According to the Anchorage Daily News,
The Army is terminating retirement credit for time served in a largely Native militia formed to guard the territory of Alaska from the threat of Japanese attack during World War II.The change means 26 surviving members of the Alaska Territorial Guard—most in their 80s and long retired—will lose as much as $557 in monthly retirement pay, a state veterans officer said Thursday. The pay claims of 37 others have been suspended. . . .The action comes almost a decade after Congress passed a law qualifying time served in the unpaid guard as active federal service. The Army agreed in 2004 to grant official military discharge certificates to members or their survivors.
This is just wrong. For what it’s worth, it sounds like this doesn’t come from the Army itself, but from somewhere in the DoD:
The reversal follows an analysis by the Department of Defense that determined that the Army is not authorized in the law to count territorial guard service for the purpose of calculating retirement pay, said Lt. Col. Richard McNorton, the Army’s human resources command in Alexandria, Va.”The focus is to follow the law,” he said. “We can’t chose whether to follow the law. We have to follow the law.”
Whether that’s a reasonable interpretation of the law or just the sort of thing you could expect some government bean counter to come up with, I don’t know, but it needs to be set right—and if that means changing the law again, then we need to change the law again. These are people who served this country, and they’re now old and vulnerable; it’s not appropriate to try to save money by taking away benefits our government had agreed to give them for their (unpaid) service. I think the state of Alaska has it right on this:
“This is earned income and it’s not being paid,” said Jerry Beale of the state Department of Military and Veterans Affairs.Gov. Sarah Palin said the state is pursuing a remedy for “these brave Alaskans, who did so much for the cause of freedom during a time of great national peril.” . . .”It took nearly 60 years before the federal government honored these defenders of our territory for their service,” Palin said in a statement. “While most died waiting for this recognition, the few who survive are now being told their Territorial Guard service is not worthy of federal recognition. This is unacceptable. These people are no less heroic than the militias at Lexington and Concord, or the defenders of the Alamo.”