Hung Up on Tailhook

& Just as U.S. Navy officials thought they had swamped the embarrassing Tailhook affair with a wave of new ship announcements and a major reorganization plan, the scandal bobbed right back to the surface. Investigators in San Diego discovered a cache of several rolls of film that showed the manhandling of a 17-year-old girl who was partly disrobed by a corridorful of rowdy Navy and Marine aviators at the 1991 Tailhook Association convention in the Las Vegas Hilton Hotel. The snapshots detail an episode in which the hopelessly inebriated teenager staggers down the hall while drunken officers tear off parts of her clothing. A hotel guard finally leads the girl away as a Navy officer zestfully waves her jeans and panties.

Possibly even more embarrassing to the Navy was a videotape record of one of the Tailhook workshops that took place two hours earlier that same day, in which senior Navy brass -- including Chief of Naval Operations Frank Kelso and former Navy Secretary H. Lawrence Garrett III -- sat by as Navy officers jeered the idea of women in combat. "By not taking a stand at this moment, these gentlemen created an atmosphere conducive to what happened afterward," said a Navy officer who witnessed the incident.