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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.

You’ve given us very little to go on, a few lines from a news article. I’m speaking from 24 years of Navy service. Whether your wife has the paperwork that says the Navy can do this in hand or not, the Navy can do this. JAGS are nothing if not risk averse. That they are being so inflexible in your case is telling.

I’m surprised the Navy is requesting all the money upfront. In my experience that not how the Navy handles indebtedness, although I have heard of other services, specifically the Army, requiring immediate, full payment for indebtedness, although not repayment of tuition.

In only one instance have I ever heard of tuition repayment being demanded by the Navy, and that is in the case of a young woman who went AWOL and hopped a plane to see her boyfriend without telling anybody where she was going. She was thrown out of school and the Navy and immediate payment of tuition was demanded. So the fact that the Navy is taking such a hard line leads me to think that 1) there’s a WHOLE lot more to the story than we’ve been given, and; 2) somewhere along the line your wife ticked off the wrong person and/or gave someone in her chain of command or the medical chain of command reason to be angry with her. I’m not accusing anyone of anything, but I am saying that in my experience what the Navy is doing to your wife is unusual bordering on unheard of, and things like that aren’t done without reason.

My advice is this: neither suing the Navy (good luck with that!)nor declaring bankruptcy will accomplish your goal. I think you and your wife need to keep in mind that the Navy has the upper hand here, and conciliatory tones and and a kindly offer to work with the Navy to lower the amount of the debt and get favorable repayment terms are the way to go. Start with a FOIA request and get ALL the paperwork the Navy has about her case. The FOIA won’t make you any friends, You may be able to figure out the rest of the story that way. Get a good attorney who was a former Navy JAG, one who worked with medical boards. And good luck.