The Corner

Drunk and Resisting The Draft

Just on a note of historical-comparative curiosity, and addressed to

military readers only:

The narrator of the Kipling poem I quoted earlier

seems to have

(a) Got seriously drunk,

(b) Lost several items of his uniform thereby,

(c) Assaulted a corporal (the narrator hiself must have been at least a

lance-corporal: “they’ll cut away the stripes I used to wear…”), blacking

his eye and tearing his uniform shirt. It seems the corporal was on guard

duty at the barrack gate & challenged our narrator when he returned from his

drinking bout.

For this, the narrator got pack drill (i.e. parade-ground drill with full

40-lb backpack) and 2 weeks confined to barracks (i.e. in a punishment

cell).

What would be the equivalent punishment for these offenses in a unit of the

US army today? I think we can assume the unit is not in a combat zone.

John Derbyshire — Mr. Derbyshire is a former contributing editor of National Review.
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