As Recruiting Suffers, Military Reins In Abuses at Boot Camp

By ERIK ECKHOLM

Published: July 26, 2005
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/26/national/26training.html?th&emc=th  (must register to view original article)

FORT KNOX, Ky. - Staff Sgt. Michael G. Rhoades, until recently a driller of Army recruits at Fort Knox, says he was only doing his job, hammering civilians into soldiers who would not crack under the pressures of war.

Sergeant Rhoades's methods, investigators said, included punching a recruit in the stomach and hitting him repeatedly in the chest, and throwing another to the floor and calling him a "fat nasty."

Years ago such accusations, if privates dared to voice them, might have led to no more than a reprimand or a transfer for a drill sergeant.

But Sergeant Rhoades, a 16-year veteran, was court-martialed in May and found guilty of cruelty and impeding an investigation. He was ordered dishonorably discharged. Two other drill sergeants in his unit were demoted for mistreating recruits, and a fourth is awaiting court-martial. Their captain is serving six months in prison for dereliction of duty.

Sergeant Rhoades says he is being punished unfairly for techniques that have long been part of basic training. "It's commonly known that all drill sergeants work in the gray area," he said. "If you don't, you aren't doing your job."

Pentagon leaders reject the notion that training is aided by humiliation and hazing. And now, as the military struggles during wartime to fill its ranks, commanders appear to be more sensitive than ever to accusations of abuse.

Their rapid, public response in the Fort Knox cases reflect a concerted effort to demonstrate, to the public and to the trainers, that such behavior will not be tolerated.

"We will hunt down and prosecute those who mistreat recruits," said Col. Kevin Shwedo, chief of operations for the Army's recruitment and training command.

"If we don't do that, we won't get the support of the mothers and fathers," Colonel Shwedo said in a telephone interview from Fort Monroe, Va. "We won't attract the right kind of people into the military."

Maj. Gen. Terry L. Tucker, the commander at Fort Knox, said procedures for uncovering abuses there had been strengthened in the last two years.

"This may have resulted in an increase in the numbers of allegations reported since 2003," General Tucker said in an e-mail message. "We have improved the ability for trainees to communicate their concerns," including giving them access to senior officers, he said.

The Fort Knox courts-martial have drawn praise and lament from soldiers and veterans. After one of the trainers, Sgt. First Class David H. Price, was demoted in April for telling a recruit to swallow his vomit, dragging another by his ankles and hitting a third with a rolled-up newspaper, one soldier wrote to The Army Times saying that when she was in basic training in 1988, "the drill sergeants were allowed to do a lot of things."

"Now if they look at a recruit the wrong way, they get in trouble," wrote the soldier, Specialist Kirstin Clary. "Back then, it was still the real Army and not a farce."

But others wrote that although they understood the stress of being a drill sergeant, the punishment was fair, or even too light. Maj. John E. Niamtu, retired, wrote that molding recruits should be done "by example, not brutality."

Senior officers and independent experts in military justice agree that the culture of basic training has been transformed since the Vietnam War.

"Hazing is neither useful nor necessary," said David M. Brahms, who retired from the Marines in 1988 as a brigadier general and top legal officer and who is now a lawyer in California. "You can't create people who are disciplined, who are law-abiding and who will adhere to the buddy system by the use of brutality."

Drill sergeants still get carried away, commanders say, but not often. The Army, the largest branch of the military, had about 2,600 drill sergeants training almost 180,000 recruits in each of the last two years. It received 99 complaints of abuse in 2003 and 109 last year. Investigators deemed that 86 of those were "founded" in 2003 and 76 in 2004, with most involving physical abuse, sexual misconduct or verbal abuse.

The complaints led to six courts-martial in 2003 and eight in 2004; the outcomes were not available. Other punishments included counseling, reprimands or removal from drill sergeant status.

In the first five months of this year, the Army trained 102,000 recruits and received 59 complaints; data on the outcome was incomplete.

The courts-martial at Fort Knox, which takes in 14,000 recruits a year, all men, are the first in recent years, said Constance H. Shaffery, a base spokeswoman.

Boot camp is still strenuous, and that is evident here at Fort Knox, one of many Army training centers, where recruits can be seen sweating through obstacle courses or martial arts training with the crackle of rifles in the background. But the gratuitous torments of legend and film - the rivers of profanity, the endless pushups as punishment for an unauthorized grin - are largely gone.

"Sometimes you have to get in their faces, but it's not about making them cry," said one trainer, Sgt. First Class John Jennings.

"The old philosophy was that you're not ready for combat unless you're made miserable all day," Sergeant Jennings said. When he was trained in 1989, he said, he saw verbal cruelty and, more rarely, physical contact that would now be reported.

According to their detailed manual, drill sergeants may address recruits only as "soldier" or "private," or by surname. With few exceptions, they must ask before touching a recruit; the use of extra pushups as a "corrective action" remains common, but with limits. At the end of their nine weeks of initial basic training, recruits can discuss any complaints with the commander, whether about the food, the homework or the drills, in "sensing sessions."

The Marines are now considering filing charges against an instructor at Parris Island, S.C., who they say failed to prevent a flailing recruit from drowning during a test in a swimming pool. The case has been referred for a hearing similar to a civilian grand jury to determine if a court-martial is warranted.

Aspects of the case raise worrisome questions, said Eugene R. Fidell, president of the National Institute of Military Justice, a nonprofit group in Washington.

The day before the drowning, the same recruit was grabbed and hit by an instructor after he refused to enter the pool. That instructor and another who failed to report the incident have been disciplined. Mr. Fidell said he wondered whether the scuffle would have been reported if a visiting television crew had not captured it on tape.

Parris Island is where the most infamous case of military abuse occurred, in 1956, when six recruits drowned during a forced nighttime march through a swamp. That tragedy led to tighter guidelines for drill instructors, known as D.I.'s.

"Substantiated cases of D.I. abuse are rare because the system is designed with multiple relief valves," said Maj. Kenneth D. White, a spokesman at Parris Island, one of two marine training centers. He said that he knew of only one court-martial conviction for abuse in the last three years but that the base had not compiled statistics on complaints.

Sergeant Rhoades, one of the punished trainers at Fort Knox, says that the charges against him were exaggerated and that court-martialing him and his colleagues was unfair.

"There was an agenda from the chain of command to do whatever it takes to keep the Army from getting a black eye," he said in a telephone interview.

Several drill sergeants and officers at Fort Knox said in interviews that the recent prosecutions had caused some soul-searching. But they said they felt able to distinguish right methods from wrong ones.

"We're not here to coddle them," Sgt. Brian Schrank said as he watched fellow trainers hustle bewildered arrivals into straight lines. "But there's a saying," he added. "Every now and then you take off your hat for a while and just talk to them."

The drill sergeants have a formal buddy system, watching each other for signs of fraying nerves. "We read off each other; it's a system of checks and balances we use," said one, Sgt. Daniel Mendez.

Even with more concern for aggressive techniques, boot camp remains emotionally and physically intense, for trainers as well as recruits.

In one exercise on a recent morning here, recruits carried rifles retrofitted with lasers and watched filmed simulations of scenes from Iraq, like cars approaching a checkpoint and a forced entry into a house. The recruits had to decide if and when to open fire.

When they shot without clear cause, the special instructor, a combat veteran, told them they could face jail for a "bad shoot." When they were too slow to kill an attacker, the instructor told them he would send condolence letters to their parents.

More traditional was a grueling obstacle course that a platoon ran through on a hot July afternoon. The recruits cheered each other on, and sometimes were joined by sergeants as they helped laggards across monkey bars or over a wall.

When a man got blisters on his hands, he was given bandages and a pass on the bars. When a recruit vomited, he was told to drink water and carry on.

"Are you ready to kill somebody?" a sergeant shouted to the privates as they readied for a third agonizing run through the course.

"Yes, drill sergeant!" they cried in unison.

"What's the matter? Give it to me!" he yelled back.

"YES, DRILL SERGEANT!" they screamed before diving into sawdust pits for a crawl under webs of ropes.