3 Navy Officers Resign From Tailhook Board

Three active-duty Navy officers have resigned from the board of directors of the Tailhook Assn., which is mired in a sex scandal involving several Navy and Marine Corps aviators.

Association spokesman Steve Millikin, a retired Navy captain, said Tuesday that two captains and a lieutenant commander have tendered their resignations. Millikin said six of the 11 board members are active duty naval aviators, but only three have offered their resignations.

He identified the three who have resigned as Capt. Frederic G. Ludwig Jr., Capt. Richard F. Braden and Lt. Cmdr. James P. Usbeck. The three resigned after acting Navy Secretary Dan Howard’s directive last week forbidding active-duty Navy aviators from serving on the Tailhook board of directors.

Millikin said he had not heard from the other three active-duty officers who serve on the board, but said they may not have acted yet on Howard’s order because they may be at sea.

Bonita-based Tailhook, a civilian organization formed to promote Navy aviation, holds annual conventions that have earned reputations for being raunchy affairs. At least 26 women, half of them Navy officers, charged they were fondled and sexually harassed at the group’s 1991 convention in Las Vegas.

The charges of sexual harassment and subsequent government investigations have resulted in the resignations of Navy Secretary H. Lawrence Garrett III and a Navy admiral who failed to act on reports from his aide who complained that she had been sexually assaulted at the convention.

“This whole thing has been blown out of proportion in my mind. We see this as a political situation. We see this as a reaction to an important series of events,” Millikin said about the resignations of the three officers from the Tailhook board of directors.

“We regret the incidents that led to the allegations. But we were hoping the situation would be investigated and appropriate action taken and the situation put to rest much earlier than it has.”