“If we KNOW the guy did not have a sleep or other disorder then we can call him lazy. If we don’t know it, to call him lazy is unreasonable and immoral.”
I understand your empathy for the guy, you were a chaplain in the military. That was your job. But the NCOs and Officers on the line have to think of the other guys that he potentially endangered, four times. I really don’t care about why he fell asleep. He fell asleep in a combat zone. he was a danger to his unit. He should have been shipped out asap.
“I don’t care how strong and principled one’s character is. Will cannot override narcolepsy.”
He didn’t have narcolepsy. It’s also immoral and unreasonable to deflect responsibility from a soldier for no proven reason. Unless you, of course, no he had narcolepsy.
I completely agree that they should have shipped his posterior out of there yesterday.
My alleged thouht-process is “We have a SERIOUS problem here. Lew falls asleep on watch. We need to understand and to solve this problem. Either he’s sick or he’s an unreliable SOB. I don’t have the facilities to rule out the first. But I can’t live with a Marine who falls asleep on ewatch in Indian country. Let’s get him somewhere where someone cn find out what’s up and where my men are not imperilled by his incapacity, whether moral or medical.”
As things turned out, viewing it in the most cynical way, they”re just as short-handed with a suicide as they would have been with a medical transfer.
(I was only a civilian hospital chaplain and then an LEO chaplain. I do not have the great honor of having been a military chaplain. But sometimes I think pedistrics comes close.)