I know enough not to drink it - vile stuff made from wormwood. I much prefer a good scotch.
One of the worst, payday drunk Marine incidents I ever experienced was an Officer of the Day while stationed on Okinawa. It involved a big, corn-fed midwestern Lance Corporal, anibuse (anti-drinking drug), and absinthe. I won’t detail it here as the log book entry - when all was finally said and done - took hours to complete and ran 2 1/2 pages.
If it had been a movie, no one would have believed it.
The kicker was that we only saw/dealt with the on-base portion of the incident. That occurred when his buddies, wanting to keep him out of trouble, decided to send him back to base in a taxi after he had just finished wrecking a bar on Gate 2 Street.
It would have been better if they had let the Japanese police arrest him. The JP at least had experience dealing with absinthe and misbehaving Marines on liberty. And not very gently, I might add.