bjturk.commentary: unfinished business

bjturk.commentary
hanging from my own rope

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this bjturk.commentary:
unfinished business

Nearly eighteen years ago, a man I know was honorably discharged from the United States Army. His four-year stint as a Heavy Anti-Armor Weapons Crewman (TOW missile gunner) had come to a premature end. More than two years premature, in fact, as he served just under sixteen months of a forty-eight month commitment. The choice to leave when he did was his own, and he has regretted it ever since.

We occasionally make decisions that affect us for quite some time - possibly the rest of our lives - and never know it at the time, nor can we predict how it might later impact us. This is one reason why otherwise smart people do stupid things. In his case, it was joining the infantry. He chose infantry because they were dangling a $5,000 enlistment bonus for a four-year hitch as bait. He bit.

That was his first major mistake. He's a relatively intelligent guy and was never much into athletics. That right there destined him for failure as an infantryman, but he never even thought about it. He went for the money.

Basic training in Fort Benning, Georgia, wasn't so bad. He entered service 2/14/84 and spent the next three months learning to be a soldier. He got used to getting up early every day, found the food to be much better than he expected, qualified expert with the M-16 rifle (though he swears to this day that he only hit 35 targets, not 36), qualified sharpshooter with the grenade because he got lazy on one of the six objectives on the course, and learned to set up and fire the TOW anti-tank missile launcher (qualified expert on that one too). He had read a book about basic training before he went in, so he pretty much knew what to expect and was only mildly surprised once. He wasn't the company's honor graduate, but he passed basic with relative ease.

On to West Germany he went after two weeks' leave, where he felt isolated and alone, even though he was posted with about 3,000 other soldiers. What made a difference is that his unit was one of only two American posts in northern West Germany, in what was then the British Sector. There were few other Americans around, and almost nobody that he knew. Only one of the 100+ recruits in his basic training company ended up at the same post, and he was in a different unit. So he started drinking.

He had a bit of a drinking problem before joining the Army, but in Germany, it reached a new low. He went to the Enlisted Mens' Club every night and drank Black Russians (one shot each of vodka and Kahlua). He had only three reasons for leaving the Club, and they were: A. the club was closing (usually the case), B. he ran out of money (happened a few times), or C. he passed out (which happened exactly once over the course of a year).

This behavior didn't often affect his ability to perform during duty hours. He responded with skill and professionalism to each alert, scored better than ninety per cent on his Skill Qualification Tests, and generally did his job fairly well. Again, not outstandingly, but not badly either. However, there were four events in particular that ulitmately led to his early departure from service.

Three of the four events were similar. After drinking all night, he returned to his barracks and passed out without having relieved himself first. Twice he wet his own bed, and once similarly soaked the desk chair in which he conked out. He was written up by way of a counseling statement after each of these for having damaged government property. In the space on these statements where he was to enter a response, his varied from nothing at all to a rant about having to pay for the damage even though he didn't do it on purpose. In the fourth case, he got drunk in town and passed out in a ditch while trying to walk back to the post. The military police brought him back to his barracks, where he had already missed the formation for that morning's exercises. He received a counseling statement for this too, and entered no response.

In January 1985, less than a year after his enlistment, he was led to the company commander's office for the imposition of a bar to reenlistment. The four counseling statements, along with a fifth for failure to buff the hallway floor as ordered, constituted all of the evidence against him. From the commander's office, he was led across the hall to the first sergeant's office to write his response to the bar, his squad leader at his shoulder. He was told that he would have to stay there until he had finished writing his response. He opted not to respond. Nobody advised him to contact the Judge Advocate General's Corps for assistance. He was barred, just like that. As long as the bar remained in place, he would be unable to reenlist and would have to leave after his four years were up.

For a while, he cleaned up his act, in a manner of speaking. His squad leader forbade him to go the the EM Club and restricted him to post, so he spent a lot of time at the post recreation center, playing Dungeons & Dragons with soldiers from other units. Once the restrictions were lifted, though, he went back to his old ways. Then, in May, he was still so buzzed from the night before that his squad leader had him taken to the post clinic to have a blood sample drawn to be used as evidence for a drunk-on-duty charge against him. He had no doubt that it would come back positive.

Within days, he was told that, since he already had the bar to reenlistment on his record, he could apply for discharge to avoid the punishment and the Army would have to give it to him. He thought about it, and even went to talk to a chaplain about the decision: should he stay, take the punishment and likely be discharged anyway, or apply for the discharge and just get it over with? Either way, he reasoned, he was going to be leaving the Army. Applying for discharge, though, also made the bar to reenlistment permanent. With some misgivings, he chose to apply for the discharge, which would be Honorable, rather than wait to be discharged, which would not have been Honorable and would have first been accompanied by a fine and extra duty.

By early June 1985, he was on a bus back home, but even though he left the Army, the Army never quite left him. He continued to be haunted by his decision, and after a few months, he wrote for copies of his service record, and reviewed copies of the regulations under which he had been barred from reenlistment. Much to his dismay, he found that the regulations stated that he was supposed to have been allowed a reasonable amount of time to prepare a response to the bar, and was supposed to have been notified in writing of his right to appeal it. He knew that he wasn't given a "reasonable amount of time," never got the written notice of right to appeal, and there was no copy of the appeal notice in his service record.

Seeing a small glimmer of hope, he wrote to the Army Board for Correction of Military Records, requesting that the bar be rescinded due to procedural errors in its granting that violated regulations. The Board rejected his appeal. Having quit drinking early in 1986, he even wrote his former commanding officer, asking for assistance. The officer wrote back that he would write a statement of support if he could prove to the officer that he had actually stopped drinking. With no way to prove it, he never wrote the officer back. He was barred permanently, and that was that.

Even though all hope should have been lost, he never gave up dreaming that, somehow, some way, there would be a knock on the door. When he opened it, there would be one or more Army officers there to tell him that it was all a mistake. He had to keep this dream alive because he was proud to be an American, proud to have been a soldier, and simply couldn't bear to think that the country he loved didn't want him. Even so, not having completed the remaining thirty-two months of his enlistment ached like an open wound.

Through the actions in Grenada, Panama, Somalia, Kuwait and Iraq, he agonized over the suffering of the troops there, knowing that he could have been one of them. In his mind, he knew that he should have been one of them. He was a soldier, and he should have been in the thick of the fight with his brothers in arms. Instead, he worked as a security guard, then in electronics, aluminum manufacturing, occupational safety and health, web development and mortgage servicing. At least he finished his bachelor's degree along the way, but he took out massive student loans because he wasn't on active duty long enough to get any veteran's benefits.

Eighteen years later, he still dreams of that knock on the door. He has it all pictured in his mind: what people would be there and what they would say, what he would tell his wife, how he would be sent into combat and return a decorated war veteran, how his friends and former co-workers would react to seeing him in uniform again, everything. Like a phoenix, an honorable military career would rise from its own ashes, and he would no longer have to dwell on the unfinished business of 1985.

That day will probably never come. What he never finished, probably never will be finished. The honor of the Honorable Discharge he received having tarnished long ago, he will probably remain in Army records forever as PV2 Brian Turk. The anguished man, with impossible dreams, is me.

April 12, 2003

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