Great question. Yep. At the age of 19, you are considered fully competant to join the military. You can’t crack open a beer without being arrested for underage drinking, but you are considered fully capable of putting your very life on the line for your country.
It can, but does it always? I think the actual effect on combat should be taken into consideration in sentencing.
Cite? Last time I checked Clinton was never convicted of purjury or obstruction of justice, and that’s the big liberal justification for that argument that Clinton committed no crimes. Well, Bush was never convicted of any crime involving his absence from his military duties either, so he obviously committed no crime.
There’s no mechanism for punishing Bush. Whatever may have happened his CO didn’t take the actions that would be necessary, back then, to get him punished. Now that it’s decades later there is obviously not near enough evidence to sustain any sort of punishment. It’d be akin to reopening the Jack the Ripper case, it’s a waste of public funds because no resolution could ever be reached given the evidence at hand and the current position of the perp. Jack being dead and Bush being untouchable.
Excellent post, and the liberals that seem to support the idea that soldiers should get veto power over what they do based on their feelings about a given conflict need to think about what that means.
What if the military was a highly anti-Semitic place in 1941? And soldiers from top to bottom were saying, “We’ll fight and die to kill those bastards that bombed Pearl Harbor, but we’ll all put down our guns and walk home if you send us to save a bunch of Jews.”
Individual soldiers can’t be allowed to pick and choose what orders they obey or what wars they fight, it undermines the entire concept of a military serving a country and a civilian government as opposed to a military that does pretty much the reverse. Soldiers that get to decide when and how they will be used are basically taking for themselves all authority in making national defense decisions for the country. That would make the military a more powerful force than the electorate and the federal government.
Another reason it would be difficult to pin desertion on Bush is Bush could say in his defense that the Air National Guard apparently never considered him a deserter since he was properly discharged and such. In general a deserter is in a limbo discharge-wise because that’s stuff that isn’t resolved until they come back into custody at some point.
Most international law doesn’t specify punishment. Which means talking about legality/illegality is almost impossible.
It’s like trying to prosecute someone for a crime which is only defined as a crime but has no statutory provisions detailing punishment.
And staying can do the same thing.
Indeed.
There is a reason why 21 is generally regarded as a minimum age under contract law. I think we are being unnecessarily harsh in judging this man.
Um, and your point is?
Sure, staying in the military may cause problems too. This guy could have been insane, maybe he would have shot a bunch of his fellow soldiers or even innocent civilians. Maybe he would have done something contrary to national defense.
It’s like a surgeon stopping in the middle of a delicate heart procedure and watching the patient die. That surgeon is going to go up on criminal charges. Just because finishing the surgery also had X% chance of also ending in the patients death doesn’t change the fact we need to have laws that make it clear stopping in the middle just because you don’t feel like its worth finishing is going to have consequences, and serious ones, due to the serious consequences that can come about because of your desertion.
So now we need to link responsibility with the drinking age?
I guess in some countries children 12 and younger should be considered legal adults under contract law.
Martin, my point has nothing to do with the drinking age, and everything to do with contractual capacity. The prevailing argument in this thread is that he willingly and voluntarily entered into a contract. And yet what is being overlooked is that he did so at the age of 19, which is generally regarded as a “minor” age.
This man is being held responsible for a contract he entered into as a minor. I think there is something intrinsically wrong with that.
It’s not like that at all. The man felt that the war was wrong and was doing more harm than good. It’s more like a surgeon walking away from a heart transplant because he realized the heart was fine and he didn’t have all the instruments to perform the operation anyway.
I’d bet nothing much will happen to him. Plenty of deserters have walked. Or have had minimal punishment. As it should be.
I’d have paid for him to desert. The war was wrong and poorly executed. Fuck the rules. He did the right thing.
That’s quite an oversimplification of that particular case. For one thing, that’s not what Jenkins’ sentence was. He was sentenced to six months confinement in a military prison, reduction to the lowest Enlisted pay grade, and awarded a Bad Conduct Discharge. A pre-trial agreement limited the time in prison to 30 days. That’s in prison, not “confined to base.”
And he hasn’t gone “back to whatever he was doing before.” He’s living in Japan under the sponsorship of both the Japanese government and his Japanese spouse.
While I disagree very much with the man and think he was a coward when he deserted and is still a coward today, I don’t think it helps to mischaracterize his case. The United States Army didn’t give in to the supposed political pressure. After all, the Japanese government was trying to get the Army to drop the charges completely.
Sorry 'bout the coding. It’d be great if someone could fix that.
Got any evidence that’s actually the case? After all, the man was a member of one component of the Armed Forces and received an actual discharge from same.
I’d venture to say that 5 minutes is well within the statute of limitations on prosecuting someone for underage drinking. Desertion, though, IIRC, has no statute of limitations.
Sentence him to retroactive forty years of transportation/deportation to Canada.
I’m a liberal, and I’m for his arrest and charging. Do I have to revoke my bleeding heart license?
Man, sentenced to 40 years in Canada? So much for the Eighth Amendment.
Wrong. The “right” thing would have been to not voluntarily enlist in the first place, to desert a few months later in opposition to a war that had been raging for years before he fucking enlisted. THAT would have been the right thing. All of this “unjust war” stuff may be relevent to those who were drafted, but it falls pretty fucking flat when the guy chose to join up after the war had been on for quite some time, and was already at no risk of being drafted, given his Canadian citizenship.
You sign up for the armed forces, you are making a commitment, and it is very important for the proper functioning of the forces that those commitments stick HARD. You cannot have a functioning army when individual soldiers can, without fear of punishment, decide entirely on their own what to do, where to go and when to leave.
Desertion is a crime with no statute of limitations, and one that is taken very seriously. He should have taken the 10 minutes to research it before deciding to come to the US for holiday.