Sadly, of course, the pages of Colorado Politics are understandably saturated with stories about the mass murder here in Colorado Springs this week. Even as an even more deadly mass shooting in a Virginia Walmart knocked our shooting off the national front pages, for local and state news, our horrific crime remains fresh and appalling.

But there is other news out there, and perhaps as you are munching on leftover turkey (the key is jellied cranberry sauce on everything except the green beans), your eyes might be drawn to other newsworthy items.

In my case, I noticed a story, yet again, about a couple of military guys who don’t want to get the COVID shots and are taking their claim to court (where they will lose). Both are making the usual and false claims about the vaccine, such as it being “DNA altering,” and “ineffective,” despite both claims being demonstrably false. Oh, and they claim that the shot will cause an “extremely high likelihood of injury or death.” Unless they are talking about the tiny hole the needle leaves behind, more nonsense. One might wonder where these troops are getting their bogus information, but frankly, we know, even if we can’t say exactly on which far-right website they did their “research.”

Over my more than 25 years on active duty, I stuck out my arm for quite a few mandatory inoculations. I remember flu shots administered on a mass basis with a fancy air gun that shot the fluids into your bicep without the need of a needle. Happily, those aren’t used any more, because they really did hurt.

I remember, as a relatively new 2nd Lieutenant (the lowest and starting rank for officers) I was in the clinic to get my typhoid shot, among other vaccinations. Typhoid was not especially rampant anywhere in the world, but as military members, we needed to be ready to deploy anywhere in the world at a moment’s notice. When he got to my typhoid shot, the tech took a vial from the refrigerator and started warming it with his hands. I asked him why he was doing that, and he replied that if he warmed the vial, my arm wouldn’t ache for three days. He then paused and told me he kept a vial in the freezer for colonels.

I accepted my military vaccinations many times over my 25 years, and I did so because I realized that joining the Air Force, like any armed service, is fundamentally different from signing on to work at Best Buy or Safeway. As I used to tell my students at the Air Force Academy, their job, when stripped of all the nice words, is to be willing and able to blow things up and kill people if ordered lawfully.

That, dear reader, is the core of a military member’s job.

And with such extraordinary responsibility comes a duty to accept the limitations the military puts on you. As a military member you have less freedom of speech, you have less freedom to assemble, and so on. And you are not free to decide which vaccines you will and will not accept. If you don’t want to accept those rules, get out. Or better still, don’t sign on in the first place.

Setting aside the nonsense these two gents were spouting, an armed forces member simply doesn’t get the right to choose which shots to take. If that policy was not in effect, we could see troops deployed to critical hot spots only to have a COVID breakout among the front-line warriors. We literally learned that lesson in our nation’s first war, the Revolution. In that conflict, more died from disease than from British musket balls. In fact, early in the war, smallpox was a killer to the extent that George Washington ordered the first mandatory vaccination of military troops in our history.

Though it is a virtual certainty that these two fellows will lose their court cases, their shenanigans will, nonetheless, cost the military time and money to contend with. I fully support the immediate discharge (I’d even argue for a general discharge as opposed to an honorable one) for vaccine deniers.

There is no fundamental right to be in the military. It is an honor bestowed upon us by a nation we are sworn to defend. If avoiding a COVID shot is more important to some than actual service, let them go, as they didn’t really belong to the brotherhood and sisterhood in the first place.

Hal Bidlack is a retired professor of political science and a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel who taught more than 17 years at the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs.