A female Marine finds photos from her personal Facebook account re-posted on a Marine humor page and subjected to derogatory and sexual comments. This happens not once, but again and again, and it doesn’t stay online: she gets honked and yelled at in the street when she’s walking near her base, and her friends tell her she’s developed a reputation as a “barracks mattress,” because Marines think that if she gets posted to these sites, she must be a slut. On Facebook pages like “Just The Tip, Of The Spear,” and others, most users say there’s no problem with what…
Browsing: Hazing
The Marine Corps’ top general wants an end to the monkey business that, since the start of 2012, has cast a steady, unflattering light on an institution defined in no small part by the pride it exhibits in being a disciplined, moral fighting force. “We are allowing our standards to erode,” Gen. Jim Amos, the service’s 35th commandant, laments in an internal memo distributed to all of his generals, commanding officers and sergeants major. Known as a White Letter, the sharply worded missive comes in response to “a number of recent widely publicized incidents” involving Marines misbehaving abroad. Complacent leadership…
Lance Cpl. Harry Lew was with 2nd Battalion, 3rd Marines, in Afghanistan when his life unraveled. As first reported last week, Lew committed suicide in April after he was allegedly hazed for falling asleep on post. Struggling to handle the stress, he put the muzzle of his M249 Squad Automatic Weapon in his mouth and pulled the trigger, according to a report outlining a military investigation into his death. In its print edition this week, Marine Corps Times outlines what happened in significantly more detail. Leveraging nearly 100 pages of documents and interviews with Lew’s father and Marine officials, I…
