The Trib‘s Angela Woodall has a terrific, squirm-inducing piece on the choices one Oakland Army specialist had to make when she was told to ship out to Afghanistan. Alexis Hutchinson joined the Army in 2007 and had been in the ROTC program throughout high school. But when she gave birth to a child earlier this year, she ran into problems. The father has become estranged from her, and Hutchinson planned to have her mother take care of the child when she was deployed overseas. But the mother soon realized that she couldn’t take care of the newborn on her own, and Hutchinson had a choice to make: obey orders, or take care of her child. She chose the latter, was AWOL for a day, and imprisoned when she came back. Hutchinson now faces an “other than honorable discharge” in the next few weeks. It’s well worth reading in its entirety.
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