Indecent Exposure

THERE WERE MANY OFFICERS BUT FEW GENTLEMEN AT the 1991 Tailhook convention in Las Vegas. A Pentagon report released last week found that 83 women and seven men were forcibly groped, stripped, bitten on the buttocks or made to drink from the phallus of a fake rhinoceros during the three-day, semiofficial bacchanal. Navy and Marine aviators lured women down a gauntlet of drunken officers who molested them; some walked through the Las Vegas Hilton exposing their testicles or ran naked around the pool. The report is full of lurid new details about the scandal, but it may not be the whole story. Investigators believe "several hundred" of the naval officers interviewed concealed information and 51 others lied outright. Pentagon Deputy Inspector General Derek Vander Schaaf has sent files on 140 officers to Navy and Marine Corps commands for possible disciplinary action. And 35 other top brass who attended the convention, including Acting Secretary of the Navy Admiral Frank Kelso, could be punished for failing to prevent the sexual assaults.