Navy’s old-style ‘bread and water’ punishment to end with the new year
- Share via
With the start of the new year, the U.S. Navy will no longer authorize commanders to punish low-ranking sailors with punishments of bread and water, ending a tradition that hearkens back to the days of wooden sailing vessels, broadside cannons and flogging.
Ship captains have broad authority to dole out punishment at sea. They can place sailors on restriction, give them extra duty, lower their pay grade and take half their paychecks for up to two months.
Until the change, a ship captain also had the option to confine sailors at the rank of E-3 or below to the ship’s brig for up to three days and feed them only bread and water.
Tim Druck, who served as a nuclear machinist mate on board the carrier Enterprise in the 1990s, said he was given three days of bread and water in 1998.
While sailors have to be medically cleared before going on bread and water, Druck said there were other indignities that accompanied his sentence.
“Going to the brig is a really demeaning experience,” Druck said by telephone from his home in Louisville, Kentucky. “The barber shaved my head. You have to be strip-searched.”
Druck said he was given his sentence because he was already on restriction — due to another non-judicial punishment — when he fell asleep and missed muster, something that all-but guarantees harsher punishment for sailors.
“At first, you might be hungry, so you order eight or 10 slices of bread,” he said. “By the end of the second day, you’re just trying to make it through.”
Druck described his strategy for getting by on bread and water in a post on the question and answer website Quora in 2016.
“(Y)ou get creative — you make bread sandwiches and bread tacos and bread rolls and everything you can think of to make it not bread,” he said in the post.
Navy instructions described bread and water as being on par with solitary confinement, because the sailors would not be authorized to exercise or interact with anyone but their guards.
Druck said this was the worst part of his ordeal.
“It’s sensory deprivation — it’s pretty bad,” he said. “I would consider that cruel and unusual.”
Until the mid-19th century, flogging was the preferred form of discipline on a Navy ship at sea, according to the U.S. Naval Institute. Misbehaving sailors were whipped across their back with a multi-pronged whip called a cat o’ nine tails.
Congress put an end to that in 1862, which is when bread and water came into favor.
In 2015, a Pentagon review recommended Congress make several changes to the Uniform Code of Military Justice, the laws that govern U.S. military personnel.
Among them was ending bread and water. Congress approved the changes, which went into effect Jan. 1.
Druck, who said he thought the punishment was “archaic,” said he thought one problem was with the authority granted to ship captains.
“(Bread and water’s) application is uneven,” he said. “It’s too much power for captains to have. They don’t have to explain their decisions.”
A 2017 Navy Times report on how the over-use of the punishment by the captain of the guided-missile cruiser Shiloh poisoned morale on board. On the Shiloh, stationed in Yokosuka, Japan, sailors were sent to the brig on bread and water for infractions such as underage drinking and missing curfew.
The Navy did not respond to emails and phone calls for comment on this story. A Pentagon spokeswoman also declined to comment.
