker.com

Hosted, produced, and edited by Zack Jackson.

Original music and sound design by Jon Watts (Listen to more of Jon’s music here.)

This season’s cover art is by Todd Drake

Supported by listeners like you (thank you!!)