Fix in recovering troops’ bonuses won’t cover all
WASHINGTON — For the last three years, retired California National Guard Master Sgt. Bill McLain’s wife, Terese, has repaid a bit of his enlistment bonuses to the Pentagon with a caustic note.
Each month, she writes “blood money” on the $100 check — the token amount the McLains pay on the $30,000 debt they deny owing — that she sends to the Pentagon. “Shame on you. Extortion,” she writes on the envelope. The Pentagon cashes each check.
Facing public outrage, the Pentagon scrambled this week to temporarily suspend its demands for thousands of California Guard soldiers to repay enlistment bonuses and other incentives they were given to go to war.
But McLain and other soldiers who were wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan may still be required to repay their bonuses, one of several apparent exceptions in the proposed Pentagon solution.
Two weeks before McLain left to fight in Afghanistan in early 2013 — his fourth combat tour in a decade — the National Guard garnished his entire $3,496 monthly paycheck for the enlistment bonuses it claimed he was improperly given five years earlier.
“I had nothing,” the retired special forces soldier, 55, recalled Thursday. McLain managed to get the wage garnishment lifted, but his troubles were just beginning.
The Pentagon has hounded him ever since to repay the bonuses, even after he was diagnosed as 90 percent disabled due to combat injuries.
McLain is one of about 9,800 current and former California Guard soldiers who were ordered to repay enlistment bonuses, tuition assistance or other payments that officials said were improperly awarded when the Pentagon was frantically trying to fill its ranks for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
A Los Angeles Times story last weekend that revealed the Pentagon repayment demands sparked a public furor. Under pressure to respond, Defense Secretary Ash Carter interrupted his trip in Europe on Wednesday to announce a temporary suspension of the claw backs. He pledged that a special review panel would consider each soldier’s case over the next eight months.
Carter said the Pentagon would grant debt waivers to soldiers who took the enlistment incentives and other payments without realizing they were ineligible. Some soldiers were given as much as $60,000, officials said.
But given the criteria Carter and other Pentagon officials laid out Wednesday, it’s far from certain McLain and other wounded combat veterans will qualify for that debt relief.
Neither Carter nor his deputy, Peter Levine, the acting assistant secretary of Defense who will lead the review, indicated they will make a blanket exception for soldiers who were wounded in battle.
Federal law already allows the Pentagon to waive certain debts from Purple Heart recipients. But officials haven’t granted that exemption to McLain and other Purple Heart recipients contacted by The Times.
Pentagon officials also said they don’t plan to waive repayment from soldiers who were ineligible for the re-enlistment bonuses because they already had served 20 years and thus were entitled to military pensions.