One week after being sworn in as secretary of defense, William S. Cohen held his first news conference. Cohen’s opening statement — his first substantial public remarks as manager of the most powerful military force in history — contained a total of 902 words. Cohen devoted 74 of those words to the Chemical Weapons Convention, 31 to the Pentagon’s quadrennial defense review, and 14 to “modernizing our arsenal.” He gave “the challenges of tomorrow” 21. He uttered not a word about Bosnia, China, the Middle East, nuclear proliferation, terrorism, or SDI. Instead, the bulk of Cohen’s statement concerned a primetime magazine show he had recently seen on television.
The show in question was, of course, Dateline NBC, specifically a segment on hazing in the Marine Corps that aired late last month. The program contained video footage taken in 1991 and 1993 that showed Marine paratroopers engaged in an unauthorized ceremony called “blood pinning,” in which men who had completed 10 parachute jumps received a metal parachutist’s insignia pin, which was then pounded and twisted into their chests by other Marines. In the video, men moaned in pain as the metal spikes from the pins dug into their flesh, often drawing blood. The images made for jolting television. Cohen was appalled. “Abuse such as this has no place in any branch of the United States military,” he declared, adding that he was personally “disturbed and disgusted” by the footage.
Gen. Charles Krulak, commandant of the Marine Corps, promptly echoed Cohen’s sentiments in an anguished appearance on the Today show. Such hazing, said Krulak, was “disgusting,” “an outrage,” the kind of brutality the Marine Corps “will not put up with.” Watching the video, revealed Krulak, “hits me in the Tucker Carlson is a staffwriter for THE WEEKLY STANDARD. gut and in the soul as if that tape was made yesterday.”
By all accounts, the commandant knows something about hitting. While a student at the Naval Academy in the early 1960s, Krulak, the son of distinguished Marine general Victor “Brute” Krulak, had a reputation as an unusually enthusiastic practitioner of hazing. “He was legendary for carrying a knotted rope around and beating the piss out of plebes who straggled on their morning runs,” recalls a retired Marine officer who was Krulak’s contemporary at the academy.
Petty hypocrisy aside, Krulak’s ferocious response to the hazing video is puzzling. Every outrage requires a victim, but who is the victim here? The Marines who were hazed? According to Chris Scholl, producer of the Dateline segment, the majority of the Marines he contacted who had experienced blood pinning defended it as “a proud tradition.” Doubtless others felt differently, yet not one of the men who were pinned apparently ever complained to superiors about his treatment during the ceremony. (Indeed, the videotape of the hazing came to light only when the Marine who owned it decided to raise some cash by selling it to the network.) Were the Marines cowed into silence by peer pressure? Maybe. On the other hand, the men involved were adults, every one a volunteer who had chosen to jump out of airplanes for a living. Presumably they were capable of speaking up for themselves.
Or was it the Marine Corps itself that was victimized by the hazing? The consensus among retired officers and military sociologists is that most forms of hazing, brutal or not, do not affect unit cohesion or performance in combat — in other words, the ability of the corps to carry out its task of training men to be effective fighters. Blood pinning may be against the rules, but it does not appear to lose wars.
Who, then, was victimized by the blood pinning ceremony? By all appearances, journalists, who in many cases yelped more loudly than the bleeding servicemen. “Blood pinning cannot be written off as the overexcitement of young Marines,” declared writer Elizabeth Gleick in an almost hysterical news article in Time magazine. Entitled “Marine Blood Sports: Another Revelation of the Naked Sadism that Goes Under the Name of Hazing in the Armed Forces,” the piece denounced the “military love of macho ritual” (a photo caption described it as “macho madness”) and the “chilling,” “barbaric,” “naked sadism” it produces. “If the leadership does not put teeth into its zero- tolerance policy,” Gleick concluded, “‘the few and the proud” will have little to be proud of.” The Los Angeles Times, in a foaming editorial, agreed: “No American who has seen the videotapes of young Marines being sadistically abused by other Marines in a bizarre rite of passage — who heard the screams and saw the blood — can fail to share the outrage expressed by Marine Corps Commandant Gen. Charles Krulak.” Even the foreign press weighed in, the Agence France Presse in a story with the titillating headline “Videotaped Blood Rite Rocks U.S. Military.”
Other reporters did their best to link blood pinning to the military’s ostensibly sordid history of hazing. “Last year,” the Associated Press reported by way of background, “three Army airborne officers were disciplined for their roles in a hazing ceremony called ‘prop blast” at Fort Bragg, N.C., in which soldiers received mild electric shocks, were forced to wear lipstick, and had food thrown on them.”
Had food thrown on them? Like many such accounts, the AP story lacked a certain perspective. A quick perusal of Broken Pledges, the definitive study of college hazing, makes it clear that the average pigeonchested economics major at a state university can expect worse treatment from joining a fraternity. In 1979, for instance, a Sigma Phi Epsilon member at the University of Arizona was left by fraternity brothers in an alcoholic coma on the floor of a convenience store wearing only “a grocery sack, shoes and balloons. His vital signs took hours to stabilize.” Two years earlier, police in Austin, Texas, stopped a moving van packed with 27 pledges who had been dipped in potentially dangerous amounts of “corn flakes, molasses, eggs and Tabasco sauce.” In one particularly cruel incident at Tulane, “pledges were forced to sit in a boarded-up room for twelve hours listening to radio static. ”
Other fraternity members were set aflame, stunned with cattle prods, burned with chemicals, forced to eat dog food, kept from bathing for weeks, compelled to wear trousers filled with peanuts and glue, and made to spend the night naked in a closet with a wet goat that had been fed laxatives. Not to mention the scores of college students who have died by electrocution, suffocation, acute intoxication, blunt trauma, drowning, and blood loss in hazing incidents over the years. And if that sounds bad, things have, if anything, gotten better: At the beginning of this century, it was not unusual for hazing to end in gunfire.
Nor, relatively speaking, are the Armed Services experiencing a particularly virulent rash of hazing. At West Point in 1900, a young Douglas MacArthur found himself caught up in a congressional inquiry into a hazing incident in which a cadet had been killed. MacArthur himself “had been so brutalized by hazers that his body had gone into convulsions and he had ordered a comrade to stuff a cloth into his mouth should he cry out, lest he be viewed as weak or his ordeal be discovered by officers.” (Encouraged by his mother not to tattle, MacArthur refused to divulge the names of the hazers to Congress.) Apparently unreformed, West Point faced another hazing scandal 10 years later, when seven cadets were expelled for, among other things, beating an underling into critical condition with tent poles. In 1915, President Wilson personally intervened in the affairs of the Naval Academy to punish 25 midshipmen for unacceptable hazing.
Far from encouraging hazing in the services, military authorities generally have worked to root it out. Indeed, the services kept up such a successful campaign against hazing that, by 1990, West Point officials were able to release a report that complained of freshmen at the academy being “forced to perform menial tasks and subjected to ‘pinging,’ an unnatural walking gait.” Unpleasant treatment, perhaps, but a big improvement over being beaten with tent poles.
As hazing in the military became rarer and probably less brutal, the crusade against it became more vigorous, driven in part by attacks from critics of the military on Capitol Hill. One of the first things Marine commandant Krulak did after seeing the Dateline tape was assure reporters that the Marine Corps was searching for the men involved in the blood pinning ceremony. “We know who they are,” Krulak said ominously. If Krulak’s words sounded like the beginning of a witch hunt, it would not be the first. In 1995, a midshipman assigned to the submarine U.S.S. Los Angeles had his enlisted submariner’s qualification badge, referred to as a Silver Dolphin, ground into his chest in a ceremony much like the one shown on television. Navy officials later learned of the incident and attempted to force the midshipman, a 21-year-old named Dennis O’Brien, to reveal the names of those involved. O’Brien refused, then shot himself.
The moral of the story is not that military officials should ignore hazing – – they shouldn’t, especially not the potentially dangerous kind — only that hazing may be more resistant to elimination than many of its opponents realize. At his first press conference, Secretary Cohen responded to the blood pinning video by declaring his intention to “enforce a strict policy of zero tolerance of hazing, of sexual harassment, and of racism.”
At first, it was not obvious what racism and sexual harassment had to do with blood pinning. There were no women involved in the incident in question, and, if anything, the ceremony was the picture of harmonious racial integration, with blacks hazing whites and whites hazing blacks side by side. Then it became clear: To Cohen, as to many of those outraged by blood pinning, hazing seemed — like sexual harassment and racism — just another noxious byproduct of “the culture of the military.” The solution appeared obvious: Change the culture, eliminate hazing. The Marine Corps itself has adopted this line of reasoning and has already incorporated a “values” segment into the training regimen designed to overhaul its evidently diseased culture.
What’s wrong with this approach to rooting out hazing? As retired general Jarvis Lynch, the former commander of Parris Island who was once responsible for much of Marine recruiting, puts it, hazing is a product not simply of military culture, but of “maleness” itself. Attempts to end hazing by changing the culture of the Marine Corps are likely to cause the service to de-emphasize the very qualities that make effective Marines — toughness, physical courage, notions of honor and achievement and obedience that are incomprehensible, even offensive, to the civilian world.
Certainly that is the goal of many of the corps’s critics. “The message that must once again be unequivocally driven home is that the deliberate infliction of pain on another person is not evidence of strength or manliness, ” editorialized the Los Angeles Times in its furious response to blood pinning. In fact, in the context of the United States Marine Corps, the willingness to inflict pain and injury on other persons — like the readiness to risk one’s own life — is not only evidence of manliness, it is also the entire purpose of the organization, which exists, even in the gentle 1990s, precisely to destroy things and kill people. If hazing itself is not central to the objective of the military, the savage instinct that inspires it is.
“Contrary to what you hear people say, we’re not at the point where we have entirely pushbutton wars,” explains John Hillen, a decorated cavalry officer who served in the Gulf War. Of course blood pinning is “awfully silly and stupid behavior,” says Hillen, now a defense analyst in Washington. On the other hand, “You still need small groups of men to do stupid and courageous things. Macho bullshit may not be the best motivating factor, but it’s the best we’ve got.”
Meanwhile, as the horrors of blood pinning receive an extended airing in the press, many servicemen seem baffled by the controversy. “Punching on” a man’s medals is a long-standing tradition in the military. At a televised ceremony in 1987, secretary of the Navy Jim Webb pinned a final star on Marine commandant Al Gray with a punch so hard that the general, then in his late-50s, stumbled backwards. Like most professional soldiers, Gray could take it. “These guys are tough, no kidding” says John Hillen. “I’ve commanded guys I was afraid to talk to.”
At root, most of the loudest objections to blood pinning seem to be aesthetic in nature: Hazing is ugly, excruciating to watch on television, and therefore must be stopped. But is hazing so ugly that stamping it out warrants ruining a man’s military career? Driving him to suicide? It depends on whom you ask. Ask a young Navy officer currently training to fly jets off an aircraft carrier about his upcoming blood pinning ceremony, and the answer seems curiously unaffected by the recent controversy. “When I get out of flight school,” he says, “I expect to go through it. I look forward to going through it.”
By Tucker Carlson; Tucker Carlson is a staff writer for THE WEEKLY STANDARD
