Reports: Mud wrestling soldiers should be punished
The Associated Press
MIAMI
Ten soldiers from Florida should be disciplined for an unauthorized mud-wrestling match they staged at a U.S. military prison camp in southern Iraq, an internal investigation has concluded.
The investigation found that reservists from the Tallahassee-based 160th Military Police Battalion engaged in "an impromptu public mud-wrestling contest on Oct. 30, 2004, at Camp Bucca, Iraq," spokesman Steve Stromvall said Friday from Reserves headquarters in Atlanta.
No detainees saw the episode, which took place at one of the largest U.S.-controlled detention centers in Iraq, official said.
It is up to the Army Reserves commander, Lt. Gen. James Helmly, to decide how to discipline the soldiers - who include three female guards who wrestled and six sergeants who encouraged them.
The 10th is a soldier who let one of the women change in his quarters, where she "exposed herself," Stromvall said. Helmly can impose punishments that include reprimand, reducing the soldiers' ranks, discharging them from the military or ordering a court-martial, Stromvall said.
"I'm told he will make the decision soon," Stromvall said.
Investigators concluded that a fourth female soldier also engaged in the mud wrestling - and "exposed her breasts to the crowd observing the . . . event," Stromvall said.
She was from a different unit that was still in Iraq. Her rank was reduced as punishment.
The party took place as the Florida unit, which had previously served at the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba, was heading home from a nearly year in Iraq.
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