THE ROBERT W. WHITAKER ARCHIVE

SIEGECRAFT: WATER | nationalsalvation.net

The first lines of Rudyard Kipling's poem, "Gunga Din," are:

YOU may talk o' gin an' beer

When you're quartered safe out 'ere,

An' you're sent to penny-fights an' Aldershot it;

But if it comes to slaughter

You will do your work on water,

An' you'll lick the bloomin' boots of 'im that's got it.

I've seen that.

Wouldn't it be nice if hard-core prisoners spent none of their lives thinking about how to throw feces at guards or getting drugs or lawyers, and all their time thinking about water?

It could be done.

Put them in the desert. Give each one a time and place when his very limited supply of water would be dropped. It would be different each time.

Restricted zone. If you have a pilot's license this is one area you KNOW about. Any aircraft violating it gets shot down. This area strictly for the water-dropping aircraft.

Nothing gets into a prison zone without being shot at.

So we have a slab of desert where the prisoner's ONLY concern is getting his water and, incidentally, anything else he needs.

Believe me, when you need water, water is everything.

We have lots of desert, at least a hundred thousand square miles federally owned. If all those tough guys in prison could end up there, they would be very, very different people.

Being desperate for water is a whole different experience.