| One of the most common pieces of advice a lawyer will give a client is "If you have the right to remain silent, do so." If the military is not asking about your high school credentials, as a practical matter you may be best off not bringing it to their attention. In other words, ideally, you could just serve out the rest of your Active Duty obligation, get your honorable discharge, and be free. Then, you could join the ANG but now be honest about not having a degree -- with a GED and an honorable discharge they probably won't mind that you don't have a diploma. With luck, no one will ever notice the discrepancy. Once you get an honorable discharge it is very unlikely the military would ever bother to try and punish you for a fraudulent enlistment like yours (though they could). If you are still on active duty, however, you run a much higher risk of provoking some kind of bureaucratic response. It's not too late to get a DH or general discharge, lose your benefits, screw up any chance of future service, etc.
However, if you are filling out paperwork for the ANG right now while you are in active duty, you are in a different boat. Every time you lie you are committing a new offense. While officials might be able to "overlook" a "mistake" made by a naive recruit years ago ---if they catch a veteran who should know better making false statements, they will probably be very much harder on you. Whatever you may have done in the past, don't make things worse by doing it all over again.
The bottom line: If you come forward, you are throwing yourself on the mercy of the AF. They may let it slide, they may hammer you. No guarantee one way or the other. If, for example, AF policy says only high school graduates should be put in your MOS -- then the AF may have no choice but to transfer you from your current job (no matter how good you've been doing at it), and that will cost money and time and will piss off a lot of people who will be motivated to go "the extra mile" to hammer you.
My suggestion: go to base legal and talk to a JAG lawyer. Make certain that before you tell him/her anything, you have lawyer/client confidentiality. Don't just blurt out your story, make them tell you explicitly that they owe you confidentiality. Then ask them how you can get yourself out of this jam. It might be possible to quietly handle the matter as a "correction to your service record" with a letter to some desk in D.C. It may not. Only someone familiar with the AF regulations and practices will be able to give you solid advice. | 
04-26-2008, 03:02 PM
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