Army penalizing soldiers seeking religious accommodation to vaxx mandate: 'Technique of coercion

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Army penalizing soldiers seeking religious accommodation to vaxx mandate: 'Technique of coercion'

Service members are calling it a "technique of coercion" to force voluntary requirements

The U.S. Army is subjecting unvaccinated soldiers to punishments, including prohibiting off-base travel, halting promotions, and enforcing involuntary terminations from the service, which active-duty service members claim is a strategy to pressure them to abandon their deeply held religious beliefs.

An Army spokesperson confirmed to Fox News Digital that unvaccinated soldiers, including those without an approved religious accommodation exemption, are "subject to certain adverse administrative actions."

"Soldiers who refuse the order to be vaccinated without an approved or pending exemption request are subject to certain adverse administrative actions, including flags, bars to continued service, and official reprimands (GOMORS)," said the spokesperson.

According to the Army's public coronavirus statistics, 4,664 active-duty soldiers requested a religious exemption to the vaccine, but only 44 were granted. The Army has enacted 1,722 total separations with unvaccinated soldiers, according to the data. The Army did not detail how many separations were due to having been denied a religious exemption.


One current major in Army Special Operations, who was deployed to Kabul, Afghanistan, last year during the Biden administration's deadly withdrawal and has served for almost 11 years, including three combat deployments, called it a "technique of coercion" being unitized by the military to force voluntary retirements.


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"What [the Army] is doing, it's a technique of coercion to stall people's careers, to force voluntary retirements, voluntary exits," he said. "In my case, I could be a year behind my peers, and that will have devastating results when it comes to my next promotion."

The major explained that due to his unvaccinated status, he is being kept from getting his master’s degree at Liberty University, which will stall his career. In addition, he had already bought a house in Virginia and planned to move his family from Fort Bragg to their new home at the end of the summer, but he is now stuck in limbo because he has been barred from traveling.

"My career is still being stalled. They can't claim it's because I'm in the process of having a religious accommodation approved or reviewed, because that in and of itself is religious discrimination," he said. "And they are cleverly crafting cases. So it appears as if they're simply losing a higher rate of people to natural exit, not tying it to COVID or their policies. So I was intentionally trying to use the entitlements that I've earned and to demonstrate how they are in breach of contract and actively preventing their own officers' advancement."


"It's troubling being in limbo like this," he said. "First off, with the Army not acknowledging your First Amendment rights and issues, they have to guard. But second, just not knowing at what point you're going to get the boot and need to have that income stream in order to not get foreclosed on, or what have you."

"The most troubling piece" of the entire process, he elaborated, is that soldiers were cautioned against submitting religious exemptions in the first place, because if their faith were found to be "insincere" by the Army, they could be subject to the Uniform Code of Military Justice.

"It's coercion," he explained. "I'm frustrated as a service member, but I am appalled as taxpayer in how much time and money the Department of Defense has wasted on this."

In addition, he explained that most of the service members' exemption denials contained almost identical language and punctuation, which he said is a violation of First Amendment rights.

"I do not believe that it was a mere coincidence that every commander used the same verbiage (including the same punctuation) in the chain of command recommendations for the religious accommodation requests. It seems there was a template pushed down through the legal channels with an emphasis to recommend disapproval. The Surgeon General then uses the chain of command recommendations to justify his denial of the religious accommodation requests. It seems there has been a gross violation of the requirement to actually consider each individual request in accordance with the law," he stated.

The Pentagon has come under scrutiny for its "potential noncompliance" with the individualized and thorough review required under federal law for each religious exemption request