When I reported to my initial assignment following Naval Officer Candidate School, my commanding officer asked me somewhat jovially, “You know why the Navy sends me Ensigns don’t you Mr. Hudson?” Puzzled, I replied, “No, Sir.” Still grinning, he explained, “If anyone screws up here, I’ll need someone we can court-martial.” U.S. Navy discipline has always been somewhat different from the other military services. Maritime law developed over thousands of years has always delegated absolute power to the captain of a ship at sea. The intrinsic risks are so great there can only be a single person charged with responsibility for decisions. The captain, serving as sovereign ruler aboard ship, is both in charge and ultimately responsible for the safety of his or her crew and passengers. Once underway, there is no appeals process for challenging a captain’s judgment.

There are ample Navy regulations governing virtually every conceivable nautical situation, as well as the Uniform Code of Military Justice, yet they often apply only when ashore. Even then there is an inherent bias best expressed by the Judge Advocate General’s staff in 1970 when I submitted a complaint regarding the misuse of funds at Naval Radio Station Fort Allen outside Ponce, Puerto Rico. They pronounced, “We are responsible for supporting Naval Regulations and the chain-of-command in place to enforce them.” As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, this admonition was directed to then Lieutenant, Junior Grade, Hudson as an implicit warning, “You’d better be right about this accusation, or you will be the officer who is in trouble.” I quickly recognized throughout the American military there exists a propensity for managing affairs with an eye on Covering Your A** (CYA), even when such behavior allows problems to fester. Malicious obedience frequently steers consequences.

The American military, as true for most armies throughout history, attempts to balance the brutality of the battlefield against basic human decency. I recall a story told by my father’s cousin who landed at Normandy on D-Day. He lost a leg on the third day of the assault, but before that, as his unit overran German positions, he was instructed to “take a dozen prisoners to the rear and return in five minutes.” His prisoners were marched to an irrigation ditch where they were executed. Many combat soldiers return home with similar memories whether they fought in one of our World Wars, in Korea and Vietnam or our more recent “police actions” across the Middle East. This is the stuff of nightmares and PTSD episodes. These horrors are mostly swept under the rug or euphemized as “collateral damage.”

I recount this history because it is only a few exceptional cases that emerge from the fog of combat and capture public attention. During my years of service this occurred twice, generating wildly different results. The first was the My Lai massacre in Vietnam where an American army platoon commanded by Lt. William Calley slaughtered 500 unarmed civilians in March of 1968. More than a year elapsed before war reporters Seymour Hersh and Wayne Greenhaw broke the story. Ensuing trials surfaced the fact Calley’s superiors from Captain Ernest Medina, to whom Calley reported, up through the country command staff in Saigon scrambled frantically to cover-up the civilian killings. Calley’s court martial defense was that he was following direct orders from Medina to punish the village since it likely harbored Viet Cong who killed several soldiers in their units.

Despite the extensive CYA campaign conducted by the entire command structure, Medina was acquitted at a court martial on the grounds his order to kill “all the Viet Cong in the village” meant only enemy soldiers. The court ignored testimony Medina claimed everyone in My Lai was Viet Cong. Calley did not fare as well at his court martial. More than 100 witnesses were marshalled against him, and they painted a picture of utter chaos on the day of the raid. Women were raped and then bayoneted, 17 of them pregnant. I should confess I had significant sympathy for Lt. Calley at the time when 26 of his superiors who were charged in the cover-up walked free. In retrospect, I thank God I had receipts for the fiscal shenanigans I chose to report. Public opinion then showed a majority of Americans thought Calley’s life sentence in 1971 was grossly unfair. Truth be told, he only served three years under house arrest at Fort Benning before being pardoned by Richard Nixon, who was on his own way out the door as president.

Nonetheless, the principle and precedent obeying an illegal order is a crime was ratified by Calley’s court-martial decision. Also in 1968, North Korea captured an American spy vessel outfitted with cutting edge communications gear and is remembered as the Pueblo Incident (USS Pueblo). Previously a naval research vessel, it had been refitted for espionage surveillance in 1967. Commander Lloyd Bucher surrendered the ship to a half-dozen North Korean gunboats. Equipped with the latest encryption gear, Bucher was required to destroy the ship’s electronic consoles with incendiary devices and then toss the remains overboard. He failed to do this, as we learned in Puerto Rico when we received orders to destroy thousands of broadcast encryption cards and communication manuals which had been compromised and were now in the hands of Soviet cryptographers. In this instance, the captain of the ship failed to follow an explicit order that was entirely legal.

It would be a year before Bucher’s crew was freed by the North Koreans. I’ve always felt Commander Bucher should have been court martialed for his neglect of duty during his loss of the Pueblo. Instead, the entire crew received a ticker-tape parade to welcome their return home. Both Calley and Bucher are deceased today, but their stories differ because of the specific circumstances surrounding their misdeeds. When six Democratic members of Congress, all with military or intelligence experience, recently videotaped a message to American troops advising them they have no obligation to comply with an illegal order, they were speaking the truth. What they failed to say is doing the right thing always entails substantial risk. There is reason to believe the Trump administration has and will continue to demand our military violate their oaths to defend the U.S. Constitution.

In fact, we are forced to conclude the deployment of military units to police American cities and an apparently imminent threat of unleashing formidable firepower to precipitate regime change in Venezuela are each a violation of the law. The callous assassination of crews aboard small boats plying the Caribbean and Pacific coasts of South America claiming they are moving drugs for criminal cartels seems dubious at best. I will be interested to learn why Admiral Holsey abruptly quit as our Southern theater commander. True to form, the Trump administration has wildly overreacted, creating suspicion the administration realizes it is violating the law. Mark Kelly and his twin brother, Scott, are the kind of genuine American heroes, fighter pilots and astronauts Pete Hegseth and Donald Trump resent.

Not to worry, a White House legal team that failed to prevent a grand jury from acquitting a sandwich-tossing protester isn’t likely to succeed at a court martial. Kelly’s statement, “I’ve given too much to this country to be silenced by bullies who care more about their own power than protecting the Constitution” speaks powerfully to many Americans. It’s worth recalling Kelly serves in the Senate in order to complete the work begun in the House by his wife, Gabby Giffords, who was severely handicapped by a lunatic, right-wing assassin firing a gun. The president’s confidence in his immunity may satisfy a delusional Supreme Court but it is wearing thin with voters.

Miller Hudson is a public affairs consultant and a former Colorado legislator.