Military makes little effort to punish deserters

'Equivalent of a firing'
The number of Army soldiers prosecuted for desertion tripled in the year after Sept. 11. But it has essentially held steady since 2002. The Navy prosecuted 17 deserters in 2006, the Marine Corps just four. There were 10 prosecutions for desertion in the Air Force during fiscal year 2006.

The decision of whether to prosecute is up to the soldier’s unit commander.

Deserters who are discharged on less-than-honorable terms through an administrative, or non-criminal, proceeding lose the medical and educational benefits and other privileges available to veterans.

“I sort of look at the administrative discharge process as the equivalent of a firing ... leaving with a bad reference,” said David Miner, a former Army attorney now in private practice, with Clousing among his clients.

The number of Army deserters in 2006 amounted to less than 1 percent of the active-duty force. That compares with 3.4 percent at the height of the Vietnam War in 1971.

“We had a larger problem in Vietnam because we had the draft,” said Scott Silliman, a law professor and director of the Center on Law, Ethics and National Security at Duke University, who added he knows of no units that chased down deserters back then, either. “Here the individual is not going to go into the military unless they had some inclination to do so in the first place.”

'Dropped from the rolls'
In the Army, officials said deserters are typically junior enlisted soldiers in their teens or early 20s, with less than three years of service. Most often, they cite financial or personal problems as a reason for leaving, officials say.

Army and Marine officials say there is no evidence that repeated deployments to Iraq are leading to more desertions. The Army’s Edgecombe said that more than 60 percent of deserters over the past 18 months have had less than a year of service, so they haven’t been deployed at all.

In recent years, the military has lowered its standards to fill its ranks, letting in more recruits with criminal records or low aptitude scores. But officials said that does not appear to be a factor in the rising desertion rate either.

In fact, Edgecombe said, recruits who got into trouble before they enlisted tend to shape up under the influence of the military’s code of honor and discipline.

Those who leave without permission are considered AWOL for 30 days, after which they are “dropped from the rolls” and branded deserters.

That is when the paychecks are supposed to stop, but a congressional audit found that more than 7,500 deserters and soldiers who were absent from duty improperly received $6.6 million in pay between October 2000 and February 2002.

Once a soldier is dropped from the rolls, employees at a small Army office at Fort Knox in Kentucky enter the deserter’s information into the FBI database.

'Years and years'
When someone is arrested for a civilian offense and the computer flags him as a deserter, local authorities typically hold him and contact the military, which might send someone to bring him in, or ask him to come in on his own.

The military does actively chase down deserters who committed crimes before abandoning their posts. Military officials do not have jurisdiction off-base to arrest a deserter, and so the federal Marshals Service works with the military in such cases. Spokeswoman Nikki Credic said federal marshals arrested 68 deserters from all services in fiscal year 2006.

“People have been hiding for years and years. If you want to hide out, you can,” said Maj. Jay Delarosa, a Marine Corps spokesman. But he added that in the information age, it is less likely that a deserter can hide forever.

“There’s other ways people reveal themselves besides being caught with a broken tail light,” Delarosa said.

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