Oh, how much the times have changed!
The United States Army is now begging Covid unvaccinated soldiers who underwent involuntary discharge for their refusal to take the vaccine to return to service and also permits them to correct their military records.
Just two years ago, in a shameful campaign, the Pentagon was gleefully discharging soldiers who refused to take Covid vaccines.
We were assured that these discharges would “not affect military readiness”.
“I can tell you there are no operational impacts across the force for readiness,” Marine Corps Lt. Gen. David Ottignon told lawmakers. “There’s no one community that has signalled an instance where a [leader], an NCO or another enlisted Marine is not present because of that.”
The Marine Corps has, by far, kicked out the most service members: 1,968 total, 20% of whom received an honorable discharge. That amounts to just under 1% of the total force, which stands at about 215,000.
However, the readiness suffered: thousands of service members were dismissed, and potential recruits declined to enlist in the Armed Services, because, guess what, young healthy men loath Covid vaccines.
More than 17,000 service members balked at taking the shots, citing safety fears linked to the vaccine’s speedy development and spurred by misinformation [sic] about messenger ribonucleic acid technology, as well as concern over fetal cell lines used in formulation and testing. The more the controversy raged in the news, the more troops asked to skip the shots, Military Times reporting found.
The Covid vaccine mandate removed three times as many servicemembers (8,339, see above) compared to the 2,402 soldiers tragically killed in Afghanistan. The involuntarily terminated soldiers included, of course, the best, the brightest, the healthiest and most conscientious who cared the most about their health.
Thousands were given career-destroying reprimands:
Lt. Col. Terry Kelley, a spokesman for the Army, said that 2,767 soldiers have received “general officer written reprimands” — killing their opportunities for promotions or transfers within the military — and that two battalion commanders as well as four other officers have been relieved of their duties but remain enlisted in the military.
The leadership, sadly, stayed silent.
As a result, the military is missing its recruitment goals by 25%.
Covid vaccinations and other reasons “caused [the army’s] end strength to fall from an original level of 485,000 in late 2021 to around 452,000 active duty soldiers today”.
Now, Covid vaccinations are all but forgotten, but the bitterness, nastiness and senselessness of the mandates should be remembered. Remember how those dismissals were cheered by the media, such as the LA Times:
I am sorry about the destroyed careers of the best servicemembers. They kept their health and they will get military discharge papers corrected, but they will always remember the unfairness, the trauma and the helplessness they felt as their commanders dismissed them for not taking experimental and non-working Covid vaccines.
Life is not fair; the soldiers have not been compensated, but they at least remained healthy and true to their principles.
Please appreciate how hard it was for those brave souls to stick to their principles: their entire lives and careers were being wrecked by the illiberal Covid orders. These are courageous people – and the military needs stoic and strong heroes, of which 8,331 were dismissed due to insane orders of the Biden administration.
This article was first published on Igor’s Substack page. Subscribe here.
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