Business Ethics & Social Responsibility

A Single Parent in the Army

Source: Photo courtesy of US Army Africa, http://www.flickr.com/ photos/usarmyafrica/ 4034104565/.

The post of cook in the mess hall is probably one of the Army’s least dangerous assignments, the closest you get to actual battle is a food fight, but it’s still a military job where you go and do what your orders command. For Specialist Alexis Hutchinson, a twenty-one-year-old Army cook, that meant catching a flight to Afghanistan. She missed hers, though, intentionally. She regretted abandoning her unit, but felt she had no choice. The single mother of a tenmonth-old, she says she couldn’t find anyone to care for her child during the absence; the only potential help, her mother, was already overwhelmed by caring for three other relatives with health problems. Hutchinson’s fear, according to her lawyer, was that if she showed up at the airport, the Army “would send her to Afghanistan and put her son with child protective services.”

For its part, a military spokesman says, “the Army would not deploy a single parent who had nobody to care for a child.”

The situation is under review, but for the present, just like anyone else who refuses deployment, she’s under military arrest on her base in Georgia.“Mother Refuses Deployment,” New York Times, November 16, 2009, accessed May 12, 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/17/us/17soldier.html .

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