One of my all-time favorite and most hated pet peeves!!

Basically, it works like this: IdiotBoy in your office goes out, gets drunk, and whacks a cab driver on the ear. (Or in the previously mentioned case, IdiotBoy on your island…) The next day, all 20 people in your office are restricted to the barracks, the chow hall and your office. Indefinitely, most of the time. Oh, and also throw in some fun MARCHING TO WORK in a group. That’s loads of fun.

I don’t even know where to begin.

1. Punishing people who were doing the right thing is WRONG.

2. Punishing people who were doing the right thing DOES NOT MOTIVATE THEM TO CONTINUE DOING THE RIGHT THING. I lost track of how many good Marines gave up because no matter how well they behaved, they kept getting punished for other Marines’ crimes. So why not go wild? Might as well have fun if you’re going to be on lockdown regardless.

3. Mass punishment does NOT motivate people to control the behavior of others. (Except maybe for something mild like the one guy who’s always late for PT. You can wake him up, that’s easy) The troublemakers tend to hang out with troublemakers and the well-behaved people hang out with other well-behaved people. In order to “shape up” the troublemakers in our midst, we would have to spend our liberty time with them, possibly involving ourselves in questionable, disgusting, or destructive activities. How did our commanders expect us to fix our problem children if we wanted nothing to do with them? Why risk getting in trouble ourselves in attempt to babysit the Idiots? I explained this to my captain in Okinawa and his response was: “Oh. I never thought of that.”

4. Mass punishment doesn’t make us think, “Oh wow, those guys are idiots and got us all in trouble! ATTACK!” We already knew they were idiots and we know they weren’t trying to get us restricted to the barracks on purpose. But we DO know that our commanders are including all of us law-abiding citizens in the same category as the idiots and punishing accordingly. Guess which group the hate and discontent is directed at? No, not the idiots…

5. The single best and most effective way to destroy a unit’s morale is to inflict some sort of mass punishment on them, multiple times for an even greater effect. Especially when we know you’re only doing it so you can say to someone, “See, look what our response was! We did something!”