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Carpino alleges that Hale forced her into a sexual relationship in early 1997 by telling her that her husband was involved in an adulterous affair of his own. She says Hale told her he would protect his deputy from a possible court-martial only if Carpino went to bed with him. "He controlled our employability, controlled where we lived and how we lived," Carpino says. "He controlled everything in our life." She says she felt blackmailed and complied. Most of their dozens of trysts over the next four months occurred during the day at his handsome government apartment. He would often arrive in a chauffeur-driven, armored white Mercedes limousine, she says. Carpino's marriage, already shaky, grew more so. "I'm disappointed that Donna couldn't tell me about the pressure she was getting from this guy," her former husband says.
Carpino says Hale encouraged her to divorce her husband, offered her $2,000 to help pay for a lawyer and expressed a desire to marry her. She presented her husband with divorce papers last June. But the relationship between Hale and Carpino collapsed soon thereafter, she says, when Hale admitted to her that the story of her husband's affair was a lie. Carpino said she vowed then to get even, and the two began waging war on each other. Carpino's ex-husband remembers Hale's calling him to say he would help him gain custody of his son. When the colonel explained he needed to demonstrate Carpino was an unfit mother, the general allegedly offered to testify in court to that effect.
Carpino filed a complaint about Hale's actions with Army investigators on Jan. 22. Because of Hale's rank, they turned the case over to the Pentagon's inspector general. Shortly after learning of it, Hale submitted his request to leave the military; he was honorably discharged by Reimer a week later, on Feb. 28.
His treatment was no big surprise to those familiar with the kid gloves the Army uses to handle its top officers, under a system designed to insulate them from the grilling routinely faced by their subordinates. Unlike personnel decisions for the other 485,000 people in the Army, those involving the service's 307 generals are dealt with by a separate general officer management office under Reimer's purview.
Even so, Hale should not have been let off that easily. Army regulations require that the personnel folders of soldiers under investigation be pulled from the Army's regular files and "flagged" to "guard against the accidental execution of specified favorable personnel actions." The rules say that retirement is "prohibited" until the flag is removed. But Army officers working for Reimer say Hale got no special protection. They say that because Reimer knew Hale was under investigation, Hale's file didn't need to be formally flagged. And it was within Reimer's power to issue a waiver allowing Hale to retire in spite of the investigation. "Is Reimer supposed to ask himself for a waiver?" a senior Army officer asks. There was nothing illegal about allowing Hale to retire, the officer argues. Besides, he contends, Hale can always be recalled to active duty to face punishment.