‘I’m not mad at the Navy. I just wish they hadn’t persecuted me and my family.’

The Navy branded Guiles L. Gadsby a deserter. Eleven years after Gadsby allegedly enlisted and then disappeared, they tracked him down, took him away from his family in Lancaster and locked him away, preparing to court-martial him.

Gadsby, 39, insisted upon his arrest more than a year ago that it was all a mistake, a nightmare. He had served honorably in Vietnam--in the Army--he told them. He was never in the Navy, he explained.

Navy officials apparently reached the same conclusion on Oct. 30, 1987, 38 days after Gadsby was arrested by military investigators and taken to the San Diego brig. They wrote him a $303 check--the salary he would have earned as a basic sailor for having spent 38 days in service--and sent him on his way without a word of apology.

Life None Too Rosy

Life has been none too rosy for Gadsby since.

His wife left him, Gadsby said. He attributes it to the financial pressures of having lost so much in wages while in Navy custody and of having spent so much in attorney’s fees to free himself. Gadsby’s attorney, Karl Seuthe, attributes it to delayed stress syndrome brought on by the trauma of having been arrested last year.

In September, Gadsby left his job as a reservoir operator for the Las Virgenes Water District and filed for stress-related disability. The pressure--his wife’s departure, the Navy, intimations by acquaintances who questioned his innocence--was just too much, he said.

And on top of it all, he slipped on some newspapers a few weeks ago and broke his ankle.

He intends next month to file suit in federal court against the Navy, hoping to retrieve at the very least the wages he lost from his job while being held in military custody. But it may be years before his claim is ultimately resolved.

“My life,” Gadsby said with bitter irony, “has been just great ever since the Navy thing.”

On Oct. 21, 1976, according to Navy officials, a man bearing Gadsby’s name, appearance, signature, Social Security number and military history entered a Navy recruiting office in Colorado and signed up for a two-year hitch. That man was inducted, told to report to San Diego for further orders and given a one-way plane ticket. He never arrived.

Eleven years later, a team of Navy investigators located Gadsby through California Department of Motor Vehicle records and arrested him. He was taken to San Diego, given a recruit haircut and uniforms and placed in the brig.

A Navy spokesman said at the time that fingerprints would prove that the Lancaster man had, in fact, enlisted in the Navy five years after he had served in Vietnam with an Army supply unit. Military authorities, however, could not locate any fingerprints taken when Gadsby was alleged to have enlisted in the Navy.

Gadsby’s attorneys, meanwhile, found witnesses who bolstered his claim that he was attending college in the Los Angeles area when he allegedly enlisted in Colorado. Gadsby also passed a polygraph test while a handwriting analyst found “significant fundamental differences” between Gadsby’s handwriting and the enlistment signature recorded in 1976.

Gadsby told authorities that an acquaintance, whom he would not publicly name, may have assumed his identity when signing the enlistment papers.

“I’m not mad at the Navy,” he said after being released. “I just wish they hadn’t persecuted me and my family.”