Navy Commander Guilty in Sexual Harassment Case : Court-martial: He is convicted for his treatment of an enlisted woman while in charge of a unit at El Toro.

A decorated Navy commander was found guilty Friday in a court-martial of conduct unbecoming an officer in the sexual harassment of an enlisted woman.

Cmdr. Steven C. Tolan, a 23-year career officer with combat medals for service in Vietnam, was fined $2,000, given a letter of reprimand and will be dropped to the bottom of the promotions list, the panel decided.

Tolan’s attorney, Marine Maj. Paul McBride, noted in court that his client’s advancement in the Navy will be impossible after this. “Cmdr. Tolan’s career has ended. We all know that,” he said.

McBride said that to his knowledge, Tolan is the first high-ranking Navy officer to be court-martialed on charges of sexual harassment since it became a military crime in 1989. The conviction comes in the wake of the scandal involving aviators at a Tailhook Assn. convention in Las Vegas last year. The scandal prompted the resignation of Navy Secretary H. Lawrence Garrett III and put the spotlight on sexual harassment in the military.

Tolan was charged with 14 offenses, including indecent assault, cruelty or maltreatment of a subordinate and behavior unbecoming an officer, after two women--a petty officer and a former civilian secretary--accused him of sexually harassing them while he was in charge of a special unit that teaches ocean survival to pilots at El Toro Marine Corps Air Station.

After a five-day trial presided over by Marine Col. Edwin W. Welch, Tolan was found guilty on two of the charges for his treatment of former Petty Officer Kathryn Sparre. The allegations made by the former civilian secretary, Carole Wiemert, 48, were dismissed.

It was Wiemert’s complaints in February that launched a criminal investigation and caused Tolan to be transferred to an administrative post at the Navy hospital at Camp Pendleton. During the investigation, Sparre was contacted and reported her own experiences.

The panel of five officers, including a woman Navy captain, agreed with the prosecution’s accusation that Tolan had made “repeated offensive comments of a sexual nature” to Sparre, who had been assigned to Tolan’s unit fresh out of boot camp and scuba-diving school.

The offenses spanned the length of Sparre’s assignment to the unit between October, 1989, and March, 1992. Sparre, now 22, testified that at the end of that assignment, she left the Navy partly because of Tolan’s behavior toward her and partly because she wanted to marry and settle down.

The panel also criticized Tolan for having celebrated Sparre’s 21st birthday by spanking her with “a wooden oar and his hand, to the disgrace of the Armed Forces and his dishonor.”

Before the sentencing, Tolan apologized to the panel and to Sparre, who was not present, for his behavior.

Tolan said Sparre had been “a fine sailor, and I deeply regret if my conduct influenced her decision to leave the Navy.”

Tolan said his conduct as leader of the Aviation Physiology Training Unit at El Toro had been “totally indefensible, and I will make no attempt to try to defend it.”

Tolan said that when he took over the unit’s command, he had found a kind of flamboyant behavior among divers and hospital corpsmen and had “allowed that prevailing attitude to continue as a means to establish cohesiveness, esprit de corps and unity towards a common goal.”

When put in charge of the training unit, Tolan said he had been “ordered to scoop it out of the gutter and turn it into a place where Marine aviators and air crew members could receive the best survival training the Navy had to offer.”

“Unfortunately, I set my professional demeanor aside and participated in the roughhousing with my troops,” he said.

In pleading to the panel, McBride said that Tolan had vastly improved the performance of the unit and had received a meritorious service medal for training aviators bound for the Persian Gulf War.

In addition, McBride said that Tolan, throughout his career, had risked his life to help others, including diving into the ocean off the coast of Thailand in 1976 to save a youth from a shark attack.

Tolan said his “proudest moments” were working as a corpsman in Vietnam to save the lives of fellow servicemen.

“Nothing this court can do will erase those thoughts, just as nothing that you adjudge can cause me more pain than the same which I have caused myself,” he told the panel.

Tolan declined comment after the proceedings. However, McBride said his client was “somewhat relieved” that the panel had dismissed all but two of the original 14 charges against him and had rejected the prosecution’s recommendation for a tougher sentence, including a month imprisonment and dismissal from the service.

Dismissal through a court-martial would have deprived Tolan of his retirement pension, which at more than $2,200 a month could amount to a loss of hundreds of thousands of dollars. Tolan, 46, is eligible to retire at any time.

The verdict and sentence will be reviewed by Brig. Gen. B. D. Lynch, the base commander of Camp Pendleton, and the Office of the Judge Advocate of the Navy in Washington.

However, McBride said he will not ask for a reduction in the sentence, saying that the decision had been “very fair.”

The prosecuting attorney, Marine Capt. Sean Sullivan, agreed.

Earlier in the day, however, Sullivan urged the panel to sentence Tolan to a month’s confinement “to send an unequivocal message that repeated offensive comments of a sexual nature directed to a subordinate, to a female, in a chain of command will not be tolerated.”

McBride contended that the less punitive sentence would send the same message.