A Few Good Men

Defending the Constitution Behind Enemy Lines, by Robert A. Green Jr., Skyhorse, 192 pages.

In Defending the Constitution Behind Enemy Lines, Captain Rob Green offers a detailed account of the battle by military service members to remain faithful to conscience and the Constitution during the DoD’s Covid vaccine mandate. This well-researched and accessible book covers various legal precedents for the mandate, the moral and legal responsibilities of service members, and the constitutional limits of Defense Department leaders. It reviews the diverse experiences of those who resisted, their wins and losses along the way to repeal, and offers a hopeful call to remain faithful to conscience and the Constitution. 

Green’s lucid portrayal of both his personal experiences and the tragedy and triumph of other defenders of conscience is essential reading for those interested in preserving the core constitutional principles that have grounded our nation since its birth. He opens by describing the special role that officers have in judging the legality and morality of military orders, helpfully noting that a service member’s obligation to disobey an illegal or unconstitutional order is just as strong as the obligation to obey a lawful order. This obligation to disobey explains the motives of the many who resisted the mandate.

Rob presents the vaccine holdouts as having the same sort of righteously rebellious spirit as the early-American “Sons of Liberty.” Great men such as Samuel Adams, John Hancock, Patrick Henry, Paul Revere, and other Founding Fathers rightly resisted King George’s regal overreach through a loose network of American patriots. They pledged their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor to one another to mutually resist the growing tyranny from across the Atlantic.

Similarly, Green equates the incremental oppression of the crown with our own government’s gradual aggregation of authority in the name of protecting American citizens from communicable diseases by impinging on their medical freedoms. He shows how mis-rulings in both Jacobsen v. Massachusetts in 1905 and Buck v. Bell in 1927 gave an over-zealous medical bureaucracy the unconstitutional authority to limit free medical choice.

In addition to these precedents, the Department of Defense militarized the effort to defeat Covid-19, listing the disease as a priority even over the competition with near-peer adversaries. Defeating Covid birthed Operation Warp Speed, which cut the Covid vaccine’s approval and testing time from about a decade to mere months and became the impetus for the subsequent DoD actions that gave rise to the book.

Moreover, this threat inflation was used to pressure men and women in the services to receive and compel reception of the Covid vaccine. Service members, especially early in the mandate, risked a dishonorable discharge if they did not take the vaccine. Such an outcome would have given them the social standing of convicted felons, with the subsequent loss of Second Amendment rights and addition of “dishonorable discharge” to every future job application. In light of such risks, it is remarkable that so many resisted. Green’s moving representation of this group contributes to the greatness of his book.

If there is an inclination to read the use of “behind enemy lines” in the title as hyperbole, the true stories and experiences of those brave men and women who risked so much to stand by their consciences and the Constitution suggests otherwise. Green tells of a conscientious recruit who was encouraged to join by tales of religious accommodation, only to be denied and kicked out within months. Additionally, some service members were not permitted to enter their workplaces and were counted not present for duty even while working from their cars. 

The harm, though, was not limited to those who took a conscientious stand against the mandate policy. Green tells of a Navy captain hospitalized with blood clots only four days after receiving the vaccine. He also tells of those who experience great remorse for having succumbed to the pressure to take the shot. All who would have otherwise opted not to take it were harmed by the mandate. For all of these service members, as well as those who resisted, the feeling of being “behind enemy lines” is no exaggeration.

But in what way did they “defend the Constitution?” This ever-growing network of conscientious, highly motivated, intelligent, and diverse men and women spent thousands of hours researching and writing arguments in support of their religious and moral views. One of the most important issues this network addressed was the dubious character of the mandate’s enforcement. For instance, the millions of vials of the Pfizer Covid vaccine purchased by the DoD did not automatically gain FDA licensure when the FDA approved “Comirnaty.” All of these products remained Emergency Use Authorized (EUA) products. And by federal law, EUA products cannot be mandated.

These men and women also revealed the sleight of hand at play in the DoD’s legally disputable claim that existing EUA vials were “interchangeable” with the licensed Comirnaty. Federal law explicitly defines “interchangeability,” and the two products did not meet the statutory requirements for such a declaration. They also discovered that in some cases, religious-accommodation denials were drafted before the requests themselves were even read. Finally, they demonstrated how military leaders denied religious accommodations on the grounds that the member would not be medically fit to deploy, while at the same time deploying other service members with approved medical accommodations.

Green recounts a great many personal experiences—his own and others’—that show how the military’s application of the Covid vaccine mandate was detrimental to readiness, good order, and discipline in the military. He closes by noting that while the government can change its policies and work to rebuild trust, they cannot rewrite history. He writes, “It is our duty to ensure that history does not forget the unlawful actions taken by so many military leaders and government officials.” Green has acted on this duty in good faith. His book is courageous, compelling, engaging, inspiring, and at times, revolting.

Integrity, it is often said, is what you do when no one is looking. Captain Rob Green and the faithful men and women he describes in his book show that integrity is also what you do when many are looking and expecting you to do otherwise. This book is essential reading for those who have concerns about military readiness, medical freedom, national security, or the preservation of the core principles bequeathed to us in the Constitution.

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