Quote Originally Posted by Infected7 View Post
While I was in basic, one of the guys that was in our group was from New York, his wife was raped and he didn't get word from the Red Cross for a good 2 weeks after the fact, and then he was refused any contact with her outside of the usual "If you're good, we'll let you call your family for 2 minutes" so this isn't surprising to me in the least.
Piss-poor leadership there. The Red Cross is expeditious in relaying messages, the Army (and probably the other services) acts upon the messages immediately. The only times I've seen the Red Cross fail was when a family member failed to send a message. I've known a few people who were granted leave during training to deal with a family emergency. We even had a guy deploy to Kuwait, find out his father had been murdered, and get offered the chance to go home for good. He came back after two weeks.