“SHE didn’t reject the Navy, it rejected her.”
She is unable to fulfill the terms of a contract which she signed of her own free will. In this case the moral of the story is READ THE FINE PRINT. If the Navy didn’t have the clear legal upper hand here, they would not be taking such a hard line. I have sympathy for her, but I won’t condemn the Navy for acting like the military service it is instead of a jobs program like the liberals want it to be.
“But there ARE jobs that are done, onshore, in the Navy. Seems they could have left her in and had her taken one of those. There are Navy folks serving at the Pentagon, for example.”
There is a sea-shore rotation. So many years at sea then so many years ashore. Those guys and gals at the Pentagon have been to sea and are currently on a shore tour. Some specialties spend more time than others ashore, but I know of no specialty, none, where one is guaranteed to spend an entire career ashore. Even the GURLS must be deployable, and an asthmatic is not deployable.
While your friends’ son’s inner ear problem makes him unable to fly, it does not make him a potential medical emergency like asthma does. In a case like your friends’ son, sometimes an officer will be allowed to “lateral” to another specialty. It depends on the medical condition and the officer’s skills. I know of a pilot who developed a medical condition which precluded flying so he became an intelligence officer. If circumstances like those applied here, the Navy would have offered alternatives.
We’ve looked through the fine print. We haven’t found anything about reclaiming money from a medical discharge. There’s no legal basis here. The moral of this post is not to make claims like “READ THE FINE PRINT” if you haven’t read the fine print. I’ve seen the paperwork. You haven’t. Don’t claim you understand this.
What’s the moral? Don’t enlist in the military if there’s a possibility that you might develop an unforeseeable illness? How could we have avoided this? Lots of people sign on to the military because they don’t have money. That’s the entire appeal of these ROTC programs.
If a soldier’s foot is blown off on his first day a of duty, he’s not asked to pay back all the money that the military spent on training him, now wasted. Why is this any different? There was no choice to become sick. There was no malicious intent. There was an unfortunate diagnosis at an inconvenient time. When I say inconvenient, I don’t mean that it’s inconvenient to the government. I mean that it’s inconvenient to us. We’d much rather she served her time as she’d planned than go through this mess. We’d much rather have her spend her four year in the service than owe an amount so massive that we’ll be paying it back long past our retirement.
We’ve looked through the fine print. We haven’t found anything about reclaiming money from a medical discharge. There’s no legal basis here. The moral of this post is not to make claims like “READ THE FINE PRINT” if you haven’t read the fine print. I’ve seen the paperwork. You haven’t. Don’t claim you understand this.
What’s the moral? Don’t enlist in the military if there’s a possibility that you might develop an unforeseeable illness? How could we have avoided this? Lots of people sign on to the military because they don’t have money. That’s the entire appeal of these ROTC programs.
If a soldier’s foot is blown off on his first day a of duty, he’s not asked to pay back all the money that the military spent on training him, now wasted. Why is this any different? There was no choice to become sick. There was no malicious intent. There was an unfortunate diagnosis at an inconvenient time. When I say inconvenient, I don’t mean that it’s inconvenient to the government. I mean that it’s inconvenient to us. We’d much rather she served her time as she’d planned than go through this mess. We’d much rather have her spend her four year in the service than owe an amount so massive that we’ll be paying it back long past our retirement.