There are a lot of things at play here at one time. First of all, you have a weak kid who probably should not have been there, and if the Marine Corps itself wasn't so stringent about initial retention, or didn't put so much pressure on recruiters to begin with, this kid either would have 1.) washed out of Boot Camp very early on or 2.) been laughed out of the recruiter's office. But a recruiter not meeting his or her quota enough times can end their career, which is beyond stupid. It's how you get kids like this, who have obviously spent their entire lives hanging out in their room playing Call of Duty and building robots. If you have to learn to swim before trying to join a military branch whose stated purpose is to conduct amphibious warfare operations, you might be about to f**k up.
Secondly, you have a combined problem of what is clearly toxic leadership from the very top. You have a Colonel who has been there for some time. We're at the time this happened 15 years into a war and instead of having a combat command somewhere he's been the commander of the Parris Island Recruit Depot for a significant amount of time. That sounds like a red flag right there. Add to that that you have the female Lt Col who just so happens to be coming from a previous assignment as a JAG prosecutor and is coming there after numerous accusations of hazing have already been made, who is described in the article as "percived as meddlesome". That's more than likely because she was. She was probably sent there specifically to meddle. This more than likely caused an environment where these two people weren't really communicating with each other, and none of the subordinates really understood who was in charge, as the Col is described as "hands off." Most Marines that I've been around, hell most people in general, if there is no leader or at least a person in charge will simply do whatever they want.
Third, you have a sub culture here of people who aren't Drill Instructors, who aren't Marines, who are brought in in advance of this event to look for that big boogie man known as "hazing" who don't understand the Marine Corps or what the purpose of Boot Camp is. for example, from the article:
In 1998, a Navy chaplain, Thomas Creely, now retired, came to Parris Island to serve as chaplain for the recruit training regiment and noticed a particularly stark pattern of abuse in the Third. ‘‘For example,’’ he later wrote in a paper presented to the International Society for Military Ethics, ‘‘after lunch recruits were made to drink water until they vomited. Then they were made to do push-ups in their own vomit.’’ Creely worked with the command until 2003 to try to eradicate the problem, but the ‘‘blind loyalty of drill instructors,’’ who remained silent in the face of abuse, stood in the way. ‘‘What you have in the Third Battalion is a cycle of abuse,’’ Creely told me recently. ‘‘And until that cycle is broken, it doesn’t matter how much education you do.’’
This is not hazing. The entire purpose of Boot Camp is to teach you not to quit. To put you in uncomfortable and unfamiliar situations and force your mind to go to places that you don't want to go. As a civilian if you're doing something, say working out, and you puke all over yourself, you're done for the whole day. That's just it. Combat doesn't work like that. You get sick on patrol 5 clicks from the FOB they aren't calling a medivac for you and you can't just stop and hang out. Yes, they forced those kids to drink a bunch of water, do push ups until they puked, and then do more push ups in said vomit, probably more exercises than that, and do you know what happened to those kids? NOTHING. There was nothing physically wrong with them. That was the entire point. To teach them that, that you're fine, that you can keep going and it is all in your mind. That you don't get to stop just because you threw up, or because you rolled an ankle, etc.
Lastly, and this is the biggest problem that I see most Marines totally unwilling to address is that what you have here are absolutely out of control Drill Instructors doing absurd things. They put this kid in a goddamn dryer. A Drill Instructor's job is to teach you about the Marine Corps, it's to be hard on you, yes most of the time it's about being in your face. But what we're talking about there is a sadistic person put in a postion of power with no actual oversight whatsoever and a kid, who just so happened to be a Muslim, died because of it.
