Matthew McKeon Court-Martial: 1956 - Was The Drill Sergeant Drunk?

When the Commandant of the Marine Corps, General Randolph Pate, arrived at Parris Island, he responded to a reporter's question by announcing that apparently McKeon had broken regulations and would be punished to the fullest extent of the law. Before all the bodies had been recovered a court of inquiry convened. A military court of inquiry is similar to a civilian inquest or grand jury proceeding. For several days the court heard testimony from 23 of the surviving 69 platoon members, asking several of them if they thought that McKeon had been drinking. Many men praised McKeon's attempts to save the drowning men and his work as a drill instructor. A medical officer testified about the results of the sobriety tests he conducted on McKeon. McKeon himself had said he had consumed "a few shots of vodka that afternoon." Extensive testimony dealt with the issue of whether the swamps were out of bounds for training. The court of inquiry recommended a general court-martial on charges ranging from involuntary manslaughter and oppression of recruits to drinking intoxicating liquor in the presence of a recruit.

During the preliminary hearing, McKeon was represented by his brother-in-law Thomas Costello. Through the intervention of a New York Supreme Court judge, Costello secured the services of Emile Zola Berman, a personal injury lawyer with a large civil practice. Berman accepted the case pro bono, and despite his lack of criminal experience he proved the ideal defense attorney for McKeon. In a case that would be conducted in the full glare of publicity, Berman immediately set to work trying to reform his client's image in the media by characterizing him as a loyal family man and a patriotic marine, rather than as the drunken sadist he currently seemed.

The court-martial was convened on July 17, 1956. The prosecution began an orderly presentation of witnesses to show that nothing was wrong with the Marine Corps training practices and that McKeon was a "bad apple" who deserved conviction for taking men who could not swim into a dangerous area.

Berman's defense was more subtle. He realized that his client was going to be convicted on at least some of the charges. He wanted to get an acquittal on the manslaughter charges in the hope McKeon would lose a stripe and get minimal brig time instead of being sentenced to ten years in prison and a dishonorable discharge. He ignored the alcohol charges and tried to establish that although McKeon may not have used good judgment, he was following a well-established boot camp procedure for instilling discipline in the recruits. He argued that the six men died as a result of panic rather than any circumstance McKeon could reasonably have anticipated.

In presenting the defense Berman hammered away at several themes. First, he claimed that McKeon was guilty of breaking regulations regarding drinking, but that he was not drunk on the day in question. To support this assertion he had the medical officer testify that he had incorrectly circled "yes" instead of "no" on the record next to the term "intoxicated." Second, Berman argued that the charge of oppression should fail because there was no clear definition of the crime. In historical contexts it connoted tyranny and cruelty. He cited Nero and Captain Bligh as examples, and claimed that a man who led his men into danger, shared their peril, and risked his own life attempting to save them could not be oppressing them. He put the defendant on the stand and let him explain his own actions and accept responsibility for them, hoping that McKeon's own remorse and demeanor would impress the court. Berman also introduced evidence to show that taking recruits into the swamps was not unusual or forbidden, but understood to be common practice.

As to manslaughter by negligence, Berman called two famous witnesses to give their opinions of McKeon's conduct. First he called Commandant of the Marine Corps General Pate, who had already publicly condemned the defendant. When asked what punishment he would recommend, Pate said, "I think maybe I would take a stripe away from him.… I would have him transferred away for stupidity … I would have probably written in his service record book that under no conditions would this Sergeant ever drill recruits again. I think I would let it go at that." The second witness, Lieutenant General Lewis B. "Chesty" Puller, was probably the best-known and most respected living marine. When Berman asked Puller what action he would take in these circum-stances, he replied, "I would say that this night march was a deplorable accident.… I think from what I read in the papers yesterday … [Pate] regrets that this man was ever ordered tried by a general court-martial."

McKeon was found guilty of involuntary manslaughter by simple negligence and of drinking in an enlisted barracks. He was acquitted of the two most serious crimes: oppression and manslaughter by culpable negligence and the lesser charge of drinking in front of a recruit. He was sentenced to reduction to the rank of private, nine months of hard labor, forfeiture of $30 per month in pay, and a bad-conduct discharge from the Marine Corps. This sentence was later reduced by the Secretary of the Navy, who cut the prison term to four months and remitted the bad-conduct discharge.

The Ribbon Creek incident and McKeon's court-martial highlighted some of the more brutal aspects of Marine training and revealed a low level of officers' supervision of recruit training. It ultimately resulted in the reform of marine training practices to rehabilitate the corps' badly damaged public image.