Sorry, I had woken up at 2am and was APSing while half asleep. Dogmush is correct. A repatriated/escaped POW/Detainee has no position in the Chain of Command due to potential trauma/and other psychological reasons. The mission then becomes to get them to the rear (I thought I had typed that last night, but fell asleep before hitting "POST").
I had a similar situation one REFORGER. We were directing the attack of 8ID into VII Corps at night. At one intersection, 5/77 ARM came down the road they were supposed to leave on, and the company commander of the lead company wanted to depart on the road they were supposed to come down.
I pointed out to both the Company Commander and Battalion Commander their errors and offered to help get the Battalion turned around and guided into their attack position. They refused to listen and decided to go their way.
Come morning, 5 battalions of armor from 8ID were in position and ready to attack. The 6th Battalion (5/77) was wandering the Corps rear, getting in everyone's way.
MG Calvin Waller (google him) was not happy and ready to rip my head off when I gave the brief on the passage of lines/movement to contact that was supposed to happen with all 6 battalion early that morning (5 did attack and it went very well, a 6th battalion would have been even better).
Any way ended up with that evening brief being put in front of all the Maneuver battalion commanders with one highly pissed-off MG Waller pointing at me (and the MP brassard on my arm) telling them "If he says to turn right, you *expletive deleted*ing turn right. If he tells you to turn left, you turn left. Whatever he tells you to do, you do. LTC x (commander of 5-77ARM), come see me at the end of this brief. (Pretty sure that he became "Charles Atlas" in MG Waller's OER Rating Profile.)
Ah, yes ... occifers. Probably just about every GI has at least one occifer story.
At one point during my sojourn in southeast Asia, the commanding general of the 4th Infantry Division decided he was tired of the division base camp being shelled almost every night by mortar fire. At the time I was in base camp. We arrived back at the hooch one afternoon as the mama-sans were loading into the trucks to be taken back into town (Pleiku). As usual, we said "See you tomorrow, Mama-san." To which they replied, "No see tomorrow. We no come, you no be here. You aw go out."
We didn't know WTF that was supposed to mean. Late in the afternoon (or early evening) we found out. There was to be a major sweep-and-clear mission first thing in the morning. Every warm body within ICBM range of Camp Enari was going to be loaded for bear, trucked out 5 km from the perimeter, form up a cordon, and sweep in toward the camp to clear out any attack positions. Naturally, this was all top secret, so we weren't told until the last minute -- but ALL the hooch maids knew about it, so you can guess how many mortar emplacements we found. But that's not the point of this story.
At the appointed hour, my platoon loaded into a deuce-and-a-half and we were trucked out to a hilltop and dropped. We stood around for awhile, waiting for the signal to start closing the circle. From our hilltop location, the camp was plainly visible. So along comes a captain from some unit other than ours (our platoon was being led by our SFC for the day), and he gives us the order to MOVE OUT -- pointing in the opposite direction from the base camp. Several of us tried to point out that the base camp was over thar, not where he wanted to send us. He was undeterred -- he had his map and his Boy Scout compass. So we started walking, in the wrong direction. A couple of minutes a helicopter flew over, swung around, and dropped into a hover. A voice (a rather
annoyed voice) came over a loadspeaker: "Captain, where in 'ell do you think you're going?"
Momentarily two or three jeeps sped up, a bunch of company grade and field grade officers jumped out, and a heated discussion ensued, complete with maps spread out on the hoods of jeeps, compasses, the whole enchilada. Meanwhile, we're all just standing there, enjoying the show, and telling anyone who would listen (which was about nobody for the longest time) that, "See? That there's the base camp, right over thar." Finally somebody pulled his head out of his rectum and listened, the jeeps and helicopters all left, and we were allowed to begin our sweep in the proper direction.
Fragging definitely should have been more widespread than it was.