A mural of Army Spc. Vanessa Guillen standing outside the Vanessa Guillen Gate at Fort Hood in Killeen, Texas, in October 2020. (Rose Thayer/Stars and Stripes)
The Army wants its leaders to act more quickly when a soldier does not report for duty and cannot be found, according to a new directive from the service’s top civilian.
Commanders must report a missing soldier to law enforcement within three hours and notify family members of the soldier’s missing status within eight hours, according to an Oct. 28 memorandum issued by Army Secretary Dan Driscoll.
The memo was meant to provide a more specific course of action for leaders dealing with missing soldiers, according to the Army. Previous Army policy gave commanders a day or more before they had to act on a soldier’s disappearance.
Driscoll’s directive instructs Army commanders to place missing soldiers in the duty status of “absent-unknown” within three hours of discovering they are missing “and make every effort to locate the soldier.” Commanders must also alert Army law enforcement officials to the missing soldier during that time frame. Law enforcement officials must then “create a blotter entry,” issue a “Be-On-The-Lookout,” or BOLO, order for the missing soldier and enter “all relevant information into the Missing Persons File of the National Crime Information Center (NCIC) database,” which provides information to law enforcement officials nationwide.
Local law enforcement officials must also be notified of the missing soldier’s status during that three-hour period, Driscoll wrote.
If the soldier cannot be located in 48 hours, commanders are to determine “by a preponderance of evidence” if that soldier’s absence is voluntary or involuntary. Those found to be missing intentionally will be reported as Absent Without Leave, or AWOL, and potentially face criminal charges. Those found to be involuntarily absent, or if there is a lack of evidence to determine if they left intentionally, should be reported missing to law enforcement and their status declared “duty status-whereabouts unknown,” or DUSTWUN.
Missing soldiers who have indicated the potential for self-harm are also to be reported missing to law enforcement, according to the memo.
Driscoll’s order comes after the service has for years faced criticism that it has acted slowly to find missing soldiers. It updates the missing soldier processes that were implemented after high-profile investigations into the disappearance and slaying of 20-year-old Spc. Vanessa Guillen at Fort Hood, Texas in 2020. The Army launched an internal command investigation into Guillen’s death and a separate probe into Fort Hood’s command climate and culture after her death conducted by a panel of outside experts dubbed The Fort Hood Independent Review Committee
After those investigations, the Army added the “absent-unknown” status to allow commanders to assess the situation without immediately labeling them AWOL, which carries a negative connotation and implies they are intentionally missing, Army leaders said at the time.
Driscoll wrote in his new memo that his new policy should provide a detailed explanation of how commanders and Army law enforcement should handle all missing soldiers.
“The Army will always place people first and will never leave a soldier behind,” he wrote.
