The trust issue is another part of the grey area with desertion. Paul mentions that if a soldier was a deserter, he would not put any trust in that soldier but I think this is also something that's going to vary between different units, commanders and probably more importantly, different nationalities.
To me, it would be paramount to find out the reasons for why the person went absent and for how long they were absent (to decide if they really had deserted, given that the period of absence generally seems to be around 30 days before they are declared as a deserter - something that's going to be difficult to keep track of given the number of devastated units & lack of admin trail at year 2000).
I tend to think that even in the T2k world, there would be no standard treatment and deserters would be taking a gamble any time they asked to join up with a unit. I'm certain there would be some units who would execute deserters and I'm certain there would be commanders with a different point of view. For example, if someone wandered away from their unit because they were shellshocked, I'd like to believe that their condition would be recognized as the mental health issue that it is and not a case of them simply running away from their responsibilities. And then there's the question of is the person actually deserting or are they defecting? From the point of view of the unit they left, they're a deserter but for the unit they just joined, they're a defector - what happens with the trust issue then?
Then we start getting into the aspects of game design that were taken to make the game interesting - if you treat every deserter as someone to be executed, you lose the chance for the PC unit to comprise various nationalities. Plus you lose one of the tropes of the T2k game, the WarPac soldier who hates the communists/Soviets/Russians and just like it would happen in the game world, someone (in this case, the Referee) is going to have to decide who is a deserter and who is a defector.
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