142 Days Difference

When comparing service in the Peace Corps to other experiences, it is often hard to quantify one’s arguments. How hard is something? My somewhat hard could be another’s very hard or even perhaps not very hard at all. In short, how many increments of stress are we as volunteers exposed to here greater here than would be the case somewhere else?
In this case, history has given us a little help. When French Soldiers were discharged from the Army, the checklist determining whether they would be Honorably Discharged included the question: Has the soldier been confined to prison status for more than eight days during his service? Eight days in prison was standard for a moderately serious mess up, such as insubordination, a minor AWOL (not desertion) or getting involved with some scrabble with the local civilians that turned into a PR mess for the Captain. However, after the question mark was a small phrase in parenthesis “(Legionnaire: Cent-cinquante jours)”. Thus a Legionnaire could lose his cool exactly 18.75 times as often as an equivalent soldier in the regular army. Granted, Legionnaires served a little longer in 5 year enlistment terms while French Conscripts for the regular army were only held for 2 years (3 years in the lead-up to the World Wars). Even if we allow for this, the gap is significant- for the half a penalty that the French Army Private was allowed per year, his legionnaire brother was allowed 3.75 for a ratio of 1:7.5 over a period of 2 years.
Now that I’ve thoroughly bored you with statistics, we come to the big question- how is this relevant to Dave and his Peace Corps service? During the 150 year existence of French Empire in Africa, French Regular Army units were principally deployed in the European Theater, while Legionnaires were almost exclusively engaged in Africa. You do the math.