#lawbreaking

"The sort of lawbreaking going on here is, I think, a special subspecies of collective action. It is not often recognized as such, in large part because it makes no open claims of this kind and because it is almost always self-serving at the same time. Who is to say whether the poaching hunter is more interested in a warm fire and rabbit stew than in contesting the claim of the aristocracy to the wood and the game he has just taken? It is most certainly not in his interest to help the historian with a public account of his motives. The success of his claim to wood and game lies in keeping his acts and motives shrouded. And yet, the long-run success of this lawbreaking depends on the complicity of his friends and neighbors who may believe in his and their right to forest products and may themselves poach and, in any case, will not bear witness against him or turn him in to the authorities.

One need not have an actual conspiracy to achieve the practical effects of a conspiracy. More regimes have been brought, piecemeal, to their knees by what was once called “Irish democracy,” the silent, dogged resistance, withdrawal, and truculence of millions of ordinary people, than by revolutionary vanguards or rioting mobs."

We had stopped for a rest in a dusty little town out on some unknown desert backroad. It was hot and bright and the air was making me itch. While my girlfriend was getting her nose powdered inside a small grocery store, I was outside admiring the dust and dirt. Maybe "admiring" wasn't the best wording for it. Some young guys were hanging around an old walk-in phone booth on the side of the building, dressed in t-shirts and jeans and talking oddly enough that I had to focus on them to listen. I really couldn't understand what they were saying, at first. It sounded like gibberish. After a few moments it sort of all straightened out in my head. They were speaking in Shakespearean prose. I just stood there, stunned by it, then wincing to myself. Last thing I wanted was to be trapped in some 1980's retelling of Romeo and Juliet.

Inside the store it is relatively dirt-free and a lot cooler. My girlfriend has taken up residence in one of the employee breakrooms in the back and I join her. If the locals don't like it then too bad. We've robbed and murdered people for less reasons than an irate store owner wanting us out of the employee areas. We couldn't stay though. This was just a pit stop on a long drive. In fact, we probably already stayed too long. Time to get moving again. Can't stay in one place too long or else someone will eventually send the local cops to check on us, or they will get way too nosy for our own good.

We are back out on the road. It's a dirt lane among sand and scrub and rolling dirt hills. It's all bleak and eye-searingly shades of dirt. I hear it before I see it. There's a cop car right behind us, lights and siren on, hidden in the dust cloud behind our car. Crap. I was speeding? Yeah, probably. I pull over. We are going to let this one play out and see what happens.

The cop walks over and leans into my window. He's got all the stereotypical cop looks going on: Mirror shades, brown uniform, thin moustache. He stares at me while I give the best non-nervous smile I can muster. Then he lifts up a large green ball and pushes it through the window to me. It's a head, like a vaguely monster ridiculous oversized carnival head. He tells me he'll go easy on us if I put it on. I glance over to my girlfriend, expecting to share a "get a load of this guy" look, but she is already wearing one and bouncing around in the seat, looking utterly ridiculous and enjoying every second of it.

The cop walks back to his car to do the cop thing of running plates and license info. My girlfriend is still bouncing about but has a little different tempo to her movements. A tractor- trailer big-rig slides by us in the narrow roadway and comes to a stop up ahead, then starts pivoting to do a u-turn on the far-too-narrow-for-it roadway. The sand up ahead on the road is too much and they don't want to chance getting stuck there.

My girlfriend is bouncing vertically, like that bounce when she has to go powder her nose. She still has that ridiculous head on and it muffles her voice as she goes on repeat with "We should go now."

My hand is rubbing the gear shift knob as I glance into the rear-view mirror. The cop is still looking at whatever cop stuff is in the cop car.

The semi pivots some more, turning into a very large, fancy L shape along the road.

"We should go."

The cop looks up.

My hand is on the ignition switch.

The semi inches sideways on the road.

"We. Should. Go.”

"NOW"

The engine coughs to life and I have my foot on the floor, kicking up a cloud of dirt and raining rocks down on the cop's car and on the cop with his open door and window. My girlfriend is laughing as she tosses the monster head out her window. She's so excited now that we are running from the law again. And this time it is a hot chase, not just hiding. She's bouncing and laughing maniacally. I guide the careening sedan onto the shoulder, or berm, or whatever they call these piles of sand and dirt that line the roadway. Somehow I plow past the semi as it fills the roadway, then scramble hard to keep from losing it in the soft sand until I can force it back onto the harder dirt road. I can't even believe we made it through that without getting stuck or crashing into the front of the truck. But here we are speeding away, with the cop somewhere back there, blocked from following for a few seconds, or even minutes. It's all we really need to make a quick escape. We just have to get out of sight before he can catch up.

We end up back at the grocery store, stopping lightly behind the back of the building to keep out of sight from the main road in front. We pile out of the car and I grab the phone cord leading from the phone booth to a hole in the wall of the store. I yank the cord hard. It's a signal to those inside. A yank on that cord means big trouble is coming and to bail. My girlfriend and I rush in as the group of gangland friends inside is scrambling to grab stuff and get out.

As we are packing I am replaying the getaway in my head; the surprised look on the face of the cop, the screaming engine sound, the gravel bouncing off the car wheelwells, the chrome grille of the big-rig close enough for me to kiss as we slingshot our way past it, and the truck itself, this time hopelessly suck in the sand and completely blocking the road with the helpless cop standing there and yelling curses into the desert heat. It all makes me giddy with excitement and I am laughing.

My girlfriend shouts from the doorway and I go over to look. There are some motorcycles on the paved road, in the distance, coming our way. She's sure they are more cops, but different ones that have been trying to follow and catch her for her own doings before we got together.

A complicated question tbh. My apologies for taking a while to answer it; I had to do some heavy reading through UCMJ - The Uniform Code of Military Justice. You’re specifically looking for the article regarding going AWOL - being absent from a place of duty without authorized leave. I THINK this is the one bit that applies to your character specifically:

(e) Apprehension by civilian authorities with-out prior military request. When an absentee is in the hands of civilian authorities for other reasons and these authorities make the absentee available for return to military control, the absence is terminated when the military authorities are informed of the absentee’s availability.These are the different circumstances under which your soldier abandoned her post:(1) Failing to go to, or going from, the appointed place of duty. Confinement for 1 month and forfeiture of two-thirds pay per month for 1 month.(2) Absence from unit, organization, or other place of duty:(a) For not more than 3 days. Confinement for 1 month and forfeiture of two-thirds pay per month for 1 month.

(b) For more than 3 days but not more than 30 days. Confinement for 6 months and forfeiture of two-thirds pay per month for 6months.(c) For more than 30 days. Dishonorable discharge, forfeiture of all pay and allowances, and confinement for 1 year.(d) For more than 30 days and terminated by apprehension. Dishonorable discharge, forfeiture of all pay and allowances, and confinement for 18 months.(3) From guard or watch. Confinement for 3 months and forfeiture of two-thirds pay per month for 3 months.(4) From guard or watch with intent to abandon. Bad-conduct discharge, forfeiture of all pay and allowances, and confinement for 6 months.(5) With intent to avoid maneuvers or field exercises. Bad-conduct discharge, forfeiture of all pay and allowances, and confinement for 6 months.It is completely possible for a soldier to go AWOL and receive little to no punishment, especially depending on intent. While I can’t list every possibility, I do know that the army does take into account WHY your soldier went AWOL. Like during training, the army sometimes gets AWOL recruits back and is just like “look, you wanna get out? Fine. Here’s your paperwork, get out.” It gets more serious if the soldier abandoned an actual guard or if they were deployed or if they were for example supposed to embark on a ship and they missed it.So on the books, UCMJ states that an absence of 30 days or more is enough to get you jail time for a year, a DD, and no pay. But it does also depends whether your AWOL was terminated by apprehension, meaning essentially that you got caught and didn’t turn yourself in. It’s a little easier on a soldier to just turn themselves in if AWOL. Depending on the unrelated crimes, the civilian police might turn her over to the MPs. From my understanding it appears that this is more likely to happen for less serious crimes, whereas harder crimes would be tried first. If the soldier is convicted in a civilian court, they automatically receive a discharge, likely dishonorable but possibly other-than-honorable, which isn’t much better. If the crime occurs on a military installation, again depending on what it is but the odds are they’d see military police for it. There was actually a case in Hawaii you might find of interest. The soldier went AWOL but was then picked up by civilian authorities for theft, imo not a particularly hard crime. Upon learning he was AWOL military, the civilians confined him until he posted bail, whereupon he was immediately picked up by the Coast Guard. His case was controversial because he was picked up by civilian authorities first and he told them he was an AWOL service member, which then resulted in him being picked up by his unit. The argument was that he was apprehended by authorities which effectively ended his absence, (termination by apprehension) but because he wasn’t apprehended by military authorities people figured there was some kind of loop hole there where he technically turned himself because his confession led to his unit finding him but not really. A weird case.