Soldier Must Pay for His Body Armor After Being Wounded

Here's a story that just makes you scratch your head.

A West Point graduate, wounded in Iraq, upon his discharge back in the USA, is asked where his body armor is and tells the Army that it was destroyed in Iraq when he was wounded. Because he cannot prove what happened to the body armor, he is not allowed to be honorably discharged until he waits for a Report of Survey to be completed (which could have taken a week or a month) or he pays $700 for the missing body armor. Because he wanted to go home and did not want to wait, the soldier was forced to pay the money.

I imagine that soldiers wounded in battle are not thinking about what is happening to their body armor as it is being taken off their bodies (or has been blown off their bodies) so that when the time comes they can tell some pencil pusher what happened to it. I understand each soldier is responsible for his or her gear, but this is ridiculous. That some officer stateside could not simply have signed a waiver in this case is inexcusable.