Military Jobs Casualties Of Aids Reworked After Earlier Veto, Defense Bill Forces Discharge Of Troops Infected With Hiv

Tim Nichols joined the Navy 14 years ago, wooed by a recruiter’s promise to his parents that the service would always take care of him.

Christa H. Davito’s oldest boy signed up at the same time, breaking his mother’s heart but saying it was time he made his own way.

Both were middle-American kids, sons of Michigan and Illinois, who went on to excel in the service and to find worthy careers there.

But along the way, they became infected with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. And this week perhaps as early as today - President Clinton is expected to sign a bill that would force such people out of the military and onto the streets.

“I sent a healthy 18-year-old into the service 14 years ago,” Christa Davito, who asked that her son’s name not be used, protested. Now, “to be to be kicked in the teeth by your own government …”

The bill in question is the annual defense authorization bill, which finances the Pentagon. The president vetoed an earlier version of the bill on Dec. 28 because it contained several items, including the HIV provision, he found objectionable.

Last week, however, Congress passed a new version of the bill that resolved many of the president’s objections, but retained the HIV provision.

And while White House spokesman Michael McCurry called it “a lamentable addition to a bill that’s otherwise necessary to keep our nation’s defense strong,” the president now intends to sign it.

The HIV provision, sponsored by influential California congressman and presidential candidate Robert Dornan, would end the service of HIV-infected members within six months of the law’s enactment.

Paul Mero, a spokesman for Dornan, a former fighter pilot, said Tuesday that the congressman’s reasoning is that HIV-infected service members, whom the Pentagon does not send on deployments, should be removed to make way for people who can be deployed.

“If these guys are not deployable, or they can’t do anything that defines them as ‘military,’ then why are they in the military?” Mero said.

Once terminated, the service members would retain medical benefits, but their dependents would not.

This would particularly devastate military families in which dependents are infected as well, activists said. There is one case in which a serviceman, his wife and two of his three children all have the virus.

The terminated service members would also receive a lump-sum payment based on their length of service that the White House said would probably average about $20,000.

But they would be deprived of potential retirement pay, of potentially substantial disability pay, and of their livelihood.

While people with HIV often go many years before getting sick, AIDS is a terminal illness that so far has no cure. Previously, service members with HIV who went on to develop AIDS were retired on disability.

The Pentagon says there are 1,049 service members with HIV. All are in good health.

One of them is Tim Nichols.

He took a medical retirement from the Navy last month to avoid getting booted out by the HIV provision and to salvage disability payments he said the bill would erase.

A petty officer first-class from Muskegon, Mich., he had signed up right out of high school in 1982.

“One thing that stands out in my mind,” he said in a telephone interview Monday from his home in Norfolk. “When I joined the military, the recruiter wanted to meet my parents. He came to my house. He told my parents: ‘We’re going to take care of your son. His family will be taken care of.”’

Nichols, who turned 33 Tuesday, said at first the government did that. He served well in a variety of assignments, becoming expert in the field of operating ships’ guided missile systems. “It was fun,” he said.

He said he discovered he had the virus in 1992. He had a fight with his wife, then had too much to drink and went out and had unprotected sex. “It happens all the time,” he said.

He said he recently met a 20-year-old sailor who was in the same position. “His life is over. What are we going to do? We’re going to send him back to mom and dad. We tell their parents we’re going to take care of them, and then we kick them back as refuse.”

“Let me tell you, I would put my 14 years of honorable service … up against Congressman Dornan’s any day,” he said. “The fact is I did my best and would have continued to do my best had I been allowed to.”

And, often, the pain of the sailor or soldier is echoed by spouses and parents.

Christa Davito’s son was diagnosed as having the virus in 1990, and is crushed by the prospect having to leave.

“It is tearing my heart out,” she said in a telephone interview this week. “I bore that young man. I raised him to be a fine upstanding citizen. He is a good man.”

“It’s the worst feeling when you have a young man on the phone and his voice is choked with tears and he stands to lose one of the things he loves the best.

“It kills you as a parent. It’s not like he is 6 years old and you kiss it and make it feel better. You feel alone and you feel isolated because the government that you trust has deserted him.”