Posted on 03/25/2009 7:07:20 PM PDT by rabscuttle385
COLLEGE PARK, Md. - If it seems like a nightmare now, it started with a dream come true.
Anna Viviano got into one of the best schools in the country, and as an ROTC recruit, she didn't have to pay a penny.
"I talked to a couple recruiters and they were just like you can go to Vanderbilt for free," she recalled.
And for two and a-half years, Viviano thrived -- second in her ROTC class and a near-perfect GPA.
"I thought everything was going swimmingly -- was right on track to do what I wanted," she said.
Then came the unexpected. During a doctor's visit for allergies, she was diagnosed with asthma. Two months after that, in December 2005, she got news from the Navy.
"And that's when they told me you're being kicked out because you have exercise induced asthma," she recalled.
Not only was she medically discharged, she had to pay back what the Navy had spent on tuition for her first two and a-half years: $75,000. It was to be paid in full within the month.
"And when that didn't happen, they asked for $20,000 on top of that," Viviano said.
Three years of appeals to the Navy -- and three letters of rejection later -- 24 year-old Anna Viviano now owes $100,000.
"And it just feels like I'm yelling out there and nobody's hearing," she said. "And I hired a lawyer, thinking he's got a bigger voice but he just got drowned out just like me."
Viviano is now a graduate student at the University of Maryland. She says she is considering suing the Navy and considering filing for bankruptcy.
A Navy official says the Navy is looking into the matter but decline to comment, saying each case is different and a response will take time.
If it were a pre-existing condition, why wouldn't it have shown up either in the pre-enlistment physical, or during the two years she'd already been in the NROTC? I'm assuming that they do physical training at some point during those college years.
And why couldn't she have been trained by the Navy for a less strenuous position? Not everyone in the Navy has a position that is physically demanding.
I’m pretty sure there was due diligence.
I don’t know what it’s like now, but in the 90’s every ROTC candidate (Army, Navy and Air Force) had to undergo a very thorough physical and each physical was reviewed by the Department of Defense Medical Review Board (DODMERB) before a scholarship was awarded. These physicals are much more thorough than the MEPS physicals.
Indeed, but the contract says if YOU back out of the deal, then you must repay. Recall that is was the Navy that backed out of the contract. That is very different.
“And why couldn’t she have been trained by the Navy for a less strenuous position? Not everyone in the Navy has a position that is physically demanding.”
Here’s why. Navy officers go to sea. In fact, I can’t think of a navy officer job that doesn’t go to sea. Dentists, lawyers, supply officers, intelligence officers, cryptologists all go to sea, not just the pilots, submariners and surface warfare types. What are considered REMF-type jobs in the army, those which mostly require sitting at desk and producing paperwork, are done at sea in the navy. Navy officers, therefore, must be deployable, which precludes a lot of medical conditions that may be acceptable in the other services where REMF-types can be are stationed at bases with good medical facilities. Not so in the Navy. At sea, an asthma attack can become a medical emergency that requires a whole lot of manpower and extraordinary effort, effort that is not, at that point in time, going into accomplishing the mission. The navy, understandably, goes to great lengths to minimize medical emergencies at sea.
In my experience the navy is a whole lot faster to “medical board” an officer (toss them out for medical reasons) than the army or air force. I had a friend with cancer who sought treatment at army facilities instead of navy facilities for that reason.
I was a senior officer in the reserves when I developed asthma in my early forties. Even though I hadn’t been “haze gray” (deployed) in decades, I was told I had to retire. Bottom line is—navy officers must remain deployable, or they must go.
I don’t think that she can file for bankruptcy on this one. When you owe a government agency a debt, the debt is not dischargable. That’s why you can’t dodge on student loans or tax bills.
It’s a Hail Mary play at best, but if she goes to her congresscritter, maybe he might offer a personal amendment to discharge her debt in one must pass bill or another. It hardly ever happens, but neither does hitting the lottery.
Or, they might even require the Navy to offer her a choice between service and discharge of the debt.
Sooo not guilty!
Hubba hubba!
On the other hand, I had a friend (may he RIP) who was diagnosed with Type I diabetes on a sea trip in the Navy.
He never worked another day in his life.
Whether he was in the Navy or not, he would have the disease.
I liked the guy, but it seemed out of whack to me.
It’s not just a job, it’s your life savings and more!
Maryland “Freak State” PING!
She is semi-guilty, but sentenced merely to time served due to her patriotism.
I can speak from experience on this issue. I attended 3 years of colleg on an Army ROTC scholarship in the 90’s. In my last year (I would have finished in 3 1/2) I decided to leave college and the Army to pursue a another career. My ROTC contract clearly stated that if I left the program I had to pay back all the tuition and training costs. However, the semester prior to my leaving school I had suffered a lung condition that the Army was aware of. When I gave my letter of resignation to my Professor of Military Science (CO) It stated that I was resigning for personal reasons. He asked me multiple times if my lung condition was the reason I was leaving. Had that been the case I would have been eligible for a medical discharge (and no repayment.) Because of my pride and a desire to keep my military options open I said the lung thing had nothing to do with it, thus giving myself a $40,000 debt that I could have had a doctor waive for me. At that time I had to pay the debt or enlist for active duty. I chose to pay. It doesn’t have to be a lump sujm. They will give you a payment plan. Defense Financing and Accounting Service handles just like any other debt to the DOD. Unless they have changed the contract she should not have to pay if they are rejecting her and not vice versa. I know some guys who left the program and paid because the DOD was going to branch them differently than they had originally been promised. That was a DOD decision but since they were still being offered a commission they had to take it or pay.
Although I feel there is not enough information to make a good decision, if I were pressed, I would say she has to pay it back, but the Navy should have worked with her financially, and not assessed an extra $20K.
But there ARE jobs that are done, onshore, in the Navy. Seems they could have left her in and had her taken one of those. There are Navy folks serving at the Pentagon, for example.
We have some friends whose son graduated Annapolis, and went to train as a Navigator. Turned out, he had an inner ear problem that kept him from flying, but since he'd graduated with a degree in Computer Science, he was sent to DC to work on Computer Security. I don't think he's EVER been on a ship for any duty. Oddly, his brother, who is an AF Academy graduate, did serve on a ship in the Persian Gulf, because he's a missle specialist. Go fig.
Anna Viviano is my wife. I found this website while doing a search for the video of the original interview.
Several things to address:
This wasn’t an issue we were aware of. She’s always been physically fit. During her time with the Navy, she was consistently at the top of her class for PT tests. She’s worked as a life-guard in the past, and she even took one semester of marine physical training, just for the workout. There is no way we would have known about this. I guess the implication is that she intentionally got diagnosed to get out of serving her time. First off, why would she do that during her junior year? Wouldn’t waiting till the end make sense? Secondly, we have nothing against the miliatry. At this moment, I’m giving the Army Band a good hard look (I’m a musician). She grew up with a father in the Army, and so the military life has always been something she’s seen as a positive.
Why didn’t she take a desk job? She tried. She asked to remain in the Navy with some sort of land-based job, and they said it didn’t matter. No one in the Navy can have any touch of asthma.
I was at first angered by the people who said we owe the money to the Navy. The majority of people are on our side, so I’ll take this as a positive, generally.
During her time in ROTC, she took all the classes, served in all the required ceremonies, and excelled. In the event that an individual is fired from a job, the money doesn’t ask for its money back. I understand that the had to stop paying her tuition, even though it put us in a rough place financially. Asking for the money back that they’d invested, though, is unreasonable.
She had a Navy physical before enrolling in the program. This doctor did not catch the asthma. The fact that a different doctor later on said that she did have asthma means that the condition either didn’t pre-exist or that the Naval doctor missed something.
In any case, I remain firm in my belief that this is an outrageous charge. I, of course, am biased.
“SHE didn’t reject the Navy, it rejected her.”
She is unable to fulfill the terms of a contract which she signed of her own free will. In this case the moral of the story is READ THE FINE PRINT. If the Navy didn’t have the clear legal upper hand here, they would not be taking such a hard line. I have sympathy for her, but I won’t condemn the Navy for acting like the military service it is instead of a jobs program like the liberals want it to be.
“But there ARE jobs that are done, onshore, in the Navy. Seems they could have left her in and had her taken one of those. There are Navy folks serving at the Pentagon, for example.”
There is a sea-shore rotation. So many years at sea then so many years ashore. Those guys and gals at the Pentagon have been to sea and are currently on a shore tour. Some specialties spend more time than others ashore, but I know of no specialty, none, where one is guaranteed to spend an entire career ashore. Even the GURLS must be deployable, and an asthmatic is not deployable.
While your friends’ son’s inner ear problem makes him unable to fly, it does not make him a potential medical emergency like asthma does. In a case like your friends’ son, sometimes an officer will be allowed to “lateral” to another specialty. It depends on the medical condition and the officer’s skills. I know of a pilot who developed a medical condition which precluded flying so he became an intelligence officer. If circumstances like those applied here, the Navy would have offered alternatives.
We’ve looked through the fine print. We haven’t found anything about reclaiming money from a medical discharge. There’s no legal basis here. The moral of this post is not to make claims like “READ THE FINE PRINT” if you haven’t read the fine print. I’ve seen the paperwork. You haven’t. Don’t claim you understand this.
What’s the moral? Don’t enlist in the military if there’s a possibility that you might develop an unforeseeable illness? How could we have avoided this? Lots of people sign on to the military because they don’t have money. That’s the entire appeal of these ROTC programs.
If a soldier’s foot is blown off on his first day a of duty, he’s not asked to pay back all the money that the military spent on training him, now wasted. Why is this any different? There was no choice to become sick. There was no malicious intent. There was an unfortunate diagnosis at an inconvenient time. When I say inconvenient, I don’t mean that it’s inconvenient to the government. I mean that it’s inconvenient to us. We’d much rather she served her time as she’d planned than go through this mess. We’d much rather have her spend her four year in the service than owe an amount so massive that we’ll be paying it back long past our retirement.
We’ve looked through the fine print. We haven’t found anything about reclaiming money from a medical discharge. There’s no legal basis here. The moral of this post is not to make claims like “READ THE FINE PRINT” if you haven’t read the fine print. I’ve seen the paperwork. You haven’t. Don’t claim you understand this.
What’s the moral? Don’t enlist in the military if there’s a possibility that you might develop an unforeseeable illness? How could we have avoided this? Lots of people sign on to the military because they don’t have money. That’s the entire appeal of these ROTC programs.
If a soldier’s foot is blown off on his first day a of duty, he’s not asked to pay back all the money that the military spent on training him, now wasted. Why is this any different? There was no choice to become sick. There was no malicious intent. There was an unfortunate diagnosis at an inconvenient time. When I say inconvenient, I don’t mean that it’s inconvenient to the government. I mean that it’s inconvenient to us. We’d much rather she served her time as she’d planned than go through this mess. We’d much rather have her spend her four year in the service than owe an amount so massive that we’ll be paying it back long past our retirement.
You’ve given us very little to go on, a few lines from a news article. I’m speaking from 24 years of Navy service. Whether your wife has the paperwork that says the Navy can do this in hand or not, the Navy can do this. JAGS are nothing if not risk averse. That they are being so inflexible in your case is telling.
I’m surprised the Navy is requesting all the money upfront. In my experience that not how the Navy handles indebtedness, although I have heard of other services, specifically the Army, requiring immediate, full payment for indebtedness, although not repayment of tuition.
In only one instance have I ever heard of tuition repayment being demanded by the Navy, and that is in the case of a young woman who went AWOL and hopped a plane to see her boyfriend without telling anybody where she was going. She was thrown out of school and the Navy and immediate payment of tuition was demanded. So the fact that the Navy is taking such a hard line leads me to think that 1) there’s a WHOLE lot more to the story than we’ve been given, and; 2) somewhere along the line your wife ticked off the wrong person and/or gave someone in her chain of command or the medical chain of command reason to be angry with her. I’m not accusing anyone of anything, but I am saying that in my experience what the Navy is doing to your wife is unusual bordering on unheard of, and things like that aren’t done without reason.
My advice is this: neither suing the Navy (good luck with that!)nor declaring bankruptcy will accomplish your goal. I think you and your wife need to keep in mind that the Navy has the upper hand here, and conciliatory tones and and a kindly offer to work with the Navy to lower the amount of the debt and get favorable repayment terms are the way to go. Start with a FOIA request and get ALL the paperwork the Navy has about her case. The FOIA won’t make you any friends, You may be able to figure out the rest of the story that way. Get a good attorney who was a former Navy JAG, one who worked with medical boards. And good luck.
That being said, the problem I have with this situation is that the contract does not leave room for unforeseen events which might affect the contract.
If Viviano had fraudulently hidden that she had allergies or exercise induced asthma, I could understand the Navy's hard line. The Navy requires that its members regularly pass PT. And in order for a member to pass PT, many of them must exercise to make the standards.
I would favor a ROTC contract which starts with a comprehensive physical exam requirement. After the exam, I would like to see wording takes into account that if there was no fraud involved in the signing of the contract, and that if there was a serious health change due to circumstances beyond the control of the student that the Navy would cancel the agreement and no further action would be required of either party.
Later, a medical condition comes up later which was diagnosed by a civilian doctor and voluntarily revealed to the Navy.
If this condition had come up on her Navy commissioning physical, she probably would have been released without having to repay anything. That used to happen when I was in ROTC, and it happens at service academies. The most common problem I recall for ROTC students when I was irregular heartbeats in males. Men do not physically mature until around 21 years old, so an irregular heartbeat might not manifest itself until after the scholarship physical and prior to the commissioning physical. These people never had to pay back their scholarships. But then again, I went to a state university, and I know high cost private universities are a different class of ROTC scholarship. But I know people this happened to at a service academy, and they did not have to pay the money back.
As for asthma, it is hard to see that as disqualifying to all duties if it is controllable. Heck, almost everyone under 30 seems to have asthma now. I don't know if it was based in fact, but in the movie "Blackhawk Down", one of the soldiers has asthma.
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