Sergeant Gets 5-Month Prison Term in Army Sex Case

A drill sergeant who had sex with three female recruits got five months in prison and a bad-conduct discharge Wednesday in the first sentencing stemming from the burgeoning Army sex scandal.

Sgt. Loren B. Taylor, 29, pleaded guilty a day earlier to breaking the ban on sex between commanders and subordinates, having consensual sex with three female recruits and trying to have sex with another.

Two other instructors at Ft. Leonard Wood face similar charges. The charges were disclosed on Tuesday, five days after a sex scandal broke at the military’s Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland, where four drill instructors and a captain have been charged with raping or sexually harassing at least a dozen female recruits.

The Aberdeen men were suspended, along with 15 other instructors, pending resolution of the investigations.

Taylor, who had faced up to 14 years behind bars, asked the judge to spare him prison so he could support his 7-year-old son, who lives with his former wife.

But prosecutors, bolstered by the testimony of two women who said they felt pressured into having sex with Taylor, asked the judge to send him to prison as a deterrent to others.

“I was so confused,” former Pvt. Joy Paulsen, 21, testified. “He was my drill sergeant. I was supposed to obey. On the other hand, I didn’t want to do what he was asking me to do.”

Taylor was ordered to be confined at Ft. Sill, Okla., and was demoted to the rank of private, a court official said.

In exchange for his guilty plea, prosecutors agreed to drop charges of obstruction of justice and perjury.

Unlike the Maryland investigation, none of the Missouri cases involved charges of rape or forcible sodomy. The alleged offenses occurred between the summers of 1995 and 1996 and appeared to be unrelated, the Army said.

The sentence in the Army scandal was handed down as a Pentagon spokesman disclosed Wednesday that Defense Secretary William J. Perry wants the Navy and Air Force to investigate their training programs for any signs of sexual harassment.

Perry and Deputy Defense Secretary John P. White spoke with Navy Secretary John H. Dalton and Air Force Secretary Sheila Widnall in the past few days and ordered reviews of their training procedures, said the Pentagon spokesman, Sam Grizzle.

Perry and White told Dalton, Widnall and Army Secretary Togo West Jr. to report on how their units “communicated resolve not to tolerate sexual harassment or unprofessional relationships at any level of command,” Grizzle said.

He called the move precautionary and noted that no evidence has surfaced that the other services are experiencing particular problems similar to those of the Army.

“This is a common-sense measure,” Grizzle said.

Army spokesman Lt. Col. Bill Harkey said the Army’s Training and Doctrine Command, responsible for 17 training facilities and about two dozen Army schools, plans a survey of all such training programs by its inspector general.

“They need to go out and see if there is a systematic problem that needs to be addressed,” Harkey said, but the assessments have yet to begin.

In another case, meanwhile, the San Antonio Express-News reported that female Army trainees from Ft. Sam Houston kissed their supervisors during wild drinking binges and that one trainee performed oral sex on her supervisor. Five sergeants were disciplined.