Do you think the drinking age should be 18 again?

[Typical_08]

Maybe it's a base by base thing?

No, it used to be (back in the late 80s to mid 90s IIRC) that if you had a military id, you could drink at the Eclub. And even in the late 90s and early 00s while the law was 21 on base, most Eclubs did not care. But in about 01 they started to really crack down on underage drinking.

Sorry for the flash back. But anyway.

When I first joined I remember being a young private and got a look at the training schedule. Monday morning PT, then hump to the field, train till Thursday then hump back. Friday morning hump out and back, weapons maintaince and classes and secure for libo.

The schedule was like that for the next several months. SO I naturally figured life would suck.

Well that Friday we were coming back from our little 15 mile hump, and as we got close to the Company office we could smell steaks. Off to the left was a smoking hot chick wearing short shorts and a bikini top. I remember being envious because that meant that someone would be getting off early and having a little party.

Well we fell into formation, and the Co took it from First Sergeant. He said, "Have em fall out, throw the weapons in the armory, shower and change into civies. Then meet me by the pavilion."

I was shocked. I figured we would be playing stupid games all day.

Well we all did as told.

Well a bunch of us that were under 21 were kind of milling about eating our burgers and steak, wondering why there was no soda to drink when the half sloshed Captain came walking over to us and asked why we were not hitting up the kegs he bought. We simply responded that we weren't 21. In his own words. "I don't give a flying f. Drink, have a good time, go back to your rooms and drink, keep it nice and the OOD will not f with you. We work hard, we play harder."

Well we did just that. And we did this almost every Friday for the better part of six months. Not one person from our company got into trouble. Not one. We drank and had a good time, then drank in our rooms.

Well then after we got back from deployment we figured all would be the same. Nope. Mother MC decided that too many people were drinking and getting into trouble. So they started enforcing the no beer under 21, the OODs started walking through the BEQ, and what not. If you were 21 and were a LCpl or below you could only have one six pack in your room, if you were a Cpl or Sgt and were 21 you could have a 12 pack. So the younger kids figured that they would just go get a hotel room so they could drink. Which was all fine and dandy. They stayed there and got sloshed. But fairly quickly they realized that they could only do that one or two weekends a month because a Private or PFC didn't make much money, so they started sneaking drinks in the clubs.

In 2001 we lost more Marines to drunk driving accidents than we did on operations around the world. And in the first six months we were back from dep, we had 11 NJPs because of alchol related incidences in our Company.