Navy Commander Apologizes for Sign Incident

Describing himself as “humiliated, disgusted (and) frustrated,” a top naval commander apologized Thursday for an incident in which vulgar language was used to describe a congresswoman at a recent fighter-pilot party at Miramar Naval Air Station.

“We are going to make changes,” Vice Admiral Edwin Kohn Jr. told a news conference at the North Island Naval Air Station. “We are going to change . . . a decaying culture that has been proven more and more unproductive and unworthy.”

Kohn’s remarks stemmed from controversy over a large sign unfurled during a skit at the June 18 “Tomcat Follies” at Miramar’s officers club that made sexual slurs about Rep. Pat Schroeder (D-Colo.). Schroeder has criticized the Navy’s handling of an earlier sexual harassment scandal, the so-called Tailhook episode.

Two top officers at Miramar--Capt. Richard Braden, the No. 2 man at the Navy wing that oversees fighter aircraft in the Pacific Fleet, and Cmdr. Dave Tyler, commanding officer of Fighter Squadron 51--have been temporarily relieved of their duties pending an investigation of the incident.

“We need to be the moral leaders of our society,” said Kohn, the commander of the Naval Air Force in the Pacific. “We want to ensure that we are the leader of our society for opportunity, for fairness, for integrity, professionalism. . . . It does not appear that all of our people have received the message yet.”

Kohn, who temporarily reassigned the two men, said Tyler is under investigation because he was aware of the skit before it was staged and apparently did nothing to halt it. Braden, meanwhile, faces possible disciplinary action because he was the senior officer present during the skit and failed to upbraid participants afterward, Kohn added.

The Tailhook scandal deals with a September, 1991, meeting of a Bonita-based aviation group in which at least 26 women, half of them naval officers, have charged that they were groped and fondled while being pushed through a gantlet of drunken aviators in a Las Vegas hotel hallway.