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So...as an AG officer and self-professed nerd and comic-aficionado, I’ve thought about this in fairly excruciating detail and here’s what I THINK would be done using the context of current casualty, awards and financial regulation: https://twitter.com/combatcavscout/status/1380692864880017408">https://twitter.com/combatcav...
A lot would possibly revolve around the determination of the final duty statuses of those who disappeared in the blip/snap. The logical choices would be to declare personnel “Duty Status, Whereabouts Unknown” or DUSTWUN followed by a determination of a missing status.
Under this status, pay and benefits would be maintained , along with assumed “good standing” statuses and service members would receive promotions, pay raises, GI Bill eligibility, etc., and that would continue until their return.
But under the blip circumstances, I don’t think DUSTWUN/Missing would be applicable statuses because 1) their duty and whereabouts were known and 2) with them being reduced to ash, the logical status would be to consider them KIA.
There would be enough evidence to have the event declared a terrorist attack or an act of war along with enough witness statements to support the declaration of mass KIA statuses. This would trigger at least 2 actions.
1) IAW AR 600-8-22 and other service regulations, this would most likely be considered an attack/a to of war and the service secretaries or SECDEF in the case of multiple affected services would authorize the issue of the Purple Heart as an entitlement to anyone killed...
...or wounded by hostile action. There would be lots of discussions about the wounded/injured related to the action because people may have been doing mundane things like driving to work and being hit by a car that was made empty but Thanos’ snap was definitely hostile...
...and you would have to reasonably act in favor of the awards. The 9/11 attack on the Pentagon is a reasonable precedent to cite here.
2) The next action triggered would be the activation of SGLI and any other benefits associated with a service member’s death, i.e., VA education benefits for surviving children. With the service members declared KIA, all benefits would be paid and other benefits would activate.
With that, we come to the question of what happens when the people return. I’m aware of only one time a benefit was paid erroneously and that came as the result of an administrative error. It happened when DD93s were still filled out manually and scanned into records...
...and a former spouse was paid the $100k death gratuity by because a piece of paper wasn’t scanned into iPERMs. Long story short, to avoid incredible difficulty and hardship, the former spouse was allowed to keep the money and the Soldier’s new spouse received all entitlements.
Despite the awful mistake, this gives us a bit of precedent because of the desire to avoid hardship and err on the side of the family/service member. It would also be reasonable to assume that the likelihood of people returning from the dead was unlikely and that their returns...
...would likely be seen as a form of hardship in of themselves. Bottom line, precedent shows that the likelihood of anything having to be recouped is highly unlikely and given the circumstances of the newly emerged hardships, you would probably see more benefits established...
...to aid returnees as they reintegrate into their new lives.
