Two part question about soldier’s enlistment ending.
Do they deploy men into combat that are only weeks or a couple months from leaving the service? If you’re in a combat assignment when do they let you leave (before the enlistment ends)?
Are reenlistments automatic for POW’s? They’ve reported Bergdahl got promoted to Sergeant in captivity. Is that strictly ceremonial or a real promotion?
Say someone had 14 months left to serve. Gets deployed. Captured. 3 years a POW and released. What is his military status? Can he walk away from the military or does he have an automatic reenlistment to serve?
I’m referring to modern day limited deployments. Not WWII where men that had left the service a few years earlier got recalled. I’m pretty sure reenlistments in WWII were automatic unless you were severely injured and disabled.
Generally, if you’re a short-timer on your enlistment, you may be allowed to stay back as rear-echelon support, or be transferred to a holding company with the brigade or battalion. That happened to me, although it wasn’t during a combat deployment.
If you’re in a war zone, it’s possible that your enlistment could be involuntarily extended. Fairly unlikely in an all-volunteer force.
POWs are carried as being on active duty, with pay and allowances either paid out to a spouse or carried “on the books” until the member is repatriated. Promotions can continue as a matter of longevity. Once you return to the States, your service is done. There’s no enlistment to finish, AFAIK; it would just be cruel to do require such a thing.
“Oh, hey, Taliban guys, look, uh, my term just ended and I didn’t re-up so, like, as of Tuesday I’m not actually in the U.S. Army anymore. So, hey, can I just leave now?”
I can see why short timers would be held back from dangerous assignments. Their head really isn’t in the game anymore. They are already planning and looking forward to their civilian life.
Depending on the needs of the military, a soldier with only a few months left may be involuntarily extended and sent to deploy with the unit. He would then leave the Army 90 days after the unit returns from their 12-15 month deployment. There was a lot of publicity regarding this policy during the recent wars.
SGT Bergdahl’s promotion is as real as any other. He holds the rank and authority and earns the pay. What he doesn’t have right now is a duty position commensurate with his rank.
This might fall under “Stop Loss” but most enlistment contracts also include a few years stint in the Inactive Ready Reserve, which is basically just like being a civilian, except you’re technically still on the books if they need to suddenly expand the ranks. Unless you have some unusual skill that is abruptly in high demand, those guys don’t get called up unless the Reservists and Guardsmen have already. This isn’t exactly a hidden thing, it’s right there in your enlistment contact along with how many years of active duty you signed up for. Most folks just tend to forget about it because it is utterly irrelevant to you while you’re actually serving.
There’s also the issue of logistics. Why send a guy to an assignment when you know you’re going to have to send a replacement in a few weeks and bring the original guy back? You might as well just send the replacement guy in the first place.
On a somewhat related issue, what happens when a member of the armed forces goes missing. How long does the military continue to pay his salary to his family and such?
I wondered about that with the UK army. But then I realised that it is pretty rare for a soldier to 'go missing". In fact I can’t recall any case of where the army don’t have a pretty good idea where the soldier is. They may not know whether he is alive, but they will know that he was captured or whatever. I guess he is ‘alive’ until someone decides that he isn’t.
Suppose a pilot went out on a mission in the Pacific during WWII and his plane didn’t return. He might have been shot down and killed or captured or perhaps he landed on a small island. It might be years before the military knows his fate, if ever.
My uncle’s plane was shot down over Japan in June of 1945, and he was declared MIA. The next year my grandmother received a letter from the Army dated Aug. 16, 1946, stating that since it was a year and a day since the cessation of hostilities, with no further information that he survived, they were changing his status to killed in action, and that would be his official date of death. ( A year later she gets another letter telling her he had been captured and taken POW, but died along with all the other American POW’s at the prison he was taken to. They changed his date of death to Aug. 15,1945, the last time any Americans were seen alive at the prison camp he was at.)
Good question. Suppose a pilot gets shot down - fate unknown. The service starts paying his salary to his family. Family gets two years of pay. After those two years, the pilot’s body is found and it is determined that the pilot had survived the landing, spent six months in a POW camp, and then was shot at dawn. Does the family have to pay back a year and a half worth of pay? Yeah, it would be pretty scummy to make them do that, but is the authority there?
If the servicemember received a promotion in abstentia, but it later turns out that he died before the date of the promotion, is it revoked?
This was NOT done during the Vietnam conflict, and there were stories of soldiers being killed within a few days of the last of their 365-day tour of combat duty. Their family at home was eagerly awaiting their son starting toward home on Friday, and then gets notified that he was killed Wednesday night. This just made their shock and pain that much worse.
This policy caused a lot of anger & resentment among military families during the Vietnam conflict (along with other reasons). That may be one of the reasons it has been changed.
There’s a difference between a “re-enlistment” and an “extended enlistment”. POWs get the latter. Before an “extendee” becomes a civilian, they’ll have to be returned to the states, get a discharge physical (maybe*), and be out-processed.
*I’m sure all released POWs get physicals. And lots of combat vets come home malnourished, so they’ll spend a week or two loosely restricted with doctors’ orders to eat steaks for lunch and dinner.
It came up as part of the anti-Bush rhetoric. “Back door draft.” When actually it was part of military regulations for many decades.
Viet Nam was a totally different situation. For one you had many soldiers (but not as big a percentage as people assume) who were drafted and had short enlistments. Also Johnson did not follow through with declaring the conflict a state of emergency. That is the reason why there was not authority to put stop loss in effect and there could be no large activations of the national guard. Mostly done for political reasons.