Chris Vickers, a former Army medic, first came across footage of the standoff at Standing Rock on Facebook. He’d been out of the Armed Forces for seven years, but he felt a duty to answer what he saw as “unconscionable violence that an over-militarized police force was willing to exert on an unarmed civilian population.”

So he dusted off his gear and joined the thousands of vets who gathered from around the country to support the anti-Dakota Access Pipeline movement in North Dakota, many of them Native themselves.

When the Army Corps of Engineers announced they would look for other pipeline routes on Dec. 4, vets like Vickers were there to stand in solidarity with the Sioux. Watch the video above to hear more from Vickers and other veterans.

Read our coverage of Standing Rock.

This video was produced by Ralph King, a former Wall Street Journal reporter turned independent documentary filmmaker based in the San Francisco area.