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The Gist
The story below is fiction. The sniper positions on the arch it’s set on were announced on Sunday.
Every enlisted service member swears to defend the Constitution “against all enemies, foreign and domestic.” Congress put that language in the oath in 1962. Before then, the Constitution was not in the enlisted oath at all.
Military law presumes an order is lawful. A service member who refuses is betting a judge will later agree it was patently illegal.
Troops are deployed in American cities right now, and the courts haven’t finished deciding what’s legal.
This is fiction. It’s a future I hope we never see.
As he sat in his sniper’s nest on top of the new Arche de Trump, surveying his surroundings, he turned to his sergeant and said, “Surreal.”
She answered, “At the very least.”
Their eyes were fixed on the graves at Arlington Cemetery. American men and women who had given their lives to protect the Constitution. And now their orders were to be ready to turn their weapons on Americans protesting to prevent the overturning of the Constitution.
Four days on this roof and all they had seen was a crowd. Signs. Chanting. An old man in a Vietnam veteran ballcap who showed up every morning and left before dark.
The order hadn’t come. That was the part that kept them up. One bottle. One firework. One voice online saying somebody down there had a gun. That was all it would take.
He said, “I thought we were supposed to protect from foreign and domestic enemies.”
“That’s the oath I took,” she said. “You having doubts?”
“Yeah, Sarge. I’m having doubts.”
She moved down the line to see how the others were faring. It was a mix, but most weren’t sure they could follow orders to shoot Americans.
She had her own doubts, and had decisions to be made.
She grabbed her smokes without thinking, and started to put them back in her pack.
Light discipline, she thought. On a monument. Aimed at Americans.
What the fuck.
She walked to a sheltered spot behind the parapet, lit a smoke, and stared at Arlington.
The sniper and the sergeant are made up.
The sniper positions on the arch are not.
What was announced Sunday
On Sunday, September 20, the President posted on Truth Social: “At the strong request of the United States Military, and for National Security purposes, I have agreed to convert the magnificent Triumphal Arch... into a top grade Military Complex/Triumphal Arch.” He wrote that it would “house, store, and have the rapid ability to use large numbers of drones, plus Snipers, on both the roof and plaza areas, and additionally have and hold large quantities of sniper ammunition in storage.”
He didn’t say who in the military asked. He didn’t say who the snipers would be watching.
The Pentagon said it had no information beyond the president’s statement. Newsweek found no evidence of a formal military request, and the published project description says nothing about drones, snipers, or ammunition. In August, the Park Service quietly started calling the planned observation deck a “military observation deck.”
What “sniper ammunition” means
He didn’t say what kind. He capitalized Snipers.
Here’s what American military snipers carry now. The Army’s Mk 22 Precision Sniper Rifle fires three cartridges: 7.62mm NATO, .300 Norma Magnum, and .338 Norma Magnum. Soldiers are expected to hit targets up to 1,500 meters away with it. That’s nearly a mile.
At long range, the bullet arrives before the sound of the shot does.
Army surgeons have spent decades documenting what military rifle bullets do inside a body. They tumble. Some break apart. The stretch they throw through the tissue around them can tear an organ like the liver even where the bullet never touched it. Large exit wounds are the mark of that energy dumping out. Bone doesn’t crack. It shatters. (Borden Institute, Conventional Warfare; Emergency Care and Medicine, 2025)
“Large quantities of sniper ammunition.” His words. In a monument at the edge of the capital.
The arch isn’t built. On September 3, the Interior Secretary said excavation would start within two weeks. The next day, government lawyers told a federal court the planned work is archaeological survey work. Judge Tanya Chutkan ordered 48 hours’ notice before any activity on Memorial Circle. A group of Vietnam War veterans and an architectural historian have been suing since February, arguing Congress never authorized it.
The arch would stand at Memorial Circle, between the Lincoln Memorial and Arlington National Cemetery. Veterans have pointed out that anyone on its observation deck would look out over funerals at the cemetery. A sniper on that roof would be looking at the graves. That part of the story is just geography.
The oath
Every enlisted service member in America swears this:
“I, ___, do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; and that I will obey the orders of the President of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me, according to regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice. So help me God.”
It didn’t always say that. Before 1962, an enlistee swore to “bear true faith and allegiance to the United States of America” and to “serve them honestly and faithfully against all their enemies whomsoever,” according to the amendment notes on the statute. The Constitution was not in it anywhere.
Rep. H. R. Gross of Iowa wanted that fixed. At a Senate Armed Services subcommittee hearing on August 8, 1962, he said, “I can conceive of no valid reason why individuals enlisting in the Armed Forces should not take an oath to support and defend the Constitution.” Then he asked the question that still matters: “Why should there be any difference in the enlistment oath and the oath for officers?”
Hamilton A. Long, a retired New York lawyer who had served as an officer in both World Wars and as an enlisted man, put it plainer: “we don’t want our soldiers required to bear allegiance to something different from the officers.” The new oath, he said, put enlisted troops “in a position of comparable dignity and comparable trust and comparable obligations.”
The VFW and the American Legion backed it. It became law on October 5, 1962.
Congress didn’t add a word. It replaced the whole clause, and it changed three things at once. The Constitution went in. “Foreign and domestic” replaced “whomsoever.” And the allegiance itself moved: an enlistee now pledges “true faith and allegiance to the same.”
The same as what? One senator caught it before the bill passed. At that August hearing, Sen. Robert Byrd of West Virginia put the question to four witnesses in a single afternoon. Does “the same” mean the Constitution, or the United States?
Long, the old lawyer, didn’t hedge. “It refers to the Constitution of the United States. It is not referring to the United States of America as a government or something else.” He said it refers “strictly and pointedly to the Constitution.” Rear Adm. W. R. Furlong, reading the same clause where it already sat in the officer’s oath, agreed: “That is right. It says that.” The American Legion’s man wouldn’t go that far. Asked whether the words were clear beyond doubt, John S. Mears answered, “I do not believe I could say that they are clear without doubt.” The ACLU’s witness read it as both.
So Byrd floated a fix. Keep the old line about allegiance to the United States of America, put the Constitution clause next to it, and nobody has to guess. Long pushed back, and his reason is the whole story: that “would then be putting the enlisted man in a special category different from his officers.” Byrd didn’t press it.
Congress didn’t take the fix. It passed the text as written.
Read that again. Since 1962, the thing every enlistee swears loyalty to is a document. Including the ones who aren’t citizens yet. That’s the best reading of the clause, and it’s the one the bill’s own supporters gave under questioning. It’s also a reading Congress was told was not clear beyond doubt, in that room, and left alone.
Congress gave enlisted troops the Constitution so they’d carry the same weight as the officers over them. That’s the weight on that roof.
What the law says about the order
The Manual for Courts-Martial is the rulebook for military justice. The 2024 edition says this about orders:
“An order requiring the performance of a military duty or act may be inferred to be lawful, and it is disobeyed at the peril of the subordinate. This inference does not apply to a patently illegal order, such as one that directs the commission of a crime.”
At the peril of the subordinate. Not the officer who gave the order. The one holding the rifle.
Who decides whether the order was legal? “The lawfulness of an order is a question of law to be determined by the military judge.” A judge. Later. In a courtroom, long after the moment on the roof is over.
Now flip it. Rule for Courts-Martial 916(d) says following orders is a defense “unless the accused knew the orders to be unlawful or a person of ordinary sense and understanding would have known the orders to be unlawful.”
So the sergeant is boxed in from both sides. Refuse, and she’s betting her stripes and her freedom that a judge will someday agree the order was patently illegal. Obey, and “I was following orders” fails if an ordinary person would have known better.
And doubt doesn’t count. The manual says “the dictates of a person’s conscience, religion, or personal philosophy cannot justify or excuse the disobedience of an otherwise lawful order.” “Yeah, Sarge, I’m having doubts” gets him nothing. The only thing that protects him is the order being unlawful.
The Pentagon’s Law of War Manual goes further: service members “must refuse to comply with clearly illegal orders to commit law of war violations.” But that manual governs war. An American city isn’t a battlefield. On that roof, it’s the court-martial manual that counts.
An order to shoot unarmed Americans directs the commission of a crime. That’s the easy case. The hard cases come with a reason attached: a crowd, a fence line, a report of a weapon, a word like “insurrection.”
And here is the part that should bother everyone. Dan Maurer, a retired Army lieutenant colonel and judge advocate who now teaches law at Ohio Northern University, wrote in January that “no exact definition of an illegal or ‘unlawful’ order exists in military law.” Not in the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Not in service regulations. Not even in the Manual for Courts-Martial’s own explanation of the lawfulness of orders.
Congress never wrote one down. So the sergeant on that roof is asked to apply a standard nobody has defined, in the time it takes to decide, and carry the whole risk of getting it wrong.
And the legal exposure is only half of what she carries. I’ve written before about the other half, what it does to troops when we turn them on our own people. Moral injury doesn’t wait for a court-martial. It starts the moment the order comes.
This isn’t hypothetical anymore
In Washington, nearly 5,000 National Guard troops from more than 20 states are on the streets. The mission has been extended through Inauguration Day 2029. The Congressional Budget Office puts the cost at more than $3 million a day. A veteran named Anna King was detained by Guard troops in her own front yard. She’s suing.
In Chicago, the President called 300 Illinois Guard members into federal service on October 4, 2025. On December 23, the Supreme Court refused to let the deployment go forward. The majority wrote that “the Government has failed to identify a source of authority that would allow the military to execute the laws in Illinois.” Three justices dissented.
In Los Angeles, a federal judge ruled on September 2, 2025, that the deployment there violated the Posse Comitatus Act, the 1878 law that keeps the military out of civilian law enforcement. The administration appealed. I can’t find a final ruling as of today.
In 2023, before he went back to the White House, Stephen Miller laid out the plan on The Charlie Kirk Show: “you go to the red state governors and you say, give us your National Guard. We will deputize them as immigration enforcement officers.”
Last November, six members of Congress, all veterans of the armed services or the intelligence community, recorded a video telling troops they can refuse illegal orders. Legal experts said they were restating the law. That is what the Manual for Courts-Martial already says.
The President called it “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH!” In January, Defense Secretary Hegseth censured Sen. Mark Kelly, a retired Navy captain, and moved to cut his retired rank and pay. On February 10, a grand jury in Washington refused to indict the lawmakers. Two days later, Judge Richard Leon blocked Hegseth, writing that the Pentagon had “trampled on Senator Kelly’s First Amendment freedoms.” Hegseth vowed to appeal and posted: “Sedition is sedition, ‘Captain.’” I can’t find a ruling on that appeal as of today.
Six members of Congress read the manual out loud. The President said that was punishable by death.
What nobody has answered
Who are snipers on a monument in the nation’s capital for?
If that order ever comes, who decides it’s patently illegal before a round is fired, and not a year later in a courtroom?
The officer who gives it swore an oath with no promise to obey the President. The sergeant on the roof swore one that includes it. Which oath is she supposed to keep?
Congress never defined “domestic enemy.” The Manual for Courts-Martial defines “enemy” exactly once, for the article on misbehavior before the enemy, and that definition reaches “any hostile body that our forces may be opposing, such as a rebellious mob,” civilians included. It was written for a battlefield. Nothing stops it reaching a crowd.
Congress put the Constitution into the enlisted oath 64 years ago and wrote “domestic” right next to it. Nobody has taken either one out. Nobody has said what it means either.
If you swore that oath, or love someone who did, pass this on. Send it to someone who swore it.
Last verified: September 22, 2026
This is journalism, not legal advice. Any service member facing an actual order should talk to a military defense counsel, not a news article.
I use AI as a research and editing assistant, the same way I’d use a good reference book or a sharp editor. Every word published here is reviewed, verified, and approved by me. The perspective, accuracy, and editorial decisions are mine.
Tips and documents: ipersist@tbirdsquietfight.com
Theresa “Tbird” Aldrich, Navy veteran (VAQ-34, 1983-1990), Investigative Journalist, TbirdsQuietFight.com, Founder of HadIt.com | Advisory Board Member, Veterans Healthcare Policy Institute (VHPI).