In this excerpt from the Independent Lens film National Bird, Heather, a former U.S. military drone pilot who is now a masseuse, talks about the emotional distress caused by knowing she was responsible for the deaths of people, something she tried to push out of her mind but found impossible to shake. “You see someone die, because you said it was okay to kill them,” she says. When she was a drone pilot she would alternate between taking breaks to cry, and just feeling an empty void, on top of the brief adrenaline rush when piloting.