Yesterday I had the rare pleasure of speaking with people who actually knew Holsey—two flag officers and a colonel. One of the former flag officers knew him personally; the others were offering background in light of the mess we’re now living through.

First, they all have read what I’ve written, and they all expressed the same disgust: I’ve framed the issue exactly right. The United States is not in an armed conflict with Venezuela. The United States is not in an armed conflict with narco-terrorists. Period. Whatever else the White House may hallucinate on Truth Social, the law of armed conflict is not a choose-your-own-adventure pamphlet. They all expressed disgust—genuine, unvarnished shock—that such orders were given at all.

Every one of them called them what they plainly are: manifestly unlawful.

When I asked why Holsey walked, the story I got matched almost word for word this account. The man who relayed it was not in the room, but his former aide—now a senior officer himself—was. The versions align down to the emotional temperature.

When Holsey retired, I said at the time: you don’t do this on a whim. A fracture that deep means the man looked at the board, weighed prison against pension, and decided that protecting his family beat serving as accessory to a presidential tantrum with body counts.

I respect that. I’d respect him more if he’d stayed in the chair and refused the unlawful orders outright. But let’s be adults: disobeying a manifestly unlawful order doesn’t just put your own skin in the game—it involuntarily drafts your spouse, your kids, your entire financial future into the line of fire. If he were a bachelor with nothing to lose, I suspect we’d have watched him stand his ground and dare the regime to blink.

What they also told me: senior officers are retiring across all the services. That absurd “NO FAT CHICKS!” tirade detonated a series of long-brewing conversations in the flag ranks. They’ve been waiting—grimly, quietly—for the moment a truly unlawful order landed on their desks.

Now it’s here.

And the danger is precisely what you’d expect: once the sane, seasoned adults leave, all that’s left are the phony-tough and the crazy-brave. The ones who will salute anything, shoot anything, burn anything, so long as the order comes stamped with the imprimatur of Adolph Trumpler and his DUI-hire Rasputin.

When Milley said, “We do not swear allegiance to a king,” he was not being poetic. He was stating the core rule of the American military. And he was warning what happens when that rule is broken.

I’ve met more officers than most Americans ever will, including those who served. They are—normally—the country’s best: thoughtful, trained, serious, sober in judgment. To become a three- or four-star like Holsey is to rise into a stratosphere most citizens will never even glimpse. It is the top 1/10,000th of 1% of the entire military ecosystem. Plenty more are qualified, but only a handful ever get the nod.

Which is why I am merciless here.

I do not expect the Marine on the .50 to parse international law while staring at a mob. He obeys orders; his life and the lives of his buddies depend on it. He is not the problem.

But his team leader? His squad leader? His platoon commander, company commander, battalion commander, brigade commander, and ultimately the combatant commander? These people damn well know the law. They know what an unlawful order is. They know the politics; they understand the rules; they grasp the stakes.

Holsey’s refusal to play executioner is admirable. But his departure leaves us with a new officer corps—one increasingly selected not for judgment, but for obedience; not for integrity, but for loyalty to the Leader.

And that is how you wake up one morning to a military willing to shoot protestors, firebomb American cities, and train weapons on non-combatants because someone in the Oval Office decided the law was optional.

That’s the actual threat. Not Venezuela. Not “narco-terrorists.” Not phantom enemies drifting somewhere off our shores.

The threat is what remains of the United States once the last adults leave the room.