This may be why Jean Fraud sKerry won’t sign a Standard Form 180 allowing the Navy to release all his military records. In a column in The New York Sun today, Mark Sullivan, a former Navy JAG officer says,
“Unlike enlisted members, officers do not receive other than honorable, or dishonorable, certificates of discharge. To the contrary, the rule is that no certificate will be awarded to an officer separated wherever the circumstances prompting separation are not deemed consonant with traditional naval concepts of honor. The absence of an honorable discharge certificate for a separated naval officer is, therefore, a harsh and severe sanction and is, in fact, the treatment given officers who are dismissed after a general court-martial.”
The article, writen by Thomas Lipscomb, goes on to say,
With the only discharge document cited by Mr. Kerry issued in 1978, three years after the last date it should have been issued, the absence of a certificate from 1975 leaves only two possibilities. Either Mr. Kerry received an “other than honorable” certificate that has been removed in a review purging it from his records, or even worse, he received no certificate at all. In both cases there would have been a loss of all of Mr. Kerry’s medals and the suspension of all benefits of service.
Lipscomb’s done the digging and, absent an SF-180 from sKerry, may have the best information available about this gaping hole in sKerry’s resume. Just read it.