Pablo Gets Hard Labor
PABLO PAREDES has been demoted to the lowest rank in the Navy and sentenced to three months hard labor for refusing to deploy aboard the USS Bonhomme Richard last December, AP reports.
The 23-year-old New Yorker said he refused to support a war he believed was illegal and immoral.
Prosecutors had asked the judge to sentence Paredes to nine months of confinement. Paredes and prosecutors left the courtroom without commenting.
This is disappointing. "Hard labor" is what most military personnel do every day. Pablo's former shipmates are five months into a six-month stint of "hard labor." I would think that an appropriate punishment would be at least as long as the deployment he skipped.
I don't know about the other services, but it's not uncommon for sailors to come up with very creative ways to skip out on deployments, even in peacetime. Every mixed-gender ship experiences a mini "baby boom" right before a long deployment, leaving the detailers scrambling to find replacements for all those newly expectant mothers. Among the male sailors, there always seems to be a rash of "recreational accidents" involving broken limbs in the weeks leading up to the start of cruise.
It's called "malingering," and while it is a serious offense, it's often difficult to prove. A few years ago, I was transferring to a new command. Since the ship was at sea on the date that I reported aboard, I had to check in at the "shore detachment" office, which was manned almost exclusively by pregnant women and men with broken limbs. This was just a few weeks before a major deployment.
Other shirkers didn't bother with the pretense, and just stopped coming to work. Usually, these folks would have a change of heart after a few weeks -- generally about the same time that their money ran out. Normal practice was to court martial these losers, and send them on their way with an Other-Than-Honorable (OTH) discharge.
But the captain of this ship quickly realized that a discharge was just what many of these kids wanted, so he came up with a new policy, which he called "punitive retention." He would give them the maximum non-judicial punishment he could mete out, and then put them on "liberty risk" for the duration of the cruise. Essentially, this meant that they would be reduced in rank, have their pay docked, and be confined to the ship until the end of the deployment.
Once word got out, unauthorized absences and malingering dropped off to zero."
indepundit.com |
