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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“We have never condoned abuse of any cadets,” says public affairs director Robert Beckley. “Regulation 10.05 in the Right Guide [which outlines the academy’s regulations] clearly states that ‘physical abuse, ridicule, or personal degradation of one cadet by another is strictly prohibited.’ If such an incident does occur, we immediately investigate it and take appropriate action.” As for the claims leveled by former cadets, Beckley explains that “it is difficult for the Marine Military Academy to respond fully to nonspecific allegations made by anonymous plaintiffs”—referring to the fact that the suit filed by McColl and McColloch did not include details of the alleged abuse or names, dates, or places. “Until more information is forthcoming, the academy will not respond but stand ready to defend its excellent reputation of providing an environment conducive to learning and of building boys into men.”
Wayne’s suit (she has since changed lawyers) is not the first of its kind against the academy—a 1983 civil case, which was later dismissed, alleged that cadets put another cadet in a phone booth, doused it with lighter fluid, and set it on fire, and a 1995 suit that was later dropped accused several cadets of beating another with a baseball bat—but it is the largest in scale and the most serious. “I’ve had to go down to speak to MMA on at least two other occasions in the last two years, once about a hazing incident,” says Michael Thomas, a state director for the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools. “In the past, the response at the school has been ‘boys will be boys,’ but that’s just not adequate anymore. There’s obviously a problem down there.” One of the most critical problems is that the school employs just one staff person, a drill instructor, to oversee each company of roughly eighty teenage boys, some of whom have been sent to the academy because of past disciplinary problems. (Marine Corps boot camps, by comparison, employ one drill instructor and at least two assistant drill instructors for each barracks, in which recruits are considerably older than the Marine Military Academy’s eighth through twelfth graders.) Former cadets say that when drill instructors retired for the evening at lights-out, the barracks became a free-for-all for abusers, and that older, more senior cadets ruled through threats and intimidation.
The school’s officials maintain that hazing is strictly against the academy’s code of conduct and insist that violators are punished accordingly. And many hazing stories, Major General Glasgow contends, are invented by first-year cadets to pull on parents’ heartstrings because they hate the rigors of military school. For this reason, parents of new students have been advised in the past not to open letters from their child for the first few weeks of school. “We had a problem for a long time with youngsters who were here because their parents wanted them here; they were doing everything in the world they could to build up a case to get themselves out,” said Glasgow in a conversation before the announcement of the class action suit. “They’d start with stories about people putting soap in socks and beating on them at night, and if that didn’t get the word across, a couple days later it would be ‘a blanket was thrown over me and somebody was hitting me from outside,’ and finally, six to eight weeks into it, if nothing worked, they’d say, ‘Mom, if you don’t come get me, I’m going to kill myself by ten o’clock tomorrow night.’ There’s such a tendency among the youth of today to yell that when they really are not serious about it at all, although a parent can’t afford to take that as an empty threat.”
But the former cadets involved in the class action suit say that they are not crying wolf—that they have left the academy far behind, but not its scars. “Remember Lord of the Flies?” asks one former cadet involved in the suit. “That’s what it was like down there. They stuck eighty kids together to fend for themselves. If you weren’t a part of the group, you were doomed.”
One student who desperately tried to fit into the group was seventeen-year-old Cadet Corporal Jeremy Jensen—a likable but “goofy” kid, in the words of his peers, who had dreams of attending Annapolis. Before starting at the academy last January, he was an average high school student from Vancouver, Washington, who had paid out of his own pocket twice a month to travel 240 miles round-trip to Young Marines meetings in Oregon, and his outstanding performance in the program had earned him a full scholarship to the academy. Jensen was excited at the prospect of getting into the Marine Military Academy and even more thrilled about leaving Vancouver and its complications behind. He had been abandoned at birth by his mother and suffered through a rocky relationship with his father, running away with a carnival when he was fifteen and later living with a Vancouver couple he called his foster parents. The academy, by comparison, seemed like a safe haven. “They say there are four ways to escape an unhappy family life: run away, get married, commit suicide, or join the military,” Jensen says. “I chose the military.”
Instead of escaping, Jensen spent two months this fall in the Cameron County jail, a depressing gray concrete building in downtown Brownsville, before being released on December 8. Jensen, along with his former roommate, Cadet Corporal Christopher Boze, had been arrested on attempted murder charges about forty hours after the attack on Cortez, on the day following their brutal interrogation at the hands of other cadets. (Boze was released the next day on bond and returned to his mother’s house in neighboring Olmito; Jensen, whose family was unable to make his $100,000 bail, remained behind bars.) The Cameron County jail is not where Jensen had planned on spending his senior year. As an ambitious junior who eagerly embraced the school’s military routine when he started there last January, he was promoted this fall and was generally well liked, although he hadn’t managed to work his way into the inner sanctum of Bravo Company’s more senior, ruling elite. But this September he received some devastating news from a Marine Corps recruiter: His asthma would prevent him from joining the Marines. His plans for the future were shattered, and he slowly lost interest in the academy, toying with the idea of withdrawing from the school after Christmas break. He stopped attending Fellowship of Christian Athletes meetings, which were popular with the corps’ high-ranking cadets, and increasingly began to pal around with his roommate.
Christopher Boze was an introverted, bookish senior with a solid academic and military record—he had had the honor of receiving two exemplary-conduct awards—who was nevertheless uniformly disliked by the corps. He was considered an oddball by many of the cadets, who described him as “weird” and “creepy” and found his skittish mannerisms unsettling. “He could tell you the name of every single part of a sailboat,” says Cadet Lieutenant Colonel Sven Jensen, referring to Boze’s fascination with marine science, “but he couldn’t hold a conversation.” Gossip about Boze’s eccentricities circulated freely in the academy’s rumor mill without regard to fact: He was a member of an esoteric Eskimo religion, went one account, and had even shot someone when he lived in Alaska; he had a cache of weapons, went another, and had once pulled a shotgun on his mother; he had threatened to throw chemicals in another cadet’s face, went a third. At a school where uniformity was the norm, Boze was a square peg. Jensen’s association with Boze caused some cadets to look scornfully upon him as well; he hadn’t just run away with the carnival, some chuckled to each other, he had been a sideshow attraction.
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