I promised too much too soon, it seems. Due to some changes in how Arma 2 treats "undefined variables", the scripts as they are right now throw up errors (they still work, more or less, but it's ugly). Secondly, the way Arma 2 treats initializations fucks things up - in ArmA, if you used "call" on a script in the init.sqf, it'd run BEFORE the briefing loaded. In Arma 2, call no longer does that. In short, there's a lot of weirdness. On the other hand, Arma 2 might have changed how saveVar works as well, hopefully improved it, so I might not need my workarounds any longer. I'd need to experiment with that. Naturally experimenting with campaign saving and loading is terribly time-consuming, so it might take a while. Sigh.
Sorry, I'll get back to you though if I can get it to work. For now, I suggest you simply use saveVar to save a variable that checks alive/dead on your units, and then use it as their "condition of presence" when placing them - that ought to work (mind though that saveVar saves backwards as well, meaning that if you revert to an earlier spot in the campaign where the unit SHOULD be alive, it'll be dead if the variable was ever updated with saveVar
You need to use separate variables between missions to circumvent that).
Wolfrug out.