I don’t remember his name. All I know is he was the oldest looking PFC I had ever seen. And, of course, he was talking to me because he was in trouble. The Army wanted to kick him out. Sometimes the Army can really screw over a person and this was a classic case.
The thing that was most impressive about my PFC was that he was wearing the Combat Infantry Badge with two stars. That meant he had seen combat in three wars, World War II, the Korean War and the Vietnam War. I don’t know how it is today, but you didn’t see many CIB’s with two stars back then. These guys were really special.
About that same time, there was a chief warrant officer in the JAG Office with a CIB. He was telling me about the conversation he had with a first lieutenant who was proudly displaying his Expert Infantryman Badge ( EIB ). He was explaining to the chief all of the tests he had to successfully complete to be awarded the EIB. The lieutenant then asked the chief what he had to do to be entitled to wear the CIB. The chief said, “All I had to do was stay alive.”
The Army was determine to get rid of my PFC. He had prepared false official documents. Many years back, he had married a woman, who unbeknownst to him, was already married. They had lived in government quarters on post and when he was shipped overseas, she received an allotment called a Class Q Allotment. This allotment was mandatory. The Army wanted to insure that wives were supported while the soldiers were overseas. Later, she left him telling him that she was going back to her “real” husband. So our PFC went to the JAG Office and asked a young military lawyer whether he was, in fact, married. The young lawyer advised him that if his wife was already married, then their marriage was illegal and he was a free man.
Well, he had been dating this sweet young thing and since he was a free man, they got married. This second marriage was legal, but Army Records still showed him married to the first woman. In fact, she was still receiving the Class Q Allotment (the devil is in the paperwork). His inquiries led him to a military clerk who explained that the only way he could stop the allotment was to show the Army a divorce decree.
So everything rocked along until our soldier received overseas orders and he wanted to make out an allotment for his present wife. The allotment clerk advised him that he could only have allotments to relatives and that he should list his present wife as his cousin, since he already had an allotment going to his first “wife.” So, he did just that.
When he returned to the states, the Army would not assign him to military quarters to live with his “cousin.” She got fed up and left and he went after her. That AWOL cost him some stripes and then when he tried to explain, they decided he had “falsified” allotment documents and to process him out of the Army.
I was a young captain, but I felt certain that we could explain away any supposed misdeeds. I was in the process of obtaining his first wife’s first marriage certificate (to prove she was a bigamist, and that it wasn’t my guy’s fault), when he decided to disappear.
This would have been a great story if I could have saved his career and gotten everything squared away, but it just wasn’t to be. The only good news is that when he went AWOL for the last time, the Army probably stopped the bogus Class Q Allotment.