Phantom Soldier
Veteran stories, told as songs. A project of Project Veteran Overwatch. We built and maintain its website, phantomsoldier.org, at no charge, and PVO owns it.
What Phantom Soldier does
Most veterans have one story they have told maybe twice and a dozen they have never told at all. On paper those stories read like a report. Out loud they stop a room. Phantom Soldier gives them a third way out: a veteran writes the story down, a real person writes back and works through the words with them, and it comes back as a song. The song is released under the Phantom Soldier name, never the veteran's, with a permanent page on the site next to the story it came from.
It costs the veteran nothing. Everything the music earns is donated to veteran suicide prevention. Phantom Soldier runs on a nonprofit basis through Project Veteran Overwatch, which is pursuing 501(c)(3) status. It is a storytelling project, not medical or clinical care, and the site says so on every page.
Who it is for
- Veterans of any branch, any era, any job, with a story that has nowhere else to go.
- The people around them: spouses, parents, kids, friends, and the veterans who hear themselves in a song someone else told.
- The places veterans already are: VFW halls, Vet Centers, VA waiting rooms, and the county Veterans Service Officers who help with claims.
What we built
- The sitephantomsoldier.org on its own domain: fast on a phone, nothing to install, no accounts, no tracking.
- A page for every songStill Here, All the Wrong Reasons, Hard to Break, and I Can't See the Glass, each with the story behind it and links to Spotify, YouTube Music, Apple Music, and Amazon Music.
- Tell your storyAn intake form that asks for two things, an email and the story, and makes everything else optional. Submissions go to PVO, not to us.
- How it worksThe four steps, in plain language, including what happens if a veteran changes their mind partway through: nothing gets written.
- ResourcesCrisis and support lines with who picks up, caregiver and homeless veteran lines, and a Veterans Service Officer finder by ZIP code, rebuilt every month from the VA's accreditation list by a scheduled job.
- Printable flyersA flyer for the current single, as a PDF with tappable links and as an image, for posting where veterans gather.
- Art and story pagesThe drawing that became I Can't See the Glass sits next to the lines it turned into.
- The plumbingSitemap, search metadata, link previews, custom domain, and a print stylesheet, so the site works wherever a link to it ends up.
How the engagement works
Phantom Soldier is the first commitment of our pro bono program. It runs like paid work: a one-page charter, a weekly update, and an after-action review. The difference is ownership. Project Veteran Overwatch owns the domain, the site, the code, and whatever it publishes. If PVO ever chose to work with someone else, nothing of theirs would stay with us.