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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The two roommates say that they were just as surprised and appalled at the attack on Gabriel Cortez as anyone else in Bravo Company—that like other cadets, they didn’t learn of the assault until they were awakened and called out on line in the early morning hours of October 6. They also insist that they barely knew Cortez, a senior from Southern California who had been transferred into Bravo three weeks before he was attacked. Cortez, said one cadet, was “the kind of kid who puffs himself up by putting somebody else down.” He had an undistinguished record at the academy; after three years he was no more than a lance corporal, one rung above a private, and he had been shuffled between companies, first from Charlie to Alpha, and then from Alpha to Bravo. “He’s a wannabe tough guy,” says Master Gunnery Sergeant Jim Hager, Cortez’s drill instructor in Alpha Company, “not the martyr he’s been portrayed.”
Cortez may have earned himself a few dirty looks, but nothing worthy of an attack on his life, as far as Bravo Company cadets knew. The attack sent a chill through the barracks on that October morning, though Cortez was not in as grave a condition as had initially been feared; he was given 28 stitches before being transferred back to the school’s sick bay. “Please pray,” he wrote the next day in a letter to the corps, “for these people who have attempted to put me to rest.” Many of the cadets in Bravo feared for their lives, knowing that whoever had attacked Cortez lurked among them. “This is the straw that broke the camel’s back,” Jensen wrote that Monday in a letter he sent by overnight mail to his former Young Marines leader, asking to be withdrawn from the school. “A kid was attacked and his throat was slit. The kid was in my company and right above me. Actually one room off. Still too close for comfort. I’ve been threatened before. But I never took it seriously. Now I do.” Each hour that passed without an arrest threatened to further unhinge Bravo Company, and in the nights following the incident, panic reigned. “I don’t think anyone slept at all,” says Cadet Captain Matt Kutcher. “I had eighth graders sleeping in my room, just scared to death. It was hard, thinking that the person who did this was walking around, going to the same places you went every day.”
As Monday, the day of the attack, dragged into Tuesday without an arrest, the need to resolve the case became increasingly urgent. At least one cadet is said to have reported seeing Boze and Jensen running back to their room immediately after the attack on Cortez. Eyewitness accounts may be questionable, since all the cadets have identical haircuts and clothes and because the barracks were dark at the time of the sightings. Whether this was the reason that some cadets concluded that Jensen and Boze were the attackers is unknown; the academy would not allow them to answer questions about motive or guilt. On Tuesday night, Harlingen police officers arrested the roommates on attempted murder charges. Jensen and Boze were handcuffed and driven out of the academy’s iron gates in separate squad cars.
But at press time, the case was no closer to being solved than it was in October. One day before Jensen’s December evidentiary hearing, prosecutors dropped charges against him, pending further investigation; Boze, who was already free on bond, remains charged. It is conceivable that either or both boys could be indicted when the grand jury meets. The Harlingen Police Department and the Cameron County District Attorney’s Office have remained tight-lipped about the investigation and will not reveal whether there is physical evidence that points to the two cadets, who steadfastly maintain their innocence, or a plausible motive. Cortez and Jensen had had at least one scuffle this fall, when Jensen sat on Cortez’s desk—“Gabriel doesn’t like it when people touch his things,” his mother explains—and cadets speculate that Boze, who was sensitive to slights, may have been a target for Cortez’s taunts. Was that enough reason to make the roommates want to teach him the ultimate lesson? Or, in a company pushed close to the point of hysteria, were Jensen and Boze the most logical fall guys for a crime that desperately needed to be pinned on someone, quickly?
By all external appearances, the academy was back in full swing a month later at the Marine Corps Birthday Ball, a formal dance in which the spit-and-polish cadets wore their dress blues and nervously pinned corsages on their dates, who had flown in from Dallas, Houston, and elsewhere around the country. Jensen and Boze were already far removed from the school, awaiting indictment; the cadets who had interrogated them had been stripped of rank; Bravo’s drill instructor had been relieved of duty; and the purple scar along Cortez’s neck was beginning to heal. Most importantly, the Leathernecks, the academy’s football team, had beaten their rival team, the Harlingen High Cardinals—a particularly sweet victory for the cadets, who had grown tired of students at rival schools dragging their fingers across their necks at football games.
But beneath the academy’s veneer of tranquillity, not everyone’s mind has been set at ease. Cortez sleeps in a room specially outfitted with locks in Gulf Company, where he was transferred the week after the arrests because he didn’t feel secure in Bravo. “He told me that he wakes up at night,” says his mother, “and thinks—imagines—that someone is trying to open his door.” Meanwhile, the academy, which would like to put the terrible night of October 6 behind it, instead will be forced to answer difficult questions in the upcoming months, not only in regard to the attack on Cortez, but also about the allegations leveled in the Dallas class action suit. In addition, two criminal trials of cadets have been set for 1998. In one case a seventeen-year-old cadet will stand trial for allegedly beating a fourteen-year-old cadet (his injuries included a concussion, bruises, and a swollen face); in another trial two cadets—who allegedly assaulted another cadet to prevent him from testifying against them in court about a separate charge of unauthorized use of a vehicle—will be facing charges of retaliation. As these cases slowly unfold in courtrooms this year, an academy that remains stubbornly committed to the virtues of the past will be forced to confront the tragedies of the present. For the attack on Cortez was also an assault on the corps as a whole—an indictment against a code of conduct that has proved enormously successful for military men but is potentially troublesome for boys. In the light of accusations by former cadets that they learned to “give as good as they got,” it is arguable that the academy’s students are too young, and in some cases too troubled, to appreciate and embrace Marine Corps values without perverting them.
In the wake of the attack on Cortez, uncertainties linger as to whether the academy can teach discipline without cruelty. “If I had to make an assessment at this time,” Glasgow said of the throat slashing a few weeks after the attack, “I would tell you that two youngsters decided for one reason or another that they were going to administer what they would call ‘rites of passage’ to a youngster who was new to the barracks. Is that acceptable? Not under any circumstances—that is not something we would tolerate. We are taking extra precautions to preclude this or any other hazing from occurring. We are establishing TV monitors in each of our barracks; our drill instructors will make two additional tours of the barracks each night; and we’re putting in two more staff duty noncommissioned officers, who will make two tours each night,” he said sternly from the recesses of his office, his words seeming to echo, like the past glories of the academy. “We will keep the lights on.”
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