Nate Boyer, the former Green Beret-turned-long-snapper who tried out for the NFL last season, has been listening to the nationwide debate ignited by Colin Kaepernick's national anthem protest, with "listen" being the operative word, as he emphasized in a poignant open letter to the 49ers quarterback Tuesday.
Boyer urged everyone else to try to be open-minded about the underlying message.
"I’m not judging you for standing up for what you believe in. It’s your inalienable right," Boyer wrote to Kaepernick for the military periodical Army Times. "What you are doing takes a lot of courage, and I’d be lying if I said I knew what it was like to walk around in your shoes.