Tailhook Takes Toll on El Toro Esprit de Corps : Scandal: Some hope charges brought soon. Others see a witch hunt. Marine base gripped by fear, suspicion.

The nation is at peace, but not so the Marine Corps.

The Tailhook sexual assault scandal has rattled this base like sniper fire, implicating five men once stationed here, and jarring the nerves of a hundred others required to give statements about what they saw at the 1991 Tailhook Convention in Las Vegas, where 26 women say they were pawed, stripped and bitten as they were goaded down a hotel hallway gantlet of drunken pilots.

The ongoing scandal, spawned by the raucous party annually thrown by a San Diego-based civilian organization formed to promote Navy and Marine aviation, continues to wound the tightknit El Toro community. Some say they wish the perpetrators would be caught at once and court-martialed. Others complain that the investigation has become a “witch hunt” that is ruining the careers of the innocent.

Male Leathernecks are terrified of being falsely accused of sexual misconduct, while females wonder why it took a national scandal to make the military take sexual harassment seriously.

After Tailhook, relations between male and female Marines may be more equal, but they are also more uneasy. And there is a backlash brewing.

“I will not let any woman in my office with the door closed. It’s going to be just like a doctor’s office,” says one El Toro commander. “It only takes one, and an accusation is tantamount to guilt in today’s environment.”

The woman who commands all El Toro enlisted Marines, Sgt. Major Sylvia D. Walters, says the Navy’s vaunted policy of “zero tolerance” for sexual harassment acquired teeth only “about four months ago,” when the inauspiciously named Tailhook convention began generating daily headlines.

“If your shorts don’t get snapped, it doesn’t pertain to you,” said Walters, who joined a sex-segregated Marine Corps 26 years ago and is now one of its 20 highest-ranking enlisted women. The Marines also have one female general (out of 69), and nine female colonels (out of 636). Still, women make up only 3.6% of the officer corps, and Walters thinks the Marines aren’t much more female-friendly than when she joined up.

“We’re really reacting big-time to this, trying to take a lot of corrective measures in a short period of time, trying to change attitudes overnight, which is never going to happen,” Walters said. “Hopefully, we’re looking down the road to a big fix, and not just a Band-Aid.”

Every Marine on the El Toro base--along with every other member of the Navy--is undergoing a mandatory class in recognizing and preventing sexual harassment. Base officials say they hope the sensitivity training soon to begin in boot camp will vastly reduce sexual harassment in the Corps, just as military service and training has defused racism.

But Tailhook--named after the hook that dangles from planes to snare cables on aircraft carrier decks-- has left a legacy of fear and suspicion.

“Pretty soon the boys and the girls won’t talk to each other anymore. They’ll be afraid to,” said Walters. “I’m not sure it’ll really be better. I just think people will be more careful about what they say or do. Whether they actually mean it or not is a whole ‘nother ballgame.”

Ten months after the Tailhook convention, and three weeks after Navy Secretary H. Lawrence Garrett III resigned to take responsibility for the scandal, no one has been charged with any wrongdoing.

The Naval Investigative Service was pulled off the case after allegations that the Navy was doing a poor job of investigating itself. Now, a task force of fresh investigators from the inspector general’s office of the Department of Defense is reinvestigating the case.

According to sources familiar with the probe, five men formerly or currently based at El Toro are under suspicion for offenses ranging from indecent assault to obstruction of justice for lying to investigators. None has been charged.

“We did have a few people we were looking at from this level for possible involvement when the DOD took over,” said El Toro spokeswoman Capt. Betsy Sweatt.

Neither Sweatt nor Defense Department spokesmen would comment on details of the investigation. But according to information gathered by the NIS, sources familiar with the investigation and pilots and others who attended Tailhook, the chief suspect in the reported assault on Navy Lt. Paula Coughlin--the first woman to make her charges public--is an F/A-18 pilot. He was formerly assigned to Marine Aircraft Group 11, Tactical Reconnaissance Squadron 3, nicknamed the “Rhinos.”

The squadron was disbanded in August, 1990, and the suspect was transferred to another base.

But last September the “jet jockey” came to the naval aviators’ convention called Tailhook for a reunion with his fellow Rhinos, who have now become infamous for serving drinks to female guests from a dispenser in the shape of rhinoceros genitalia.

Those who know the pilot say he was popular among his fellow male officers and turned women’s heads.

They called him a “dapper guy, kind of like David Niven or Robert Wagner” who “had the most impeccable character” and was “beyond reproach.” Several said they believed he was being framed. The suspect could not be reached for comment.

Other sources said that many El Toro aviators, like naval officers elsewhere in the country, had been strikingly uncooperative.

“Nobody saw anything and nobody did anything,” one source complained. “A couple of guys said they’d had an officers’ meeting and been told not to cooperate.”

The source said one former Rhino who did not attend the convention told investigators that “the Rhinos were a very tightknit group of pilots and . . . he believed they would all band together to cover one another.”

Another former El Toro Marine and pilot said some senior officers, especially aviators, “will do everything in their power--and sometimes things not within their power--to protect their men.

“If you break the faith, how is anybody ever going to trust you in combat?”

One El Toro squadron commander is alleged to have presided over the officers’ meeting at which aviators concluded, “Hey, if nobody says anything, nobody’s going to hang,” sources said. Another officer is reportedly under suspicion for steering investigators away from a subordinate implicated in the assaults.

A Royal Australian Air Force officer on assignment to El Toro is also suspected of sexual assault. He allegedly performed what was known as “the knee slide”--skidding along the floor on his knees toward a woman, then biting her on the buttocks.

One victim alleged that one of the pilot’s bites drew blood, sources said.

The Australian Air Force has formally censured one of its officers in connection with the Tailhook scandal, said Air Commodore Errol Walker in Washington. Walker would not disclose the officer’s identity.

“The case against the person was not strong,” Walker said. “The action is seen as more than appropriate for the alleged offense.” Walker said he had never heard of “the knee slide” or the allegations of biting.

Plenty of El Toro Marines are furious at the miscreants and say any guilty officer is honor-bound to come forward and spare the Marine Corps--and his fellow officers--further humiliation.

“It’s sickening,” said Lt. Col Henry (Skeeter) Commiskey. “We were all appalled. I think everyone would like to have the guys found, court-martialed and kicked out.”

But amid charges of cover-ups, smears and witch hunts, getting to the bottom of Tailhook won’t be easy.

One of the five officers, for example, said he had not been informed he was under suspicion, and vehemently denied any wrongdoing. Though he was in the Rhinoceros Suite for five hours on the night of the attack, he said the hotel hallway was so crowded that he did not venture out and learned of the gantlet only through the newspapers.

Instead, the officer blasted the investigation as shoddy. While up to 5,000 people attended Tailhook, only Marine and Navy aviators have been interviewed, while Air Force pilots and other military personnel, as well as the many civilians who attended, have not been questioned, he claimed.

Moreover, since everyone was wearing civilian clothes, the victims could not have known whether their attackers were pilots unless they knew the men involved, he said.

The rhinoceros mural was there, he said, but it was built in Las Vegas and not shipped there at taxpayer expense, as some news organizations have reported. Tales of strippers, porno movies and other raunchy goings-on have been greatly exaggerated by the media, he said.

“It was not a bunch of people running around with underwear on their heads,” he said. “It was basically a cocktail party.”

Further muddying the waters are the so-called “aviator groupies.” These are civilian women who idolize “Top Gun” pilots and who come each year to Tailhook (and to base officers’ clubs on Friday nights) to try to meet them. According to Tailhook veterans and others, some women willingly disrobed and collected squadron stickers on their bodies, while others reportedly submitted to the gantlet voluntarily. Such assertions could neither be verified nor disproven.

“It’s almost a cliche to say that naval aviators live on the edge, but goddamn it, it’s true. . . . And there’s a certain number of women who are attracted to that,” another aviator said. “There’s women out there who are looking for real men. (Tailhook) is one of the places you can find them.”

The officer was quick to say that he does not condone sexual assault--but he insists he did not see any women being attacked.

Nevertheless, he said, “people’s careers are going to ruined just for having been there.” And, he charged, in the current political climate in Washington, “there is tremendous political pressure to punish somebody. If they’re guilty of something, fine. If not, that’s OK too.”

The intense scrutiny--and all the bad press--is clearly fanning resentment among some male Marines.

The “real man” aviator, for example, argues that after the Persian Gulf War, pressure mounted to allow women into combat. But the message from Tailhook--where half of the victims were naval officers--is that women cannot defend themselves, he said.

“Are these women going to be warriors or not?” he asked, suggesting that a female soldier fondled without permission should hit back on the spot--or return with enough friends to even the score. “That’s how a warrior would handle it,” he said. “They don’t go crying to daddy. . . . If women want to get respect, that’s how they earn it.”

In fact, one victim, described in a Naval Investigative Service interview as an attractive blonde in a tight flowered dress, got to the end of the gantlet and managed to deliver a roundhouse punch to the last man who fondled her. When she regained her composure, sources said, the woman realized that the man she had slugged was an El Toro officer, but no gentleman. He was her date.

Lt. Coughlin, who ignited the firestorm by going public with her story of assault, said some of the aviators’ remarks are aimed at discrediting any woman who reports a sexual attack, and amount to “blaming the victim.”

“I’m getting a lot more thick-skinned than I ever thought,” she said in a brief interview last week. “Nobody that’s a Marine officer would want what happened to me to happen to anybody they love.”

Despite the anger Tailhook has engendered, most of the Marines agreed that it will finally make life easier for the young women now embarking on military careers.

One 21-year-old lance corporal says she is already finding sexual harassment easier to deal with in the Marine Corps than it was in civilian society.

“Nobody’s ever touched me physically in the Marine Corps. But in civilian life I’ve had people grab (me),” she said.

The young Marine worries that recent reports of sexual harassment and rape of female soldiers will only make it harder for women to advance in the military. And she wants to believe she can trust the men she works with.

“If I am in a situation where I’m out with 20 men in the middle of nowhere, I would hope I could rely on them not to touch me,” she sad. “But it scares me to think that I couldn’t turn my back on them.”