(LifeSiteNews) — A plaintiff in the massive lawsuit against the Canadian military over its imposition of COVID jab mandates condemned the requirements in comments to LifeSiteNews this week, arguing the rules that have forced out many otherwise battle-ready soldiers is an example of “friendly fire through policy.”

As LifeSiteNews previously reported, 329 members of the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) signed onto a $500 million class action lawsuit against military leaders over their “unlawful” COVID jab mandates that led to the voluntary and involuntary exodus of hundreds if not thousands of Canadian service members. 

According to the legal challenge, the mandates “caused the Plaintiffs harm and constitute[d] a breach of the public trust.” 

Catherine Christensen, an attorney with Valour Law who filed the class action suit on behalf of the plaintiffs, said in an earlier email statement to LifeSiteNews the lawsuit “is about a corrupt Chain of Command that thinks they are untouchable and above the law.”

READ: Hundreds of Canadian military members file $500 million lawsuit over COVID jab mandates

One of the plaintiffs in the massive lawsuit, who is still an active member of the military, spoke with LifeSiteNews this week on condition of anonymity.

The litigant, who is known to LifeSite and has served in the CAF for over a decade, said in a Thursday phone interview that military leaders’ decision to oust members who did not want to take the abortion-tainted experimental jabs for religious or other reasons has caused the loss of more service men and women than were “taken out by the Taliban during the entire Afghan conflict.”

While 158 Canadian soldiers reportedly died during the Afghanistan conflict, according to reports, the CAF member told LifeSiteNews that the “COVID policy reduced our fighting capacity by double, triple, quadruple what the Taliban took out.”

“It’s friendly fire through policy is what it is,” he said.

He described the gradual imposition of COVID jab mandates as “like watching a tsunami from the shore slowly get closer and closer and closer” as leaders “slowly cranked up the heat.”

“They first suggested we get it. Then they recommended we get it. Then, as the summer progressed, they started to tighten the noose,” he said. “They took the gloves off, and then it was 100% vaccination. And it’s your jab or your job.”

He said unvaccinated service members began to be ostracized from social events, ceremonies, and even the gym, “a very bizarre strategy” in a military whose members are supposed to be “strong,” “fit,” and “in good shape.” 

“So there are just so many levels of coercion,” he said.

Pointing to the “heartbreaking” testimonies listed in the statement of claim previously viewed by LifeSiteNews, he recounted the stories of colleagues who had “military members banging on their door, asking them for paperwork, asking them when they’re going to get the jab.”

He said even female CAF members who were pregnant were pressured to get the shot and were told to “take this jab or you can pack your bags” when they asked if they could at least wait until giving birth so as not to risk the safety of their preborn baby.

At a granular level, he said he witnessed colleagues as they became “more and more desperate” after being threatened with the obliteration of their careers and livelihoods if they failed to comply with the mandate.

He said people who bucked the COVID mandates were not only coerced, threatened, and ultimately discharged, but that some were even kicked out under category 5-F, i.e., a dishonorable discharge. He said the added black mark has added “insult to injury” and ensured the unvaccinated would be unable to “be employed in any capacity for the government ever again.”

Behind every one of the 329 names listed in the statement of claim, the plaintiff told LifeSite, “is an eight-year-old daughter or a twelve-year-old son asking [their] mom and dad, ‘Why are you guys fighting so much?’ Saying, you know, ‘Are we going to have to move back to grandma’s house because we’re going to lose our house?’”

“As heartbreaking as that, it is the tip of the iceberg in terms of the negative impact it had on members and their families,” he said. 

“They went to an extreme,” he said, adding that he has “never seen anything [like it] in my life.”

The litigant said he became especially “irritated” when he perceived that the crackdown on unvaccinated soldiers was directly tied to the 2021 election cycle and a concurrent political “competition to see who was toughest on the on the virus.”

While the CAF has long put a premium on “developing a culture of family support,” he said all that changed during the COVID response.

What he observed and experienced led him to believe that the government “had no qualms about politicizing our bodies, politicizing our health, politicizing our mental health, our families, security,” he told LifeSite.

He said military leaders have been at “complete loggerheads” with “the rhetoric and the reality,” and that service members have been treated as “pawns in a political game.”

“Everything we’ve invested over decades to care for our families, support our families, was all just thrown out like yesterday’s newspaper, because in the blink of an eye — you could have a chest full of medals, you could have will be willing to sacrifice your life for your country — but if you don’t roll up your sleeve, you’re garbage,” he said.

RELATED: Canadian military to dismiss unvaccinated members even after dropping COVID jab mandate

Asked how he personally came to the conclusion that he did not want to take the shot, the litigant told LifeSite he had “common sense,” didn’t want to take an experimental abortion-tainted drug, and — like his fellow military members — believes in protecting human rights, including medical freedom.

“What motivates people to get into the service in the first place is because we believe that every Canadian has intrinsic human rights,” he said. And those rights include freedom from being “a medical experiment.”

“This is so basic to Western society that you’re not going to force and coerce people with any medical treatment. Never mind an experimental medical treatment. We’ve gone completely off the rails as a civilization,” he said, denouncing government officials for demanding “that our citizens are forced to take experimental injections for something they don’t want or something they don’t need, with no long-term safety data,” in which “the only liability offered here is for the manufacturer.”

He told LifeSite his hope for the lawsuit is that there would be “a measure of justice [and] restoration for all the careers that were shattered, that were cut short, families displaced … divided marriages as well.”

“The pressure on marriages throughout this was devastating,” he said.

In addition, he said litigants are looking for an apology — preferably from radical Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau himself.

The CAF member said when he first entered the military he believed he would be “fighting out there” in “some other strange foreign exotic landscape.” Now, however, he believes “the battle is here at home and the battle is for all Canadians to live in a place and live in a country where they’re not going to be coerced into medical experimentation ever again.”

While he said it’s “a hard pill to swallow” for many who are confronted with the reality of the last several years and the injustice of the COVID response, he said that those who “do wake up” from the “mass formation psychosis” will “wake up with a vengeance.” Those individuals, he said, will be positioned to form “a very strong minority movement” that will push its way into the mainstream and begin to “influence the culture.”

For the plaintiff, a husband and father of a large family, his hope and motivation is to fight for a better world for his children.

“If I don’t fight this madness, I am leaving them a world in which people can be stripped of their rights and dignity at the stroke of a pen,” he said.