Military Justice
 

By God, there is some.
No prison time for Bowe Bergdahl.

I'd say he did his time.

But give him the dishonorable, which I assume they did?

reduced in rank to privet , has to pay back $10k ish , and a Big Chicken Dinner ,
Bad Conduct Discharge , he is in essence a fellon , cant own guns , or vote

Seeing as folks got hurt looking for his dumass self i think he got off light ,
they could have executed him

Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl has received his sentence after pleading guilty to charges stemming from his 2009 capture by the Taliban. While he is receiving no prison time, he has been given a dishonorable discharge.
At first, it may sound like he’s gotten off very lightly, given that he pleaded guilty to desertion and misbehavior before the enemy, and the fact that, according to the Washington Times, he endangered the fellow soldiers in his unit.
According to the Manual for Courts Martial, the death penalty is a potential punishment for both of those charges.
According to Lawyers.com, this discharge wipes out any and all military and veteran benefits for Bergdahl. That means no access to the GI Bill for further education, no VA home loans, no VA medical benefits. Bergdahl gets none of these benefits.

In addition, according to 18 USC 922(g), Bergdahl is now prohibited from owning any sort of firearm or ammunition. Even one pistol round could land him 10 years in the federal slammer (see 18 USC 924).
In addition, GettingHired.com notes that a dishonorable discharge is entered into law-enforcement databases. Furthermore, that site pointed out that Bergdahl will probably face “significant problems securing employment in civilian society.”

http://www.wearethemighty.com/news/t...s-for-Bergdahl

Wait for Bergdahl and Manning to get married on a reality TV show.

Bergdahl's walking away was foolish and dumb, but not cowardly.
I never got any home loan, only got education benefits too late and too little to do any good. And doing without VA health care is a healthy choice.
I say thanks to Bowe, his defense team and the Judge for the guts to what they saw was right, not screeching like all the chicken hawks from Trump on down.

He's branded DISHONORABLE for the rest of his life. Whether or not cowardice was a factor won't interest most.

I happened to be in the Dallas VA hospital ER when this was announced. The general reaction was...negative.

There are a lot of unhappy veterans and active duty military tonight.

Maybe he can write a book and do the talk show circuit.

Not only for Bergdahl, but for all the other felons, why is this a good idea? I get the whole retribution angle. I don't agree with, but I recognize it. The likelihood of Bergdahl reoffending is minuscule, but what about the other felons, having been released from custody who face the same "significant problems securing employment"? Who benefits from this civic stance?

The guy walked off the job negligently endangering his coworkers. The probability of someone with such poor judgement in some way acting to the detriment of another employer and coworkers is high. Look at criminals' rap sheets. He's beyond the formative years where his thinking processes can be easily retrained. The penalties he received were not sufficient enough to cause a Significant Emotional Event that would shock his thought processes into realignment. That's why society puts long term constraints on offenders.

Such a person could negligently endanger coworkers again. Such a person can bring great discredit upon a future employer, enough to put them out of business which affects the livelihoods of other employees and their ability to provide for their spouses and children. Not hiring such a person benefits everyone except the offender.

There's a card that psychologists play when they're trying to salvage the future of someone they believe has been either wrongly convicted; or, fully rehabilitated. They employ the old adage: Past human behavior is not necessarily a reliable indicator of future human behavior. Neither condition applies to this person. In this case it would be more like saying: Gambling with all of your money is not necessarily a reliable indicator that you're going to lose it.

Yet there are those who would tell others that it's good to do that citing the possibility that they could win.

Easily remedied... death penalty.

85% percent chance this was a problem in top management tho






not really

I am not sure whether the big man hunt was to rescue a fellow soldier from the enemy or to capture a traitor for punishment.
The following was actually in last week's testimony:
"Army Capt. John Billings also testified for the prosecution. Billings, who was Bergdahl's platoon leader in Afghanistan, said the platoon searched for Bergdahl for 19 days. He described wearing a filthy uniform while looking for the then-private first class."
"Cols. Clint Baker and John White also testified to the trying circumstances. One platoon was out for more than a month and had to have socks airdropped."
I'd say Bergdahl probably did have something to talk to headquarters about.

If you're a platoon leader, you have a man missing, and you can't explain for sure exactly why, I think it would behoove you to do everything you can to find him.
Besides, it's better than staying at base with your CO yelling at you. :haha:

I was a platoon leader.
And I did have a CO who would have yelled because he got his uniform dirty.
Missed the point, Bruce.

Death penalty for all felons.. ok sarcasm noted

Yeah, you didn't answer my question either. Who benefits?

I don't think so.
OK, platoon leader, you have a man missing and you don't know if he's AWOL or snatched by the enemy, you wouldn't do everything possible to find him?
If you were missing wouldn't you want the military to do everything possible to find you?

The situation over there wasn't easy to search, big area, hostile people, IEDs, potential snipers everywhere. If he'd been snatched they could easily move him around, so you can't be sure of where you'd already searched. That makes it tough to second guess their actions.

I don't get the point, does it have something to do with the state of their uniforms?

OK, Boss, I will try and find a transcript and get back to you.
I was going by CNN's report that seemed to me to describe the horror and desperation of a search that left the poor long suffering captain's uniform filthy dirty.
A platoon out for a month seems pretty silly, especially since there was no food or water resupply in that time that just might have included some socks.
I have a hunch that in a close knit platoon the feeling was that that silly goose Bergdahl fucked up again, but we better go look.
The brass more likely felt that bring him back dead or alive was the best way to save face and rank.

My use of the term "such a person" refers to Bergdahl et al who share the characteristic of being a felon.

What branch were you?

Army Infantry, 1965-1967. 2nd Bn, 1st Inf, 196th Light Infantry Brigade RVN 1966-67

I think chain of command attitudes on the recovery of missing combatants, in theaters of operation, has improved since I was on active duty and your service period precedes mine. Contemporary communications technology and greater transparency makes it more personal for commanders as they're more easily contacted by relatives of missing soldiers. Commanders may be more inclined to do right by the missing soldier's family regardless of how the missing soldier was thought of by peers and superiors. Commanders during our time(s) were more insulated from such outside influences.

Uh, are these the same commanders that have brought us such sterling outcomes wherever they tread?
The chain of command that lost this soldier for five years and hoped to make up for it by imprisoning him for many more?
And on the eve of Veterans Day takes away his verteranship?
And gives Petraeus a medal of valor for hearing gunfire in the distance?

Did you suffer some head trauma in nam?

You sound a little out of sync with reality.

Actually, you sound like you have all the worldliness and understanding of the military that a PFC or 2LT has.

Gee, sexobon, I guess you figured out my agenda.
I thought it would take longer to unearth yours.

Your empathy for Bergdahl gave you away as just another disgruntled veteran. You have every reason to be after the fiasco you endured. I hope that you were drafted and didn't volunteer. Today's military is all volunteer. A deserter has to be a proven latent conscientious objector, diminished capacity; or, a crime victim (incl. being told to carry out unlawful orders) before I'll criticize a chain of command's legal retribution. It's called military ethics. It's likely that you didn't serve long enough; or, in enough positions for yours to become well rounded.

BTW: All that gibberish about dirty uniforms and socks is probably just something some military legal beagle, who never spent a day in the field that wasn't for training, came up with. Whoever wrote the story just didn't know any better and ran with it. Makes no difference to the gist of the case as it's not part of the EEI (that's essential elements of information for you grunts). :p:

PS: If you didn't see my post in Cellar META, starting Veterans Day, all honorably discharged veterans can register to use the online military PX.

https://www.shopmyexchange.com/

One of my favorite books from the Vietnam era is "Military Justice is to Justice as Military Music is to Music."
I still say good on Colonel Jeffery Nance for hitting the rare pure note.
And good on me for not having well rounded military ethics.

Justice? More like crime and punishment, but they let you know in advance what the punishment could be before you commit the crime.

We had a simple philosophy when I was an instructor in SF. Some people just aren't cut out for it; but, that doesn't make them a bad person. Likewise now. Thank you for your service.

sexobon:
I just read over this thread (the second I have started in ten years in the Cellar) and realized that in it you have purposely and personally insulted me more in the past 6 days than all others have in that whole time.
Enough said.

Welcome to the club.

You should have seen the time he ruthlessly goaded and harassed a young man with schizophrenia. We like you, Jim, it's all good.

Corollary:

Service in the Special Forces might make you special, but that doesn't make you a good person Thanks for your service .

You didn't just introduce a topic for discussion when starting this thread, you started it as an opinion piece. The credibility of the source of an opinion is subject to scrutiny. For instance, BigV has offered opinions in discussions of medical matters. But this is a guy who went into CHF because he wouldn't take his blood pressure medication. How credible is he as a source? Tw has well established that he lacks credibility as a source. Clodfobble thinks she knows better than everyone who knows better than her. She probably doesn't know or care that her referenced schizo was subsequently arrested for violating an order of protection after leaving the Cellar. It seems to me, DJ, that you've simply joined an elite crowd of people who are full of themselves. Now the EEI have been said.

If you can't take the heat, ...

While all that is fair, it's interesting that you can mostly only criticize people's credibility, bon, because at one point, they were open enough to reveal details about their lives.

We all have credibility issues, right?

When we present ourselves warts and all, is it only to face withering judgement? Why would we do that at all?

Fair question

I do it because I wish to engage in conversation with you (plural). I endure sexobon's criticism which I find mostly unfair, unkind, and unhelpful. His credibility as a reliable source for constructive criticism is very low. I think he's a smart fellow, and that he enjoys using those smarts to be needlessly mean, time and time again. My response is to mostly ignore him.

Did know; did care; partly blame you for it.

Once upon a time, when I was at the lowest point of my life, and was so desperate and hopeless that my loneliness outweighed my desire for privacy--a rare occasion--so I decided to do something I never do--I opened up and shared several years worth of extremely painful and humiliating personal experiences, just opened up the floodgates.

So many of the people of the Cellar were so supportive. People shared their perspective and similar experiences and helped me to feel that I was part of a community--something I didn't have at that time in my real life.

However, there was one person that took my vulnerability as an opportunity to make an off-the-cuff, extremely demeaning and personally hurtful comment directed at me. It stuck with me. I thought about it a lot because it played into my total lack of self-worth. I stopped coming to the Cellar--it was the place that a very hurtful thing happened to me, and I didn't have any more capacity to be hurt. I literally thought about coming back to the Cellar but made a conscious decision not to.

So, I was not part of a community anymore. Years passed, I tried coming back to the Cellar, on occasion, but never really re-integrated. Along the way I made some dick moves and made people mad. I take responsibility for that part. But I also felt like nobody remembered who I was or valued me as a person anymore, because so much time had passed.

It turns out all of humanity is just a bunch of apes, and our ape behavioral instincts are deeply fucking us up.

Our DNA tells us how to behave, because for some 100,000 years, life was brutal and the only behavior that was passed on was those of successful humans.

Humans succeeded by gathering into tribes. It was those humans who lived and reproduced their DNA.

We believe we need the tribe in order to survive. So, we need the validation of the tribe.

Then, we need to protect the tribe from weakness, and determine roles and ranking. In order to do that, we will provoke battles. Bitter fights will occur. Recasting of the tribe will happen.

But all that doesn't exactly map out in modern civilization. Here, and everywhere in life, we are weirdly doing all this without even realizing it. We don't really need to any more, it's not helpful and it seems to often prevent us from moving forward and finding truths. But it's built-in...

Evolutionary Biology, Evolutionary Psychology, have become nearly the only way I try to think about why a thing is happening with a human. Nothing else makes as much comprehensive sense to me.

We do have hard-wired traits. I think the challenge is, knowing this, accepting it, how to move forward while taking it into account.

Like racism. We're wired for it. We all have it. If we know this, accept it, we can move forward--even if just to make incremental progress. If we deny it, ignore it, we'll stay stuck there forever.

It's gratifying to see this thread has drifted into a topic of any significance at all whereas it previously had none. Thank you for your cooperation. I couldn't have done it without you. I love youse guys.

How very Trumpian of you.

Thats Trumpanzee to you !!!!

Thats Trumpanzee to you !!!
And no i cant stand the dude ,
But Hillz was WAY Worse

Between Trumpanzee and Hillzorilla, the former would be a compliment.

Sez you !!!

A rose by any other name ...

Hi Zip, how they hanging?

Dey be swingen to and fro Bro

Good to hear.

Can ya tie 'em in a knot, can ya tie 'em in a bow?

Do they chime like a gong when ya pull upon ya dong?

Can ya do the double shuffle when ya balls hang low?

Yes
and yes the grass grew tall ,
tickled my ballz ,
made me piss in my overalls

We really need the space aliens to come so we can be one tribe against the universe. Of course that prolly won't work out in the long run.

Thanks for the sanity fellas.

Likewise, brother man. Live long and prosper \\//,