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The Spartan Pledge

A battle plan for when you don't know what to do. A mission when a warrior has lost his.

Share Your Pledge

Record Your Pledge. Send It to a Battle Buddy.

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Max 500 MB. Up to 10 minutes long. MP4 / MOV / WebM.

“I will not take my own life by my own hand until I talk to my battle buddy first. My mission is to find a mission to help my warfighter family.”
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Warriors have taken the Spartan Pledge

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Commit to yourself and your battle buddy. No one fights alone.

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But the real lifeline is your battle buddy. The one who gets it. Call them. That's the Spartan Pledge in action.

Battle Buddy

Call Before You Fall

The pledge isn't just words. It's a phone call you make before the worst day of your life. Your battle buddy is the one who answers. This is what that promise sounds like in practice.

How It Started

Watch Boone explain in his own words

The Spartan Pledge wasn't born in a conference room. It came from a conversation between two combat veterans who had lost someone they loved.

Boone Cutler and a fellow veteran he called “Nacho” were talking about a mutual friend who had taken his own life. Boone asked the question that many don't have the courage to ask:

“Have you ever thought about it?”

Nacho's answer came instantly, and it shattered Boone. Despite everything they'd been through together—combat, recovery, the VA—Nacho said:

“Yeah, I think about it every day.”

That moment changed everything. Boone didn't offer therapy-speak or suicide hotline statistics. He responded the way a soldier speaks to a soldier, from the gut:

“Just call. Just call me first. Don't punk out. Don't go without saying goodbye.”

They made a mutual agreement right there. Call first. Talk to your battle buddy before making an irreversible decision. Simple. Direct. Warrior to warrior.

Other veterans helped take that raw moment and shape it into something bigger. They formalized the language. They added the second commitment—finding a mission, because Boone understood something fundamental about warriors: a soldier without a mission dies inside. But one with a mission becomes deadly.

That's the Spartan Pledge. Not a therapy program. A battle plan.

Two Commitments

The Battle Buddy System

When you take the pledge, you're saying: if I get to a dark place, I call my battle buddy first. Not a hotline. Not the VA. A real person who understands what it's like. Someone who won't judge. Someone who will show up.

And you're making a silent second commitment: when another veteran calls you, you answer. No questions. No judgment. Just be there.

Find a Mission

The second line of the pledge is as important as the first: “My mission is to find a mission to help my warfighter family.”

Warriors need purpose. Service gave you that. When service ends, the empty space that remains is where the darkness creeps in. The Spartan Pledge asks you to fill that space with something that matters: helping the people who understand you.

The Movement

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Around a thousand veterans took the pledge initially, and it grew from there through word-of-mouth, veteran events, and social media—the organic way movements happen when they're real.

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You don't have to be suicidal to take the pledge. This is preventive. It's about building a safety net before you need it, the same way you build unit cohesion before you go into combat.

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The pledge belongs to the warfighter community. It is carried forward by veterans, families, artists, advocates, and battle buddies who refuse to let anyone fight alone.

“It's a battle plan — what to do when you don't know what to do. It's a mission because a warfighter without a mission is a dead warfighter. But one with a mission is a deadly warfighter.”

— Boone Cutler

Video Transcript
I will not take my own life by my own hand until I talk to my battle buddy first. My mission is to find a mission to help my warfighter family. I'm Boone Cutler and I'm the author of the Spartan Pledge. So the Spartan Pledge is a battle drill. It's a plan. It's what to do when you don't know what to do. And it's a promise to say no matter how bad things get, I'm going to reach out and I'm going to contact you. It's also a promise to do something on behalf of the warfighter community and maintain a mission. Because a warfighter without a mission is a dead warfighter. But a warfighter with a mission is a deadly warfighter. When I told Karl Monger, he's a good friend of mine, he runs an organization called GallantFew, he's a mentor to me, he's an adviser to me. When I told him what me and my buddies were doing, he was like, Boone, I think you got something. I think you really got something here. This is something we should promote. From his networks, guys started taking it one on one, guys in groups. And then from there, Soldier Hard picked it up. He's doing it at concerts. Once Boone told me about the Spartan Pledge, I wanted to promote it in the best way that I know how. How could I incorporate the Spartan Pledge into music? Every warfighter knows about taking an oath. We take oaths very seriously. Well, why not invite warfighters in the audience to come up on stage and take the Spartan Pledge first? So every show that I did, no matter where I went, it's always been part of my show. So far since this entire journey has started, the most humbling thing I've seen is for someone to say, I want to contribute to this. But when Danny Prince got into the picture, an FDNY firefighter, he had in his possession actual metal from the World Trade Center. We met so many different people. One of them was Steve Danuk and he had introduced me and told me about the Spartan Pledge, and they were telling about how there's 22 vets a day that are committing suicide and how that's just totally unacceptable. Immediately, the Pledge resonated with me. So talking with Danny, we felt that, hey, let's do something with the steel. So we said, why don't we make a sword out of the steel from 9/11? And just the reverence and the importance of that steel would mean so much more to these servicemen and women. So that's what we did. We contacted a couple other guys, they did some research, found a swordsmith down in Texas, and it wasn't very long at all. It was a couple months later we had the final product, which is the sword. We're talking about the same thing that every warfighter joined. In this current era, everyone is there because of what happened at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on 9/11. And so we come full circle now by creating a sword out of that tragic event that inspires people to live. That's humbling. That's something that touches your heart. When people touch that sword, it's like connecting with all the souls we lost. People ask me, Boone, what are you going to do with the Spartan Pledge next? I'm just the author. I'm not doing anything with the Spartan Pledge next, because it belongs to the community. So the question is, what are you going to do with the Spartan Pledge next? I will not take my own life by my own hand until I talk to my battle buddy first. My mission is to find a mission to help my warfighter family.
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The Spartan Pledge isn't just about you. It's about building a culture where warriors protect each other. Send this pledge to someone you know — a veteran, an active duty soldier, a first responder, or anyone serving a higher mission.

Don't let them fight alone.