Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) is highlighting the negative outcomes for former servicemembers –who refused to comply with President Joe Biden and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin’s coronavirus military vaccine mandate – at the State of the Union by inviting a former Green Beret and Army captain named John Frankman, whose career was upended by the now-reversed order, as his guest.
Breitbart News caught up with the pair on Thursday at the House GOP’s media row ahead of Biden’s address later in the evening.
Frankman “was one of thousands who voluntarily separated from the Army due to hardships he and other unvaccinated service members faced based on discriminatory and punitive Department of Defense (D0D) policy,” Gaetz’s office noted in an emailed release Thursday morning. Now, he advocates for those affected servicemembers, having held a crucial role in starting the Declaration of Military Accountability initiative, which has more than 31,000 signatures.
Army Captain John Frankman (left) and his detachment are on the ground in Eloy, Arizona, after having completed a Military Free Fall jump in June of 2021. (Photo courtesy of John Frankman)
“So what we’re doing is we’re pledging to hold the DoD accountable as much as we can, and what we’re willing to do is we have people who sign this declaration who are running for congressional seats, and they are willing to take away retirement pay from these generals – who if you list by name for the illegal order – and also make sure they don’t serve under Senior Executive Service,” Frankman said.
“And what we’re also trying to do is let the next president and the next administration know that he has the power – the service secretaries have the power to take these generals off of retirement onto active duty so they can be court-martialed,” he added. “If they did nothing wrong, great. But they did break the law. They forced us to take something experimental, and furthermore, they didn’t give us any knowledge or informed consent”
The declaration can be found at militaryaccountability.net
Gaetz emphasized that the United States “invested a great deal of money in training John Frankman and so many others in our elite special forces, and because of Joe Biden’s actions, their lives have been changed, and our country has been weakened.”
Frankman previously noted that a myriad of missed opportunities followed his application for a religious exception to the vaccine.
“After I put my religious exemption in, I lost out on deployments, my team time got cut short, and I wasn’t able to advance my career by going to grad school and teaching at West Point in an assignment I was accepted to,” he detailed.
He then “decided to leave” and exited the military in July 2023, when his “additional duty service obligation… was up for [his] special forces training.”
While Republicans in both chambers successfully forced the Biden Pentagon to rescind the order in the 2023 National Defense Authorization Act, as Breitbart News noted, Frankman has said the mandate “irreparably damaged” his career.
Gaetz told Breitbart News Thursday it is “more than a brigade worth of people that we drained out of our military as a consequence of the vax mandate.”
“So I wanted one of the service members from my district, who was negatively impacted by this vaccine mandate, to have the opportunity to be here and to be able to represent all of the strife that has been caused for the great many people that I communicate with and that John communicates with,” Gaetz explained. “The vax mandate impacting lives is a kitchen table issue in my district because I represent one of the highest concentrations of active duty military in the country, and I wanted to reflect their concerns.”
Gaetz vowed that “under any administration, I will not rest until we get back pay, reparations, and restoration of rank to our service members who were unfairly driven out of the military.”
In December, Frankman authored an exclusive op-ed for Breitbart News detailing his vision for how the federal government can make things right with the former service members who refused to abide by the mandate. This includes, in part, holding military leaders “accountable for this order that destroyed readiness, mistreated service members, and was often executed through coercive means,” he wrote.
He also calls for “restitution for their hardships.”
“This includes, at a bare minimum and is not limited to, automatically elevating discharge statuses, allowing service members the opportunity to return, backpay or severance pay, health care for life and 100 percent Department of Veterans Affairs disability for any service members injured by the shots, favorability for promotion and assignments for lost opportunities, and a reward for personal courage,” Frankman writes.
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