Veterans For America

Wayne Woolley, the Star-Ledger

Jerseyans like this Boonton couple face various conflicts amid Iraq deployment

Laura Sullivan and New Jersey Army National Guard Sgt. Joe Rivera gave up dreams of a storybook wedding when it became clear his preparations for deployment to Iraq could collide with the big day.

So the Boonton couple opted for a drastically scaled-down wedding this month and asked merchants to return deposits on the grand affair at the Excelsior in Saddle Brook on March 29.

The DJ refunded the money. So did the florist. And the church.

But the couple’s pursuit of a refund of the $11,650 for the tony catering hall on Route 46 has been a different story. The Excelsior management told Sullivan and Rivera their contract calls for them to lose everything if they cancel. In exchange, the Excelsior has offered the couple any future date, even if it falls in a month of peak demand, at the same discounted rate they got for booking in March.

The couple wants their money back. Not all of it, they say, but most of it.

“It’s not fair, or very patriotic,” said Sullivan, a teacher at a private school in Milford. “I understand they’re a business. I can understand them keeping $1,000, or $2,000 even $3,000.”

Jay McVeigh, the Excelsior banquet manager, calls it “beyond fair” and tops any offer the hall has ever made.

“We are big supporters of the military,” McVeigh said. “But we take what they are saying as ‘Our plans have changed and we want our money back.’ That’s not fair to us. Now, unfortunately, we’re in the position of being the hard guys, the bad guys.”

STORM AHEAD

fLegal experts call disputes like this one the first flakes in what promises to become a blizzard as more than half of New Jersey’s 6,000-member Army National Guard ships off to Iraq next year.

“With a wholesale deployment of this magnitude, there is a whole host of problems,” said William S. Greenberg, a retired brigadier general in the Army reserve and a partner at Newark’s McCarter & English law firm. He founded the military legal assistance program at the New Jersey Bar Association, which in 2001 began offering free legal assistance to deployed reservists.

The lawyers will have their work cut out for them.

Beyond simple contracts fouled by uncertainties arising over shifting deployment dates, other troops will suffer financial hardships that could lead to legal troubles. Still others will need legal advice when they return to civilian jobs. For now, the bar’s main focus is helping combat wounded troops navigate the bureaucratic maze that governs disability claims.

At this point, Rivera, 25, and Sullivan, 22, aren’t ready to involve an attorney in their dispute with the Excelsior, which they booked more than a year ago.

The hall was to be the centerpiece of a day they had been thinking about off and on since their first date, the prom at Pompton Lakes High School where both attended. Rivera was a senior; Sullivan was a freshman.

“Even then, I knew that she was the one for me,” Rivera said. “I knew that sooner or later, it was going to work out for us.”

It took a few years before they became a couple again. By then, Sullivan had graduated from Montclair State University, and Rivera had landed a job working for a company that creates elaborate electronic displays. He’d also joined the National Guard, rising to the rank of sergeant and specializing in communications.

By the time Rivera and Sullivan started planning a wedding, they knew his deployment was a possibility. Rivera already had been mobilized for a portion of his unit’s deployment to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and he spent weeks on security details after 9/11.

But for much of the past year, the Pentagon had been telling New Jersey National Guard leaders to prepare for a “major” deployment to a combat zone in late 2009 or 2010.

Then, in September, the Defense Department told New Jersey officials they had been moved up. Way up. Mobilization would begin in June 2008, and most would be in Iraq by summer.

That’s when Rivera and Sullivan say they started to panic. Although his unit won’t likely report to Fort Bliss, Texas, until June, Rivera and his fellow soldiers already have been told to be available most weekends throughout the spring for extra training at Fort Dix and their home armories. He’s been told he should expect orders to travel to Georgia and Texas to master new equipment he’ll use in Iraq.

“The point is, I don’t know when I’ll be around and when I won’t,” he said. “There is enough going on as it is to make my head spin. Squeezing the wedding in was just too much.”

By early October, Rivera and Sullivan had given up on a ceremony at St. Mary’s Parish in Pompton Lakes followed by the big bash at the Excelsior for 150 people with the cocktail hour, a pasta station featuring rotelli in a pesto sauce, choice of three entrees and chocolate-covered strawberries for desert.

They ended up getting married the day before Veterans Day at the Casa Bella in Denville. About 40 friends and relatives joined them for dinner.

“It wasn’t what we’d been planning, but we thought it was the best thing to do under the circumstances,” Sullivan said.

Meanwhile, the Excelsior awaits word on the couple’s plans. McVeigh, the banquet manager, says the hall is making an unprecedented offer by promising any open date when Rivera returns from Iraq at the same $70-per-person rate.

“This is a tough situation,” McVeigh said. “We don’t want to come off looking like bad guys. It’s a tough situation for me, too. If it was my son or daughter, would I feel differently? Maybe.”