Page:United States Reports 502 OCT. TERM 1991.pdf/378

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KING v. ST. VINCENT’S HOSPITAL Opinion of the Court

To these arguments, and others like them that we do not set out at length, two replies are in order. We may grant that the congressionally mandated leave of absence can be an ungainly perquisite of military service, when the tour of duty lasts as long as King’s promises to do, and if we were free to tinker with the statutory scheme we could reasonably accord some significance to the burdens imposed on both employers and workers when long leaves of absence are the chosen means of guaranteeing eventual reemployment to military personnel. But to grant all this is not to find equivocation in the statute’s silence, so as to render it susceptible to interpretive choice. On the contrary, the verbal distinctions underlying the hospital’s arguments become pallid in the light of a textual difference far more glaring than any of them: while, as noted, subsection (d) is utterly silent about any durational limit on the protection it provides, other subsections of § 2024, protecting other classes of full-time service personnel, expressly limit the periods of their protection. Thus, § 2024(a) currently gives enlistees at least four years of reemployment protection, with the possibility of an extension to five years and even longer. Again, for example, § 2024(b)(1) extends protection to those entering active duty (except for “the purpose of determining physical fitness [or] for training”) for at least four years, with the possibility of a further extension beyond that.9 Given the examples of affirmative 9

As a counterexample, St. Vincent’s might cite § 2024(g), providing reservists ordered to active duty for not more than 90 days with a guarantee of reemployment extending through their period of duty. Standing alone with subsection (d), this provision might suggest that a guarantee extending through the duration of a reservist’s tour of active duty must be express; but the examples of specific durational limitations described in the text above show that Congress knew how to provide limits on its benefits when that was the intent. Even if the express examples unsettled the significance of subsection (d)’s drafting, however, we would ultimately read the provision in King’s favor under the canon that provisions for benefits to members of the Armed Services are to be construed in the beneficiaries’