In January 2016, a Marine recruit at Parris Island was ordered to exercise within a Pentagram drawn on the floor with foot power.
The incident was documented in one of six investigations into allegations of abuse at the Marine Corps’ East Coast recruit training depot, which were released Thursday following a Freedom of Information Act request.\u00a0
The investigations provide a window into the world of boot camp, where juvenile and immature behavior have been investigated as hazing.
In one case, a recruit said his drill instructor ordered him to put an entire brownie in his mouth but did not allow him to chew. Another was accused of accidentally spraying hand sanitizer onto two recruits’ bare chests.\u00a0
Several of the allegations turned out to be unsubstantiated. One recruit’s claims of his drill instructor choking and punching him turned out to be baseless. Other recruits said they were told to put hand sanitizer in their eyes to prevent pink eye, but they misheard directions about washing their hands. Most incidents where drill instructors get into trouble stem from “innocent mistakes,” said retired Sgt. Maj. Antonio Vizcarrondo Jr., who did two tours as a drill instructor at San Diego and later served as Parris Island’s regimental sergeant major. “They were maybe moving a little faster than they needed to be,” Vizcarrondo told Marine Corps Times on Thursday. “They were concerned about making sure they were giving the recruits everything they would possibly need to be successful to graduate from boot camp.” Vizcarrondo spent more than 33 years in the Marine Corps. When he dealt with drill instructors who acted maliciously, some were fined, reduced in rank or lost their jobs, but most could be rehabilitated, he said. Another factor that can cause drill instructors to get into trouble is post-traumatic stress, he said. Toward the end of his time at Parris Island, some of the drill instructors accused of breaking the rules were combat veterans who had deployed several times to Iraq and Afghanistan. “You don’t need to artificially create any kind of combat stress or combat environment,” Vizcarrondo said. “An example I would give you is the Crucible. That is a structured training event with a desired outcome, which is typically team-building, confidence building and in some senses, trying to replicate things they may have to do in a combat situation. But none of that is artificial. It’s all part of the training syllabus.” \u00a0 Investigations show some minor misconduct investigated as hazing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":42542,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_yoast_wpseo_meta-robots-noindex":"","_yoast_wpseo_meta-robots-nofollow":"","_yoast_wpseo_canonical":"","_acf":"","_yoast_wpseo_primary_category":88,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","_smg_distribution_targets":[]},"categories":[15,88],"tags":[],"coauthors":[1240],"class_list":["post-43640","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","category-your-military"],"acf":{"subheadline":"","legacy_arc_id":"IFXGH3N36FC3HCSYR4NJPLSBYY","arc_canonical_url":"\/news\/your-marine-corps\/2017\/05\/25\/parris-island-hazing-investigations-reveal-juvenile-pranks\/","remove_feature_photo":false,"is_sponsored":false,"subtype":"","redirect_url":"","disable_inline_ads":false,"native_logo_pretext":"Presented By:"},"yoast_head":"\n