crmason,
Ive seen this situation many times. I am an active duty career counselor and a lot of times the many ways given to document active, inactive, reserve, guard and/or sister service time is not correct. I refer you to AR 635-200 chapter 12. If you google it, its the first one to come up off the USAPA website. Chapter 12 gives us an idea of what service counts for active, inactive time. The best course of action is to gather up all 214s, orders NGB 22s and any other document that tell some kind of service, make an appointment to have a DA1506 done up at the local PAC or AG office. This form will have every period of service documented and an AG officer will have to sign off on it. This will give you two very important dates. The BASD and the PEBD. BASD is the adjusted Basic Actice Service Date. The PEBD is the Pay Entry Base Date. I suspect the PEBD is correct given the 28 year time frame. I also suspect that the BASD is not correct and needs to be adjusted.
When this date is determined, you take todays date whatever that may be and subtract the BASD from it to get total active duty time and therefore the time attributable toward retirement.
I will give you mine as an example. I have active duty from April 3, 1985 to 30 June 1992. I went into the reserves on 1 July 1992 and then I came back on active duty 18 September 1998 and am still serving on active duty.
Since I have no break in military service, active, reserve, active my PEBD is April 3, 1985. My BASD is another story.
Today is July 12 2008.
So the math is done as such, YYMMDD
End of first period of service for me is 920630
Begining of first service is.You subtract the difference) 850403
070227 or 7 years 2 months and 27 days. 30 days minus 03 is 27, 06 months minus 04 is 02 months, 1992 minus 1985 is 07 years.
I came back on active duty on 980918. The rules say take the last period of continous active duty and subtract any previous active duty.
So for me it written as such. YYMMDD 980918
Minus the active time already served 070227
This is my adjusted BASD 910621
How you do the math is every month counts as 30 days. I am not subracting February or December per say. I am using 30 day as my benchmark. So in my example above the day column is 18 minus 27 which cant be done so I have to borrow a month from the middle column, in my case Im borrow 1 month from 09 so it gets changed to 08 and then the month I borrowed is converted to 30 day and then added to 18 to give me a total of 48 days. Now we can subract 48 days from 27 days giving me 21. The month column is done next and now the 09 has been reduced to 08, so 08 minus 02 is 06. Next is the year column, 98 minus 07 is 91. So my adjusted BASD is June (06) 21st, 1991.
Easy, right? If you have many active service periods you must do this math and then add them together.
Now to get my total active time we use today's date 080712
Minus my adjusted BASD 910621
Same borrowing rules apply but my total is 170021
Or 17 years no months and 21 of active duty time.
My years for pay are calcuted much the same way but since I have no break in service, it looks like this 080712
Minus my PEBD 850403
230309
Or 23 years, 3 months and 09 days. I know this looks confusing but if you write all the dates as YYMMDD and remeber the borrowing rules if you need to borrow then you can calculate within a day or so what each of these date should be.
RCM7