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"I would have told the manager to wait until the next infraction and then lower the boom."

I strongly suspect this WAS the 'Next infraction'. We really don't know anything about what preceded this but I would think if she was doing well at her job this would not have happened.

What I do find surprising is the knee jerk condemnation by many here of the employer because this one-sided presentation of facts involves the War and our troops. There is more to this than meets the eye IMO and I strongly suspect this woman is not the innocent victim she portrays herself to be.

Where I work, it's policy that a person be employed there for an entire year before a Leave of Absense is approved. The key word there is "approved." An employee can apply for LOA, but that doesn't necessarily mean it will be approved. This lady was gone from work for, what, 6 or 7 days? Anything over 5 days is considered a leave of absense at my company. So basically, she took 5 approved days off (as a part time employee), then called in to work to request more time off. That addditional time off after the 5th day is a LOA, which absolutely does not have to be approved.

This is the opinion of a guy that works his butt off every day and has been fired before, I'm certainly no cheerleader for big companies abusing their employees.

I'm in agreement that there is much more than meets the eye on this case. I just think that if she were the poor employee I suspect she was, another infraction probably wouldn't have been far ahead.

In our office last June we had a fulltime legal secretary who suddenly disappeared, just didn't show up for work on a Friday and she was the sole person in the office from 8-9 am. By calling around to mutual acquaintances, we discovered that she had an argument with her grandmother, with whom she was living, and had hopped a plane cross-country to cry on her mother's shoulder. She finally called the office the following Tuesday. Of course it happened to be just a week before her scheduled vacation and so she ended up taking nearly three weeks off on an earned one-week vacation. They let her come back, not because she was a terrific employee but because they felt sorry for her. She stayed another six weeks and quit. I was glad to see her go. She wasn't suited for the job and had little or no sense of obligation to the company. It wasn't the first time she failed to show up without calling in. So I know about irresponsible employees and I have a lot of contempt for them.

I suspect this National Guard wife was of the same cloth but the timing of the firing handed her a club with which to bludgeon the employer so I still would have recommended waiting. And I agree that many on this site tend to leap to conclusions about "evil corporations". I know there are abuses on both sides.