Updated 6:07 pm.
SAN DIEGO, California -- On Jan. 26, 2011, a pair of U.S. Marines put Alan Gourgue in handcuffs and a restraint belt and hauled him across the country to face trial as a deserter. Gourgue was distraught and completely confused; he had been honorably discharged in 2006 and finished his reserve obligation four months earlier.
Gourgue's ordeal provides a glimpse into a rarely seen, slow-moving, stiflingly bureaucratic world of military desertions, where one administrative mistake can result in a catch-22 that Joseph Heller couldn't have invented.
In the military, there are two types of unauthorized absence: Desertion and a lesser charge that is clled Absent without Leave (AWOL) in the Army and Air Force and Unauthorized absence (UA) in the Navy and Marines. The key difference between them is that AWOL/UA is a misdemeanor, while desertion is a felony that assumes the missing soldier abandoned the service with the intent never to return. To employ a school analogy: AWOL/UA is like cutting classes, while desertion is dropping out altogether. If a soldier is gone for more than 30 days, the charge is automatically converted to deserter status, according to Victor Hansen, a professor specializing in military law at New England Law, Boston. It’s like a teacher striking a missing kid from the rolls after a few absent weeks to make room for another student.
Once a soldier is classified as a deserter, the soldier's name is added to a national crime database. Then the Marines wait.
"Typically, they turn themselves in or they get picked up for something else by local law enforcement," Marines spokespersons Capt. Gregory Wolf says. "We don't have thousands of guys looking [for deserters] … People have information that they put out there. They kind of do themselves in or they come to their senses."
This passive system of deserter capture has been pretty successful for the Marines. According to data provided by Wolf, the Marine Corps has recorded 7,323 desertions since 2005, with the number peaking in 2008 with 1,491 deserters. Over the same period, 7,072 deserters have returned or been caught. As of June 12, the Marines had 584 open desertion cases on the books, some dating back to World War II.
But the system didn't work out so well for Gourgue, who was neither UA nor a deserter. Yet he languished in custody for more than a month before he was released with an apology for the mistake and a ticket home.
Gourgue thinks he deserves more, including an explanation and compensation for the job he lost due to what he believes was at best negligence, at worst a civil rights abuse, on the part of the Marine Corps.
As outlined in a federal lawsuit against the Department of the Navy (.pdf), Gourgue's tale reads like a screenplay treatment for one of the "Worst Day Ever" slapstick comedies, the kind where everything that can go wrong does go wrong, spectacularly, and the protagonist is left crying out, "Really?" and "C'mon!" and "Throw a dog a bone!" The big difference: For Gourgue, it was the worst month ever and neither he, nor his seven-months-pregnant wife and two sons thought it was very funny.
Wolf declined to comment on his case on behalf of the Marines, citing privacy and legal issues. To Hansen, a retired JAG who serves as vice president of the National Institute of Military Justice, Gourgue's story is certainly outrageous, but also sadly plausible.
"One of the challenges of the military is it's not a nimble organization," Hansen says. "It doesn't turn on a dime, it doesn't address very well individual needs and individual circumstances. If the facts as they're alleged in the complaint are in fact true, then the military screwed up, no question about it."
In 2002, Gourgue was a directionless, recent high-school graduate living in Miami. His 26-year-old brother, the only father figure in his life, was joining the Marines, so Gourgue signed up too. He made corporal and was assigned to logistics at Camp Pendleton in north San Diego County, where he managed broken vehicles for one of the military's largest motor pools. He married, started a family and realized toward the end of his fourth year that he couldn't balance being a father and an active duty Marine. To avoid a divorce, he made arrangements to finish the second half of his obligation as an inactive reserve.
Gourgue readily admits he couldn't get away from the Marines fast enough, but desertion? No, sir. And he has the paperwork to prove it.
The day the Marines handed him his honorable discharge (a copy of which was provided to Danger Room), Gourgue hauled ass across the country to Miami, where his wife was going into labor with their second child. He arrived just in time to sleep through the birth after 36 hours awake on the road.
That was 2006. Over the next few years, Gourgue moved his family to Baton Rouge, Louisiana, to stay employed. For the most part he succeeded, even as the economy tanked and the unemployment rate for veterans his age rose from 5.3 percent to more than 12 percent. By January 2011, Gourgue's obligation had expired and things were looking up. He'd saved his marriage and his wife was pregnant with their third child. The company that moved him to Louisiana had gone under, but after an eight-month job hunt, he was able to find work at the front desk of a three-star hotel in South Baton Rouge.
But, somewhere in the tar pit of the military bureaucracy, a cock-up with his name on it was bubbling to the surface.
Gourgue was picking up a friend in New Orleans to bring back to Baton Rouge when he was pulled over and cited for driving too slow and an insufficiently visible license plate. (Gourgue says his 1998 Acura Integra rides a little low and the road was a minefield of potholes.) The next thing Gourgue knew, he was handcuffed for the first time in his life. He spent the night in a holding cell at Orleans Parish Prison. The following morning, the guards explained he had a warrant out for an authorized absence and formally booked him in with the rest of the prison population.
"That's when it all kind of settled in and that's really where I was a nervous wreck, because I was never in that position before," Gourgue says, recalling the cold of his cell and the other inmates' yelling. "I've only seen it on TV, so kind of being in the reality of it all was a little overwhelming."
Gourgue's experience with the two Marine chasers who picked him up four days later also bore very little resemblance to anything he might have seen on television. Military chasers, the soldiers assigned to escort service members accused of breaking the law, don't get a lot of attention outside the occasional obscure comedy film. In the 1973 film The Last Detail, Jack Nicholson played half a chaser team who showed a young soldier, played by Randy Quaid, one last good time before handing him over to the brig. In 1994, Dennis Hopper directed the far-fetched comedy, Chasers, in which a vampish AWOL ensign leads two naval officers on a wild road trip.
There was no partying or hijinks on Gourgue's trip to San Diego — just commercial air travel and an exceptionally awkward layover in Denver. He was ordered not to speak to anyone but them, not to look any direction but forward.
"Just walking through the airport was like a walk of shame," Gourgue says. "It was so embarrassing because I looked like a hardened criminal walking through the airport. The gentleman to the left of me, he was in a full suit. The senior corporal to the right of me, she was in a full suit. Each of them had their hands around my biceps, walking me through the airport. That was possibly the longest walk I think I've ever had in my life.
Back on the home front, Gourgue's wife had just learned how to put credit on his prison phone account when he was already on his way again. Gourgue's mother had to fly in from Miami to help his wife put the pieces together and take care of the kids. His wife went to pick up his paycheck only to learn that it would be Gourgue's last.
He was fired for deserting his job.
In San Diego, Gourgue was housed at Camp Pendleton. He learned that he was suspected of deserting a reserve unit in 2008 and could face a court-martial. Gourgue knew that was a mistake, since his papers show that he had not only been discharged honorably but that his reserve obligation had ended in 2010. It would take the Marines weeks to reach the same conclusion.
In the meantime, Gourgue was given a meal card and tasked with picking up cigarette butts, cleaning empty barracks and other random tours around base. Back in New Orleans, the state suspended his driver's license and issued him a $340 fine after he failed to make the traffic court appearance for the slow-driving citation.
On Feb. 23, 2011 — a month and a day from Gourgue's initial arrest — Marine staff told him that his detention was based on an administrative error and they had no evidence against him. Gourgue was released the next morning with an apology from a lieutenant colonel and a plane ticket back to Louisiana.
Military defense lawyer Col. Jane Siegel (Ret.) speculates that the mistake could have been something as simple as a name misspelling or transposed digits in a Social Security number.
"It would not be the first time, nor will it be the last time that the left hand and right hand don't know what's going on," Siegel says.
Once home, Gourgue's unemployment claim was rejected because the hotel had cause to fire him. His wife gave birth days later, and had to go back to work six weeks later. Gourgue won benefits on appeal, but it was little consolation.
"When I got back home, I just wasn't in the right state of mind," says Gourgue, who has returned to San Diego to go to school. "It was a relief being home but everything took a toll on me.... I just kind of felt like less than a man because my wife was the one busting her butt to bring in the paychecks and I just felt like I couldn't contribute to my family. It was just a hard time, a really, really hard time that I went through afterward trying to adjust back to my normal life."
Here's another paradox: If Gourgue had really been a deserter, he automatically would have started collecting pay again the moment he was back in custody. However, the military can't compensate someone who's not in the Marines anymore. That means Gourgue hasn't been paid for his labor while at Camp Pendleton.
"That, to me, is a financial, administrative nightmare," Hansen says. "You can just imagine everybody trying to dig through the regulations to figure out how to answer this question and the regulations are going to say nothing about it and everybody's going to scratch their heads and go, 'I don't know what we can do for this guy.'"
Siegel is a bit more optimistic about Gourgue's chances and is surprised the Marines haven't already settled.
"I don't understand how the military could deny the claim," she says. "I get that it's a pro forma, knee-jerk response, but it wouldn't be the advice I'd give as the commandant's adviser. I would've told him to sit down at the table with the guy to see what could be worked out."
In addition to winning compensation, Gourgue hopes his lawsuit will uncover what that error was and why it took them so long to fix it. His attorney, William Halsey, says the debacle indicates Marines lack a quality control mechanism when it comes to desertion data. (In March 2011, due to budget cuts, the U.S. Department of Defense told the military branches they no longer needed to file quarterly desertion reports.)
Despite the government's seemingly obvious mistakes, Hansen thinks Gourgue's going to have a tough time proving his case. Government agencies enjoy a certain amount of immunity to negligence claims, he says, and Gourgue's arguments rely largely on civil-rights laws. Here, Hansen says, it sounds more like incompetence than malice or racism.
"This is kind of a reflection, frankly, of the administrative state in which we live," Hansen says. "While, sure, there's a presumption of innocence, the reality is, in a big organization like the military, there's just not the resources to continue to check these things. When a guy like this gets apprehended, the burden does shift to him to prove he's not AWOL, he's not a deserter, that's legally out of the military and it has no grab on him. When he's sitting in jail and doesn't have access to his paperwork, that can be hard to do."
