In military terminology, desertion is the abandonment of a duty or post without permission (a pass, liberty or leave) and is done with the intention of not returning. In contrast, Unauthorized Absence (UA) or Absence Without Leave (US: AWOL; Commonwealth: AWL) refers to a temporary absence.

Desertion versus Absence Without Leave

In the United States Army, British Armed Forces, Australian Defence Force and Canadian Armed Forces, military personnel will become "AWOL" (/ˈeɪwɒl/; U.S. and Canada: Absence Without Leave) or "AWL" (U.K. and Australia: Absent Without Leave, AWL never AWOL) if absent from their post without a valid pass, liberty or leave. The United States Marine Corps, United States Navy, and United States Coast Guard generally refer to this as "Unauthorized Absence" or (UA). Personnel are dropped from their unit rolls after thirty days and then listed as deserters; however, as a matter of U.S. military law, desertion is not measured by time away from the unit, but rather:

Desertion is a 2005 novel by Abdulrazak Gurnah.

Plot

There is, as you can see, an I in this story, but it is not a story about me. It is one about all of us, about Farida and Amin and our parents, and about Jamila. It is about how one story contains many and how they belong not to us but are part of the random currents of our time, and about how stories capture us and entangle us for all time.

The novel is narrated by Rashid in all but one of the ten chapters, which exception is drawn from the notebooks of his brother Amin. Rashid is the youngest child of teaching parents: he is two years younger than Amin, who is in turn two years younger than Farida, their sister. The children are brought up in Zanzibar in the late in 1950s, during a time of heady transition from colonialism to independence.

Rashid spins two tales: one is in part his own, and largely contingent on the other, set some fifty years thence on the outskirts of a small town in colonial Kenya, along the east African coast north of Mombasa, when early one morning in 1899 an Englishman stumbles out of the desert and collapses before a local shopkeeper outside his mosque. The latter, Hassanali, takes him back home and, amidst the considerable kerfuffle, and with some help from family and local professionals, begins nursing the man back to health.