Conscientious Objectors: Joy Metzler, Air Force Lieutenant Honorably Discharged - 2025

“My turning point was Gaza. Everything I had learned about international law and what we were supposed to be upholding as members of the military, was not in practice what was actually happening."

What does an active member of the military do if they believe their government is acting illegally and they feel they’re being used to carry out a mission they don’t believe in? Some seek separation from the military using the legal process known as conscientious objection. In this first of four profiles, I interviewed Joy Metzler, former Air Force Lieutenant who was honorably discharged in 2025.

Joy Metzler, left, at her graduation from the United States Air Force Academy on June 1, 2023 with her now husband, Isaac Hummel. [Provided]

Joy Metzler, 24, was born in August, 2001 and grew up in Amish country outside Philadelphia. The month after she was born, 19 men (15 from Saudi Arabia, two from the United Arab Emirates, and one each from Egypt and Lebanon) hijacked and crashed US passenger airplanes into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a field in Pennsylvania on September 11, 2001 killing more than 3,000 people. “I joined because I wanted to serve and defend,” Joy told me.” I grew up conservative Christian. So a lot of the rhetoric around why 9-11 happened was, ’Oh, these Islamic extremists hate us because we’re free and we let women wear bikinis.’ So for me, joining the military was defending our fundamental rights and protecting our way of life.”

Joy chose the Air Force because she wanted to fly. ”The Air Force kind of struck me as the more nerdy branch. And I did well in school and wanted to be an engineer since late high school,” she said. “Air Force Academy seemed to be the best place to go for engineering/STEM.” She graduated from the Air Force Academy in June, 2023. “When you’re training to be an officer, you get trained in ethics and law because you’re expected to have to make decisions for a lot of people,” she said. “And so the expectation is that you understand what is and isn’t a lawful order because you would be giving orders as an officer.” After graduating from the Academy, she joined civilian graduate school at Georgia Tech as part of her active duty service commitment.

Memorial for Aaron Bushnell, Air Force serviceman, who killed himself via self-immolation in front of the Israeli Embassy in 2024. Courtesy: Rolling Stone

Eight months later, in February 2024, Aaron Bushnell, an Air Force serviceman, killed himself through self-immolation in front of the Israeli Embassy in Washington, DC as a form of protest against the US support of Israel’s continuous war against Palestinians in Gaza after Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, 2023. Aaron’s action opened the door for Joy to start looking into the history of Palestine. She soon realized “everything I had learned about international law and what we were supposed to be upholding as members of the military, was not what was actually happening. And so when I started applying the lessons I had learned to what I was seeing in Gaza, I came to the conclusion that Israel was committing war crimes. And so I figured, of course, that the US would step in and stop these war crimes from happening. And of course, this was during the Biden administration.” The US did not stop the war as Joy had hoped, and continued to arm Israel.

About a month after Aaron’s death, Joy started attending Emory University’s student encampments for Gaza. “At the first couple of protests I showed up to, I felt strange going as an active duty member of the military until I saw Veterans for Peace people there,” she said, “and realized that these people were, you know, in a similar boat to me or at some point had been in the military. And I was intrigued. l felt so alone that I was like, I’ll give these people a try. Without them I never would have been able to apply for conscientious objection or even do half the things that I did without their support.”

Joy Metzler with Veterans for Peace during their hunger strike in New York City in June, 2025. [Provided]

Having grown up in a conservative Christian family and still holding onto those values “minus the awful parts of conservative Christianity (it) made the most sense for me to use my faith values to explain why I didn’t want to be in the military anymore.,” she said. She had three years and two months remaining on her five-year contract when she submitted her 18-page long application for conscientious objection.

“I had to write my entire life story about what I believed when I joined the military, because I had to prove that I wasn’t a conscientious objector when I joined the military,” Joy said. “I had to write about what I believed at the time, which of course I believed I was doing the right thing at the time. I had to write about how my beliefs developed, which they developed a lot while I was at the Academy, but I hadn’t realized it until, you know, I sat down and thought about it. And then they developed to a point where, you know, I talked about Gaza being my point of crystallization, where I realized that I’m not going to be able to trust the US government’s evaluation of who should and shouldn’t die, especially according to my Christian faith.”

While her application for conscientious objection was being considered, she continued to attend protests to stop the war on Gaza and wrote opinion pieces and articles for like-minded publications.

“When I was finally granted conscientious objector status, a lot of people texted me like, ‘Oh, congratulations. It must feel good.’ And I was like, no, I mean, it really doesn’t,” she said. “This is something I really wanted to do. This is something I cared about for a long time and to just kind of, you know, feel like I had no other choice but to leave is a strange place to be.”

Even though Joy was never deployed, she says she “feels a lot of guilt for being stupid enough to join. Imagine somebody who comes back from a combat mission knowing that what they did was wrong. Not only do they know what they were doing was wrong, but they’ve seen it, they’ve lived it. They’ve done things they regret that those symptoms of moral injury manifest very similarly to the way symptoms of PTSD manifest. And so they go through this horrible mental health crisis. And the only way to deal with that is to completely fall apart or to pretend that everything you were doing was okay. My theory is that’s why you see a lot of veterans be overly proud of their military service, because the other option is to do what I did and do what a lot of other people did, which is to unravel at the seams based off of the things that you have had to be involved in. So I guess the long story short is not everybody has the privilege to speak out and to follow their morals, which everybody should have the right to do. But the military doesn’t afford.”

Joy told me that the military denied her the GI Bill for getting out as a conscientious objector and she now has to repay her graduate school costs which are upwards of $150,000. She’s not happy about it. “I know other people who have gotten out with a service academy commitment have not been issued debts before they did.” She was investigated by the security forces at Patrick Air Force Base over her published editorials but her case was quickly dropped, she said, after her leadership told them to stop. She currently lives in central Florida with her husband.

Other Conscientious Objector Profiles by this author:

Daniel Lakemacher, Hospital Corpsman, US Navy