Blood & Honor
Winner of the 2026 Independent Publisher Book Awards Gold Medal for LGBTQ+ Non-Fiction.
Nick Harrison enlisted in the Army, deployed to war, earned a law degree between overseas assignments, and sought a commission in the Judge Advocate General’s Corps to complete his military career. He believed in the institution he served. He followed its rules. Then, after being diagnosed with HIV, he found himself confronting a military policy that had fallen behind the science.
By the time Harrison asked to continue serving, the medical consensus was clear: HIV is not transmissible when a person is undetectable. Much of that research had come from military medicine itself. The Department of Defense said a policy rewrite was underway. Harrison submitted a narrow request to keep serving in a limited capacity while the policy was reconsidered.
Instead, the request forced him through every level of the chain of command, up to the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense. His privacy disappeared. The policy rewrite was shelved. And Harrison became a named plaintiff in litigation challenging the military’s HIV policies.
Blood & Honor is a memoir of service, law, loyalty, and institutional accountability. It asks what honor requires when the institution you serve becomes the obstacle you must confront.
A Word From The Author
This book exists to place a set of lived experiences, institutional failures, and hard-won lessons on the record.
Blood & Honor is a story about service, law, loyalty, HIV, and the cost of challenging an institution from within. I wrote it to document what happened, but also to examine how policy, culture, command authority, and individual decision-making shape real lives.
I have tried to tell that story plainly and honestly. The book does not ask readers to accept easy villains or simple answers. It asks them to sit with the harder questions: what loyalty requires, what accountability means, and what happens when institutions built on honor resist the evidence in front of them.
My hope is that this account will serve as a reference point for those who come after me, and for those entrusted with deciding what happens next.
Nick Harrison
IPPY Gold Medal-winning author of Blood & Honor
Attorney | Army National Guard Officer | Combat Veteran | LGBTQ Advocate