What’s the first thing you do when you get home from work? Kick off your shoes, make some dinner, check the mailbox… An important part of getting home for me is reaching in the fridge and grabbing a beer. It’s what most of us want after work regardless of what we do for a living.

Imagine if work for you meant months long deployments to foreign countries where people are shooting at you. And that getting home means 30+ hours of travel. How much would you want a beer at the end of THAT workday?

But, for one soldier, a beer wasn’t in the cards, at least not as long as he was in uniform.

See, Sapper Anthony Walls is part of an Engineer Regiment and spent the last four months building a road in Afghanistan. When he finally got a few days off he headed home to spend them with his family.

His first stop, once he arrived, was at a supermarket for a few beers. When he took them to the cash register to pay, the clerk refused to sell them to him. This had nothing to do with the law, it would have been perfectly legal for him to buy the beer, and it’s not the store’s policy. This was just about a clerk not wishing to sell beer to a man in uniform. Her manager was called over and he backed her up, telling Walls that there was nothing he could do.

I thought that we’d gotten past this kind of stupidity. The newspaper article doesn’t explain why the clerk didn’t want to sell beer to Walls so I can only assume it was one of two reasons. Either she is opposed to the war in Afghanistan or she has an irrational phobia of uniforms. If it’s the former, she needs to take her objections up with the politicians. If it’s the later, she probably needs to see a psychiatrist. Either way, leave the soldier alone and sell him his damn beer!