By @InfantryDort on X, active duty Army Major
Tortured Warrior XL: Kacy Dixon @KacyJDixon
The Torment
For nearly sixteen years, Dixon wore one uniform with two distinct missions — first as an intelligence officer, then as a Judge Advocate General. She built her life inside the Air Force, serving in Afghanistan, advising special operations, and earning an LL.M. in national security law. She carried a Top Secret clearance, commanded teams, and spoke truth in courtrooms and briefing rooms alike. But her deepest torment came in 2021. Pregnant, she faced the order that all service members would take an experimental vaccine. She had taken others without question. This was different. Clinical trials excluded women like her. Her doctor advised caution. Her conscience and the law said no.
The Breaking Point
The institution she had given her entire adult life to responded with silence and scorn. Her next assignment was canceled, while her husband and young children proceeded cross country on his orders. A Major with no mission, a mother without her children, cut off from her family and the team she had served for nearly two decades. In 2024, she separated — leaving her career, her benefits, her stability. For her it was also personal: the rage of being threatened while carrying life inside her, the sting of betrayal from the very system she had trusted to honor its oath.
The Transcendence
But Dixon did not fold. Guided by faith, and gifted in law, she turned her torment into advocacy. Fiat justitia ruat caelum — let justice be done though the heavens fall — became her banner. She helped launch Coker v. Austin, joined with others like Jordan Karr and Mark Bashaw to fight the mandate in court, and built a voice online that gave hope to the thousands purged in silence. She demanded apologies, accountability, and restoration for those cast out. She reminded the public that a nation which betrays its warriors corrodes its own defense. Today she balances motherhood with advocacy, her voice steady, her fire unquenched.
The tortured warrior is not always scarred by battle abroad. Sometimes she is scarred by injustice at home, cut down not by the enemy but by the very institution she swore to serve. Dixon carried that wound, yet she rose. Her scars became her compass, her faith her shield, her advocacy her weapon. Proof that truth can still be spoken, even when it costs everything.
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Tortured Warrior XLI: Ernest Evans
The Torment
Ernest Evans was born in Pawnee, Oklahoma — part Cherokee, part fighter, all warrior. He carried the hard edge of the plains into the Navy, rising through the ranks in a service that rarely looked like him. When given command of the destroyer USS Johnston, he promised his crew he would take them into harm’s way. That vow became his torment, for he knew one day he would be asked to make it good.
The Breaking Point
On October 25, 1944, in the Battle off Samar, Evans and the Johnston faced the impossible: Japanese battleships and cruisers bearing down on a small escort carrier group. Outgunned and out-armored, Evans ordered flank speed and charged. His destroyer darted into the teeth of the enemy, firing torpedoes at giants and blasting away with her 5-inch guns. The Johnston was torn apart, Evans himself wounded and bleeding, steering from the stern because his bridge was wrecked. He fought until the ship went down beneath him. He was never seen again.
The Transcendence
For his valor, Ernest Evans was awarded the Medal of Honor. His crew testified to his defiance, his ferocity, his refusal to bend before overwhelming firepower. At Samar, his sacrifice helped turn the tide in the largest naval battle in history and saved the American landing at Leyte. Evans proved that a single destroyer, led by a man with an unbreakable will, could defy an empire.
The tortured warrior does not measure himself against the odds. He measures himself against his promise. Ernest Evans vowed to fight — and when the day came, he kept that vow to the end. His life was consumed in flame and steel, but his name endures forever in the annals of the sea.
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Tortured Warrior XLII : Stephen Simmons @simmonsactual
The Torment
Stephen Simmons lived the creed of the Marine officer. Coming from a legacy of American warfighters whose lineage can be traced all the way back to the Bacon Rebellion and the Midnight Ride, he enlisted in the Marine Corps and rose to Major, carrying the warrior ethos through deployments, training, and the long grind of service. A husband, a father, and a man of faith, he was a vested heir to the institution he wore on his shoulders. While the institution crumbled around him, Simmons built a reputation for transforming unit cultures into immediately deployable organizations. Simmons revitalized how the Corps approached retention matters and under his leadership retention became a strength for the first time in a decade. But his deepest torment came not from battlefields overseas, but from a single order in 2021: the COVID-19 vaccine mandate. He stood by and watched as those senior to him either left or failed to object. Pregnant wives, weary families, and principled men and women across the force raised objections. Simmons stood with them. For him it was not rebellion — it was fidelity to the oath he swore to the Constitution.
The Breaking Point
The Marine Corps gave him no quarter. His refusal to comply ended a career that should have carried him to the highest levels of command for which he was destined. A Major with decades of sacrifice was suddenly on the outside. His family endured uncertainty, his purpose and stability ripped away, his career ended not by failure of command but by the stroke of a pen. He described it as the breaking of faith — the military turning on its own, discarding thousands of warriors as though they were expendable. The numbers tell the truth: tens of thousands separated, readiness eroded, families devastated, trust destroyed. For Simmons, the sting was personal and generational — the betrayal of those who had given everything.
The Transcendence
But Simmons refused to vanish into silence. He turned his scars into testimony and his anguish into advocacy. Alarmed by the impact to readiness, Simmons maintained his oath and his purpose. Online and in the media, he became a voice for military personnel and their families. In Congress and public forums, he offered solutions while demanding reinstatement and redress for those cast aside. By 2025, he had been appointed Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Military Community and Family Policy, fighting to restore trust, strengthen military families, and ensure that no Soldier, Sailor, Airman, or Marine would be abandoned again. His work is guided by a simple creed: America’s warriors must be fit, their families resilient, and their sacrifices honored.
The tortured warrior is not always scarred by bullets or bombs. Sometimes he is wounded by unlawful orders and the betrayal of trust. Stephen Simmons bore that wound, but he rose from it with greater fire. He serves now as both witness and reformer, proof that torment can be transfigured into mission — and that even when the uniform is stripped away, the warrior spirit endures.
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