IN MEMORIUM
Aaron Bushnell Opposed ‘All State-Sanctioned Violence’ — Not Just the War in GazaBefore his self-immolation, Aaron Bushnell supported his friend’s conscientous objection and deeply regretted joining the military.
March 16, 2024
Source: Waging Nonviolence
Credit: Elvert Barnes / Flickr
Levi Pierpont’s voice was steady, the day I called him to ask about his friend Aaron Bushnell. “He was the sweetest guy you’d ever meet.”
The 23-year-old Air Force veteran was talking about one of his military peers — whose name was suddenly everywhere. Four days earlier, on Feb. 25, Bushnell had set himself on fire in front of the Israeli Embassy in Washington, D.C., to protest U.S. support of Israel’s war on Gaza.
I’d reached out to Pierpont because he’d left the military last year as a conscientious objector, long before the Oct. 7 Hamas attack that burst the blister of Israel’s long siege. As someone who has spent much of the last 20 years writing about such servicemembers, I wanted to know more about Pierpont’s journey, and his response to his friend’s far more visible and permanent act of conscience.
In the three weeks since that day, Bushnell’s name has been spoken often at the near-daily Gaza protests across the country — especially those organized by veterans of the U.S. military. Last week, artist-activists got his words on the New York City subway, replacing ads with his final statement on social media: “Many of us like to ask ourselves, ‘What would I do if I was alive during slavery? Or the Jim Crow South? Or apartheid? What would I do if my country was committing genocide?’ The answer is, you’re doing it. Right now.”
Pierpont talked to me shortly before The Guardian published his op-ed: “Aaron Bushnell was my friend. May he never be forgotten.” When I talked to him it was still very fresh; his voice trembled a little as he described his journey, one he wishes Bushnell had shared more fully.
They met in May 2020 at Goodfellow Air Force Base, at the beginning of basic military training. Bushnell arrived almost too late to start training; Pierpont said he “stood up for me” when Pierpont felt harassed. Bushnell’s bonhomie was a salve, Pierpont told me, amid basic training’s stereotypically loud atmosphere. Both were moving beyond their restrictive Christian families — Pierpont’s in evangelical Michigan, Bushnell the secretive Community of Jesus in Orleans, Massachusetts. And both were going on to work with intelligence with high-level security clearances.
“[W]henever people in basic training would talk about me or would talk about him, we would stick up for each other. And he always stuck up for me,” Pierpont told “Democracy Now!” on Feb. 28. They spoke and texted often, even after basic training ended and they pursued different divisions of Air Force Tech School,Bushnell for cybersecurity and Pierpont for Operations Intelligence. Pierpont later started to ask the questions that would ultimately lead him to seek discharge as a conscientious objector, just as Bushnell was exulting on social media, “Man, the Air Force does some cool-ass shit.”
Still, Bushnell’s own doubts about the institution would grow after he was a firm member of the 571st Cyber Division, with access to real-time intel about what the Air Force was up to. The two of them didn’t talk much at Tech School, but did once they were at their respective bases, Pierpont at Minot AFB in North Dakota and Bushnell staying in Texas at Lackland AFB.
By then, Pierpont had left Operations Intelligence behind. At Tech School, learning to develop “intelligence products” assembled with Microsoft PowerPoint, he was bemused by its focus on Russia and training products he called “Secret YouTube and secret Wikipedia.” Less amusing was a video in which his whole class watched the death of an enemy combatant. Pierpont found himself feeling bad for the guy’s family, even if he was one of the terrorists they were being trained to hate. When “a bunch of my classmates laughed at that video,” Pierpont realized he wasn’t one of them. He asked to change classifications, so he wouldn’t be so directly involved in violent “operations.”
At Minot, Pierpont was 2ROX1, a Maintenance Management Analyst — in charge of generating and monitoring data on the maintenance of Air Force planes and equipment. It wasn’t a stress-free gig, though; all that data was in service of weapons of war, like Minot’s 488,000-pound B-52 bombers. “It was very traumatic for me to think about those aircraft,” Pierpont told me. After nearly a year, he contacted the Center for Conscience and War, and began working on his application for conscientious objection, or CO. He told his friend Aaron about it all “and he was really supportive,” he said.
In June 2023, Bushnell said on Reddit that he agreed with Pierpont, noting that “Apparently it’s very doable to become a ‘conscientious objector’ on religious grounds even after voluntarily enlisting. It’s a bit of a process and it takes about a year, but there are organizations to help guide you through it and the success rate is very high.”
But in his case, Bushnell said, “I’m sticking it out to the end of my contract, as I didn’t realize what a huge mistake it was until I was more than halfway through, and I only have a year left at this point. However it is a regret I will carry the rest of my life.”
Pierpont, who now identifies as more of a Buddhist than a Christian, said he had told Bushnell that CO wasn’t only for religious resisters, but respected his commitment not to break his contract. Still, Bushnell told Pierpont that he “wanted to take a stand against all state-sanctioned violence.”
The last time they saw one another was in January 2024 in Toledo, Ohio, after Bushnell moved to Akron for SkillBridge (a transition program for members about to separate). They talked about Pierpont’s CO discharge, which had been approved in July 2023; they did not talk about what happened two months later, the Oct. 7 Hamas attack. “We never talked about Gaza” he said. Pierpont felt it was due to his own “centrist” position on the conflict, since Bushnell was on Reddit describing Israel as a “settler-colonialist apartheid state.” Back then, said Pierpont, “the Gaza war felt complex to me … but that was before 30,000 were dead.” And in the meantime, Bushnell was learning more about what he considered U.S. complicity in those deaths.
Afghanistan veteran Jeremy Lyle Rubin, pointed out in The Nationthat “The U.S. Air Force has played a significant part in the killing spree in Gaza, assisting with intelligence and targeting.” He added that the U.S. is contributing to “what the political scientist Robert Pape has called ‘one of the most intense civilian punishment campaigns in history, [now sitting] comfortably in the top quartile of the most devastating bombing campaigns ever.’”
Given Pierpont’s Buddhism, I asked him if he knew about the high-profile Buddhist CO, Aidan Delgado. He had not; neither did he know about Norman Morrison, who set himself on fire nearly 60 years ago, to protest the U.S. war against Vietnam.
I don’t mention Morrison in my book “I Ain’t Marching Anymore,”a history that focuses on dissenting military personnel like Pierpont and Bushnell, drawn on those I spoke to daily in the 1990s as a staffer with the Central Committee for Conscientious Objectors. Many of the latter were like Pierpont, describing how military service had triggered a moral crisis that made it impossible to stay in the military.
The book does describe the all-hands movement against the Vietnam War, which included many Quakers like Morrison, whose fiery death, on Nov. 2, 1965, came as the U.S. war against Vietnam was metastasizing. At his Baltimore Quaker meeting, Morrison and his wife Anne watched, worried and prayed as more than 100,000 servicemembers were shipped to Vietnam and TV screens showed the massive bombing of North Vietnam by American fighter planes.
Morrison’s revelation of “what I must do” was triggered, his wife wrote, by an account in Paris-Match of the incineration of families in the village of Can Tho. “I have seen the bodies of women and children blown to bits,” a French priest told the author, Yves Larteguy. “I have seen all my villages razed. By God, it’s not possible!” Morrison circled that sentence in the clipping of the article he mailed to Anne from the Pentagon, just before he poured kerosene on himself and lit the match in full view of then-Defense Secretary Robert McNamara. Though it still took 10 years for that war to end, Morrison’s act helped catalyze the sustained anti-war movement that shaped how it ended.
As Colonel Ann Wright points out, the death of Morrison and others “mobilized the anti-war community,” with years of weekly vigils at the U.S. Capitol that ultimately persuaded members of Congress to stand up against the war, the first of whom was Rep. George Brown. “After the Quakers were arrested and jailed for reading the names of the war dead, Brown would continue to read the names, enjoying congressional immunity from arrest.”
Perhaps hoping to build similar momentum to end the war in Gaza, Veterans for Peace and About Face — the antimilitarist group formerly known as Iraq Veterans Against the War — swung into action after Bushnell’s death. They expressed regret that he never connected with either organization. In Portland, some About Face members burned their uniforms, and the group has seen a surge of new members since those protests.
In addition to these actions, a separate “autonomous network of active duty service members across nearly all U.S. Armed Forces branches have released an open letter condemning Israel’s genocide in Gaza,” journalist Talia Jane tweeted on March 4.
Activists have still had complex responses to Bushnell’s “extreme act of protest,” wondering whether self-immolation damages the movements they’d hoped to propel — in addition to the damage to their families. Anne Morrison writes that she and her three children suppressed their pain and rage for years. Advocates for servicemembers and veterans raised the alarm that valorizing Bushnell’s death would do nothing to abate the already-high suicide rates in both populations.
Nonetheless, Bushnell’s name has been invoked frequently by the “Vote Uncommitted” movement, an electoral pressure campaign that made a noticeable impact on the primaries in Michigan, Minnesota, North Carolina, Georgia and Washington State.
Many of the vigils broadcast Bushnell’s last words, livestreamed on Twitch before he lit the match: “I am an active duty member of the United States Air Force. And I will no longer be complicit to genocide. I am about to engage in an extreme act of protest. But compared to what people have been experiencing in Palestine at the hands of their colonizers — it’s not extreme at all. This is what our ruling class has decided will be normal.” Those words have been ubiquitous on the internet ever since.
So has the voice of Levi Pierpont, who is now volunteering for volunteering with the Center on Conscience and War and active with the divestment coalition at Michigan State University. “I want people to remember that his death is not in vain, that he died to spotlight this message,” he said in his interview with “Democracy Now!,” which has played at numerous vigils. “I don’t want anybody else to die this way. If he had asked me about this, I would have begged him not to.” But after seeing the way the media responded to Bushnell’s immolation, he added, “it’s hard not to feel like he was right, that this was exactly what was necessary to get people’s attention about the genocide that’s happening in Palestine. And so, I just — I want people to remember his message.”
Credit: Elvert Barnes / Flickr
Levi Pierpont’s voice was steady, the day I called him to ask about his friend Aaron Bushnell. “He was the sweetest guy you’d ever meet.”
The 23-year-old Air Force veteran was talking about one of his military peers — whose name was suddenly everywhere. Four days earlier, on Feb. 25, Bushnell had set himself on fire in front of the Israeli Embassy in Washington, D.C., to protest U.S. support of Israel’s war on Gaza.
I’d reached out to Pierpont because he’d left the military last year as a conscientious objector, long before the Oct. 7 Hamas attack that burst the blister of Israel’s long siege. As someone who has spent much of the last 20 years writing about such servicemembers, I wanted to know more about Pierpont’s journey, and his response to his friend’s far more visible and permanent act of conscience.
In the three weeks since that day, Bushnell’s name has been spoken often at the near-daily Gaza protests across the country — especially those organized by veterans of the U.S. military. Last week, artist-activists got his words on the New York City subway, replacing ads with his final statement on social media: “Many of us like to ask ourselves, ‘What would I do if I was alive during slavery? Or the Jim Crow South? Or apartheid? What would I do if my country was committing genocide?’ The answer is, you’re doing it. Right now.”
Pierpont talked to me shortly before The Guardian published his op-ed: “Aaron Bushnell was my friend. May he never be forgotten.” When I talked to him it was still very fresh; his voice trembled a little as he described his journey, one he wishes Bushnell had shared more fully.
They met in May 2020 at Goodfellow Air Force Base, at the beginning of basic military training. Bushnell arrived almost too late to start training; Pierpont said he “stood up for me” when Pierpont felt harassed. Bushnell’s bonhomie was a salve, Pierpont told me, amid basic training’s stereotypically loud atmosphere. Both were moving beyond their restrictive Christian families — Pierpont’s in evangelical Michigan, Bushnell the secretive Community of Jesus in Orleans, Massachusetts. And both were going on to work with intelligence with high-level security clearances.
“[W]henever people in basic training would talk about me or would talk about him, we would stick up for each other. And he always stuck up for me,” Pierpont told “Democracy Now!” on Feb. 28. They spoke and texted often, even after basic training ended and they pursued different divisions of Air Force Tech School,Bushnell for cybersecurity and Pierpont for Operations Intelligence. Pierpont later started to ask the questions that would ultimately lead him to seek discharge as a conscientious objector, just as Bushnell was exulting on social media, “Man, the Air Force does some cool-ass shit.”
Still, Bushnell’s own doubts about the institution would grow after he was a firm member of the 571st Cyber Division, with access to real-time intel about what the Air Force was up to. The two of them didn’t talk much at Tech School, but did once they were at their respective bases, Pierpont at Minot AFB in North Dakota and Bushnell staying in Texas at Lackland AFB.
By then, Pierpont had left Operations Intelligence behind. At Tech School, learning to develop “intelligence products” assembled with Microsoft PowerPoint, he was bemused by its focus on Russia and training products he called “Secret YouTube and secret Wikipedia.” Less amusing was a video in which his whole class watched the death of an enemy combatant. Pierpont found himself feeling bad for the guy’s family, even if he was one of the terrorists they were being trained to hate. When “a bunch of my classmates laughed at that video,” Pierpont realized he wasn’t one of them. He asked to change classifications, so he wouldn’t be so directly involved in violent “operations.”
At Minot, Pierpont was 2ROX1, a Maintenance Management Analyst — in charge of generating and monitoring data on the maintenance of Air Force planes and equipment. It wasn’t a stress-free gig, though; all that data was in service of weapons of war, like Minot’s 488,000-pound B-52 bombers. “It was very traumatic for me to think about those aircraft,” Pierpont told me. After nearly a year, he contacted the Center for Conscience and War, and began working on his application for conscientious objection, or CO. He told his friend Aaron about it all “and he was really supportive,” he said.
In June 2023, Bushnell said on Reddit that he agreed with Pierpont, noting that “Apparently it’s very doable to become a ‘conscientious objector’ on religious grounds even after voluntarily enlisting. It’s a bit of a process and it takes about a year, but there are organizations to help guide you through it and the success rate is very high.”
But in his case, Bushnell said, “I’m sticking it out to the end of my contract, as I didn’t realize what a huge mistake it was until I was more than halfway through, and I only have a year left at this point. However it is a regret I will carry the rest of my life.”
Pierpont, who now identifies as more of a Buddhist than a Christian, said he had told Bushnell that CO wasn’t only for religious resisters, but respected his commitment not to break his contract. Still, Bushnell told Pierpont that he “wanted to take a stand against all state-sanctioned violence.”
The last time they saw one another was in January 2024 in Toledo, Ohio, after Bushnell moved to Akron for SkillBridge (a transition program for members about to separate). They talked about Pierpont’s CO discharge, which had been approved in July 2023; they did not talk about what happened two months later, the Oct. 7 Hamas attack. “We never talked about Gaza” he said. Pierpont felt it was due to his own “centrist” position on the conflict, since Bushnell was on Reddit describing Israel as a “settler-colonialist apartheid state.” Back then, said Pierpont, “the Gaza war felt complex to me … but that was before 30,000 were dead.” And in the meantime, Bushnell was learning more about what he considered U.S. complicity in those deaths.
Afghanistan veteran Jeremy Lyle Rubin, pointed out in The Nationthat “The U.S. Air Force has played a significant part in the killing spree in Gaza, assisting with intelligence and targeting.” He added that the U.S. is contributing to “what the political scientist Robert Pape has called ‘one of the most intense civilian punishment campaigns in history, [now sitting] comfortably in the top quartile of the most devastating bombing campaigns ever.’”
Given Pierpont’s Buddhism, I asked him if he knew about the high-profile Buddhist CO, Aidan Delgado. He had not; neither did he know about Norman Morrison, who set himself on fire nearly 60 years ago, to protest the U.S. war against Vietnam.
I don’t mention Morrison in my book “I Ain’t Marching Anymore,”a history that focuses on dissenting military personnel like Pierpont and Bushnell, drawn on those I spoke to daily in the 1990s as a staffer with the Central Committee for Conscientious Objectors. Many of the latter were like Pierpont, describing how military service had triggered a moral crisis that made it impossible to stay in the military.
The book does describe the all-hands movement against the Vietnam War, which included many Quakers like Morrison, whose fiery death, on Nov. 2, 1965, came as the U.S. war against Vietnam was metastasizing. At his Baltimore Quaker meeting, Morrison and his wife Anne watched, worried and prayed as more than 100,000 servicemembers were shipped to Vietnam and TV screens showed the massive bombing of North Vietnam by American fighter planes.
Morrison’s revelation of “what I must do” was triggered, his wife wrote, by an account in Paris-Match of the incineration of families in the village of Can Tho. “I have seen the bodies of women and children blown to bits,” a French priest told the author, Yves Larteguy. “I have seen all my villages razed. By God, it’s not possible!” Morrison circled that sentence in the clipping of the article he mailed to Anne from the Pentagon, just before he poured kerosene on himself and lit the match in full view of then-Defense Secretary Robert McNamara. Though it still took 10 years for that war to end, Morrison’s act helped catalyze the sustained anti-war movement that shaped how it ended.
As Colonel Ann Wright points out, the death of Morrison and others “mobilized the anti-war community,” with years of weekly vigils at the U.S. Capitol that ultimately persuaded members of Congress to stand up against the war, the first of whom was Rep. George Brown. “After the Quakers were arrested and jailed for reading the names of the war dead, Brown would continue to read the names, enjoying congressional immunity from arrest.”
Perhaps hoping to build similar momentum to end the war in Gaza, Veterans for Peace and About Face — the antimilitarist group formerly known as Iraq Veterans Against the War — swung into action after Bushnell’s death. They expressed regret that he never connected with either organization. In Portland, some About Face members burned their uniforms, and the group has seen a surge of new members since those protests.
In addition to these actions, a separate “autonomous network of active duty service members across nearly all U.S. Armed Forces branches have released an open letter condemning Israel’s genocide in Gaza,” journalist Talia Jane tweeted on March 4.
Activists have still had complex responses to Bushnell’s “extreme act of protest,” wondering whether self-immolation damages the movements they’d hoped to propel — in addition to the damage to their families. Anne Morrison writes that she and her three children suppressed their pain and rage for years. Advocates for servicemembers and veterans raised the alarm that valorizing Bushnell’s death would do nothing to abate the already-high suicide rates in both populations.
Nonetheless, Bushnell’s name has been invoked frequently by the “Vote Uncommitted” movement, an electoral pressure campaign that made a noticeable impact on the primaries in Michigan, Minnesota, North Carolina, Georgia and Washington State.
Many of the vigils broadcast Bushnell’s last words, livestreamed on Twitch before he lit the match: “I am an active duty member of the United States Air Force. And I will no longer be complicit to genocide. I am about to engage in an extreme act of protest. But compared to what people have been experiencing in Palestine at the hands of their colonizers — it’s not extreme at all. This is what our ruling class has decided will be normal.” Those words have been ubiquitous on the internet ever since.
So has the voice of Levi Pierpont, who is now volunteering for volunteering with the Center on Conscience and War and active with the divestment coalition at Michigan State University. “I want people to remember that his death is not in vain, that he died to spotlight this message,” he said in his interview with “Democracy Now!,” which has played at numerous vigils. “I don’t want anybody else to die this way. If he had asked me about this, I would have begged him not to.” But after seeing the way the media responded to Bushnell’s immolation, he added, “it’s hard not to feel like he was right, that this was exactly what was necessary to get people’s attention about the genocide that’s happening in Palestine. And so, I just — I want people to remember his message.”
Aaron Bushnell's Sacrifice Was a Deeply Loving Act
War resister Rory Fanning reflects on Aaron Bushnell’s legacy.
War resister Rory Fanning reflects on Aaron Bushnell’s legacy.
MARCH 14, 2024
People in London gather on February 29, 2024, to collectively mourn U.S. airman Aaron Bushnell, who self-immolated in front of an Israeli embassy in protest of the genocide in Gaza.
PHOTO BY RASID NECATI ASLIM VIA GETTY IMAGES
This article was originally published by Tempest Magazine.
It was 6:30 a.m. on Monday morning when I watched Aaron Bushnell pour accelerant over his head and light his military uniform and self on fire outside of the Israeli embassy in Washington D.C.
My kids were still sleeping. My wife was upstairs preparing to start another week of teaching first graders. Water for oatmeal and coffee heated on the stove. The sun cast an unseasonably warm light through the window over the sink in our kitchen.
I learned of Aaron’s name via text from my friend Spenser Rapone, who famously opened his dress blues at his West Point graduation to reveal a Che Guevara T-shirt. Spenser then renounced the military and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. His military career ended with the protest, his conscience fully intact. Spenser’s text that morning read:
Aaron Bushnell.
Now that’s personal courage.
Truly we are led by the most gutless cowards.
I Googled Aaron’s name. ”Active-Duty Air Force Member Self-immolates in Front of Israeli Embassy,” one headline declared at the time. I found the video.
As Aaron walked down the street, his cell phone broadcasting through Twitch, I knew I was about to watch something horrifying and gruesome. “You owe it to Aaron to watch,” I told myself, trusting my ability to block out what I was about to see before my kids walked down the stairs that morning.
Writing about my time in the military, my experience as a war resister for the last 15 years and the deadly consequences of U.S. imperialism, I’ve grown accustomed to compartmentalizing my feelings around my kids and wife. (Although I’m sure they could point to many examples that contradict that.) I thought I would be OK that morning.
I was struck by how calm Aaron was as he addressed the camera.
He talked about the genocide in Gaza and refusing to be complicit in it. He also spoke of the ruling class normalizing the kind of death he was about to show us.
It was a Sunday afternoon. The sun was bright overhead as he walked to his final destination. It seemed too sunny, too nice of a day, for what I was about to see. Aaron reached the Israeli embassy, placed his phone on the ground at an upward angle, walked up the driveway and stood in front of a black gate that looked like it was made of iron spears. Aaron then doused himself with a liquid stored in a large navy blue water bottle covered in bright stickers. The fuel looked like water. He bent over and had a hard time with the lighter. Yet his hands weren’t visibly shaking. I rooted for it not to light.
Then it happened. The fire grabbed hold of his pant leg. The flames were in control now. My blood started racing. Aaron yelled “Free Palestine” as fire rushed up his leg and back. His yell turned to a visceral scream. Aaron’s government issued boots pounded the pavement in a heavy stomp. For a second, the thought of the U.S. military burning Pat Tillman’s uniform after he was killed in an act of friendly fire in Afghanistan flashed in my head. Aaron wasn’t running or rolling on the ground trying to put out the flames. He was in complete control of his protest. I wondered what I would do at that moment. How would I handle the pain Aaron was experiencing? My body tensed.
Somehow, through the flames, Aaron was standing tall in spite of the agony. He accepted reality as the relentless flames engulfed him, aware that many of us would be watching.
The air was then sucked out of his lungs. It looked like his mouth was moving but there was only silence, as a cop — who would come to represent the antithesis of Aaron — moved into frame hunched over a weapon drawn on Aaron’s burning body. Aaron was still standing. I imagined every memory from his short and now hallowed life flashed before him.
Somehow, through the flames, Aaron was standing tall in spite of the agony. He accepted reality as the relentless flames engulfed him, aware that many of us would be watching.
The water boiled on the stove.
Repressing the anxiety and shock I was now feeling, I made the coffee, sprinkled blueberries and cinnamon over the oatmeal and started cleaning. More than usual. Everything was in order when the kids walked down the stairs. I felt an urgent love for them. I gave them both a kiss through their messy bed heads. I didn’t want to stop moving so I made eggs, carved up an apple and filled their orange juice glasses.
I asked them how they slept. “Good,” they both wearily answered as they ate their breakfast.
I was living. Not on fire. My kids were in front of me.
After breakfast, I sat down in the living room, opened my phone and tried to take a few calm, deep breaths. I sent a text to Spenser.
Jesus.
I just watched the video.
I couldn’t say more.
I opened Twitter and the first picture I saw was of a leveled city block in Gaza. I tried to guess how many bodies were under the rubble. It’s likely there were hundreds. Many undoubtedly experienced the same fiery death as Aaron, yet it was Aaron’s image that I couldn’t shake. Sometimes a photo that holds hundreds of dead bodies can be less haunting than an image that holds one. The mind is strange.
I scrolled and saw a story about an ambulance in Rafah that had been bombed the night prior. Then I scrolled to see the last pictures of yet another Palestinian family that had been wiped out by a U.S.-funded airstrike.
A billboard in Sana’a, Yemen, commemorates Bushnell. The billboard reads, “Martyr for Refusing the American Genocide.”
This article was originally published by Tempest Magazine.
It was 6:30 a.m. on Monday morning when I watched Aaron Bushnell pour accelerant over his head and light his military uniform and self on fire outside of the Israeli embassy in Washington D.C.
My kids were still sleeping. My wife was upstairs preparing to start another week of teaching first graders. Water for oatmeal and coffee heated on the stove. The sun cast an unseasonably warm light through the window over the sink in our kitchen.
I learned of Aaron’s name via text from my friend Spenser Rapone, who famously opened his dress blues at his West Point graduation to reveal a Che Guevara T-shirt. Spenser then renounced the military and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. His military career ended with the protest, his conscience fully intact. Spenser’s text that morning read:
Aaron Bushnell.
Now that’s personal courage.
Truly we are led by the most gutless cowards.
I Googled Aaron’s name. ”Active-Duty Air Force Member Self-immolates in Front of Israeli Embassy,” one headline declared at the time. I found the video.
As Aaron walked down the street, his cell phone broadcasting through Twitch, I knew I was about to watch something horrifying and gruesome. “You owe it to Aaron to watch,” I told myself, trusting my ability to block out what I was about to see before my kids walked down the stairs that morning.
Writing about my time in the military, my experience as a war resister for the last 15 years and the deadly consequences of U.S. imperialism, I’ve grown accustomed to compartmentalizing my feelings around my kids and wife. (Although I’m sure they could point to many examples that contradict that.) I thought I would be OK that morning.
I was struck by how calm Aaron was as he addressed the camera.
He talked about the genocide in Gaza and refusing to be complicit in it. He also spoke of the ruling class normalizing the kind of death he was about to show us.
It was a Sunday afternoon. The sun was bright overhead as he walked to his final destination. It seemed too sunny, too nice of a day, for what I was about to see. Aaron reached the Israeli embassy, placed his phone on the ground at an upward angle, walked up the driveway and stood in front of a black gate that looked like it was made of iron spears. Aaron then doused himself with a liquid stored in a large navy blue water bottle covered in bright stickers. The fuel looked like water. He bent over and had a hard time with the lighter. Yet his hands weren’t visibly shaking. I rooted for it not to light.
Then it happened. The fire grabbed hold of his pant leg. The flames were in control now. My blood started racing. Aaron yelled “Free Palestine” as fire rushed up his leg and back. His yell turned to a visceral scream. Aaron’s government issued boots pounded the pavement in a heavy stomp. For a second, the thought of the U.S. military burning Pat Tillman’s uniform after he was killed in an act of friendly fire in Afghanistan flashed in my head. Aaron wasn’t running or rolling on the ground trying to put out the flames. He was in complete control of his protest. I wondered what I would do at that moment. How would I handle the pain Aaron was experiencing? My body tensed.
Somehow, through the flames, Aaron was standing tall in spite of the agony. He accepted reality as the relentless flames engulfed him, aware that many of us would be watching.
The air was then sucked out of his lungs. It looked like his mouth was moving but there was only silence, as a cop — who would come to represent the antithesis of Aaron — moved into frame hunched over a weapon drawn on Aaron’s burning body. Aaron was still standing. I imagined every memory from his short and now hallowed life flashed before him.
Somehow, through the flames, Aaron was standing tall in spite of the agony. He accepted reality as the relentless flames engulfed him, aware that many of us would be watching.
The water boiled on the stove.
Repressing the anxiety and shock I was now feeling, I made the coffee, sprinkled blueberries and cinnamon over the oatmeal and started cleaning. More than usual. Everything was in order when the kids walked down the stairs. I felt an urgent love for them. I gave them both a kiss through their messy bed heads. I didn’t want to stop moving so I made eggs, carved up an apple and filled their orange juice glasses.
I asked them how they slept. “Good,” they both wearily answered as they ate their breakfast.
I was living. Not on fire. My kids were in front of me.
After breakfast, I sat down in the living room, opened my phone and tried to take a few calm, deep breaths. I sent a text to Spenser.
Jesus.
I just watched the video.
I couldn’t say more.
I opened Twitter and the first picture I saw was of a leveled city block in Gaza. I tried to guess how many bodies were under the rubble. It’s likely there were hundreds. Many undoubtedly experienced the same fiery death as Aaron, yet it was Aaron’s image that I couldn’t shake. Sometimes a photo that holds hundreds of dead bodies can be less haunting than an image that holds one. The mind is strange.
I scrolled and saw a story about an ambulance in Rafah that had been bombed the night prior. Then I scrolled to see the last pictures of yet another Palestinian family that had been wiped out by a U.S.-funded airstrike.
A billboard in Sana’a, Yemen, commemorates Bushnell. The billboard reads, “Martyr for Refusing the American Genocide.”
PHOTO BY MOHAMMED HAMOUD/ANADOLU VIA GETTY IMAGES
In the days since Aaron lit himself on fire, I haven’t slept much. I’ve thought a lot about the genocide that drove Aaron to such a protest. I’ve read about other massacres carried out against Palestinians, like Operation Protective Edge when Israel slaughtered 2,251 people in 2014. And Operation Cast Lead in late 2008 when more than 1,400 Palestinians were murdered by Israel, with the blessing of the United States. And the innumerable people who have been killed since and before the 1948 Nakba.
I also reread articles about Chelsea Manning’s revelations that showed how only a select few highly vetted reporters were allowed to cover the war in Iraq — a war where the United States killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians. Many were burned alive. The United States had learned much from the holocaust that was the Vietnam War, when images of death and destruction were broadcast into homes across America on a nightly basis. There would be no such images shared on mainstream news channels from Iraq and Afghanistan. Social media is changing things.
The military taught me that, for some, death carried out from a great distance is not as haunting and disturbing as death executed in close quarters. Paul Tibbets, the Air Force pilot who dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima proudly stated that he “never lost a night’s sleep on the deal.” If that same guy personally watched children burn — like Aaron burned — after his bomb detonated maybe he would have lost a night or two of sleep. Unless, of course, he was a sociopath. Lucky for Tibbets, he couldn’t see what he had participated in flying at 31,000 feet.
Aaron’s death was a lot of things. Above all it was intimate. You and I could look into his eyes as he died. We could see his dignity and honor up close. We could almost feel his immense suffering. The genocide in Gaza is also intimate. At least more so than the recent mass murders the United States has helped carry out. We’ve seen young babies die in their parents’ arms and in hospital emergency rooms, sometimes on the floor because there are no beds. Now there are no hospitals in Gaza, so we mostly see children dying in the streets. It’s this intimacy that the ruling class — that Aaron referenced — is most fearful of. Aaron wouldn’t have protested the way he did if he believed that death can be normalized when looking at it up close. He knew intimacy has the potential to cause movement and change.
Aaron wouldn’t have protested the way he did if he believed that death can be normalized when looking at it up close. He knew intimacy has the potential to cause movement and change.
Aaron showed us how deep our capacity for love and care can run, even for those we have never met. People who try to dismiss Aaron’s sacrifice and protest suppress their own capacity for love and their innate bond with humanity that extends well beyond our closest relations.
I haven’t fully processed Aaron’s sacrifice. I imagine I never will. I will, however, continue to think about his unsuppressed love of humanity. As frightening and challenging as it is to try to put ourselves in the shoes of others experiencing pain and oppression, there is purpose and life in the action. Especially when we can use that sense of connection to stand courageously with those who are most vulnerable to the wanton greed and pathological destruction of the ruling class, as Aaron did.
Connection — not racism, not murder, not indifference — is at the core of who we are. Aaron’s death was a stark reminder of this. He showed us the depths of his soul, and for those who were looking close enough, he showed us ourselves.
RORY FANNING is the author of Worth Fighting For, recently released from Haymarket Books. He walked across the United States for the Pat Tillman Foundation in 2008 – 2009, following two deployments to Afghanistan with the 2nd Army Ranger Battalion.
In the days since Aaron lit himself on fire, I haven’t slept much. I’ve thought a lot about the genocide that drove Aaron to such a protest. I’ve read about other massacres carried out against Palestinians, like Operation Protective Edge when Israel slaughtered 2,251 people in 2014. And Operation Cast Lead in late 2008 when more than 1,400 Palestinians were murdered by Israel, with the blessing of the United States. And the innumerable people who have been killed since and before the 1948 Nakba.
I also reread articles about Chelsea Manning’s revelations that showed how only a select few highly vetted reporters were allowed to cover the war in Iraq — a war where the United States killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians. Many were burned alive. The United States had learned much from the holocaust that was the Vietnam War, when images of death and destruction were broadcast into homes across America on a nightly basis. There would be no such images shared on mainstream news channels from Iraq and Afghanistan. Social media is changing things.
The military taught me that, for some, death carried out from a great distance is not as haunting and disturbing as death executed in close quarters. Paul Tibbets, the Air Force pilot who dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima proudly stated that he “never lost a night’s sleep on the deal.” If that same guy personally watched children burn — like Aaron burned — after his bomb detonated maybe he would have lost a night or two of sleep. Unless, of course, he was a sociopath. Lucky for Tibbets, he couldn’t see what he had participated in flying at 31,000 feet.
Aaron’s death was a lot of things. Above all it was intimate. You and I could look into his eyes as he died. We could see his dignity and honor up close. We could almost feel his immense suffering. The genocide in Gaza is also intimate. At least more so than the recent mass murders the United States has helped carry out. We’ve seen young babies die in their parents’ arms and in hospital emergency rooms, sometimes on the floor because there are no beds. Now there are no hospitals in Gaza, so we mostly see children dying in the streets. It’s this intimacy that the ruling class — that Aaron referenced — is most fearful of. Aaron wouldn’t have protested the way he did if he believed that death can be normalized when looking at it up close. He knew intimacy has the potential to cause movement and change.
Aaron wouldn’t have protested the way he did if he believed that death can be normalized when looking at it up close. He knew intimacy has the potential to cause movement and change.
Aaron showed us how deep our capacity for love and care can run, even for those we have never met. People who try to dismiss Aaron’s sacrifice and protest suppress their own capacity for love and their innate bond with humanity that extends well beyond our closest relations.
I haven’t fully processed Aaron’s sacrifice. I imagine I never will. I will, however, continue to think about his unsuppressed love of humanity. As frightening and challenging as it is to try to put ourselves in the shoes of others experiencing pain and oppression, there is purpose and life in the action. Especially when we can use that sense of connection to stand courageously with those who are most vulnerable to the wanton greed and pathological destruction of the ruling class, as Aaron did.
Connection — not racism, not murder, not indifference — is at the core of who we are. Aaron’s death was a stark reminder of this. He showed us the depths of his soul, and for those who were looking close enough, he showed us ourselves.
RORY FANNING is the author of Worth Fighting For, recently released from Haymarket Books. He walked across the United States for the Pat Tillman Foundation in 2008 – 2009, following two deployments to Afghanistan with the 2nd Army Ranger Battalion.
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