Many are booted out with ‘bad paper’ and can’t get upgrades

The scariest part of Emily Vorland’s relatively uneventful 2009 deployment to Iraq was that the enemy wore Army green, just like she did. When a higher-ranking male officer sexually harassed her, her commander told Vorland to file a formal complaint. So she did. Lieutenant Vorland was grateful when higher-ups ordered her alleged abuser to stop contacting her. But as the investigation continued, Vorland says the Army seemed to shift its focus to her.

It concluded she had “acted inappropriately,” engaged in consensual sex and was lying about it. A lesbian, she was concerned that her best defense was one that would end her military career because the “don’t ask, don’t tell” rules were still in place. The Army used her acknowledgement that she should have been more careful in detailing what happened to generate a letter of reprimand, which it used to boot her out with a general discharge for “unacceptable conduct,” after her unit returned to its Texas base in 2010.

Her less-than-honorable discharge kept her out of the National Guard, barred her from transition assistance, and denied her six months of free post-military health care. Finding a job proved tough, because she’d be asked for her discharge papers to prove she had served. “So I avoided jobs where they wanted to see your DD-214,” she says, referring to the Pentagon’s discharge form.

“I wasn’t happy about it, but at the time I didn’t see it as being very impactful,” she says. “There was this sense of ‘Just go to the discharge review board and you’ll be fine,’” she remembers hearing about upgrading her discharge. That’s when she ran into an even more implacable Army foe: the stacked maze veterans must endure to try have their discharges upgraded.

Vorland got a preview of the process as she waited to appear before such a board in Dallas in 2013 and heard shouting from inside the closed-door hearing, where a young vet was seeking an upgraded discharge. Suddenly, rescue personnel rushed into the building. “The guy apparently became so undone that he threw up in the hearing,” Jo Ann Merica, Vorland’s lawyer, says. “We saw him carried out to an ambulance.”

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