A Marine in Okinawa was charged with sexual assault, triggering a six-month unit lockdown. Military policy holds service members legally accountable for failing to intervene as bystanders. One person stepping in could have prevented the incident and the consequences for everyone.
All right, can you be held responsible for being a bystander in a situation you could have intervened? With the US military, is it possible you could be held literally court-wise, judicial-wise, responsible for the situation, yes or no? Yes. Absolutely. Let me give you an example. Let's just say a Marine on Okinawa gets charged with sexual assault, and everybody gets locked down for 6 months. By the way, has that stuff happened? Yes. I've been doing this for 20 years, and unfortunately, I've seen that one exact case happen multiple times. All right, so in that line of work, were they usually out alone? No. No, they weren't. Were they usually with a group of other Marines? Yes. How many did it take to have stopped that whole thing from happening? One. One. And people go, why are we all being locked down? Because the one made a bad mistake. That's not why we're being locked down. It's because the other 20 didn't stop the one. Honestly, that's usually what the case is. All right, so that's what we want to be, the one who intervenes.
