But - Publius - you're talking about the '70s and the services was loaded with the dregs at the tail end of Vietnam. We finally flushed the drug dealers, thieves, and race rioters out of the Corps in 1975 when Gen Wilson finally gave us the tools to get rid of all that detritus.
I have certainly held Office Hours (Article 15) a number of times as a battalion commander. The funniest one was when a corporal of mine repeatedly got in fistfights with his wife in public. I'd warned him before and he got in another one, so he came before me and his wife showed up too. She was big bruiser and she said "I'm not an inconsiderable woman - and I can beat any man in this room".
I said to the corporal's 6 foot 2 Captain battery commander "OK Mike, twenty bucks on you, 3 out of 5". After the laughter died down, the corporal lost a stripe.
Marriage made in heaven, I guess.
True. I was in from 1971 to 1973 via ROTC. Drugs were everywhere. One night as Duty Officer, I walked past a barracks where there was so much marijuana smoke, I thought I might get a contact high. I wasn't going to do it by the book, i.e., arrest an entire company and call the CID. Sometimes discretion is the better part of valor, especially when the company is majority black.
I grabbed one of the troops and said, "You're damn lucky my allergies are acting up because I can't smell a goddam thing. But I'm going back to Battalion Headquarters, spray my nose, and when I walk past here again, I want to smell nothing but God's fresh air!"
When I walked past the barracks later, all I could smell was Right Guard.