There were Valentine’s Day penis drawings and Santa penis drawings. Airmen drew phalluses on aircraft, vehicles, and dorms. Any dusty surface was a canvas.
The Air Force investigation of a B-52 bomber squadron released Friday found that its airmen had made a running joke out of the pictures during a deployment in Qatar, despite an effort by their commander, Lt. Col. Paul Goossen, to quash the horseplay.
Goossen was removed from command of the 69th Bomb Squadron out of Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota this week after a compilation of the penis drawings were discovered on a CD by security personnel, sparking an investigation.
“Deployed aircrew witness testimonies stated phallic drawings were prevalent throughout the base including on vehicles, in public restrooms and many dusty surfaces,” the Air Force found.
Phallic drawings have become an issue for the services. Over the past year, Navy and Marine Corps aircrews have been punished or investigated for drawing penis shapes in the sky with aircraft exhaust or their tracked flight pattern.
Goossen was notified that squadron members were making the drawings within the first month of the deployment to Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar.
They turned up on aircraft munitions and in the base lodging area near dorm rooms. Goossen was particularly worried about penis drawings in the soot buildup on aircraft because the planes could not be washed there.
He decided to take action by posting a public notice to his airmen on a bulletin board in a busy area of the base.
“Lt. Col. Goossen put a directive on the whiteboard to ‘stop drawing dicks’ and listed places they were showing up like … the dorms and vehicles,” according to the investigation.
But the penises kept turning up far into the deployment. Squadron crew told investigators it was common for airmen to draw “dick pics” with the Microsoft Paint application on the B-52 bomber displays.
“On one mission, Lt. Col. Goossen stated he saw a drawing on the [aircraft] screen around Valentine’s Day. Lt. Col. Goossen described the drawing as a heart-themed motif,” the investigation found.
Someone on the base reported seeing a “drawing inside an aircraft on a screen depicting Santa with a sleigh that included penis sketches, and that the crew was snickering.”
A superior pulled the crew aside and “essentially gave them a ‘disappointed dad’ speech,” which was mistakenly believed to have been effective.
One witness said the drawings only started showing up on the bomber screens after Goossen warned against making them in the lodging area of the base and that they were “not maliciously or sexual explicit, demeaning or directed toward anybody in particular.”
“They were drawn to see how funny, creative and artistic people could be. They gave the crew something to laugh at and keep morale high. The drawings were viewed by many as art, and it would not have happened if anybody was offended,” the witness told Air Force investigators.
At the end of the squadron’s deployment to Qatar, the various penis drawings were compiled as PowerPoint slides on a CD by members of the squadron and shown at a ceremony.
The airman who compiled the drawings told attendees at the ceremony that they would be shown and “nobody seemed offended, uncomfortable or upset.”
A copy of the CD was later discovered in the car of a Qatari entering the base, who said they did not know it was there, and was viewed by security personnel.
