Veterans and current members of the U.S. military who refused to submit to the once-mandatory Covid shot are hurt, some say “morally injured,” by the mandate’s lingering consequences. They hope the Department of Defense, and its likely new Secretary Pete Hegseth, will restore a culture that respects religious freedom within the ranks.
During his Tuesday confirmation hearing, Hegseth showed he understands how the military culture has changed.
“… I’d been identified as an extremist, as someone unworthy of guarding the inauguration of an incoming American president,” Hegseth said Tuesday. “And if that’s happening to me … how many other men and women? How many other patriots? How many other people of conscience? We haven’t even talked about Covid, and the tens of thousands of service members who were kicked out because of an experimental vaccine. In President Trump’s Defense Department, they will be apologized to. They will be reinstated, reinstituted with pay and rank. Things like focusing on extremism … have created a climate inside our ranks that feel political, when it hasn’t ever been political.”
In a decision that weakened the military and destroyed thousands of careers, President Joe Biden’s secretary of defense, Lloyd Austin, announced in August 2021 that the Covid shot would be mandatory. The move made many bristle for various reasons. Some already had Covid and they believed they did not need a so-called vaccine. The shot was developed through the cell line of aborted baby tissue, a reason the faithful had religious objections.
“The people who were most affected were those midway through their career that were at a point where, whether it’s because they felt religiously called to this by God, or they spiritually felt connected to the values and rituals and the life that the military provided them, they were forced to choose between their faith and conscience or the military,” Current U.S. Navy Chaplain Jonathan Shour, who did not take the shot, told The Federalist. “They’ve been injured morally, spiritually perhaps even, if you look at it that way. It’s hard to recover from, but not impossible. And what would hopefully happen under future leadership is an acknowledgement that the military didn’t live up to the moral and ethical values that it espouses on paper.”
An apology won’t be enough for everybody, he said, but there needs to be one.
Hegseth acknowledge this Tuesday.
“I will commit to this, because the commander-in-chief has committed to this,” Hegseth said. “That not only will they be reinstated, they will receive an apology, back pay and rank that they lost because they were forced out due to an experimental vaccine.”
From Boat To Broom
Joshua Conway, 37, a married father of two from Virginia, watched his promising career as a Naval Special Warfare Combat Craft crewman fall apart after the shot became mandatory. His unit was training for deployment when the mandate hit. The Navy spent a lot of money training him for highly specialized work, but Conway was moved to “operations,” where the desk jobs are, and he wasn’t given much to do.
“I would sweep in the mornings. I didn’t really do anything. There were odd jobs here and there, but not at all what I signed up to do, and not at all what I’ve been trained for. I’ve been trained to be on a boat off the coast of some terrible country in the middle of the night with huge guns, sneaking in to drop off Navy SEALs. I’m sitting here sweeping, for at least two years,” Conway told The Federalist. And every day, Conway said he was told he was likely to be kicked out soon.
Based on this admonishment, Conway preemptively sold his house, moved his family closer to extended family, and bought a camper van. He lived alone in the van from October 2021 through April 2023, when his term was up.
“Right before I got out, it was like, ‘Well, hey, they’re not actually kicking anybody out anymore. Hey, would you like to stay in?’”
But he felt like the Navy turned its back on him.
“They lost a bunch of good guys, that the only thing they did was stand up for their rights,” Conway said.
If the military does offer jobs back, they have lost people like Conway.
“Being able to be with my family as much as I can now, tasting that was amazing. And being able to pour into my children … I’m very glad that I did my part; the Navy built me up. It gave me the structure, morals and integrity and I have no regrets … I’m a Christian, and I’m a firm believer in God’s plan …It’s just exactly what he wanted to have happen. It built me up, it put me in the position to get bonuses, and I got to do cool stuff. And God, really set me up for, ‘hey, this is the time you need to get out.’ He made it very, very clear that I needed to go spend time with my family. And it was the best decision I’ve ever made.” If not for the Covid mandate, he would still be missing this time with his family.
Jonathan Shour, his pregnant wife, their three children, and a dog, lived in a hotel room for five months because of the Covid mandate. Shour was an Air Force Chaplain before switching to the Navy in August 2021.
“The mandate came down my first day of officer training,” Shour said. His family was in transition from their old base housing in Texas to North Carolina.
U.S. Navy Chaplain Jonathan Shour worked in this hotel room for five months.
Image Credit(Rebecca Shour)
“Because of the shot, they were then telling us we would never get to go there … We ended up moving my family into the hotel room that I was staying in, in training.” That was near the naval station in Newport, Rhode Island. They paid thousands of dollars out of pocket for the hotel. Their belongings were in storage and inaccessible. And after training, the Navy didn’t send Shour anywhere. He was told to work remotely, so he sat on the hotel bed with his computer.
Image Credit(Rebecca Shour)
The room had a couch that turned into a bed. His daughters slept there, and his son slept on the floor on top of two couch cushions. The family had planned a home birth, as they had done for the older three, and it looked like they were going to deliver their youngest in the hotel room, but three weeks before his wife’s due date, with the help of an attorney in February 2022, Shour was granted an exemption from the shot. The family was given two days to get out of the hotel room, find a new home, and move to North Carolina.
Broken Trust
“I would hope anybody coming in would see the importance of religious freedom and advocate for that,” Shour said. “If there is going to be any sort of restoration for the people that were harmed, there needs to be a team of those people — a committee, advisory group, Task Force, tiger team, whatever the military wants to call it — of those people who were harmed, that can lead the way forward to restore the people in their individual situations.”
There is not broad, sweeping change that can be made to restore people affected by the mandate, he said, because everyone’s harms were different in each branch and career path. Pilots missed flight hours; surface warfare officers are behind their peers in the traditional promotion track.
John Frankman, 36, formerly a Special Forces Green Beret officer assigned to Seven Special Forces Group, is a devout Catholic. He had to wear a red wristband and put red tape on his gear so everyone knew he refused the shot.
Image CreditJohn Frankman, training somewhere over Arizona. (Courtesy John Frankman)
For over a year, Frankman was looking forward to moving into a new position. He had been accepted to teach philosophy and ethics at West Point, but his shot status meant he could not be granted a permanent change of station to move. After missing deployments and the West Point job, he felt forced to leave the military. He ran a short campaign for Congress in Florida.
“I did leave in July of 2023, which is after the mandate was rescinded, but I was already on my track to leave the Army. I had already lost out on so many career opportunities that I felt my career was irreparably damaged. Even if I stayed in, I would not have the same trajectory,” Frankman told The Federalist.
He hopes to find a position within the Trump administration. But he does not see himself going back to the career path he was on before Covid.
“I personally think God has called me elsewhere at this time, but for the majority of service members, I do not think that back pay and reinstatement is enough. You have to understand the full extent of the damage that was done, the trust that was broken,” he said.
He recommends an adjudication board that would look at individual cases to help them recover lost opportunities.
“There also needs to be actual accountability, and firing some generals so that they can have a fat retirement paycheck and serve in the military industrial combat complex is not a punishment. They need to be court martialed, because the vaccine mandate was an illegal order … They violated religious freedoms and left many vax injured. I think there needs to be court martials, and that’s something that service secretaries can do,” Frankman said.
Navy Surface Warfare Officer Levi Beaird, a married father of five, was in a leadership school when the mandate happened. He had to wear a different colored sticker on his nametag each day so everyone would know he had not received the shot. The Navy threatened to make him pay back a bonus and the cost of his education, totaling nearly $200,000.
“I think what has not been spoken too much about is the moral injury that we all experienced. Like the PTSD and the depression still lingering,” Beaird said. “We were living on pins and needles every day.”
“They essentially paused my career and didn’t allow me to move forward,” Beaird told The Federalist. His refusal to get the shot has had a lasting impact on promotions.
“One thing that Pete said, and I appreciated, and I hope it’s the truth is that we’re going to focus on war fighting, because that is our job,” Beaird said. “We have so much that gets in the way of actually doing our job right now. All the unnecessary admin that we do on a day-to-day basis. Having to do unnecessary trainings — it’s like, just get us back to the basics and let us do our job. We’re severely undermanned. We have a lot of maintenance that has to happen on board our ships for us to be able to get out to sea. We just need the money, the tools, and the people, because we want to get the ships out to sea, and be ready to go fight a war if we have to.”
Some were forced out, some left on their own, some managed to stay, but none will forget what happened here. The military asks for no less than willingness to give up your life. That ask is so big that if demands a certain set of values. The Covid mandate put thousands in the impossible position of weighing values against their military career; only one could remain intact.
Beth Brelje is an elections correspondent for The Federalist. She is an award-winning investigative journalist with decades of media experience.
