ARMED FORCES: Tough Discipline

There were three things about 18-year-old Seaman Wesley Daggett that interested the doctors at the U.S. Navy Base Hospital at Sasebo, Japan. First, he was covered with ugly bruises on his abdomen, chest and buttocks. Secondly, he had just been discharged from the Sasebo base brig, and third, he refused to tell what had happened to him. Since the same symptoms had turned up on another case the previous week, the doctors kept after Daggett until he began to talk. What they heard sent the Navy and Marine Corps charging to the brig to investigate.

After listening to 27 sailors and four marines−prisoners and former prisoners −Marine Captain Haskell C. Baker ordered 16 marine brig guards relieved of duty and confined to the base, presented the Naval base commander with a story of sadistic punishment wrought in the name of good discipline. Items:

¶Fireman Gordon L. Dell testified that guards made him run around on his hands and knees like a dog, barking and biting other prisoners. “Once they ordered me to bite the guard sergeant. I crawled over but didn’t bite him. He kicked me hard anyway. Another time a guard burned the back of my neck with a cigarette, and another time a second prisoner and I had our heads banged together so hard I lost consciousness.”

¶Navy Fireman Paul Basom swore that guards ordered him “to have a bowel movement in front of other prisoners. Then one man poured lighter fluid under me and lighted it. When it got hot I ran.” Basom said he was later ordered by another guard to put out a burning cigarette with his bare feet.

¶Seaman Jeffrey Cohee said that a guard once smeared his eyes with shaving lotion, on another occasion ordered him to say something and then shoved a pencil up his nose for saying it.

¶Other prisoners told of being forced to fight each other while guards gleefully cheered them on, added the detail that “to put heart into the fight guards would force one prisoner to spit on the picture of the other prisoner’s girl and make insulting remarks about her.”

The accused marines hired a civilian lawyer, protested they had only been doing their duty and that soft Navy standards were the cause of the ruckus. Said tough Sergeant Robert J. Barbuti, 23, a brig warden charged with 82 counts of maltreatment: “Those guys were in the brig for beating up Japanese women, taking dope, larceny and that kind of thing. They were undisciplined, and we were only enforcing discipline.” Then he added defensively: “I only did what I was trained by the Corps to do. If I am guilty then the whole Corps is guilty.”

Admiral Roscoe F. Good, in charge of Navy forces in Japan, had another view of discipline. After reading the report on conditions at the Sasebo brig, he ordered general courts-martial for Barbuti and a second brig warden, special courts-martial for the other 14 guards.