Editor’s note: This report contains discussion of suicide. Troops, veterans and family members experiencing suicidal thoughts can call the 24-hour Suicide and Crisis Lifeline at 988 and dial 1, text 838255 or visit VeteransCrisisLine.net.
Ryan Hendrickson spent 22 years in uniform learning to find the things buried in the dirt that are meant to kill people. When the U.S. left Afghanistan, he discovered he no longer knew who he was without that work.
“I had no identity anymore, because my entire military career had been wrapped up in Afghanistan or Iraq,” the retired Green Beret told Military Times.
That void, and what he eventually filled it with, is at the heart of “Safe Ground: A Green Beret’s Mission to Remove Ukraine’s Landmines,” a documentary now streaming on Prime Video in the U.S. and U.K.
The film debuted Sept. 12, the anniversary of the day in 2010 when Hendrickson stepped on an improvised explosive device in Afghanistan while trying to rescue an Afghan soldier.
The Special Forces engineer sergeant recovered and deployed to Afghanistan seven more times.
In 2016, he earned a Silver Star for leading an IED-clearing team through a Taliban ambush in Baghlan Province. After retiring from the 7th Special Forces Group, he went back as a contractor, leaving in July 2021, shortly before the final U.S. withdrawal.
He came home hurt, confused and drinking heavily.
When Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Hendrickson felt a pull he couldn’t shake. He had no ties to the country. What he did have was his father’s longtime warning that regret is a miserable way to finish a life.
“I knew if I got to be an old man, and I didn’t at least go and try, I would regret it,” he said.
He flew into Poland in March 2022 with roughly 10 bags of donated humanitarian supplies.
Contacts on a Ukrainian missionary team asked him to bring body armor if he had it, plus two less tactical items: American Reese’s cups and beef jerky. Passing between drivers and safehouses, he reached Kyiv about three days later.
The process felt familiar. Hendrickson compared it to Robin Sage, the final exercise of Special Forces training, set in a fictional country at war.
“Well, everything went back to my training. It’s like, this is Robin Sage,” he said.
Volunteering with the missionary group Youth With A Mission, he was driving a bus into threatened areas the day he arrived, evacuating women, children and the elderly.
After Russian forces pulled back from around Kyiv, the team moved into newly liberated towns such as Bucha with food, medical supplies and shelter materials. He said the work “completely rewired my brain after Afghanistan, and now I had my purpose, and I had an identity back.”
As residents returned home, they began hitting landmines, booby traps and other explosive remnants left in the war’s wake.
Hendrickson started working with Ukrainian territorial defense units, doing what Green Berets do: train, advise and equip. He would fly home, raise money for detectors and safety gear, donate it to a unit and move on to the next one.
In October 2022, that cycle became Tip of the Spear Landmine Removal, a nonprofit he says has since carried him back to Ukraine 13 times.
Along the way, he came to believe the mission could help other veterans, arguing that “a lot of veterans’ mental health revolved around lack of purpose, service, and identity.” He began bringing veterans over as funding allowed.
At the organization’s recent gala, he announced an expansion, the Tip of the Spear Veterans Humanitarian Corps, which is meant to cover everything from mine clearance to reconstruction, agriculture, teaching and medical work.
“In the military we were trained to protect the people of America and our way of life through war. But now, we’re utilizing these same skills, but for saving lives and rebuilding. So you go from killing to healing,” he said.
When producer Colby Barrett, a former Marine captain, first pitched a documentary, Hendrickson said no. They talked for more than a year before he agreed, and Hendrickson said Barrett funded the production himself.
“Safe Ground” is part of Faith in War, a documentary series from the creators of “A Faith Under Siege.”
Hendrickson credits his faith as a huge driving force in his life and his work.
He added that Europeans often tell him he isn’t like a normal American. He pushes back. “I’m extremely normal. I am your normal American,” he said. “There’s Americans that are so much better than I am, and this is what we do as Americans, and this is what we do as veterans.”
The mission also gave him the courage to confront his own wounds. Hendrickson said suicide was once “on the table for me. I had that line in the sand that if things got worse than this, then I had my out.”
He later underwent ibogaine and 5-MeO-DMT treatment at a clinic in Mexico, the same psychedelic therapy explored in the veteran documentary “In Waves and War.”
“But the fighting inside myself has stopped,” he said, adding that he isn’t sure whether he has reached a peace agreement with himself or just a cease-fire.
As a Green Beret, Hendrickson said, “I would have a very hard time looking in the mirror because all I would see is failure.” That has changed.
“I’m proud, you know, of the man that’s staring back at me in the mirror,” he said.
Now almost 50, he is exploring similar work in Nigeria and Burma. His final objective is the country where his story began.
“Before I’m finished with my mission, I will be back in Afghanistan, and we will be helping the people of Afghanistan,” he said.
For veterans who have drawn their own line in the sand, his offer is simple: “Let me take you on a mission.”
