Army Discharges Single Mother Who Wouldn’t Leave Son

By Bridget Tyler on February 12th, 2010

• Link to StumbleUpon
• 1 Comment

Specialist Alexis Hutchinson, an Army cook at Hunter Army Airfield in Savannah, was arrested in November after refusing to board her unit’s deployment flight for Afghanistan. The twenty-one year old single mother said she couldn’t leave because her mother, who had planned to take care of Hutchinson’s baby son while she was deployed, could no longer care for the child and she had no alternate means of child care available.

The Army filed criminal charges last month against the Oakland, California native, but the general placed in charge of handling the case chose to settle by granting Hutchinson an administrative discharge rather than court marshaling the young woman. “She’s excited that she’s no longer facing jail and can still be with her son, which is the most important thing,” Rai Sue Sussman, Hutchinson’s civilian attorney told reporters.  ”We’re very, very happy right now.”

Hutchinson’s decision to stay home with her child will still carry consequences – she’s being demoted in rank to private and will lose many of the benefits that being a service member and a veteran would have afforded her, Fort Stewart spokesman Kevin Larson said.

Larson claims that the Army could prove that Hutchinson’s failure to deploy had nothing to do with child care. “This case wasn’t about a soldier having to choose between her duty to the nation and her family,” Larson said. “There is evidence both from Pvt. Hutchinson and her fellow soldiers to indicate she had no intention of deploying.”

Sussman denies this, “She was willing to deploy, and was ready to do that if her mother had not backed out of taking care of her child.”

The Army requires that all single parents submit care plans for dependent children before they deploy, and Hutchinson had a plan – her mother. After keeping the boy for two weeks, however, her mother decided that it was simply too difficult to care for a young child with her own health concerns and sent him home just days before Hutchinson’s planned deployment.

According to the Defense Department, there are more than 70,500 single parents on active duty in the U.S. military, nearly half of them are in the Army.