On New Year’s Day 2025, Green Beret Matthew Livelsberger penned manifestos testifying against war crimes, and then exploded himself in a Cybertruck outside Trump Hotel.
Ten months later, Netflix released “In Waves and War“—a film about Navy SEALs using psychedelic therapy for war trauma.
Livelsberger, perhaps the most prominent war trauma victim in recent headlines, isn’t even mentioned once.
One month before Netflix release, Dr. Nolan Williams—the Stanford neuroscientist whose research anchors the film about preventing suicide—died by suicide at 43. The film released anyway, without any mention or memorial, burying his death in passing. Watching the film you might think Williams is not only still alive, he has found the cure for the thing that just killed him.
These erasures reveal what the film actually is: propaganda offering medical absolution without moral accountability.
Two Warriors, Two Types of Trauma
American special operations aren’t monolithic. Selection and training create fundamentally different soldiers:
Navy SEALs: Selected for aggression and ability to bond intensely with small units. Trained for direct action—raids, assassinations, surgical strikes. Brief deployments killing high-value targets. Minimal cultural engagement. Team bonds become absolute; questioning the mission forbidden. Cultivated into “Christian holy warriors” fighting evil—a self-concept openly weaponized by Pete Hegseth, Trump’s Defense Secretary nominee, who successfully lobbied for pardons of convicted war criminals, defended CIA torture, advocated bombing Iranian cultural sites, and attacked the International Criminal Court for investigating American war crimes. His view: “They’re not war criminals, they’re warriors” constrained by “academic rules of engagement” that are “tying the hands of our warfighters.”
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Green Berets: Selected for intelligence and cultural sensitivity. Trained for foreign internal defense—advising, training, building relationships. Long deployments embedded with local forces. Deep cultural knowledge required. Strategic thinking encouraged.
This doesn’t even account for Delta Force, CIA paramilitaries, and other units. But these two alone produce fundamentally different psychological wounds:
SEALs suffer narcissistic injury. Their training creates illusions of invincibility and righteousness. Trauma hits when reality intrudes: teammates die, operations fail, they get injured. They ask: “Why wasn’t I good enough? How do I avenge my brother?” The rage points inward or at the enemy—never at the mission. This makes them perfect instruments for Hegseth’s vision: warriors who can torture prisoners, kill civilians, and target cultural sites without facing consequences.
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Green Berets suffer moral injury. Their training creates cultural awareness. Trauma hits when they realize the mission’s nature: allies abandoned, promises broken, communities destroyed, civilian casualties covered up. They ask: “Did I betray people who trusted me? Was this war unjust? Did I participate in war crimes?” The crisis is existential and systemic.
One trauma type can be treated without questioning empire. The other cannot.
SAINT: Cheap Grace as Neuroscience
Central to the medical credibility of the movie is Dr. Nolan Williams, apparently from a very religious community, who developed Stanford Accelerated Intelligent Neuromodulation Therapy—SAINT.
His religious branding of mental healthcare isn’t subtle.
SAINT is electromagnetic brain stimulation to treat PTSD. Results in Special Operations veterans (spoiler alert) show phenomenal results:
- 83% PTSD remission
- 73% depression remission
And I’ll be honest, the veterans in the movie are very visibly different after treatment. Their eyes literally shift from sullen, dark, empty sockets into being lit up again. I feel genuinely grateful to see such healing, the delivery of care to humans who suffer. The treatment seems to work—for narcissistic injury. In fact, the stories told from the hallucinogenic episodes all seem to be about deeply embedded sense of personal image injury, fear of being seen truthfully. The boy whose father witnessed his simple mowing error and flipped into rage, or the fierce warrior who couldn’t witness the scared ghost he saw in the mirror, are the buried lede this film skips past.
Attachment/narcissistic injury stories fundamental to SEAL psychological recruitment pipeline ARE the actual insight from these deeply personal narcotics-induced testimonials. And yet this film frames such unique childhood traumas instead as universal supporting evidence for Operator PTSD treatment.
It never seems to rise above and ask: What did you actually do per combat code, morally? Were your actions, your killings justified? Do you owe amends?
Once, as I handed a Marine Raider a rifle, he told me his sociology degree was useless downrange: “I just call in what I see, they authorize.” Observation without moral judgment. Action without responsibility. This moment is hard to forget as I wasn’t convinced he could hold that line, mentally prevent his injury from operational failure.
SEALs in this film feel better, symptoms resolve, they return to function. Perfect for “my team got hurt” trauma. Useless—worse than useless—for “I participated in evil” trauma. That’s not healing; that’s spiritual bypass, removing the pain that might lead to repentance.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, martyred for resisting Nazis, distinguished cheap grace (absolution without transformation) from costly grace (forgiveness requiring confession, repentance, restitution, fundamental change).
SAINT is thus cheap grace medicalized.
I am certain Williams understood this, and I worry that it was too much to bear. Many of his close friends were devout Christians. He called the work “holy” and met colleagues at Stanford’s chapel.
But in clinical sessions with 30 Special Operations veterans, he heard confessions bound by confidentiality: what they’d done, where, to whom. He knew things that constituted war crimes. And then he watched his treatment provide relief without requiring moral transformation.
For a true Christian, this creates impossible tension and dangerous trauma: If you successfully treat PTSD in someone who committed atrocities, enabling them to feel better without repentance, have you saved them or damned them?
Williams killed himself one month before Netflix pushed his work to global audiences.
The War Crimes Livelsberger Exposed Are Happening Again
In October 2025, Four-Star Admiral Alvin Holsey resigned abruptly as SOUTHCOM Commander rather than continue overseeing what Pentagon officials are calling “criminal attacks on civilians.”
Hegseth celebrated the killings: “11 narco-terrorists at the bottom of the Caribbean.”
But Associated Press reporters went to Venezuela and identified who was actually killed. Not “narco-terrorists.” The dead included: a fisherman, a down-on-his-luck bus driver, a former military cadet, laborers, a motorcycle driver. Most were crewing boats for the first or second time, making $500 per trip to escape crushing poverty.
The U.S. government released no information about who they killed. Families can’t hold funerals for fear of reprisal.
This is dehumanization as policy: call them “narco-terrorists,” execute without trial, celebrate as victory, release no information, prevent mourning.
Admiral Holsey walked away rather than participate. Four-star admirals don’t resign mid-tour unless they believe they’re being ordered to commit war crimes. He can’t speak publicly without violating classification, but his resignation is testimony.
This isn’t speculation about future policy. The extrajudicial killings are happening now, exactly as Livelsberger warned last January about his service under Trump.
The Mexico Irony
The documentary also provides surface level tension about ibogaine and 5-MeO-DMT treatment in Mexico. At one point a SEAL refers to it as “hippy” stuff, a reference directly to President Nixon’s criminalization of political opponents by accusing them of drug use. The circular reasoning is almost poetic:
- U.S. prosecutes racist and authoritarian War on Drugs
- Sends SEALs to kill “narco” targets in Latin America
- SEALs get traumatized trying to destroy the narcotics market
- Psychedelics remain Schedule I (criminalized by drug war)
- SEALs travel to Mexico for treatment using ibogaine (derived from African indigenous medicine)
- SEALs return healed
- Netflix celebrates this as innovation
The people SEALs killed get no documentary. Communities destroyed by their racist drug war get no treatment. Indigenous knowledge is extracted without credit. But then SEALs need healing journeys in Mexican clinics, and use medicine from traditions the U.S. spent decades destroying, to recover from operations possibly conducted in that very country.
They killed the narco market participants, then begged the narco market for cure, because their own country criminalized the medicine…leading to war crimes, which arguably caused the trauma, which now funds the narco market.
What Livelsberger Witnessed
Matthew Livelsberger served as a Green Beret in Afghanistan. He witnessed civilian casualties from drone strikes—testimony that aligns with UN investigations and documented ROE violations. His story of trauma and PTSD from war crimes reads fundamentally different from these SEALs still trying to process losing a SEAL.
He became a whistleblower risk and, like the murder of Green Beret Melgar, he was targeted for erasure.
His final communications contained two distinct threads: credible, detailed testimony about war crimes in Afghanistan drone operations, and physically impossible claims about gravity propulsion drones. The latter follows a classic counterintelligence pattern—contaminating real testimony with fantastic claims to destroy credibility. Livelsberger may have recognized the manipulation; as he kept the claims separate, suggesting he understood someone may have wanted to discredit him.
His death on New Year’s Day—Cybertruck, Trump Hotel, manifestos about war crimes—may have been a desperate attempt to force attention to his testimony before it was completely buried under “crazy gravity drive guy” narrative. He had recognized his own deteriorating state, describing symptoms just like in the film about SEALs.
His plan worked partially. Media focused on the exotic technology claims and his “mental health crisis,” not the war crimes. Officials could dismiss him as troubled. His credible testimony about civilian casualties got memory-holed. Elon Musk personally attacked and ridiculed him, as if normal for a billionaire who never served to viciously target and discredit even decorated American veterans.
“In Waves and War” leaves the Green Beret experiences out entirely, a glaring omission for a 2025 film release about war trauma. Recognition for the whistleblowers who testified about war crimes before commiting suicide or being murdered would require this film to confront what the 2025 administration explicitly wants to erase from public view. Pete Hegseth successfully lobbied Trump to pardon Army Lt. Clint Lorance (convicted of murdering two unarmed Afghan civilians) and Army Maj. Mathew Golsteyn (admitted to killing an unarmed Afghan), and to reverse the demotion of Navy SEAL Edward Gallagher (convicted of posing with a corpse after being charged with stabbing a teenage ISIS prisoner to death and shooting civilians).
Hegseth’s fallacy:
You train someone to go and fight and kill the enemy, then they kill the enemy the way someone doesn’t like, and then we put them in jail.
The accurate restatement of Hegseth’s gross logical mistakes would be:
You train someone to kill enemy combatants in lawful combat. Then they murder unarmed prisoners and civilians. Then we prosecute them for war crimes—and I call this unfair.
His fallacy is primarily False Dilemma combined with Equivocation, using emotional appeal to destroy an important and actual lawful distinction between code of combat and war crimes.
Livelsberger testified about these exact practices. The film erases his perspective because including it requires confronting:
- Moral injury from witnessing/participating in atrocities, not just from losing teammates
- The system actively working to silence and discredit whistleblowers
- Some trauma that can’t be treated because it requires systemic accountability
- An illogical and immoral Defense Secretary who promotes and celebrates those who commit the crimes Livelsberger witnessed
One narrative serves recruitment for crimes and continued criminal operations. One demands accountability and change.
The Propaganda Structure
The film presents as compassionate veteran mental health advocacy. It functions as:
- Reputation management for SEALs facing war crimes allegations (Eddie Gallagher, others)
- Commercial for Magnus Medical’s SAINT devices
- Extremist recruitment tool (Christian devotion “takes care of warriors”)
- Reframing perpetrators as victims
- Erasure of moral injury and accountability
By focusing exclusively on SEALs (not Green Berets), symptoms (not causes), individual healing (not systemic change), it performs brilliant ideological work of disinformation: we sympathize with traumatized warriors without asking what traumatized the people they killed.
The Satanic Inversion
This seems important because the film has a buried Christian warrior message. Not satanic as cartoons—pentagrams and goats—but in theological sense: a system inverting good and evil, offering false salvation, appearing as angel of light, leading away from repentance toward comfortable complicity.
Structure:
True prophets (Livelsberger) demanding costly grace (confession, change) get martyred and erased.
Unwilling false prophets (Williams) create false salvation (SAINT) for holy warriors (SEALs) who committed sins (war crimes) but receive cheap grace (healing without repentance) and are celebrated (Netflix).
Meanwhile: Latin Americans killed in drug war—no documentary. Afghans betrayed—no treatment. Indigenous communities whose medicine was stolen—no credit. Green Beret who refused complicity—erased. Doctor who saw the moral impossibility—dead.
The film dips into religious language (SAINT, redemption, holy warriors) while evacuating religious content (sin, repentance, transformation, justice). It extracts indigenous medicine to maintain imperial warriors who feel better about an extraction empire, and calls this progress.
What Should Have Been Said
The honest documentary:
Working-class kids with attachment injuries are bonded to teams that are shaped into aggressive instruments, sent on dubious operations in unjust wars. When teammates die and attachment illusions are re-shattered, they’re traumatized. The military refuses effective treatment because psychedelics are criminalized by the same War on Drugs that deployed them. They travel to countries they operated in, to extract indigenous medicine, receiving treatment that relieves symptoms without moral reckoning. The system uses them twice: bonded into love of war, then in healing propaganda to recruit others. Green Berets experiencing moral injury get no treatment in this sorry arc—their trauma requires confronting American empire. One refused the narrative and made his suicide political testimony; we don’t mention his type of injury, or that war crimes may be buried or erased by hallucinogens. The doctor providing cheap grace to war criminals committed suicide before release; we celebrate his innovations anyway without admitting the tragedy. Nothing changes, except being “healed” by illicit drugs can mean…more unaccountability.
That film never gets made.
Conclusion
Three testimonies from the dead and silenced stand in the way of a film claiming an innovative path to heal injury:
Matthew Livelsberger: Green Beret whistleblower who witnessed war crimes in Afghanistan, was targeted by counterintelligence to discredit him, died trying to ensure his testimony survived.
Nolan Williams: Christian doctor who couldn’t reconcile providing cheap grace to warriors who may have committed atrocities, died one month before his work reached Netflix.
Admiral Alvin Holsey: Four-star admiral who resigned rather than oversee “criminal attacks on civilians”—can’t speak publicly but his resignation is testimony.
All three inconvenient to the machinery of empire. The first two dead, the third silenced by classification.
Livelsberger testified about practices Hegseth has now normalized. Hegseth got Trump to pardon Lorance (murdered unarmed Afghans), Golsteyn (killed unarmed Afghan), reverse Gallagher’s demotion (stabbed prisoner). His defense: warriors who kill “the way someone doesn’t like” shouldn’t face prosecution.
Now Hegseth is Defense Secretary. He’s already fired senior officers who might object. He’s already celebrating “11 narco-terrorists at the bottom of the Caribbean”—extrajudicial killings without trial. Admiral Holsey walked away rather than continue. Pentagon officials call them “criminal attacks on civilians.”
Meanwhile, Netflix releases a documentary showing SEALs getting SAINT treatment and ibogaine therapy. Beautiful cinematography. Stirring music. Healing journeys. Medical absolution through neuroscience and psychedelics.
The people they killed remain invisible. The whistleblowers discredited or silenced. The war crimes not only unquestioned but actively celebrated and expanded. The Christian holy warriors redeemed through cheap grace, ready to “stack bodies” under a Defense Secretary who says “put us all in jail” if these are crimes—knowing no one will.
This isn’t a story about healing. It’s how empire maintains warriors: break them through violence, silence those who witness crimes, heal the compliant ones just enough to redeploy them, pardon the ones who get caught, purge officers who object, celebrate the killings, eliminate oversight, repeat.
The pattern is identical to Nixon’s Operation CONDOR. The Church Committee exposed it then. And let’s not forget the CIA hallucinogenic operations MKULTRA.
Where is a Senator Church when you need him most?
Christians call this stuff demonic, even satanic. That’s unfortunately not spelled out in such a Hegseth war crime-washing propaganda film.
For Matthew Livelsberger, Nolan Williams, and Admiral Alvin Holsey—whose testimonies, whether through death or resignation, speak truths the current system won’t acknowledge.
