It seems resonable that the Officer wouldn't be able to get a copy of the Survey Report when he is MEDEVACed out. The Bean counters at the outprocessing facility need to be able to "reason" and take care of this quickly. Some prick signed off on the garnishment here.
The same thing goes for the Hazardous Duty pay SNAFU's at Walter Reed. Someone thoughtful needs to scrub each wounded's pay record when they arrive and shut off any pays that will be need to be painfully recouped later. This stuff ain't hard!
Discipline and regimentation are things like PT and obeying your officers. This is bureaucratic red tape - and it is not immediately evident to me, admittedly a civilian, that a 1LT would be expected to know how to navigate this bureaucracy - especially one who was wounded.
Oh sure, every person involved in the emergency treatment and transport of a gravely wounded soldier has obtained and recorded the name of the soldier before passing him along. Gimme a break.
When an army medic crew comes upon a group of U.S. soldiers who have been wounded and/or killed by an IED, they grab the bodies and run with them. When they drop them at the nearest medical treatment facility, they may or may not have 30 seconds to do paperwork before heading out for another emergency rescue of gravely wounded soldiers. And wounded soldiers may or may not still have any identifying material on their persons -- explosions which blow limbs off can blow off dogtags and uniform name badges too. If medics evacuate a group of severely wounded soldiers, they shouldn't give a second's thought to which ones' armor they tore off and threw aside in order to save the wearer's life.
Any U.S. serviceman/woman who is wounded in action severely enough that they require emergency transport for medical treatment, should be assumed to have lost all uniforms and equipment in the course of performing their duties, and not owe anybody a penny for them.
Oh please. You would be the perfect REMF. There is so little appplication of common sense within the military machine. I was deployed to Kuwait for nine months. I saw the Army waste more money on more b.s. than I thought possible. But this guy loses his body armor when he gets wounded and you think he should get his money back after he proves the circumstances that it was lost under?
Some sh-tbird supply schmuck didn't check with the guys in his company before they put this too him. Plain and simple.