Shake, Rattle, and Reconsider 
A Few Bad Boys
A throat is slashed in the night at Harlingen’s Marine Military Academy, and cadets and school officials are left to wonder whether a culture of conformity and a history of violence are to blame.
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Even the academy’s inception during Vietnam was somewhat of an anachronism. At a time when many military schools were closing their doors, an ex-Marine and Arizona rancher named Bill Gary founded the school in 1965 so that his son could receive a proper military education. The school’s formula of austerity and military tradition proved to be popular with parents who did not agree with the permissiveness of the era, and the academy flourished in its early years. “Our whole system works on the premise that those drill instructors have the key to the liberty bus,” says Glasgow, referring to the campus bus that takes cadets into Harlingen on weekends if they have done their homework and avoided demerits. It’s a system that many here say works. Under the academy’s stern command, directionless teenagers have found purpose, many continuing on each year to Texas A&M’s ROTC program or the U.S. Naval Academy, and a handful to the Citadel or West Point. “I’ve watched the gleam that comes from a first-year cadet who’s never accomplished anything before,” says Master Sergeant Michael Krauss, who became Bravo Company’s drill instructor following the attack. “I’ve watched kids get silver wreaths [emblematic of academic achievement], who the year before could not score a .71 GPA, and watched young men who came here weighing 280 pounds weigh 185 by midterm. These are rewards for us as well, because we share in their joy.” Leslie Pritchard agrees, having witnessed one of the academy’s more remarkable success stories. “MMA has been a miracle pill,” she says, explaining that her seventeen-year-old son, Cody, had flunked out of two Dallas schools before hitting his stride at the academy. “He has a 3.8 GPA now, he was chosen Cadet of the Month—he has gained independence, confidence, self-discipline. He’s like a new kid. He’s excelling beyond my wildest expectations.” These aren’t easy victories, explains Glasgow; they are won with a firm hand.
Similarly, the general has steered the academy through new waters since he arrived in 1987, when cadets lived in run-down, poorly ventilated barracks and sometimes walked several miles in uniform into Harlingen, even in the sweltering South Texas heat. Now cadets ride the liberty bus to the mall on weekends, and the academy—whose lush lawn is dotted with sleek new buildings and the construction site for a future activity center—has a different feel, thanks to a multimillion-dollar building campaign and an enrollment that has ballooned from 336 cadets to 530. The academy’s plebe indoctrination (the grueling process of initiation into military life) has been shortened from eight weeks to three—although it’s still far from painless. “They’re pushed right down to the ground, right down to almost nothing,” says Glasgow. “Then you let them start to rise, you teach them basic ethics and values, what integrity is all about.” And plebes are no longer handed over to other cadets, or “plebe handlers,” for their initiation. Now almost all of the punitive authority that older cadets once lorded over younger cadets has been taken away—a source of never-ending frustration for upperclassmen. “Scrubbing something with a toothbrush for three hours, they don’t get the point,” says Cadet First Sergeant Frank Walker. “Physical training is more effective. You’re putting people through pain, and they understand pain.”
The academy looks more polished than ever before, but these recent changes have wrought their own particular set of problems. The school’s growing pains had gone practically unnoticed until October, when, in the wake of the attack on Cortez, the academy found itself in the spotlight. It was not the first crisis that year; in the spring, the academy had come dangerously close to losing its accreditation when it was one of two high schools out of roughly four hundred accredited high schools in Texas to be placed on probation status by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools. (After hiring a guidance counselor and improving testing procedures, its status was ratcheted up to ‘warned’ this fall.) But the attack on Cortez meant that the academy had to face the scrutiny of reporters and concerned parents. In response, the institution that had deliberately sealed itself off from the civilian world for 32 years made a concerted effort to reach beyond its iron gates. “I hope that everybody has opened every door for you,” Glasgow told me after a gracious tour of the academy’s grounds this fall. “I don’t think you’ll find any secrets here.”
In an institution where symbolism deeply matters—where five-pointed stars, scarlet ribbons, and gold-plated pins dictate rank and respect—nothing could have been more emblematic at the MMA, a training ground for Marine “leathernecks,” than for a cadet’s throat to have been slashed. The attack deeply rattled parental confidence in the academy, spurring the withdrawal of 32 cadets from the school. Six days before Thanksgiving, the Dallas firm of McColl and McColloch filed a class action suit against the academy on behalf of the parents of eleven former cadets, seeking reimbursement of tuition and unspecified actual and punitive damages. The former cadets alleged that extreme acts of violence occurred in the barracks on a regular basis, calling into question the academy’s assertion that the attack on Cortez was an aberration, an act of violence unparalleled in the school’s history. “We’ve had our fair share of fisticuffs, high jinks, and wrestling around,” academy spokesman Robert Beckley told the Houston Chronicle the week after the attack, “but never a stabbing, a knifing, or a shooting or anything like that. We’re all quite stunned by it.”
Although it was true that the school had never had an attempted murder before, the former cadets’ allegations of abuse made “fisticuffs” and “high jinks” sound quaint. The former cadets in the class action suit said in interviews that the throat slashing was only the most recent and most public in stance of violence to erupt between cadets and told chilling stories of cadet-on-cadet brutality, from severe beatings to sexual abuse. At a school that hardened boys into potential future soldiers, the boundaries between the necessary disciplining of teenagers and the cruelties of adolescence may have been dangerously blurred.
The class action suit was initiated by Kay Wayne, a 38-year-old Dallas single mother whose 13-year-old son returned home from the academy in the fall of 1995 with a concussion, as well as multiple bruises and contusions, that he allegedly received after being beaten by other cadets. Her son—who asked not to be identified, as did five other former cadets involved in the suit who were interviewed for this article—said that he was the victim of repeated beatings and several instances of sexual abuse, in which cadets had masturbated by rubbing against him while he was ordered to stand at attention. His tormentors, he says, went unpunished. Wayne withdrew her son from the academy after learning that he was tied up by other cadets and beaten with clothes hangers. When she began speaking to other cadets and found what she describes as a frightening pattern of abuse at the school, she decided to go forward with a lawsuit. “My son was so angry at me for putting him through that,” she says bitterly. “I wanted to be able to look him in the eye again.”
Many of the former cadets who are involved in the suit tell strikingly similar stories. Some of them were as young as twelve and thirteen years old when, they allege, older cadets beat them, holding padlocks between their knuckles and rolls of quarters inside their fists or wielding sheets that contained bars of soap and padlocks. In individual instances, they allege that older cadets grabbed them by the throat and choked them until they passed out, stabbed them with scissors, inserted mentholated balms into their rectums, smeared excrement on their faces, urinated on them, and penned explicit drawings on their bodies with markers. A few claim to have been victims of, or witnesses to, sexual assaults and rapes, which they describe in graphic detail. Their physical injuries ranged from severe bruising to concussions and ruptured eardrums; their psychic toll is unquantifiable.
If these former cadets are to be believed, how had the academy slipped so far? Numerous former employees—including board members, deans, and drill instructors, some of whom are retired Marines and all of whom requested anonymity—say the academy began to veer off track in the early nineties, when the academy’s multimillion-dollar building project created a demand for more incoming tuition money, and hence more students; the eagerness for more students, the theory goes, caused standards for admission to decline. “We never wanted to be a dumping ground,” one former board member says. “But over the years, that changed. Parents would tell the school that their children had been in a little trouble, when they had actually been in a lot of trouble. The school took kids they normally wouldn’t have taken.” The academy maintains that it does not knowingly accept anyone who has been convicted of a crime; since juvenile records are sealed, school administrators rely on what parents tell them. Two former drill instructors say that many of the cadets they supervised had been arrested before and recalled escorting cadets to see their probation officers; a third says a new student arrived on campus in handcuffs. They individually confirmed that violent confrontations happened in the barracks with regularity and named other examples, including an altercation in which a boy’s ear was bitten off, as well as an incident in which a cadet was stripped and tied to the flagpole with his mouth duct-taped shut.
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