I cannot envision a scenario where, in a training environment, such an event would occur. Most of what people know about Drills is theater, designed to achieve a specific outcome. Underneath all of that is a professional Non Commissioned Officer, the backbone of any modern military.
Their primary job is to train and take care of the needs of the people in their charge, and that includes making sure their external problems are taken care of as quickly and efficiently as possible.
Let’s suppose you DO get a sociopath of an NCO for your DI. He gets notified by the chain of command that Recruit Tenpeg has had a death in his or her immediate family. Even if they WANTED to deny the soldier leave, once the death is confirmed by the Red Cross, the entire chain of command from the Colonel on down is aware and gets involved.
The Recruit Company First Sergeant and CO will move Heaven and Earth to get the recruit in a position to be at the funeral. If the recruit is broke, they’ll help arrange a pay advance and/or a loan from Navy Relief or the Red Cross to get the recruit home and back.
If appropriate uniforms aren’t yet ready, they’ll see to it, or even send the recruit home in civvies. There is no way a “mere” DI is going to prevent a recruit from going to their own mother’s funeral.
Having the recruit ask his or her drill instructor to be sent home for a funeral is exactly the wrong way to do this.
This is how it works.
If a recruit’s mother dies during the recruit’s initial training, the recruit’s family will tell the funeral home “hey, Joe is going through Marine Corps boot camp right now.” The funeral home will contact the American Red Cross, through which all emergency leave requests initiate.
The Red Cross will notify the Marines. At this point the chaplain corps takes over. A chaplain will notify the recruit of the death and arrange transportation to the funeral and back. All this is above the drill instructor’s pay grade.
About the only input the drill instructor has is transporting the recruit to the clothing issue point to draw a service uniform to wear to the funeral if the recruit doesn’t have one already.
We had a recruit, call him Richter. . I distinctly remember our SDI (senior drill instructor) came up to him during square away time. I was a couple feet away and I just saw the SDI look at him and say “Richter, I need to speak with you, enter the duty hut. We were on range up north in Pendleton.
We didn’t see him for three days or so. In the field we’d ask about him, but we had to keep moving forward so it wasnt brought up more than 4 times. When he had finally returned, I asked him about what happened, and he told me that he wasn’t ready to talk about it so I let it go, assuming the worst, that someone had passed.
During the Crucible, he opened up eventually telling us his brother passed away. Richter had an older brother who was a Sgt of Marines. He had passed away somehow unbeknownst to the platoon.
After our given comfort and condolences, we asked him what happened that day Senior pulled him in the duty hut. I won’t explained exactly how they helped him, but he was fully supported and taken care of. As a human. When he was ready, he was able to come back to training.
I believe he was given as much time as he needed, but anymore than a certain time, he would have to get drop to a new platoon. So he stuffed it and carried it through the crucible and became a United States Marine. Each drill instructor is different. Ours really cared and he was a Gunny at the time.
This will not happen, so long as the Red Cross makes notification. My son’s Drill Sergeant allowed my son to make a call home simply because he was worried about his Mom.
When he was at combat training after boot the Corps sent him home for two weeks when she entered home hospice care, so he could have one last good visit with her. They did not have to do that. She started passing the night he got to engineer school.
His Gunny, who hadn’t even met him yet, got out of his bed in the middle of the night, got my son out of bed and packed, drove him to the airport, and had him standing with a ticket in hand by the time official notification was received, which was only a couple hours.
Sean made it home in time to talk with his Mama one last time before she passed the next morning.
This is one thing the Corps doesn’t screw around with.
