Welcome to Home of the Brave. I'm Scott Carrier. The camp of protesters or water

protectors at Standing Rock looks like a photograph of an Indian camp from the late 1800s.

Tippies along the Cannonball River, smoke from a lot of small fires, snow on the ground.

But now there are also yurts and big canvas tents and a lot of cars and a lot of

flags flapping in the wind. You can stand in camp and look up and see armored vehicles on top of the hills, the bluffs, one mile to the north,

the North Dakota National Guard looking down.

At night from the hilltops there's a long line of floodlights shining down on the camp.

This line of lights, the line of armored vehicles, is the line of the Dakota Access Pipeline

as it approaches the Missouri River.

If and when the protesters leave the camp and start moving towards the pipeline, the armored

vehicles come down off the hills and sometimes a battle ensues at a bridge, a highway bridge, halfway between the camp and the pipeline.

The bridge is the line drawn in the sand by law enforcement, the line that cannot

be crossed or even approached.

A couple of weeks ago, the first weekend in December, two to four thousand veterans showed up at the camp ready for a fight, a battle, where they would stand in a line between the water protectors on one side and the militarized forces of the state of North Dakota on the other,

willing to absorb a barrage of rubber bullets, tear gas, concussion grenades, and water cannons, sacrificing

their own bodies and maybe their own lives for a higher cause. The veterans came

from all over the country. They came from wars going back to Vietnam, including some wars we never even heard of.

As I talked to them and listened to them talked to each other, I started to think they were all the same person,

all speaking from the same experience and emotion. They'd been to war and had seen and done things

that had left them traumatized, and then they were traumatized

again in the same way when they saw the videos of militarized police, the National Guard

shooting at Native Americans.

...