COUNTERING MILITARY RECRUITMENT
Articles: Military Service: Women
Jessica Faustner freed from military contract
Manuel Gamiz Jr., The Morning Call
July 15, 2005
The Pennsylvania National Guard is freeing 18-year-old JessicaFaustner from her commitment to military service.
Faustner, who claims a recruiter misled her into enlisting last year,
will get an "entry-level discharge" and won't be prosecuted for going
absent without leave, a Guard spokesman said Thursday. Entry-level
discharges are given to servicemen and women in the first 180 days of
active duty.
"We invested time and money, paid her a salary for training and
preparing her, and she did not show up for her ship date," said Capt.
Cory Angell, the Guard spokesman at Fort Indiantown Gap, Lebanon
County. "All that is invested in her is lost. We basically said: We
gave you one chance and you blew it."
The Guard last week issued a warrant for Faustner, who graduated in
June from Northampton Area High School, because she was AWOL for
failing to report for a four-day initial-entry training program July 6.
"We try and encourage recruits to come in for pre-basic training,"
Angell said. "We issued a warrant only to bring her in to training,
because she was in violation of state law, and we only wanted her to
comply with state law."
The Guard tried to serve the warrant at the Faustner home in Moore
Township, but she was not there. According to a family friend, she
left Pennsylvania soon after graduating from high school.
The warrant expired Monday, the same day Faustner was to begin Army
basic training at Fort Indiantown Gap, Angell said.
Faustner's discharge basically voids her enlistment contract, but the
record will remain and could affect her chances if she later decides
to join the military. Faustner will "receive no benefits from the
Pennsylvania National Guard ever," Angell said.
Neither Faustner, her parents nor her lawyer could be reached.
Faustner went public with her accusations of misleading recruitment
practices at a May 9 meeting of the Northampton Area School Board,
saying her recruiter told her she would be going to nursing school
and used other deceptive practices to get her and her parents to sign.
She later learned from a Guard officer that her unit would almost
certainly go to Iraq.
Guard officials said they investigated her claims and found no
wrongdoing by the recruiter.
Faustner had been attending monthly drills at the Allentown National
Guard Armory, but stopped in April on the advice of her lawyer.
Angell said Faustner had been training with the Army's 228th Forward
Support Battalion, which was deployed to Iraq a few weeks ago and
isn't due back until August 2006.
The earliest Faustner would have gone to Iraq would have been fall
2006, Angell said, because she would have been "undeployable" until
she had completed advanced training to become a medic.
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