Conduct Unbecoming

In the Navy Sexual Harassment has Reached Titanic Proportions

There is a ghost haunting the United States Navy these days, and its name is Tailhook. That notorious 1991 event, which left no doubt that there are serious problems with the way some men in the Navy behave toward women, began a process of intensive retraining. But that program is now in trouble because the Navy brass, under the lash of Congress, have established puritanical goals that clash with decades of salty male culture. New rules that are stricter than anything found in most parts of civilian life demand nothing less than exemplary behavior when dealing with the opposite sex. Frustrated, the Navy has tried to undo past sins with dramatic punishments that may only deepen resentment in the ranks. And as the sex scandals persist, it's clear that there will be more rough sailing in the future.

It is not hard to see why change might be difficult in the tradition-bound Navy. From the earliest days, sailors and their officers have ascribed magnificent powers to a woman's body, powers that go beyond a mariner's brawny ability to conquer the sea or to control his own emotions. In the 19th century, men on merchant ships believed that having a woman on board was bad luck, unless she would strip naked. Exposing her bare breasts to the sea, they thought, could calm a raging storm.

Since then sailors have charmed, coerced or hired women to calm their private storms, the ones that build up during long months at sea or during endorphin-drenched flights into combat. Under these conditions, they ritualized sexual and alcoholic binges, often in foreign ports of call.

During World War Two sailors lined up on the Street of Lonely Hearts at the edge of Honolulu's Chinatown for a few minutes of spastic pleasure and then some drunken brotherly company. If they were heartbroken, they wound up in the tattoo parlors on Hotel Street to make mother, wife or Miss Pin-Up a dark blue part of their flesh.

During the Vietnam war, Thailand and the Philippines were the Epcot Centers of sexual fantasies for sailors and Navy aviators. Olongapo, next to the Subic Bay Naval Station, went from a laid-back fishing village to a place where women and children could be bought for the price of a meal.

The Navy offered its medical expertise to try to keep the men and the prostitutes free of venereal diseases. "Entertainment women" were registered and regularly tested at the social-hygiene clinics set up by the Navy and the city government.

By the hundreds these women were adored and loved, but also regularly infected, drugged, beaten and raped by U.S. servicemen each year. The bar girls smiled, drank and played games the sailors and fliers enjoyed. Throw a coin in Shit River, the open sewer that was Olongapo River, and watch the kids dive for it. Throw wet pesos onstage and laugh while the peso girls sucked them up into their vaginas, dropping them again while they danced. Sit around a crowded table with your pants around your ankles and see who smiles first from the sensation of busy mouths underneath.

When they were without women, Navy men carried sexual fantasies out to sea. New sailors crossing the equator for the first time were forced to crawl on their hands and knees across the deck while their shipmates lashed them and washed them down with rubber hoses. At a ceremony honoring King Neptune, an officer would smear his belly with petroleum jelly and then force young men's faces into it, or he would stick a cherry in his navel and make them eat it.

"The whole aircraft carrier section of the Navy ran on repressed sexual energy," said retired Rear Admiral Eugene Carroll Jr., commander of the Sixth Fleet carrier strike force in the Mediterranean in the early Seventies. "You go to sea, and you're locked up with the same people day after day. There's no alcohol, no perfume, no women. You work 14 to 18 hours a day, and you get to shore and everything changes. You think, I'm entitled because I've been deprived. Then you go for it."

In the privacy of the officers' clubs, hiring strippers was as common as buying a beer. For revered naval aviators, the sky was the limit.

"You need these guys to believe they can't die and they're the absolute best," said Senator John McCain, a former fighter pilot and POW in Vietnam. "There are individuals who felt and probably still feel that female conquests are part of this makeup."

Until Tailhook the Navy managed to ride out potential embarrassment with apologies, mild discipline and new policies that existed mostly on paper. That's what happened in 1987 when a Pentagon-sponsored panel reported widespread sexual harassment at naval bases in the Pacific region. That's what happened in 1989 when Gwen Dreyer, a midshipman at the U.S. Naval Academy, was handcuffed to a urinal and photographed by a group of her male classmates. That's what happened in 1990 when government investigators substantiated six rapes and five sexual assaults at the Navy's boot camp in Orlando, Florida.

Meanwhile, the Navy was slowly catching up with the rest of American society by enlisting more female officers. They were still novelties, however, and many males resented them.

Then came the Tailhook Association convention in Las Vegas, a major event for more than three decades for Navy and Marine Corps aviators and defense contractors. Its after-hours parties were the stuff of legend. Even before 1991, Tailhook was considered a free-fire zone, where top brass made no attempt to stop public sexual activity. In 1991 it drew more than 4000 active duty and retired aviators, as well as hundreds of civilian women.

Lieutenant Paula Coughlin, an aviator and admiral's aide at the age of 30, unwittingly joined one of naval aviation's hallowed traditions when she stepped into the dimly lit third-floor hallway of the Las Vegas Hilton Hotel, where most of the raucous partying was taking place. The tradition was known as the Gauntlet.

In the early evening the third-floor hallway was the place fliers hung out, drinking beer and occasionally whistling at or rating the women who walked by. By ten P.M. there were 250 men, who formed a drunken, 30-yard trap along the corridor. Hundreds of anonymous hands ripped away blouses and skirts, reached for breasts and in between legs. Some women were naked from the waist down by the time the crowd of officers was finished with them. The prey were college women, teenagers, female naval officers, officers' wives and at least one mother of an officer.

When Lt. Coughlin approached, men know who she was, knew she had a job to kill for. A tall man with bright teeth bumped her hip. "Admiral's aide!" someone yelled. Then the tall guy grabbed her buttocks with such force she was lifted off the ground.

"What the fuck do you think you're doing?" she shot back. As she turned around to confront him, someone else grabbed her buttocks and she was pushed onward. There was pinching and pulling at her clothes. A pair of hands were thrust down her bra and grabbed at her breasts. She bit the hands, but as they let go another pair reached up under her skirt, groping for her underwear.

She thought she was going to be gang-raped, she later told investigators. When she saw a man turn to walk away, she "reached out and tapped him on the hip, pleading with the man to just let me get in front of him." Instead, he turned around and put his hands on her breasts.

She broke his grip with her arms, dove through the next open door and it was all over.

For the moment.

The Gauntlet was just one of many Tailhook rituals. During the convention, the Navy's finest also urinated and vomited in the hallways and ran naked from suite to suite, around the hotel pool and among the mixed crowds that pressed into some of the hospitality suites sponsored by Navy squadrons.

Strippers were hired for several hospitality suites. Some performed oral sex and had intercourse while room-fuls of men looked on.

From Thursday, September 5 to the early morning hours of Sunday, September 8, at least 90 women and men were indecently assaulted.

The Defense Department's Inspector General found that many aviators believed their behavior was acceptable because it was a continuation of Navy "traditions." They were entitled to whatever they wanted because they considered themselves "heroes" from the Persian Gulf war.

"Many officers likened Tailhook to an overseas deployment, explaining that naval officers traditionally live a spartan existence while on board ship and then party while on liberty in foreign ports," Deputy Inspector General Derek Vander Schaaf concluded in his report. "Officers said activities such as adultery, drunkenness and indecent exposure that occur overseas are not to be discussed or otherwise revealed once the ship returns to home port." Besides, such behavior had been condoned for years by Navy leadership. In fact, Navy Secretary H. Lawrence Garrett III was at Tailhook in 1991.

(continued on page 88) Navy (continued from page 64)

When the antics at Tailhook became public in 1992 with Coughlin's dramatic account of the Gauntlet, the reaction from Capitol Hill and the public was predictable. Navy brass knew they had to act dramatically to demonstrate that the Navy was going to change course in gender relations. For public display, at least, it was as if they went from full speed ahead to full reverse.

In the years since Tailhook, six admirals and scores of senior officers have been forced to resign. Some 140 case files with allegations against aviators were sent to a special court to be investigated. There were no court-martials. But Secretary Garrett resigned and 28 officers and 30 admirals received reprimands, though some charges were of little consequence.

Congress used Tailhook to help justify removing gender restrictions from all but Seal commando units and submarines. The number of women officers started to climb.

The Navy set out to teach sailors and officers the new rules about sensitivity. They adopted a matter-of-fact approach, as if "zero tolerance" of sexual harassment were a new piece of equipment. In 1992 there was a worldwide all-Navy stand-down, a day on which everyone stopped work and was lectured on right and wrong. Sailors were issued sexual harassment handbooks and were initiated in "behavior zones," a sound-bite demonstration on how to get along with the opposite sex. Participants were supposed to call out "yellow light!" if a joke or touch could be considered inappropriate, or "red light!" for clearly offensive behavior, from asking for sexual favors to rape.

Some aviators remain confused. "The stuff about machismo is true," said "Mooch," a Hornet pilot on the USS America. "It's there, and if it's not there, you're going to get a lot of limp fighter pilots."

While the Navy's statistics show a decline in harassment, the new approach hasn't caught on everywhere.

Captain Mark Rogers, 47, a decorated Naval Academy graduate who had commanded a minesweeper, cruiser and frigate, was the deputy director of the White House Military Office from May 1993 to January 1995. According to White House colleagues, he said idle male co-workers were "pulling their puds" instead of working. His colleagues said he called one woman a "dumb bitch" and others "fat pigs." He also reportedly called an openly gay employee a "fudge packer" and asked a female Air Force major if she had been "sleeping with the president" to earn her promotion. Rogers denied all of these allegations.

In November 1994 he made the list for promotion to admiral. A month later an anonymous caller alerted the Pentagon of Roger's penchant for salty language. An investigation by the Navy's Inspector General cited complaints from colleagues (along with Rogers' failure to respond to repeated requests to clean up his language) in determining that he had committed sexual harassment. Navy Secretary John Dalton removed Rogers from the promotion list in April 1995.

The same month, Captain Thomas Flanagan, 46, a former submarine commander, was forced into early retirement for having an affair, sometimes in the Pentagon building, with a female lieutenant not in his command. Flanagan was found out when the Pentagon's e-mail system, which he used to set up liaisons with the lieutenant, got backed up.

Several months later Rear Admiral Ralph Tindal, 58, the two-star deputy commander of Nato naval forces in the Iberian region, was decked for having an extended affair with an enlisted woman in his command. Being married, he was found guilty of adultery, a crime in the military, and was stripped of one star, fined $7686 and confined to quarters for 30 days.

Navy officials said Tindal was spared a court-martial in part because they did not want to "revictimize" the woman, who had unsuccessfully attempted to end the affair. She faced no disciplinary action.

The Navy's public affairs office announced Tindal's early retirement the same day in December 1995 that Admiral Jeremy Boorda, Chief of Naval Operations, ended another stand-down for additional remedial gender-relations training. It was prompted by an episode that shows just how strong a hold the old ways still have in many quarters.

The incident took place aboard an American Airlines plane carrying the crew of the USS Gompers, a repair ship that made news in 1993 when a sailor was caught videotaping himself and a female sailor having sex. The crew wore civilian clothes and shared the plane with nonmilitary passengers on a flight from Norfolk, Virginia to Oakland, California.

Chief Petty Officer George Powell, 49, an alcoholic who had been court-martialed once for assaulting a female sailor, walked onto the plane drunk. Powell, a cook, took his seat and began caressing the hand of the 23-year-old third-class petty officer next to him.

She pushed him away and moved to the empty window seat. But according to her testimony at his subsequent court-martial, he stuck several fingers inside her waistband and pulled her to him. "Don't touch me," she said. He let her go, ordered three rums and drank them one right after another. When he got up from his seat, she fell asleep, thinking he had left for good. He returned, put his hand between her thighs and moved toward her crotch.

She woke up and told him, "Get your fucking hands off me!"

But he didn't. He put his hand on her knee and then rubbed her thigh. She shoved him out of his seat and he walked away. Again she fell asleep, only to be awakened by his hand on her breast. "Honk!" he said as he squeezed it.

"I went a little crazy," the woman testified. "I got out of my seat, I ripped up the armrest and grabbed him by the collar and shook him. I slapped his face. I said, 'You're in the Navy 24 hours a day. Why not act like it?'"

Powell doesn't remember much of the plane ride and blames the Navy for not diagnosing and treating the post-traumatic stress disorder he said he has suffered since he returned from Vietnam.

A jury found him guilty of five counts of indecent assault. He pleaded guilty to six counts of simple assault, one count of disrespect to an officer (a chaplain who eventually stopped the harassment) and one count of drunkand-disorderly conduct. His sentence included 89 days in the brig, a $1500 fine and a reduction of one grade (which cost him $300 a month in pay), and he was ordered to enter a Navy-approved alcohol rehab program. Powell also faces an administrative board hearing to determine whether he should be discharged.

While Powell's case is an example of obvious physical harassment, the most recent incidents have angered many in the Navy because punishments have seemed ill-suited to the offenses.

Take the case of Captain Everett Greene. In October 1995 this highly decorated Navy Seal, one of the few black men to break into the cliquish (continued on page 147) Navy (continued from page 88) commando community and the only African American to be under consideration to lead it, sat stone-faced in a Washington courtroom before a jury of eight captains and rear admirals.

Greene, 48, was the highest-ranking Navy officer in five decades to face a court-martial. He hadn't lost men in battle, traded state secrets or even absconded with money. The allegation against him: He had an "unduly familiar personal relationship" with a woman in his command who was junior in age and in rank.

He had given up the chance to "go to the mast," Navy lingo for an administrative proceeding in which he would have received, at worst, administrative punishment. He wanted to take his chances in court. After all, Greene was up for a big promotion, a chance to become one of the nation's 220 admirals. And he didn't think he had done anything wrong. In fact, his accuser had resolved her differences with him through the Navy's informal grievance process. It was only when she heard he was to be promoted that she came forward again, to try to stop it.

The woman later testified that she worried about Greene having an admiral's ultimate authority. She was given immunity in exchange for her testimony.

Greene was not, his colleagues said on the stand, a typical Navy commando. Small-framed, almost skinny, he hardly looked like someone trained to break necks with one clean jerk. He was shy, quiet, a church leader and, by all accounts, an innocent in the world. While stationed at Subic Bay, he avoided the hard-drinking, womanizing nights his buddies enjoyed. Instead, he met and married a straight-arrow Filipina who worked on the base.

His accuser, Lieutenant Mary Felix, also was somewhat alone in the world. When Felix started working with Greene she had just broken up with an unfaithful, abusive boyfriend who worked in the Joint Chiefs of Staff office at the Pentagon. She told Greene about her problems. She said her boyfriend had given her a venereal disease and that she might have to miss work for treatments.

The two jogged together. Worked out together. Talked about their relationships and their careers. They joked and flirted. Only once did they touch, and that was when she patted his hand when he became distressed about problems with his wife. He gave her a pair of running shorts and a bag of bubble gum.

He also sent her poems and cards. They read like the awkward approaches of a junior high schoolkid. "Whenever you need to be adored, I'll be there," one poem said. "Whenever you need to be befriended, I will be there."

"Do I miss you?" a card read. "Does a man miss the toilet when he pees in the dark?"

In a letter he wrote: "I wanted you just as much, if not more than, you wanted me.... Unfortunately, what you took as an act of rejection was in reality a deep, sincere and unselfish expression of the amount of love and respect I have for you." Felix said she was horrified by the missives. "He's married, my boss and old enough to be my father," she told the jury.

Fraternizing with enlisteds--even those not in an officer's command--is a crime in today's Navy that is punishable by jail time and discharge. And as head of the Navy office charged with handling sexual harassment complaints, Greene was supposed to have known where the lines were drawn.

On the stand, he admitted to almost everything, except the motives attributed to him by the prosecution. "Her self-esteem wasn't good and she needed someone to talk to," he told the jury. "I tried to do things to reassure her she was a decent individual. That's why I wrote the poem."

He gave her the cards, he said, "in a joking way."

Greene said his relationship with Felix sprang from the traditions he had learned in the Seal community. "You're assigned in pairs" to small rafts, he said. "If your buddy gets thrown out, you have to go into the water with him. Watching out for someone is expected."

Felix and Greene accused each other of wanting a sexual relationship. Both said they rebuffed the other.

In the closing arguments at the court-martial, the Navy's prosecutor, Commander Carol Cooper, offered her assessment: "The man sort of enjoyed the chase ... he was flattered by the attention. But it was conduct prejudicial to good order and discipline, and at some point she got tired of it."

Commanding officers, she said, are not able to afford "the luxuries of those friendships."

After seven hours of deliberating, the jury acquitted Greene of everything.

"Thank you, Lord," his wife said quietly from an observers' bench. Reporters in the courtroom craned to see Greene's reaction. He hardly moved, except for his pulsating jaw muscle.

"We dealt not on impressions or innuendos but on the facts," Rear Admiral Steven Briggs, the senior officer on the jury, told reporters in the hallway.

But the case did not end there. Greene went back to his command of Special Boat Squadron One at the Naval Amphibious Base in Coronado, California. His court records were sent to the Pentagon, where they were eventually read by Navy Secretary Dalton, who didn't like what he saw.

Two months later Dalton recommended that Greene be denied promotion to rear admiral. He lacked confidence in Greene's judgment and leadership abilities, an aide said.

Many in the naval community were outraged. Sensitivity, they charged, had gone too far. Others thought the case was an example of just how much men and women need to learn about one another.

"It's going to be hard to rid the Navy of sexual harassment," said Theodore Grabowsky, a former Seal commander who testified on Greene's behalf, because the problem "is too damn dangerous to talk about" in mixed company. Grabowsky and others fear that in today's strict climate, candid talk can get a person in trouble. "It's going to take women working with men to figure out what is inbounds and what is out of bounds," Grabowsky said.

As Greene's trial ended, another public relations disaster was in the making.

Until this past January Admiral Richard Macke, 58, was the Commander in Chief, Pacific Command, in charge of all U.S. forces in the Pacific and Indian oceans, a region of more than 100 million square miles.

In November 1995 Macke, an aviator, made one of those routine stops in Washington that the military's regional war-fighting commanders are supposed to make. And he accepted an invitation to an on-the-record breakfast with 25 Pentagon reporters.

As the journalists wolfed down scrambled eggs, bacon and muffins, Macke told them things they already knew about China and North Korea, and things they barelyscared about, such as fleet deployments in the Pacific and changes in the Joint Chiefs of Staff unified command.

Macke wasn't making any news, and the reporters were fidgety.

Hunting for news they could use that day, the reporters interspersed policy questions with questions about the recent rape of a 12-year-old Japanese schoolgirl in the backseat of a car rented by U.S. servicemen stationed on Okinawa. Macke's answers were right out of carefully formulated Pentagon press statements: The rape was terrible. The military condemns it. The U.S. apologizes profusely to the Japanese people.

There was one last question. Anything in the Marines' backgrounds that might have suggested they would commit such a crime? Any priors? Macke said he didn't think so.

Pause.

"I think it was absolutely stupid," he said in a quiet voice, as if he were speaking to himself. "I've said several times, for the price they paid to rent the car, they could have had a girl."

No pause.

The reporters clicked off their tape recorders. Folded up their notebooks. Got their coats on and left.

Except for Holly Yeager, the national security reporter for Hearst News Service and one of two or three women at the table that day. She sat there a minute longer. The comment had struck her as grossly insensitive, "searing," she recalled. It was weird that no one had followed up, she thought.

When she got back to her office she discussed the session with editors. They had to get out a couple of lines for each story they were planning that day for their wire service, an early alert for subscriber newspapers. No one had any doubt this would be the story she filed, though they struggled with whether to write a hard news lead with the comment in the first paragraph or a softer feature lead with Macke's words in the third paragraph.

Meanwhile, at the offices of the Associated Press, Pentagon reporter Robert Burns had just returned from the breakfast too. He had thought Macke's comment was bizarre, but not enough to make a story out of. Besides, his editors wanted a story on the Bosnia peace talks in Dayton, which were being attended that day by Defense Secretary William Perry, a man Burns knew well.

A reporter for Reuters filed a short story about Macke's concerns over the budget impasse. Washington Post reporter Bradley Graham had been sitting at the far end of the breakfast table and had not heard the remark.

By midafternoon, though, Yeager's story had caught the attention of the Pentagon's press handlers. Burns picked up the vibes, consulted with editors and by five P.M. had filed a short wire story.

At the Post, Burns' story was transferred by an editor to Graham's computer screen, and a debate ensued among a handful of editors and reporters about its news value. Some argued that Macke's comment was balanced out by his condemnation of the rape. Others argued that the remark was egregious, especially in light of Japan's sensitivity over the existence of U.S. military bases.

At the Pentagon, there seemed to be no doubt about the gravity of Macke's statement. Perry had been consulted by phone and was seriously concerned. Macke issued an apology and attributed his comment to his "frustration over the stupidity of this heinous and incomprehensible crime."

A White House reporter mentioned it to Clinton spokesman Michael McCurry, who phoned National Security Council head Anthony Lake, who phoned Deputy Defense Secretary John White. All agreed this would be a major problem. The U.S. ambassador to Japan, Walter Mondale, warned senior White House staff members that the public reaction in Japan would be severe. "Macke could no longer be effective in Japan," said one high-ranking defense official.

Perry, who returned to the Pentagon after six P.M., quickly concluded that Macke had to go. That evening the office of the assistant secretary of defense issued a statement that read: "His lapse of judgment was so serious that he would be unable to perform effectively. Admiral Macke realizes that he made an error and has apologized. But the obstacles he faces in working effectively with the government and the people of Japan in the future left no other choice."

Even the president, his aides made sure to tell reporters the next day, was surprised at the swiftness and severity of Perry's actions. The next day, the Navy's top brass tripped over themselves denouncing Macke's remarks. Admiral Boorda sent a message to senior Navy officers urging them to stress that rape is a violent crime.

In the wake of his dismissal, Macke came under investigation for allegedly ordering his ten-member military crew to fly him from Hawaii to California to visit two girlfriends, one a Marine lieutenant colonel, the other a Navy lieutenant commander. On one of the trips, he allegedly left his crew on the ground for four days while he flew commercially with one of the women to Las Vegas.

In another situation, the case of Commander Robert Stumpf reflects the confusion that reigns inside the Navy as civilian politicians demand not only very good behavior but also what might be called retroactive perfection.

Stumpf is one of the Navy's top gun F/A-18 fighter pilots, a "superstar" and one of "the best sticks" the Navy has, say officials in Washington. He commanded the Blue Angels, the ace flying team, until he was grounded for five months while his presence at a Tailhook hospitality suite party (at which a stripper performed oral sex on an officer) was being investigated. He attended the 1991 convention to receive an award for leading the best fighter attack squadron of the year.

Government investigators discovered he had flown his F/A-18 Hornet from the Naval Air Station at Cecil Field in Florida to an airfield two hours' driving time from Las Vegas. Taking tactical aircraft to the convention was prohibited except in special circumstances.

They also confirmed that members of his squadron had rented a couple of hospitality rooms and had hired two strippers to dance in one of the rooms and that one of them had given a flier with the call sign Gator a blow job for an extra fee.

It appeared that Stumpf, the squadron's senior officer, was in trouble, but the investigation produced other facts. It was not against Navy policy to hire strippers. Stumpf had a plausible excuse for flying his Hornet cross-country: He had to be back early for a scheduled exercise and needed to log the air time. Investigators then focused on how Stumpf conducted himself that evening. They wanted to know if he was in the room when the stripper did her extra work.

According to a special panel convened to look into the matter, Stumpf had been standing near the table on which his new trophy sat, engaged in a conversation with two other airmen, while one of the strippers danced.

At one point the dancer sat close to Stumpf and rubbed herself with an ice cube. Then she danced toward him in search of a tip. But he raised his hands and waved her off.

As the men collected money for Gator's "present," and before they placed a chair in the middle of the room and coaxed Gator onto it, Stumpf headed to his own room to sleep because he had to fly home early the next day.

That was the end of Stumpf's Tailhook adventure. And nearly the end of his career, he would find out more than four years later.

Having been exonerated by the special panel in October 1993, and having gotten a choice assignment to lead an air wing headed for Bosnia, Stumpf was found to be good enough for promotion. Secretary Dalton sent his nomination to the Senate Armed Services Committee.

In Tailhook's aftermath, the Senate committee has required the Navy to tag the dossiers of all candidates who attended the convention with a "Tailhook certificate," the Navy's version of a scarlet letter. It is meant to warn the committee that the candidate may have been involved in unsavory activities. But Navy bureaucrats neglected to send the certificate to Capitol Hill with Stumpf's paperwork. Committee staff members gave the promotion a nod, and it was passed on to the full Senate for confirmation. The Senate approved his promotion in May 1994.

That same month the Navy corrected its mistake and informed the committee that Stumpf had attended Tailhook. The committee then asked Dalton to sit on Stumpf's final approval, which ordinarily comes after the Senate vote. It wanted to review the case.

Sixteen months later, the committee told Dalton they would never have approved the confirmation if they had known about the Tailhook connection. Although he had backed Stumpf during the entire process, Dalton cited his "duty to maintain the integrity of the promotion process" and struck Stumpf's name from the promotion list.

Stumpf has been pulled off his training for the wing leader's job and is shuffling papers at the Naval Air Station in Virginia Beach.

At the time, "hiring strippers was a common practice in the Navy and Marines," said Stumpf, who seethes at the thought of leaving the Navy. "Strippers were often hired for officers' club entertainment. I didn't consider it an unusual event. These days it wouldn't fly."

Again she fell asleep, only to be awakened by his hand on her breast. "Honk!" he said.