Too Tired to Care

I suppose a gig is like a demerit.  I think the term came from the checkmark that an inspecting officer made on his clip board when he saw something he didn't like.  In some parts of the country, people call a fish or frog spear a "gig".  Those kinds of spears differ from the old fashioned military spears in that the points are barbed, and a check mark kind of looks like that.

I didn't confront the drunken sergeant that night, it was the fake sergeant that woke me up to tell me what the drunken sergeant had told him to tell his fake corporals to tell their men.  I doubt that I would have responded differently to the drunken sergeant, though.  I expected there would be consequences for my refusal to obey an order like that but, at that point, I was too tired to care.  Getting up early in the morning didn't bother me because I had always been a morning person, but I was accustomed to going to bed earlier than most people, which is why I didn't mind getting up earlier than most people.  I eventually solved this by learning to take short naps whenever I wasn't doing anything important.  I got so that I could sleep anywhere as long as I was warm and dry, and could instantly snap to whenever I needed to do so.

Like I said, it turned out that nobody said anything to me about the incident.  I figured out that was because the drunken sergeant must have realized he had been wrong after he sobered up, and thought it best to forget about it and hope that everybody else did too.  I learned later that the proper thing for me to have done was to obey the order under protest and report it to a higher authority, but I didn't know that at the time.  I also learned later that military men seldom do the proper thing anyway, and they don't expect their colleagues to either.