The military's hazing hell

In the book, you also mention some bizarre rituals involved in the Navy's "crossing the line" ceremonies, performed onboard ships since the 1600s.

Yes, these kinds of things are not that atypical in some of the Navy's crossing-the-line ceremonies. When a ship crosses the equator, King Neptune comes up from the sea. It's a carnivalesque thing. An enlisted guy takes charge of the ship as King Neptune and all the people who haven't crossed the equator are initiated. What they typically do is go through this gantlet and its wet and slippery. The other people who've crossed the equator already have their wet towels and they're slapping the initiates. Then they have to go through this tube that's filled with all kinds of garbage. It's called the whale's asshole. The initiates are reborn at the end.

Some of the ceremonies in the past have gotten out of hand. In one example, the King Neptune, accompanied by his son, the Royal Baby, who's usually the fattest sailor onboard dressed in a diaper, has this hose that's attached to his groin. The initiate would have to come and bow down and suck this hose.

Now this doesn't happen in all crossing-the-line ceremonies; it doesn't even happen in most. But certainly the whole gantlet part of it is there. We saw it in the Tailhook scandal. These naval aviators in the Las Vegas Hilton formed this gantlet, and women trying to get down the hallway were being treated the way an initiate would be treated in a crossing-the-line ceremony. But in this special sexist version the women were groped and mauled. This was a form of torture.

And there are no rules in the military warning about this stuff?

Yes, there are rules against a lot of this stuff. For example, the "Hell Night" initiation of American Marine Corps' elite "Silent Drill Team" in Yuma, Ariz., came to the public's attention in 1993 when ABC's "Prime Time" broadcast a video showing the new members of the drill team, naked, having their genitals covered with "edge dressing," the highly caustic polish used to provide a polished edge to the soldier's black dress shoes. They were also sprayed with urine. That certainly was never officially condoned. But it went on until a tape of this reached the public. On lower levels there are officers who look the other way. Of course, there are lots of commands in which this never happens.

I read a Barbara Ehrenreich article in the Los Angeles Times in which she said, "a certain feminism died in Abu Ghraib." She had more faith that women would never do these kinds of things. Does military training serve to strip women of their gender?

It does -- and it encourages its suppression. Now I haven't seen a lot of the photos and videotapes from Abu Ghraib -- a lot of them aren't available yet -- but if you look at the one that's been the most scandalous, the one of England with the leash, what you see is the use of a woman to pose as a dominatrix. The other soldiers are staging England. You certainly have some dereliction in duty on the part of some of the people in charge, but I've seen no indication that women are orchestrating this whole practice. The women are certainly willing participants, but I think what they're doing is performing in a male ritual.

But the person who was running the prison was a woman, Gen. Janis Karpinski.

There have been accounts that she did know that some abuses were going on but these were in areas of the prison that had been put under other command. I'm not sure and I think that story still needs to be revealed.

Given all your research were you surprised that this story broke or did it make some sort of morbid sense to you given all you've learned?

I've done a book on American prisons, too. Prisons are places where absolute power can be brought to bear on those under your control. Therefore, if there is not absolutely tight regulation on individuals who have that power, and if they don't know exactly what they're supposed to be doing, abuses can happen really easily. So you have that prison situation. Then, even prior to this you have the current administration deciding that we're not necessarily bound by the rules that we have defined for ourselves as a civilized democratic society, the rules that we've agreed to based on the Geneva Convention. That lays the groundwork for things to get out of hand. To find out there was abuse in Iraqi prisons, considering that we'd abdicated our responsibility to the Geneva Convention, doesn't necessarily surprise me. The fact that this kind of abuse took place in a ritualized form that I've seen in military culture doesn't surprise me. That doesn't mean that I'm not terribly shocked. It's horrifying.

Did it surprise you that the abuses were so well documented by the soldiers?

No, that really doesn't surprise me. These kinds of practices, certainly in initiation rituals, are always photographed or videotaped. And the reason they are, in the context of initiating one of your own, is to preserve the pollution and shame that the whole process represents. So if somebody gets out of line in the future, you produce the photographs and say, "See what happened to you? You're dressed in women's clothing. You're abject." There's always a trail.

Do you think the abuses at Abu Ghraib will have any effect on how far these initiation rituals are taken in the future?

Most people are not seeing Abu Ghraib in any way in relationship to military culture -- certainly the administration doesn't want to see this as an indictment of any aspects of military culture. They want to see it as an aberrant act of a few. And I would argue that unless you look at this in the context of all these other abuses, you're not going to do anything other than deal with the symptoms. You're not really going to transform the culture.

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