It was a threat… I don’t actually believe that an officer would do that no matter how high their ranking. It seems pretty obvious that they just wanted the private to fall in line so they didn’t give him any other options. But this was told to me by a vet and it happened over 20 years ago according to them. Maybe the guy was delusional but he seemed deadly serious when he told me.

I had a similar conversation about this with a Marine yesterday, and I definitely trust the lower ranks and their commitment to the American people, but it is after all an authoritarian hierarchy. I’ve heard of privates coerced into taking vaccines under the threat of disappearing, and if soldiers can fire on their own civilians in other countries, I have every reason to believe they can here. And I know some of them readily would.

To my understanding, he also very conveniently fudged a few of his experiments so that they would align with his other ones and ended up embellishing his final result, but also if he hadn’t done that he wouldn’t have discovered Mendelian genes? Not sure if that’s a win or a loss for science.