Ford granted Nixon a pardon before waiting for Nixon to be charged with any crime. The Constitution gives the President the power to grant reprieves and pardons—it doesn’t say anything about the person having to be found guilty first. There may be rules within the military justice system about this but we know Obama’s attitude towards keeping the law.
Under the military system, if found innocent of a charge via military court....you walk free. Zero need for a pardon. In a case where you’ve been offered an Article 15 and it’s a ‘light’ (I use this word sparingly) crime....then you get a punishment (usually stripes lost, some fine, some stockade time). In this case, afterwards, I could see a pardon coming up. But desertion isn’t fitting into a Article 15 type situation.
I should note....the Army has yet to say what crime will be pursued. Perhaps they’d like to overlook the desertion charge, and simply try him on AWOL or losing his weapon (leaving his weapon would be accurate, but maybe they just need a fake charge to get him out of the situation quickly). I believe if you ask an hundred Army personnel...describing the case...they’d all describe it as desertion.
Looking back over this...the idiot should have smoked some marijuana and just said he was a doper...Army would have moved reasonably quick to put him out of service.
We have another Army idiot case brewing in Germany...where some guy had re-enlisted and said that his NCO promised him he wouldn’t ever have to return to Iraq. Well...a month or two after signing the re-enlistment papers...the unit was notified of another deployment. The guy walks out the gate and asks Germany for asylum. That was six years ago. The Germans have yet to approve the case, and he’s been sitting for the whole time in some refugee center in Bavaria. Normally, they accept asylum seekers...but the problem in this guy’s case is that he re-enlisted....knowing full-well of the intent. They really don’t want to approve the guy’s status. So he sits there....in some two-star asylum center.