Report outlines security unit hazing, assault - Military News | News From Afghanistan, Iraq And Around The World - Military Times

Report outlines security unit hazing, assault

A naked female sailor was handcuffed to a bed rack and forced to role-play an angry lesbian spat with another woman — all while being videotaped by other sailors.

A dog handler who refused to visit a prostitute was duct-taped and locked in a kennel full of dog feces.

A female sailor alleged that she was sexually assaulted by another sailor, but it was never reported up the chain of command.

In all, a Judge Advocate General Manual investigation found 93 incidents involving hazing and other improper behavior in the Military Working Dog Division at Naval Support Activity Bahrain in 2005 and 2006.

Despite it all, the chief in charge of the kennel was promoted, and the investigation into the matter sat on the shelf, with no apparent discipline for anyone in a leadership role.

That all changed in early September, when a former member of the unit went public with allegations of abuse. Now, the Navy’s top officer wants a report on why no one has been held accountable for what happened.

“This was an anomaly,” said Rear Adm. David Mercer, commander of Navy Region Europe, Africa and Southwest Asia, which oversees NSA Bahrain. “This was a unit that was improperly led, and apparently the leadership was allowing things to occur — and in some cases encouraging things to occur — that were absolutely unacceptable.

“I would absolutely deny that there was a culture that promoted this sort of thing,” Mercer said.

Other findings

Besides the abuse and hazing allegations, the command’s 2007 investigation found:

• Gambling, fraternization and socializing with prostitutes were commonplace among some of the unit’s sailors.

• The sailor was berated and removed from the kennel after admitting that some of his shipmates used to falsify — or “gun deck” — paperwork in the explosives accountability logs.

• The unit’s chief frequently threatened to use his connections and clout to punish anyone who reported his misconduct, saying: “God help anyone who airs our dirty laundry.”

And as the investigation was wrapping up, a female sailor who believed she would be implicated in the probe took her own life.

The man in the middle of it all, Chief Master-at-Arms Michael Toussaint, 38, was selected for senior chief in May 2006 and now works with SEALs at the elite Naval Special Warfare Development Group in Dam Neck, Va.

One Navy official familiar with the investigation, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said Toussaint was “counseled” by his superiors in Bahrain.

Also at the time, then-commander of Navy Installations Command, Vice Adm. Bob Conway, sent an e-mail to his lower-level commanders encouraging enforcement of the Navy’s hazing policy, the Navy official said.

And copies of the JAGMan were forwarded to the current commanding officers of the sailors implicated.

None of the officials familiar with the investigation could say why none of the sailors was disciplined.

Navy Times repeatedly contacted Toussaint’s current command in Dam Neck. Someone who answered the phone said the messages were passed along to him but that the senior chief did not intend to grant an interview.

Once the documents surfaced in September, Rep. Joe Sestak, D-Pa., a former vice admiral, sent a letter to Navy Secretary Ray Mabus asking about the investigation and its final outcome.

“Failing to treat everyone with the same level of dignity and allowing acts of assault and battery to go unaddressed would be counter not only to our national values, but to the concept of brotherhood and sisterhood that I learned is so essential to — and such a key part of — the spirit of our armed forces,” Sestak said in the Sept. 11 letter.

Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Gary Roughead on Sept. 22 directed the commander of Navy Installations Command, Vice Adm. Michael Vitale, to review what happened after the investigation, said Cmdr. Cappy Surette, a Navy spokesman at the Pentagon. Mercer said he, too, began looking into the matter earlier in September.

Vitale’s report is due to Roughead by Oct. 6.

Hazing targeted gay sailor

Master-at-Arms 3rd Class Joseph Rocha arrived in Bahrain in February 2005, an 18-year-old with hopes of becoming a Navy dog handler.

He began volunteering at the kennel, but soon Toussaint singled him out for aggressive hazing.

“It started when I said I didn’t want to have sex with prostitutes,” Rocha said in an interview. Rocha described a “high-testosterone” environment where the male sailors frequently socialized with prostitutes and recounted the episodes.

Toussaint began accusing Rocha of being a homosexual, teasing him about his alleged “Marine Corps boyfriends,” investigators said.

Rocha, who is gay, said that while he was in Bahrain, he adhered to the Pentagon’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy.

Nevertheless, sailors in the unit frequently made anti-gay remarks to and about him, Rocha said.

On one occasion, Toussaint and several other sailors tied Rocha up with ropes and duct tape, then locked him in a dog kennel full of dog feces, Rocha said.

In another incident, Rocha was hogtied — with his hands and feet bound with a rope — and force-fed dog biscuits, he said. Rocha said Toussaint and others told him not to resist the hazing.

“They told me, ‘We can do this the easy way, or we can do this the hard way,’ ” Rocha recalled.

Rocha said the most humiliating incident was a “training scenario” in which dog handlers encountered two men having sex. Toussaint told Rocha to get on his knees and simulate giving another sailor oral sex.

“I found myself with my head between a man’s legs,” Rocha said. “It was dehumanizing.”

There were rarely any officers at the kennel, Rocha said. The chief ran the kennel and reported periodically to an Army colonel, who had little contact with the unit, which had 20 to 30 sailors, Rocha said.

“If I was to tell someone [about the hazing], they would have just told Toussaint and he would have punished us. There was no getting around Toussaint,” Rocha said.

“He always bragged about how he was untouchable. He made it perfectly clear that he ran the largest kennel in the Navy, that his connections were far and broad and he could destroy you,” Rocha said.

The investigation began in 2006 after a sailor reported some of the incidents, according to the report. The report did not say who raised the issue.

Rocha transferred from Bahrain in June 2007. He was accepted into the Naval Academy Preparatory School in Newport, R.I., with the goal of attending the Naval Academy.

While in Rhode Island, Rocha decided to tell his command that he is a homosexual because he disagreed with the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. He said he wanted to pursue a career permitting him to acknowledge his homosexuality. He received an honorable discharge that was unrelated to the hazing investigation in Bahrain.

He is a junior studying political science at the University of California-San Diego. He wants to become a Navy officer if the military’s ban on homosexuals is repealed.

Wider problems

The investigation that Navy officials conducted in Bahrain substantiated misconduct that went far beyond Rocha’s mistreatment.

Other sailors were mistreated to lesser degrees — ordered to wear a dog muzzle or to sing in public, forced to drag around mop buckets all day, and told to consume Twinkies and milk until vomiting.

Toussaint promoted favoritism among his sailors, offering his friends cushy temporary-duty assignments with increased pay, according to the investigation.

One sailor, Master-at-Arms 2nd Class Shaun Hogan, was removed from the kennel after responding “yes” to a question about whether some sailors “gun deck” their paperwork when compiling the unit’s explosives accountability logs, according to the investigation.

The supervisor — it’s unclear precisely who, because many names were redacted from the report — screamed at Hogan and said the proper response to that question was: “I can’t speak for other sailors, ... but I don’t gun deck my paperwork.”

Several sailors interviewed by investigators talked about “hooker parties,” and prostitutes were routinely seen at some sailors’ residential villas, investigators said.

Some sailors told investigators about a physical assault on a prostitute. One sailor recounted taking a prostitute to the hospital after an assault, according to the investigation.

Investigators also learned about an alleged sexual assault that was not reported up the chain of command. One sailor accused another of getting into the shower with her and refusing to leave, according to the investigation.

But Toussaint never notified senior Navy leaders about the incident, the report said.

A tragic end

As the Navy investigation was wrapping up, the leading petty officer in the canine unit was found dead in her villa in Bahrain on Jan. 16, 2007.

Master-at-Arms 1st Class Jennifer Valdivia’s apparent suicide came on the same day the investigators forwarded their report to the commander of Naval Support Activity Bahrain.

“They told her to pack her bags; she was going to the brig. They were going to strip her of everything she ever got in the Navy,” her father, Chris Young, of Alpha, Ill., told Navy Times.

Valdivia had been promoted to the kennel’s leading petty officer after Toussaint left Bahrain in March 2006, Young said.

The Navy official familiar with the investigation confirmed that Valdivia was leaving the Navy but her commanders halted that move as a result of the investigation. It’s unclear whether her suicide was connected to the probe, the official said.

Young said he was angry at how the Navy handled his daughter’s death. He learned of her suicide from an online report by a newspaper in Bahrain, and it took the Navy three weeks to confirm her cause of death — carbon monoxide poisoning, he said.

More than a year later, the Navy gave him a copy of the investigation of her unit, but “it was redacted so bad, it didn’t make any sense,” he said.

“That unit was in total chaos. She tried to right the wrongs, and then she got scolded for it. Why they weren’t going after Toussaint, I’ll never know why,” Young said.

DISCUSS: This story