Yokota NCO jailed, reduced two ranks for failing to report to new assignment
By Jennifer H. Svan, Tokyo
bureau chief
YOKOTA AIR BASE — A noncommissioned officer with 18 years of
military service was reduced two ranks and will spend 60 days in jail for refusing to
accept orders to North Dakota.
Tech. Sgt. Michael W. Girton, 41, told Judge David Brash that it
wasn’t the remote location of his new assignment, but the job he was avoiding.
“I didn’t want to do a stupid job for the Air Force,”
Girton said during an unsworn statement.
Girton pleaded guilty to failure to report to his appointed place of
duty the day he was to leave Yokota, intentionally disobeying a commissioned officer, and
failing to report at Minot Air Force Base, N.D.
According to testimony during the special court-martial Thursday and
Friday, Girton defied Lt. Col. John Ahern, commander of the 374th Civil Engineer Squadron,
three times since last fall.
That’s when Ahern ordered him to begin preparing for his new
assignment, with the 5th Civil Engineer Squadron at Minot.
Over the course of five months, Girton attempted to derail his
transfer by not signing paperwork, missing appointments, requesting a mental health
examination on Okinawa and not appearing at Yokota’s passenger air terminal to pick
up his airline tickets, lawyers for the government said.
“His arrogance has challenged the very backbone of the military:
discipline,” said Capt. David Young, characterizing Girton as a “criminally
selfish renegade” who deserved a bad-conduct discharge and the maximum six
months’ confinement.
Girton’s Air Force career was going well until personal
circumstances interfered, said Philip Cave, a defense attorney from Alexandria, Va.
“We forget there’s a person in there,” he said.
Pausing to fight back tears, Girton told Brash his life began to
unravel after he was assigned to Yokota in 1996 and his wife stayed in North Carolina.
He said he went home to resolve their problems and discovered she had
married someone else and ransacked their home.
Girton, who remarried, became a dorm manager at Yokota with the Civil
Engineer Squadron after he was disqualified from flying.
Girton spent most of his Air Force career in planes as a crewmember.
He said mental health issues he sought help for while at Yokota prompted the
disqualification.
At Minot, he was to be retrained in nuclear missiles — a job he
was looking forward to — but that fell through because of mental health reports in
his file and an alcohol incident more than 20 years ago, he and Cave said.
Brash’s sentence reduced Girton to an E-4. Girton’s
detention starts right away. Most of it will be spent at Yokosuka Naval Base, Japan.
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