UNDATED (WSAU) Almost 80 past-and-present Wisconsin National Guard soldiers are owed thousands-of-dollars they never received from a five-year-old benefit program. U-S Senator Herb Kohl says he’ll try for a second time to get Congress to fix the error.
The program rewards Army and Guard soldiers for making multiple deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan. The average payout is about $6,000 a person. In 2009 Congress approved retroactive benefits to those who didn’t get them between the time the program was announced and the time it was fully implemented. But 78 Wisconsin soldiers returned home just nine days after that time period. And by then, they were only eligible for extra leave time which many couldn’t take, because they had already left the Guard. Kohl blames a clerical error, and he says they should have been paid.
Most were in the Oshkosh-based 1157th Transportation Company who served in Iraq in 2006-and-’07, and had no idea the program existed until it was too late. Kohl said he tried last year to approve funding for the Guard members’ benefits – but a Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee blocked it. Kohl doesn’t know who that was. But he called it an “injustice” that he’ll try to resolve again this year.
