alcohol incident effects

[Falconjet]

First off let me say that I am not trying to judge you or anybody else on this board. This is a case, though, where you have to be careful about assuming that the way things worked in your service is the way they work in another service, particularly the CG.

An alcohol incident in the CG, as described above from the google search, is just that, an INCIDENT. There don't have to be any charges of any kind ever filed. You could mouth off at a senior officer during a unit softball game and if somebody thinks you did it because you had a few too many beers, that can be determined to be an alcohol related incident. It doesn't normally happen like that, but it can.

It is an administrative determination that goes into your service record via fitness report or enlisted evaluation, and that is about the end of it. All they are saying is that you demonstrated some behavior that you wouldn't have if you hadn't been under the influence of alcohol. Thats it. No arrest, no charges, no conviction, nothing. They became aware of the behavior and they documented it and now they are going to try to "help" you with the alcohol screening and whatnot. Believe it or not, they are trying to help you because you have demonstrated a behavior which indicates you might be heading down the road to alcoholism, and they want to nip it in the bud. Is that warranted? Probably not, but that is the way it goes now in the hyper politically correct CG. The good news is that after its all said and done none of this should follow you outside of the CG.

As for the drunk in public charge, that is a different matter altogether. Getting a civilian lawyer to help you with that is certainly excellent advice. The CG doesn't have many lawyers, and they aren't detailed to help CG personnel with personal legal issues, they are there to serve the CG's legal needs. You might be able to find a local reserve/DOD lawyer who can help you if there is a unit nearby that has some, but knowing how small and remote many CG units are I realize that would be unlikely.

Hopefully you can get a lawyer to get the town to drop or reduce the charges, you can get past the alcohol incident in your record, get out of the CG and go on to do great things. This should only be a small learning experience in the big scheme of things.

I've seen officers and enlisted do much worse things while under the influence that never got an incident, but times have changed and as others said, you just happened to get caught. Hopefully it was a one time, isolated occurance and you will be fine.

Good luck.

FJ

 

[skiddriver]

I actually pulled up the USCG publication and read the applicable parts before I posted. It is essentially the same as the USMC program (no surprise there) except a change has specified that you have to have actually ingested alcohol to have an incident characterized as alcohol related. I'm sure that there was a reason for that change, probably an incredibly stupid CO.

I referred folks to evaluation and characterized several incidents as alcohol related as a squadron level CO (mini-MAG O-5 command). It is not as benign as this young man is being lead to believe, and he has options that have not been presented to him. He needs to work with his civilian lawyer, and go see a military one.

Any administrative procedure that has the potential to reduce proficiency and conduct marks and to deny receipt of a good conduct medal is not something to shrug off, or to blithely accept being stuck in your permanent record.

My .02 cents.

 

[Pistlpetet]

Heck, sounds like you would fit right in! Wish you were in my squadron. If this had happened to an Officer we would be joking about it for the rest of his time in the squadron. The only difference is you got caught. Maybe he'd even get a really cool callsign out of it. Something like "convict" or maybe "doormat". The only real killer now is the dreaded DUI...

I vote for Call Sign "Doormat"...LOL