Just When You Think You’re Out

This gets just as bad as you could possibly imagine:

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.

You would think there would be more checks and balances in place to prevent us from accidentally apprehending people for not-deserting from the Marines, but it seems…not?