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One Discharge For All

By VVAW

A recent veteran of Vietnam applied for a job at a brokerage firm on Wall Street. Since he was a veteran, the company asked to see his DD-214 form, a form given to all bets on their discharge from the military. After they took a look at his form, he was turned down for the job.

This man had enlisted in the Army, served three years, and had been given an honorable discharge. On the DD-214, however, were the code letters "SPN" (or Separation Program Number Designator) followed by a number. That number (there are 530 possibilities) is also given to ever service man or woman as they leave the military. And since this vet's number was a code for "Apathy," he didn't get the job.

SPN codes are just part of the larger classification of veterans that are comparable to the "passbooks" blacks in South Africa are legally required to carry wherever they go. The codes affect whether a veteran can get money (loans) to go to school, medical care for wounds received in war, or a job. The SPN numbers can be both good and bad. There's one discharge "to accept employment with a legal, established law enforcement agency" or "early release for Christmas" or to "attend school." But then there are the ones like "unsatisfactory handling of personal affairs" or "unfitness -- unsanitary habits" or "sexual deviate (aberrant tendencies)" or "for the good of the service" or "habitual shirker" or "best interests of the Air Force."

One vet who was given a general discharge under honorable conditions (meaning he was still eligible for VA benefits) received a number which meant a discharge for "disloyal or subversive security program." He had gotten a lot of anti-war literature in the mail while he was in the Army. When he tried to get a job at Con Edison, the electrical company turned him down after seeing his DD-214.

So many Puerto Ricans from the island have been discharged early because they can't speak English and have been given bad discharges that there's a code number meaning "early release of Puerto Rican personnel who failed to qualify for training." Since most Puerto Ricans are drafted, it is doubly malicious since now they are marked for life. The racism of the discharge system can clearly be seen when comparing the percentage of Third World people in a service to the number of bad discharges they receive. In the Air Force, for example, only 12% of the enlistees in 1972 were black, yet they accounted for 30% of the Undesirable Discharges.

There are five classifications for discharge from the military. Honorable and the four less-than-honorable categories -- general, undesireable, bad conduct and dishonorable. Anyone who gets undesireable discharge or below is not eligible for any veterans' benefits. This means your old boss doesn't have to give you back your job, you are not eligible for any kind of civil service job and you can't get money for school, medical care, etc.

The people hit hardest are those who have not gone along with the military's way of life. Third World GIs who have resisted racism in the military or who have merely been in conflict with their sergeant have gotten an inordinate number of less-than-honorable discharges. Political activists who have worked for even the slightest change in military structure or against the war are also prime candidates for less-than-honorable discharges as well as drug users (who largely began taking drugs while in the military) and homosexuals.

One GI was shot up in Vietnam and shipped from there to Alaska. He then received orders to return to Vietnam but refused to put on his uniform to go back. He was then thrown in his underwear into a freezing cold basement. After his court-martial, he was finally given a bad discharge. Because of that, he can get no veterans' benefits to pay for the huge hospital bills incurred from operations to remove some of the shrapnel fragments he got in Vietnam.

General and undesireable discharges are considered administrative, that is, they are up to the sole discretion of the commanding officer. What that means in practice is that usually the once who decides what kind of discharge a GI will get is the immediate commanding officer, sometimes even the first sergeant. Over 93% of all less-than-honorable discharges fall under this administrative category. The military prefers to give administrative discharges as it cost them anywhere from $5,000 to $15,000 to put on a courtmartial trial. In fact, most GIs are threatened with a heavy courtmartial trial to force them to accept an administrative discharge. The line that is given to the GI is that after a certain period of time, the bad discharge will automatically be upgraded. The truth is that NO discharges are automatically upgraded.

You can ask for a hearing at an Administrative Discharge Board to fight the discharge classification, but the chances of changing your discharge are very slim since the board consists of at least three commissioned officers. The person appearing before the board has no rights to present evidence, subpoena witnesses, cross-examine witnesses or to be legally represented. And applications for review usually take from 1 - 1 1/2 years before they come up before the board. Last year, only 15% of those who applied for upgrading had their discharges upgraded.

Since there are over 500,000 vets with less-than-honorable discharges, the only solution that is just is to grant these veterans amnesty and to then change the military discharge system. VVAW/WSO believes that there should only be one type of discharge used, stating simply that one has been in the armed forces. All criminal matters should be handled by the civilian courts. To achieve this goal, VVAW/WSO is working with the Discharge Upgrading Project in San Francisco to overload the reviewing process in Washington, D.C., thus paving the way to a class-action suit against all less-than-honorable discharges.

For more information about discharges, write the Discharge Upgrading Project, P.O. Box 151, San Francisco, Calif. 94103.

(Thanks to LNS for the meat of this article.)