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Comment by rileymat2 | Hacker News Reader

"Robert D’Andrea, a retired Army major and Iraq veteran, was told to return a $20,000 bonus he received in 2008 because auditors could not find a copy of the contract he says he signed."

How is this possible? If private businesses could do this, it would be mayhem.

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I'm surprised that this is somehow even passed the slightest political oversight.

You need to be a special kind of bastard to ask some one who willingly signed up to get shot at while defending their country to pay back any amount of money they got paid for doing so.

Wars aren't pretty, regardless of what you think about them, and especially about Iraq and Afghanistan never ever take it out on the soldiers, they are probably on your side because unlike most of us they actually seen war.

Soldiers don't decide when, where or against whom to go to war, they are not at fault I never understood how the left in the US could blame people who either got drafted (vietnam) or signed up to defend their country (post 9/11) for the atrocities of war.

I wouldn't blame someone who got drafted, but it is reasonable to fault someone for joining a volunteer army of a militarily aggressive nation.

If you sign up to become a fire-fighter or paramedic, you will never be in a position where the machine you are a piece of requires / encourages you to kill people who don't need killing.

The fact is that there are parts of war / military life that are more exciting than being a fire-fighter, say. It's also culturally reinforced and lauded.

I've almost signed up at various times, but I view it as a form of "combat tourism."

We have almost a century of literature and culture devoted to uncovering the dark side of modern warfare. In addition, we have a large number of cases where our own governments have lied to us that are well documented, and entirely uncontroversial.

That said, I still see the appeal. It's just not a situation I want to allow myself to be put in.

Wow, you somehow made this about you again.

Sometimes you don't have a choice, as you so blithely put it. Many people join the military because they would otherwise have no other career, or because they need a leg up, or health insurance (pre-affordable care act). So if someone offered you an extra years salary that would allow you to put your kids through college for doing something that you feel serves the people of your country, wouldn't you take it? How about if your kid had cancer, and you and your wife after working 3 jobs couldn't make a dent in the 150K medical debt created through our medical industrial complex? Wouldn't you take a change at giving your family a better life if you had no other way to do so? Not sure where you're getting the idea of "combat tourism," but please be my guest and sign up...enjoy!

Many people joined the Taliban for those reasons, and ISIS and Al Quaeda. Many common criminals commit crime because they need money too. Just because you're desperate, doesn't give you the right to kill people. Just because you feel it serves your country doesn't make it OK to ruin someone else's country. These soldiers complaining about their money helped to destroy Iraq and caused the deaths of 100s of thousands of people.

The military in and of itself isn't necessarily bad. It can be used to do bad things. Soldiers in the military who do bad things are responsible for their actions. Is this a fair paraphrasing of your position? If not, please correct me.

If I'm understanding that correctly, I can follow that chain of reasoning.

It looks like you're also making the claim that if they've done bad things they're not allowed to complain if something bad happens to them. I don't know if that's an accurate interpretation of what you're saying, so please do correct or clarify.

I'm not trying to be argumentative or critical. I'm trying to understand your position. The politics and tragedy that surrounds the situation can make these discussions problematic.

Thanks!

Edit: I worked on the wording on this and I'm still not happy with it because I think it can still be read as being condescending or uncharitable. That is definitely not the intent. I'm open to suggestions for wording improvements as well!

Thanks for your civil response.

I mean soldiers know when they sign up that they might be required to do bad things. They agree to do those bad things to save themselves from poverty/unemployment/etc. I don't think that's right. They're using their own problems to justify creating worse problems for other people.

Not so general as "if you do bad things, you can't complain" but more like "If you do very bad things and kill people and get away with it, you can't complain about minor inconveniences like refinancing your house". Although they are separate issues, since soldiers aren't going to face justice for their crimes, why not look at their lost money as a kind of coincidental punishment?

Your heading down a slippery slope. If they did something wrong, they have a right to face and defend themselves against that crime. It seems like you're advocating against due process.

And maybe...maybe, I'd agree that the ends justify the means IF that was the intent. But since this is the Pentagon doling out the punishment . . .

If you believe that the wars were illegal, this is a double whammy. The Pentagon is by far the biggest criminal and they benefit the most from this punishment.

Perhaps soldiers should be exempt from due process because they don't apply it to the people they kill. Even if they don't directly kill anyone, they're stomping all over laws and rights in the countries they attack.

And thanks for your clarifications!

I'd like to separate the determination of which acts are good and which are bad from the reasoning of the argument itself. Is that fair?

I think there are many reasons people sign up, and that most people sign up in good faith and don't expect to be asked to do bad things. I don't think they perform some mental calculus like "I'm willing to risk doing bad things to escape poverty".

I can see how one might find a sort of karmic justice in the situation. And it's a part of human psychology to tend to wish bad things on bad people. After all, they deserve it, right? :) I know I'm guilty of feeling this on occasion.

However, I don't agree with it. If you believe the soldiers did very bad things, I wouldn't think the lost money--not associated with the bad acts--would be satisfying justice. Linking them this way could even weaken your stance, opening you up to accusations of wishing ill rather than seeking justice. I don't think such accusations are a good or fair argument--and not one I'm making or implying--but I can imagine someone uncharitably making it.

Does this make sense? I admit it's got aspects of reasoning combined with perception, but I think both need to be taken into account, especially when discussing issues that are potentially controversial.

What do you think?

I agree linking the two unrelated things is a weak argument. My comment was more of a reaction to the opposite linking shown so commonly by many people, which is "They deserve to be treated fairly because they're soldiers". That's they same type of argument as mine but in reverse.

Gotcha. Thanks!

Not your parent. This is a complicated situation, but I think you guys are conflating two points.

Is superior orders a valid defense? No. [1]

And while I'm loosely in the camp that feels that the 2nd Iraq war was a war of aggression, this action by the Pentagon is completely unrelated.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superior_orders

> Not your parent.

I'm still wet behind the ears here and am not familiar with all of the jargon. What does this mean? I take it you're scoping your response in some way but it's not clear to me what scope is intended.

If you're responding to my comment ("The military in and of itself isn't necessarily bad"), my only intent was to make sure I understood Hondor, not to make any claims myself. If that wasn't clear, I'll endeavor to be clearer in the future.

For the jargon:

I'm making it clear that I'm responding but I'm not Hondor (aka, the parent comment to your comment). You don't generally have to be explicit, but since your questions were very much directed at him, I didn't want you to accidentally read that and think it was from "Hondor". I also didn't want Hondor to think I was putting words in his mouth (again, because it was a very one-on-one discussion).

The reason I did reply though was that regardless of any individual belief, there's some facts / laws about this that should be considered.

Thanks for clarifying the jargon. That makes sense.

Yeah, your points were useful, and close to ones I was thinking as well. I was just a little confused by the "you guys are conflating" as I wasn't making any claims, but that's minor, and I should have probably just let it go. Pedantry will get me nowhere!

> The military in and of itself isn't necessarily bad. It can be used to do bad things.

Of course, the military fulfils a necessary function. Unfortunately, it is often used for ill, and there's no sign of that ending. So, one might choose to not offer oneself as a tool to be used by corrupt or evil masters, except in the most direct cases of self-defence.

To clarify, I don't see "combat tourism" as the only explanation. I think the military can provide a useful hand up to those in difficult situations. We just need to be clear that that is essentially a selfish argument, not one for service.

Regarding the scenario you've laid out: in general, people will do what they need to do for family survival, me included. But, if I steal or I kill to save my family you are right to criticise me.

Additionally, how is that any different from the choices in front of the people whose countries we go and invade?

In Restreppo, e.g. the captain lectures villagers after an Apache strike kills and maims a number of civilians. It was basically, why do you allow the Taliban to shoot from your village, so that I have to come and kill your sons?

Exactly the same argument applies in reverse. If you voluntarily join the aggressive American military machine, you're no better than the villagers who we kill for failing to root out the Taliban.

If you're a Sunni in Iraq and you're being massacred by Shia death-squads, then why is it wrong to support this ISIL gang who promise to protect you? You see where this argument leads?

I have sympathy for US soldiers, but I have more sympathy for civilians facing worse choices in the countries that we tend to invade or intervene in.

There are ways to serve that do not make you part of a machine that has historically been used to commit mayhem and murder on a vast scale.

EDIT> None of the above means that I think it is justifiable to claw back these enlistment bonuses. A promise was made to these enlistees, and it should be honoured. Is there an estimate of the total cost to forgive all of these repayments?

While I'm certainly of the opinion that this is a ridiculous situation and those bonuses should be left alone (salary of 42 auditors alone would probably take the lion's share of the recoverable funds, independent of the moral issue), let's keep things in perspective - deployment to Iraq was not 'defending their country'. The US was never threatened by Iraq.

Similarly, not everyone in Vietnam got drafted, and even if they were drafted, that's no excuse for the abuses there. If you're signed up to fight against your will, that's no excuse for taking part in activities such as the My Lai massacre. Where is the moral high ground in punishing innocent foreigners because your government on the other side of the world forced you to fight?

People serve in the military for all kinds of reasons.

Some, because it's a family tradition. Others, because they believe in serving their country. And many others, because it presents them with an economic opportunity they would never otherwise have had: college, vocational training, and increased social status.

Very few join hoping to go to war. I doubt that most of the people sent to invade Iraq truly wanted to be there.

And when they went, they were sold a well-scripted dog-and-pony show about how they were defending the freedom of the Iraqi people, about how they were there to fight a horrible dictator that murdered countless innocent lives.

Those people are not to blame, and certainly not to be held responsible, for the utter failure of both our political system and our media, which is supposed to be a watchdog, not a lapdog.

Also, something most civilians don't know is that military service isn't like a regular job.

In civilian life, you can quit your job whenever you want. In the military, while you may be able to change your job and re-train for a new one, it's not that common. Also, you do your job until you finish your term of service, or you go to jail. Only way out is to be assessed by a military doctor as unfit to serve.

In civilian life, if you screw up, screw off, or screw around, the worst that will probably happen is being fired.

In the military, at best you will face Non-Judicial Punishment for minor infractions (show up late to work once), and at worst you go to jail (keep showing up late for work).

How severely punished you will be is in large part up to your boss (commanding officer).

What makes it worse is that most people only see the marketing campaign before they join (pay for college! defend freedom!). But after they enlist, they discover that they don't get the job they were promised (we're full up on surgical assistants and aircraft mechanics, so you'll be sent to train for food service), that they spend countless hours on utterly pointless work (yet another safety briefing), and that overall, the life of a service member is pretty much the opposite of glamorous.

You don't need to worship the uniform, or agree with what the US Government does, to at least appreciate that people who serve in the military are, generally speaking, at worst a bunch of well-meaning Americans that are doing the best job they can in a situation that they largely can't control.

Oh, and once you get out? Getting all that college funding and a lifetime of government healthcare ranges from "easy peasy" to "tell me again why I made a deal with the unholy spawn of Initech from Office Space and Satan's legal team"

Just about every war ever has taught us these things over and over again. Maybe if we stop glorifying soldiers, those naive kids will stop believing it. Perhaps we should just admit that soldiers in wars do bad things and are bad people. We managed to convince most Germans that the Nazis were bad and not to be glorified. We partly achieved that with Vietnam veterans. But all the lessons of history were forgotten when Iraq came around.

It's not just the media's fault, it's every person who shows sympathy for soldiers and reinforces the idea that it's a good thing to do.

>And many others, because it presents them with an economic opportunity they would never otherwise have had: college, vocational training, and increased social status.

You should show empathy, not sympathy for Soldiers. We don't want your freaking sympathy(from former Soldier), most just want opportunity. If you want to stop people from signing up for the US Army then here's what you have to do: 1) End inequality in America 2) End the spiraling healthcare costs (adding a single payer would likely go a long way) 3) Provide a means for formal education and social support for everyone. It's not enough to teach people, there's life skills a vast swath of America misses out on. 4) Fix the credit rating system. It amazes me that this is even allowed. Security check, sure...credit? Give me a break, just another form of discrimination.

Do all those things and we can start to level the playing field. Until then we'll likely need public jobs programs (and the military is indeed such a program, even if it is also something much more) to throw folks a rope to climb towards the American dream.

I agree those are all problems and people suffer from them. But that doesn't excuse those unfortunate people from dragging others down to their level - ie the Iraqis. Or from killing people. Many criminals ruin other people's lives because they're desperate too - they also have no education or income. But we still lock up criminals even when we understand what drives them to do it. We want to make poor people's lives good enough that robbing others isn't the best option they have but at the same time, we don't excuse them for their crimes. Yet with soldiers, most people do excuse them.

> 2) End the spiraling healthcare costs (adding a single payer would likely go a long way)

Obamacare was introduced just before the US healthcare system would go into the red (be a net cost for the government, as opposed to a source of income) and delayed that by creating new income for the government. This was not a coincidence.

The whole purpose of Obamacare was to make healthcare less expensive for the government, by putting more of the burden on the population, without being a new tax. It is very far from an accident that healthcare costs have spiraled.

But Obamacare only delayed the government budget drain until somewhere between 2018 and 2020 according to the congressional budget office. So "Obamacare 2" is coming in the next president's term, don't worry. It might even have single payer, as obviously raising costs is not a compelling public message.

But it must raise costs. There's no other option. It must raise costs to get back into balance, as the US government has borrowed massively from the healthcare system and is in no position to pay back any of it, so it cannot be allowed to have more outflows than inflows. The consequences would be too great. Well, actually, unlike most of the rest of the world the US could choose to defund the military to a significant extent and actually get a few more years of healthcare out of it (but we'd be talking 10-20% budget loss for the military at least, and as you point out that would rob more than a few young people of economic opportunity). But it would only delay matters, it can't solve them.

What can you do ? Nothing really. Too few people paying into a system with too many dependents. More kids was the answer, but obviously those would have had to have been born 20-25 years ago. Right now, more kids would only put more load on the system for the first few decades. Massively opening up immigration could work in theory, but if Europe is any indication, it won't.

Of course, all of this is assuming there won't be an economic crisis, and at this point, we're overdue one.

None of what you have eloquently said particularly opposes what I said. If people joined up to fight in Iraq, they weren't defending America. America was never under threat from Iraq, and the Iraqi war machine never loomed over the US. Hundreds of thousands of people have died in Iraq due to that American misadventure, and Iraq did nothing to the US. It was also pretty clear for a long time that if you did sign up, you'd be sent to the warzone - and for the people that re-enlisted (like in the article), they shouldn't be as surprised as you suggest.

Similarly, it doesn't matter if you signed up to defend your country and were lied to, it still does not mean perpetrators get a pass on atrocities like the ones committed in Vietnam. No, not all soldiers did, but enough did to take that 'well-meaning' shine off.

The media also wasn't as unified as you suggest. I'm not even American and I saw plenty of different comedians mocking Powell's 'poster project' at the time, and there were plenty of American voices crying that there wasn't enough justification to invade Iraq. While there is some naivity to blame in going 'over there' (it's why the military recruit the young, after all), there is also some willful ignorance. To be clear, I don't think that soldiers are by default at fault, but at the same time, I don't agree with the current "never criticise a soldier" ethos coming out of the US at the moment. If it's as shit as you say, then soldiers should be coming back and telling everyone they can about the horror, and stopping kids from signing up, and generally that isn't happening.

In any case, if you want to risk your life in the service of your country, be a cop. You will directly serve the people in your community, and the greater country in general. If you want to fight for freedom, be a legal aid lawyer. Pay is as shit as the military, but you're directly helping people in need against forces they can't fight alone.

> deployment to Iraq was not 'defending their country'

They served. They were certainly misused and misdeployed, but they served their country, they lost limbs, lives, time and the innocence that most of us enjoy our entire lives, and they deserve respect and support. Not worship; merely respect and support.

Why don't police get treated the same way? They risk life and limb as well, but you don't see unrelated people thanking them for their service, or getting misty-eyed on TV when talking about them. There are abuses by the police, yes, but there are also abuses by the military.

Words matter, and if you actually care about people losing their lives and innocence in these wars, then you should totally be on board with not calling the US military adventurism in Iraq "defending their country". It's mythologising the event in a way that's likely to get more people to sign up, when you should be getting fewer people to do so. The US unilaterally decided to invade a sovereign country that was no threat to it in the slightest, a country that was on the other side of the world, and that the US's own allies were begging the US to hold off. That is not 'defending'. 'Serving', yes, but not 'defending'. It also didn't do much for 'Freedom' in the area - one country is destroyed, another is imploding, and Europe is a little destabilised, all due to this adventurism.

If you care about people in general, you should call it what it is. Don't abuse soldiers who didn't do abuses themselves, but at the same time, don't mythologise them and chest-beat about how patriotic it is to go and kill brown people that aren't a threat to the people back home. Yes, 5000 US soldiers are dead, but that's only 1% of the death toll in Iraq from the invasion, and that doesn't include the knock-on effects in Syria. There was an article recently on HN about how even the guy who toppled the statue of Saddam in that famous photo-op, even he would rather live under Hussein's regime than modern Iraq.

If you want this kind of horror to stop happening, then people need to stop getting misty-eyed about serving their country in ways that are clearly not defence. There's a difference between 'not respecting' and 'not wanting the lie propagated'. Then the next time this kind of thing happens, there's not going to be a fresh source of recruits.

There was no mist in my eyes when I suggested that we shouldn't worship soldiers.

That was all you took away from this? You didn't say it on TV, either. Chances are, I wasn't talking specifically about the one single data point that is 'a3n', but on a broader, societal level.

Unfortunately this is par for the course. DFAS' accounting systems are antiquated, involving 2200 individual systems, manual re-entry when data needs to be moved around, and "fudge" entries to fix the errors in the books. When the mistakes inevitably happen, they then try to claw back the overpayments from the soldiers.

http://www.reuters.com/investigates/pentagon/#article/part1

Another similar situation that came up when I was searching down the first article: http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/pentagon-bomb-squad...

It's been happening for decades now. On the whole, the Pentagon budget is one of the few (perhaps the only?) Federal budgets that is so screwed up that it can't even be audited. The pay for soldiers is just the tip of the iceberg here, contractors are also getting massively overpaid and the USG is not nearly as good about clawing those back (since contractors can fight back). Literally hundreds of billions of dollars each year are moving around these systems, and we cannot even reliably trace where they are going.

There's no political will to fix this because people automatically assume military = classified and golly we can't audit classified books. Another huge part of the population has a totemic fetishization of the military and criticising their books translates to criticizing the military itself. So in turn we end up tolerating terrible bookkeeping that would never be allowed in another Federal department let alone the private sector...

http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/2016/07/31/Pentagon-s-Sloppy-B...

The USG civil retirement system is similarly weird and terrible. Please reference: the giant cave system where they have to keep multiple hundreds of thousands of square feet of cabinets full of paper records.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/national/2014/03/22/sinkhol...

This terrible mess of ancient, individual systems is replicated all over the USG. The VA system operates similarly (cited above). During the 2011 and 2013 default crises the Treasury systems had no way of controlling individual payments, knowing the overall reserves at a future point in time, or even knowing when individual payments were going to happen.

>When the mistakes inevitably happen, they then try to claw back the overpayments from the soldiers.

I know from personal experience that if the military overpays you for anything, there's often no warning between when they find the error and when they garnish your paycheck. SOP is to take everything back at once, leaving the servicemember with nothing and with no warning. DFAS is supposed to send a letter of indebtedness to give the family time to prepare for any financial adjustments, this often arrives after the first garnishment.

My understanding is that the US has a professional army. Why are they called "volunteers"? Over here, a volunteer is someone who voluntarily joins earlier than required to begin his mandatory army service. People who join a job are all volunteers of course, but that's not remarkable.

Its called volunteer because there is mandatory service or conscription in other countries.

There are two types of military service compulsory and voluntary hence they are called volunteers.

Compulsory involves conscription or a draft, I'm not sure how the "jail or army" thing is classified but since you are given a choice it's technically stelly voluntary.

The "professional" classification of the army doesn't mean it's voluntary professional means that you can be a career soldier and you are paid for doing so even if you are drafted, conscripts on the other hand are not paid other than a small stipend.

That said once you sign up the contract this isn't a job, you can't quit, you can't "call in sick", can't say no to anything, you are effectively forced to give up certain rights for the duration of the contract.

compulsory is definitely not voluntary. otoh i dont think theres any difference between professional and voluntary.

I would think that the fact that they paid him should be de facto evidence that he signed a contract for the money, and that the burden of proof would be on them to show that the contract was invalid for some reason.

Based on the amount, they can probably determine what kind of bonus it was (special forces, radio operator, etc.) and then determine if he was eligible for any of those bonuses.

...except the whole problem is that they overpaid bonuses.

Yeah. They gave the radio operator bonus to the cook (as an example). It's easy to see from the amount it was the radio bonus, and it's easy to see from the service record somebody was a cook, and that was bonus was overpaid. And now they want their money back (which is pretty shitty, given the circumstances). But the amounts of the correct bonus and the given bonus are not unknowable. These aren't bespoke contracts, every one unique.

Unless they can show bad faith on the part of the beneficiary, shouldn't whoever authorised the payment be on the hook for it?

I'm guessing here, but I imagine there's a clause like "recipient agrees to attend X training, and return bonus otherwise." Whether the recipient remembers seeing that clause is another matter.

The military is very good at doing whatever they want to.

There's a better than good chance they just started docking 100% of his pay without telling them anywhere but their pay stub, then put them in a situation where it takes man-days at a minimum to get answers. It's something that happened to a way too many people that I knew. first one was old navy so ended in a hilarious fist fight(after being without pay for two months from an admin error), second one was new navy so it was a very painful process of working with personnel while they were on 4 hour workdays in shipyard, then there are way too many people that fell into classic bonus blackmail were the navy just beats you down in all directions(socially, finciancilly, and time) after getting disqualified from your job(mast, medical, mental, and family issues all included) (basically if you get bonus of some sort it hangs over your head for a good 4-6 years, and if you do pay it back you're paying it back in docked pay, withheld taxes, and maybe even your bank account. And in the amount that was paid to you before taxes).

That sounds like a scam. If the collecting agent can't find proper documentation, then there is no indebtedness. I would wait until they served you papers, then get any sane judge to throw out all charges. If they send it to collections then go at them with full might of consumer and labor protections.

Would this be through a civilian court? Or a military court?

"Hm, we were reviewing decade old records and we make a mistake by overpaying you by tens of thousands. Give it back."

What employers are legally able to get away with this?

In the US, employers that overpay you can absolutely demand it back - it's also usually covered directly in your employment contract if you have one.

Now, a decade later may be too late (and looks terrible) but it's certainly possible for shorter time periods.

If they cannot find a contract, doesn't that mean they have no evidence that he owes them money? Doesn't mean that they would have to take him to civil court for a tort, but then it would just be their word against his?

and this is why I have three giant books upstairs in the attic, with every order, leave request, expense report that I've ever made. Soldiers are used to it. We've come to call them "I love me books" ( http://www.ezarmypoints.com/army-i-love-me-book/ ). They shouldn't be able to come back after that many years for a signature, that's insane.

Didn't he keep a copy of his own employment contract? If it's the only copy, shouldn't that be the one that has legal force?

Always always keep your paperwork..

I do lots of contracts with people. Sometimes I've been told the other party "lost" the contract or "didn't remember making a deal with me", etc. I say "no problem, I have a copy of it right here with your signature on it!"

It doesn't happen very often, but enough to make it worthwhile to always keep a copy.

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