NEW YORK – The Camp Bucca flasher is being drummed out of the military.
Deanna Allen – the military police guard who bared her breasts during a mud-wrestling escapade last year at the main U.S. prison for enemy detainees – is being “chaptered out” of the service, she told the New York Daily News in an e-mail from Iraq.
The involuntary discharge could result in a general or less-than-honorable discharge.
The pretty, 19-year-old blonde made headlines around the world this month after the New York Daily News reported the scandal and published photos of her flashing her breasts and wrestling with other scantily clad female soldiers as male G.I.s leered and snapped pictures.
The Daily News accounts prompted the Army to open a full-scale investigation – after 3 1/2 months of foot-dragging.
So far, Allen, a private, is the only soldier to be punished, despite an initial military police report that sergeants allegedly arranged the party and were lending their rooms to G.I.s for sex.
“I am fine,” Allen told the Daily News in a brief e-mail Thursday. “I am being chaptered out of the military, though. Be home soon.”
Allen of the North Carolina National Guard’s 105th Military Police Battalion has been demoted from specialist to private. Although she said she continues to perform guard duties at the camp, she has been restricted to her quarters during nonduty hours.
The Defense Department refused to confirm or deny that Allen is being involuntarily discharged.
“Administrative procedures such as this are protected by the Privacy Act and we don’t comment,” said Pentagon spokesman Army Lt. Col. Barry Venable.
But Allen’s family in Black Mountain, N.C., said they had been informed she was being chaptered out. They said they expect she will return to the states this week or next and that she will be formally separated from the military at Fort Bragg, N.C.
The mud-wrestling bout on Oct. 30 purportedly was thrown as a goodbye party for soldiers of 160th Military Police Battalion, an Army Reserve unit that was returning to the U.S. The 160th was replaced by Allen’s unit.
The sergeants who allegedly organized the free-for-all and most of the soldiers said to have participated allegedly were assigned to the 160th.
Last week, Lt. Gen. James Helmly, commander of the U.S. Army Reserve, ordered an investigation into the incident under the same regulation that governed Gen. Antonio Taguba’s probe of the alleged torture of Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib prison.
Military brass declined to comment Thursday on the so-called 15-6 investigation.
But a high-ranking officer involved in the probe said that military investigators have “talked to the whole leadership” of the 160th MP Battalion, which returned to its base in Tallahassee, Fla., in November.
The officer, who spoke on condition of anonymity, confirmed that no soldiers from the 160th have been disciplined. He said he expected “this will be resolved shortly because everybody wants to get it out of the way and move on.”
Meanwhile, back in Black Mountain, a yellow ribbon circles a shade tree in the front yard of the Allen family’s modest, single-story brick home in anticipation of her return.
“We don’t condone what she did, but she feels she has been singled out and I can’t help but agree,” her grandmother, Luci Tomlin, told the Daily News Thursday. “She planned to make the military her career but now she has lost everything she worked for. This is not what she planned when she went over there.”
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AP-NY-02-18-05 1251EST
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