Defense Chief Decries Hazing Pentagon Declares ‘Zero Tolerance’ Policy After Videotaped Incident At Marine Base

Defense Secretary William S. Cohen Friday signaled a new Pentagon effort to stamp out hazing practices that he said had left him “disturbed and disgusted.”

Reacting to reports that elite Marine paratroopers had metal insignias pounded into their chests during training, Cohen said he will get out the word that such abuse “has no place in any branch of the military.” Like sexual harassment and expressions of racism, the practices would meet “zero tolerance” in the Pentagon, Cohen said.

The hazing incidents in question took place in 1991 and 1993, but film taken by participants has appeared on television newscasts this week. The film clips have been shown on Cable News Network and in a Friday night broadcast of the “Dateline NBC” program.

The incidents involved a practice called “blood pinning.”

The video, taken by participants in the hazing, shows Marines using their hands to pound gold pins, usually used to attach the decoration, into the chests of trainees. The trainees, clad in T-shirts, are shown standing in a row with their backs against a wall, and crying out in pain.

The pins are insignias they earn on completion of 10 paratroop training jumps.

The 1991 incident involved the 2nd Air Delivery Platoon, from the 2nd Landing Support Battalion, 2nd Force Service Support Group, at Camp Lejeune, N.C. The participants in the 1993 incidents have not been identified.

An investigation of the incidents was opened earlier last month but so far no one has been punished, Marine spokesmen said. The Marine Corps commandant, Gen. Charles Krulak, meanwhile, has ordered unit commanders to see that the practice is halted.

There have been about 80 hazing incidents in the Marine Corps in the last three to five years, Cohen said. He said he does not know how many incidents there have been in the services overall but is trying to find out.

“This form of activity is simply unacceptable and … those who indulge or engage in it will have consequences that will have to be paid,” he said.

But some experts inside and outside the military said the administration is likely to find such practices deeply rooted - like the sex harassment and racism problems the Pentagon is fighting.

“What’s a couple pin pricks? It could be an AK-47,” one officer said. “Yeah, blood pinning is terrible, but war is terrible.”

In a 1993 report, the Marine Corps inspector general came to that conclusion in an examination of hazing practices at a Yuma, Ariz., base. “The real problem uncovered by this investigation is a systemic one,” the inspector general said.

That investigation found that in the course of training, Marines were punched and kicked, forced to swallow lighted cigarettes and smeared with excrement. The investigators found that the hazing practices had begun 12 years earlier and “evolved from the seemingly harmless to the perverse.”

Hazing in the military is usually voluntary, a way to build morale and prove courage, according to Marines and other military officers. Cohen and others said some activities are necessary to build warriors capable of enduring physical pain and discomfort.

“People get very charged up in this business,” explained Gen. John Shalikashvili, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “We demand that people be very tough.” He said morale-building, however, should encompass only “decent behavior,” which “blood winging” clearly was not.

Retired Col. Don M. Snyder, who teaches political-military subjects at West Point, said there is “a very fine line between creating an environment in which mental toughness is obtained through military training and abusing the dignity of the individual.”

Snyder said the military has confronted that thin line “forever” but contended that the problem now is declining.

“For the last five or six or seven years the Army has moved away from a culture of abuse to a culture that respects the dignity of the individual and yet still demands that they meet the standards of the soldier,” he said. “It can be done. But it isn’t easy.”

Vice Adm. John J. Shanahan, of the Center for Defense Information, a defense watchdog group, predicted zero tolerance would be a tough goal to meet.

“You can put out all kinds of rules and regulations,” Shanahan said. “The problem with hazing is you don’t discover it until it has taken place.”