One Word Answers: How Jason Moon Turned a Documentary Ambush Into an Album, and an Album Into Warrior Songs

Jason Moon. Photo courtesy of Jason Moon.

For five years after Iraq, Jason Moon could finish only one song. Before Iraq, songwriting was the place he took every overwhelming feeling, joy, heartbreak, anger, and turned it into something he could hand to somebody else. After Iraq, he'd sit down to write about happiness and end up thinking about the family of the man who never made it home from the base's front gate. He'd try to write about anger and it would curdle into grief. Every emotion led back to the same place.

“I don't want to talk about any of this,” he remembers thinking. “I want to be old.”

It would take a French documentary crew, a request for a single song, and an offer to pay for studio time to break the silence. What came out of that ambush became the album Trying to Find My Way Home, and what came out of the album became Warrior Songs, the nonprofit Moon built to do for other veterans what music did for him.

Moon grew up around campfires in the Northwoods of Wisconsin, playing guitar for anyone who'd listen, and by his teens he was gigging around the Fox Valley music scene. At nineteen, the guitar did two things for him at once. It made him popular. And, through discovering songwriters like Bob Dylan, it taught him that music could carry more than a good time, that a song could say something true about injustice and actually move people.

“I want that,” he says of his teenage self. “I don't know how it's going to happen.”

He joined the National Guard at seventeen. His house, he says plainly, was a house of domestic violence and ignorance. Nobody around him went to college. Looking back at the friends he grew up with, he counts more who are dead, in jail, or addicted than not.

“I had to leave that,” he says. “There was no future.”

The Guard was his way out: a path to college, a break from poverty, and, he's quick to add, a genuine sense of patriotism and justice he couldn't yet put into words.

College changed him before Iraq did. He started playing music with a fellow student, a women's studies major, and after their shows the two of them would argue in the car, Moon repeating things his father used to say, her countering with what she'd learned in class. She had the facts. He had what he'd absorbed growing up.

“I would get upset, and then I'd drop her off at her house, and I'd go home and be like, well, she's right,” he says. The moment that stuck with him came when he realized he was defending ideas he didn't even believe, just repeating them because that's what he'd been handed. “I just have to shut up, then, and stop defending, because I don't have any ideas of my own.”

He spent a semester in women's studies and ethnic studies classes, deliberately working to unlearn what he'd grown up absorbing. He calls it a project he's still on. “I'm in there with a pickaxe for my whole life,” he says, “just digging that ignorance out.”

"I don't have any ideas of my own."

He earned a bachelor's degree in religious studies. His undergraduate studies were interrupted by the Iraq War. He finished his master's in the same field after he came home. Being a religious studies scholar in a combat zone produced some strange, specific moments. His unit was stationed near the ancient city of Ur, close to the traditional site of Abraham's house. On a tour of a ziggurat there, the guide told the group it was dedicated to the Mesopotamian sun god. Moon, from the back of the group, corrected him in front of everyone: it was Nanna, the moon god, not the sun god. The guide argued, finished the tour, then came back and admitted Moon was right.

Moon with a South Korean officer during his deployment in Iraq. Photo courtesy of Jason Moon.

His own battalion chaplain, he says, didn't believe that Islam, Judaism, and Christianity all worshipped the same God, a position Moon found bewildering in someone responsible for the spiritual welfare of 440 troops. Some of his more meaningful conversations in Iraq happened with the Iraqi men he was assigned to guard while they worked for two dollars a day cleaning the base's toilets. One of them explained to him why Muslims don't drink alcohol: not as a blanket prohibition, but because prayer happens five times a day, and staying sober enough to pray means never starting to drink at all.

“That makes so much more sense,” Moon says now.

His job in Iraq was combat engineer, MOS 62 Juliet, General Construction Equipment Operator. He drove a backhoe and a five-ton truck, doing the same kind of earth-moving and road maintenance a highway crew does at home, plus water retention work and foundations for bases. He served with Charlie Company, 724th Combat Engineers, Wisconsin Army National Guard.

Moon in front of a school in Iraq. Photo courtesy of Jason Moon.

Music followed him overseas, once he stopped hiding it. He'd learned fast that showing a special skill in the military just gets you extra work on top of your normal day, so for a while he kept his guitar to himself. Eventually he started playing anyway, sitting on the hood of a Humvee on Saturday nights while soldiers passed around contraband whiskey, running small MWR morale concerts, and playing for Iraqi kids outside the police tape that cordoned off work sites, using the six Iraqi words he knew.

He also started what his unit called the Moon Shows, music mixed with skit comedy. One skit, built around a surprise contraband bust that had swept up officers along with enlisted soldiers, got him banned from doing comedy for the rest of the deployment. Near the end of the tour, after the deployment had been extended two or three times and morale had cratered, the MWR sergeant asked him to bring the skits back for one final show, on the condition that he avoid a specific list of sensitive topics.

“As long as I don't joke about this stuff, I can do the skit comedy,” he told her. “Yes, please.” He built the entire final show around everything on that list. “Our last show was really controversial,” he says.

Moon, covered in mud, during his deployment.
Photo courtesy of Jason Moon.

He believes the music kept him safer in a way that had nothing to do with talent. He was openly critical of leadership, the kind of soldier officers might otherwise sideline, but he was also one of the battalion's main sources of entertainment. “They want to keep you alive,” he says, “so they look out for you in a different way.”

Not every story from that year has made it into a song. Moon was on guard duty escorting Iraqi workers at the base PX when a supervisor discovered stolen electronics in a trash pile, planted there deliberately to catch thieves. Fifteen workers were about to be fired collectively. Moon, thinking fast, laid out their ID badges on the ground and led each worker over one at a time to identify the culprits by touch, after offering an out: anyone who confessed could keep their job. One man confessed. The PX supervisor fired him along with the other two anyway.

“I gave him my word,” Moon says. “He was crying. It's just garbage.”

The next day, gunfire broke out at the front gate, coming from the direction of the village the man who confessed had come from. Moon wasn't there, but he pieced together what happened afterward: a former PX worker had come to the gate and fired his weapon into the air, and was killed in the exchange that followed.

“I have a role in that death,” he says. “I have a participation trophy for that.” He's carried the what-if ever since: that if he hadn't intervened, fifteen men might have simply lost their jobs, and stayed alive.

It's the lesson he says the war taught him about trying to do good in a combat zone. “Anytime you put your hands in the sink, they're coming out dirtier than when they went in,” he says, “no matter what situation you're involved in.”

"Anytime you put your hands in the sink, they're coming out dirtier than when they went in."

He came home to a two-week leave in November of 2003 before fully returning in April of 2004, and the leave was where he first understood something had changed. At a bar on Fort McCoy during demobilization, he lit a cigarette out of habit, was told to put it out, saw no ashtray, and stubbed it out on his own palm without thinking twice.

Moon waiting to go home on leave. Photo courtesy of Jason Moon.

“That is not a solution that a normal human being would go through,” he says. “But I'm just used to pain, and it needs to be done.”

Another moment came while his unit was shadowing the soldiers who'd replace them. Explosions went off in the distance, and the new arrivals hit the ground, certain they were under attack. Moon and his unit didn't even register it as a problem and kept working.

“That's not normal,” he remembers thinking. “We should be on the ground with them.”

The reflexes followed him home. He'd swerve toward oncoming traffic to avoid a box or bag in the road, the instinct to dodge a possible IED overriding everything else, while his friends grabbed for the handle above the passenger door. He got up at night to check and recheck the locks on his own front door in a country with no war in it.

Moon in a Humvee during his deployment. Photo courtesy of Jason Moon.

“That's not doing anything except driving me insane,” he eventually realized.

His marriage survived it, though not without cost. “They deal with it,” he says of his wife and son, both of whom absorbed the fallout of his PTSD at home and then, because Moon travels the country talking publicly about his story, heard about it from strangers too.

A VA mental health worker told him early on to just tell himself he'd been doing his job, that the guilt over civilians killed on a convoy he'd been part of was something he could talk himself out of within a year.

“That's not gonna work for me,” he says of that advice. “My job is to not do evil when people say it's necessary. My job is to stand up to that.”

Worse than the counselor's advice, in some ways, was simply not being believed. He'd describe convoy orders to run over anything in the road, children included, and people would tell him it wasn't true, that the news would have reported it. In a college class weeks after coming home, a classmate dismissed a story about civilian harm in Iraq outright. Moon felt a surge of rage so specific he had to leave the room before it went further.

“I had never felt that angry and disrespected,” he says. It wasn't until 2008, four years after he came home, when other veterans testified publicly at Winter Soldier: Iraq and Afghanistan, that he stopped being the only voice saying what he'd seen.

By 2009, five years home, Moon had survived a suicide attempt and grown exhausted from being asked, over and over, to speak publicly about trauma he still couldn't write about. A French filmmaker working on a documentary called On the Bridge scheduled an interview, and Moon, worn down, gave him one-word answers. Then the filmmaker asked about Moon's music, and about a song called “Trying to Find My Way Home.”

“Now you got my attention,” Moon says. The filmmaker asked if he had other unfinished songs, offered to pay for professional recording, and Moon saw an opening he couldn't turn down. Over the following two to six weeks, songs he'd abandoned mid-verse for years came pouring out.

“I wrote almost all the songs on Trying to Find My Way Home in two to six weeks,” he says. Four tracks were professionally recorded through the documentary's funding, and Moon leveraged that into finishing a full album.

He didn't expect anyone outside his own fan base to listen to a record about coming home from war. Instead, phone calls and emails started arriving. One veteran, then another, telling him the songs matched exactly what they'd felt and hadn't been able to say.

Moon at a 2018 Warrior Songs concert. Photo by Arrow of Light Design.

“There's two people in the world as messed up as I am,” he remembers thinking. Then three. He was midway through a master's-to-PhD track in religious studies at the time, and only half convinced this was supposed to become anything bigger. He made a private bargain: if he heard from ten people in one week responding to the album, he'd drop the PhD and follow wherever the music was leading.

As he tells it, he had nine by 11:30 on Sunday morning. Around a quarter to noon, the tenth arrived: an email from a mother whose son had served at the same airbase in Iraq during the same window Moon had, and who had attempted suicide three times since coming home. She'd played him Moon's album. He broke down, told her what he'd been carrying, and checked himself into a forty-day VA program the next day.

“All right, you win,” Moon says. “Mission received.” He left his PhD studies and started performing anywhere that would have him, developing a ninety-minute program called Seven Things You Never Say to a Veteran, covering PTSD, suicide, and what not to say to someone carrying it.

He started by folding fifteen minutes of talk about PTSD into his regular music sets, raising money for veterans' organizations around Milwaukee, roughly thirteen thousand dollars over two years. Eventually he narrowed his focus to working directly with veterans and music, which led him to found Warrior Songs in 2011, a Wisconsin nonprofit that pairs professional songwriters with veterans and turns their journals, trauma, and unspoken stories into finished, performable songs.

“It's the greatest honor,” he says of the trust veterans place in him. He treats every story a veteran hands him as a commitment, not a maybe. “We have to continue it,” he says. “We're releasing that song, regardless of whether or not it turns out great.”

Warrior Songs later produced Women at War, which Moon says was the first modern music compilation built around women veterans' experiences and military sexual trauma. He says he still doesn't fully understand the speed of the trust that greets him in those rooms. Facility staff would warn him that survivors might not want a man present at all, and then, once someone recognized his name from earlier work, the room would open up in an instant.

One therapist wrote to him about a veteran who'd refused treatment for four years, came to one of Moon's concerts, heard him talk about his own struggle with alcoholism for twenty minutes, and checked himself into an AA program immediately after.

"If all these veterans trust me, they trust me with these stories, and then I have to deliver."

That's still the whole engine, Moon says: the belief that if he can walk out of what he went through and use it for something, then maybe the veteran sitting across from him can too. “If all these veterans trust me, they trust me with these stories, and then I have to deliver,” he says. “I have to.”

“There's two people in the world as messed up as I am,” he remembers thinking. Then three. He was midway through a master's-to-PhD track in religious studies at the time, and only half convinced this was supposed to become anything bigger. He made a private bargain: if he heard from ten people in one week responding to the album, he'd drop the PhD and follow wherever the music was leading.

As he tells it, he had nine by 11:30 on Sunday morning. Around a quarter to noon, the tenth arrived: an email from a mother whose son had served at the same airbase in Iraq during the same window Moon had, and who had attempted suicide three times since coming home. She'd played him Moon's album. He broke down, told her what he'd been carrying, and checked himself into a forty-day VA program the next day.

“All right, you win,” Moon says. “Mission received.” He left his PhD studies and started performing anywhere that would have him, developing a ninety-minute program called Seven Things You Never Say to a Veteran, covering PTSD, suicide, and what not to say to someone carrying it.

He started by folding fifteen minutes of talk about PTSD into his regular music sets, raising money for veterans' organizations around Milwaukee, roughly thirteen thousand dollars over two years. Eventually he narrowed his focus to working directly with veterans and music, which led him to found Warrior Songs in 2011, a Wisconsin nonprofit that pairs professional songwriters with veterans and turns their journals, trauma, and unspoken stories into finished, performable songs.

“It's the greatest honor,” he says of the trust veterans place in him. He treats every story a veteran hands him as a commitment, not a maybe. “We have to continue it,” he says. “We're releasing that song, regardless of whether or not it turns out great.”

Warrior Songs later produced Women at War, which Moon says was the first modern music compilation built around women veterans' experiences and military sexual trauma. He says he still doesn't fully understand the speed of the trust that greets him in those rooms. Facility staff would warn him that survivors might not want a man present at all, and then, once someone recognized his name from earlier work, the room would open up in an instant.

One therapist wrote to him about a veteran who'd refused treatment for four years, came to one of Moon's concerts, heard him talk about his own struggle with alcoholism for twenty minutes, and checked himself into an AA program immediately after.

"If all these veterans trust me, they trust me with these stories, and then I have to deliver."

That's still the whole engine, Moon says: the belief that if he can walk out of what he went through and use it for something, then maybe the veteran sitting across from him can too. “If all these veterans trust me, they trust me with these stories, and then I have to deliver,” he says. “I have to.”

Moon performing in 2023. Photo courtesy of Jason Moon.

Moon is rebuilding. About a year ago he went through another major mental health breakdown, one that cost him momentum in his career and pulled him off the road for a while. He's back now, touring again, working on his memoir, and looking for places that want him to bring back Seven Things You Never Say to a Veteran. He's also putting together a new, roughly ninety-minute presentation built from everything he and Warrior Songs learned across a decade of Story to Song work, the veterans, the stories they handed him, what happened in those rooms, and what it all taught him about music, testimony, connection, and healing. He's booking concerts, story-and-song programs, workshops, veteran programs, university visits, conferences, and healthcare settings, anywhere that wants the work.

Resources

Warrior Songs | https://warriorsongs.org/

The Wisconsin nonprofit Jason Moon founded in 2011, pairing veterans with professional songwriters to turn their stories into music.

Jason Moon Music | https://www.jasonmoon.org/

Jason Moon's own music, including the album Trying to Find My Way Home.

Veterans Crisis Line | 988, then Press 1 | https://www.veteranscrisisline.net/

Free, confidential, 24/7 support for veterans and service members in crisis, also reachable by text at 838255.

Iraq Veterans Against the War / About Face | https://aboutfaceveterans.org/

The veteran-led organization, formerly Iraq Veterans Against the War, where Moon was active and which organized the 2008 Winter Soldier testimonies.

VA.gov Mental Health | https://www.va.gov/health-care/health-needs-conditions/mental-health/

The VA's hub for PTSD treatment, counseling, and mental health services for veterans.