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Questions remain about use of incentive PT

The Corps’ official line is that incentive physical training falls within the strict province of boot camp.

It’s meant to be a tool for the drill instructor, a method for teaching recruits about the perils of insubordination.

But the practice is supposed to stop when a recruit completes the transformation and becomes a Marine. The Hollywood notion of “drop and give me 20” is supposed to be as applicable to contemporary Marine life as strapping on a flamethrower to clear a cave.

Yet roughly a week after 21-year-old Lance Cpl. Dustin Canham arrived in an isolated African outpost, two of his superiors summoned him on April 27 to a tent to make amends for a round of horseplay that ended with Canham chipping a fellow Marine’s tooth.

Two minutes into the unauthorized workout, Canham was dead.

Two Marine Corps investigations and a Naval Criminal Investigative Service probe determined that Canham died of natural causes, most likely from an enlarged heart. The condition often goes unnoticed until it’s too late.

But there’s no arguing that the Marine died under questionable circumstances, in the very cloud of uncertainty that a ban on incentive PT is supposed to prevent.

Sgt. Maj. Carlton Kent, sergeant major of the Marine Corps and an experienced drill instructor, said he’s no fan of the practice away from recruit training.

“I don’t see incentive PT done that much outside of boot camp, and if they do it and they are caught, they will be held accountable for its reactions,” Kent said in a recent interview.

But the lack of significant punishment for the two Marines who ordered Canham to perform incentive PT casts doubt on the Corps’ commitment to ensuring that the practice stays on the drill field, where it belongs.

Why incentive PT?

Incentive physical training is an age-old policy of exercising a Marine in lieu of blemishing his record with formal punishment, which could hinder his career down the road. The practice is supposed to be reserved solely for recruits at the depots, where drill instructors have far fewer nice things to take away than the average unit commander.

“The only place that we have incentive PT, or the only place we are supposed to have it, is in recruit training. That is the only place that it should be,” Kent said. “We’ve got other tools for NCOs and leaders to use, and it’s called EMI, Extra Military Instruction, and that works. We don’t need to do incentive PT once they earn the title.”

Extra Military Instruction is a type of duty used to correct an individual deficiency or improve a unit’s efficiency. According to Marine Corps’ policies, EMI must “entail a valid training purpose and should always involve the identification of a particular character deficiency and the assignment of a task rationally related to that deficiency.”

In the end, EMI normally consists of extra duties performed to amend for a minor transgression that doesn’t rise to the seriousness of nonjudicial punishment. It can stretch into liberty hours and be monotonous, and is generally considered an effective leadership tool.

But incentive PT has its fans. While forced exercising may not be welcome in the fleet, some retired Marines remember it fondly, and they contend its demise has led to more problems than it has solved.

Retired Master Sgt. Vic Ditchkoff, president of the Marine Corps Drill Instructors Association, argues it’s a useful tool if used correctly.

“No, it’s not dangerous,” Ditchkoff said. “You have to use judgment. If you had to choose between 25 push-ups and an Article 15, which one would you choose? It cuts down mistakes, horseplay and Marines goofing off. Incentive PT, there’s nothing wrong with it.”

Canham’s family disagrees.

Mysterious death

A reservist from Lake Stevens, Wash., Canham deployed with a group from 6th Engineer Support Battalion, 4th Marine Logistics Group, based in Portland, Ore. He was stationed at Camp Lemonier, Djibouti, as part of the 8th Provisional Security Company, repairing and maintaining fuel equipment.

He was serving with roughly 2,000 American troops attached to Combined Joint Task Force-Horn of Africa. The U.S. uses a former French military installation there to stage missions throughout the region.

The military forces there are working to thwart terrorists taking refuge in a largely lawless swath of African desert dominated by Muslim tribes, suffocating poverty, hopelessness and heat.

Mark Canham described his son as a dutiful Marine, prepared to serve wherever his nation called. He would just as readily have patrolled the streets of Ramadi in Iraq or stormed Taliban defenses in Afghanistan, but he was eager to serve on the atypical deployment.

Canham’s death was the 18th connected to CJTF-HOA since 2003, a number that includes eight Marines and two airmen killed when two Marine helicopters collided in 2006.

Canham was disciplined by two superiors for chipping a fellow Marine’s tooth while throwing rocks and goofing off. One of the two noncommissioned officers performed the “daily seven” workout — a common regimen of push-ups, bends and more — with the junior Marine, the investigations said.

The Corps’ June 13 final report indicates Canham’s superiors, Sgt. Jesus Diaz and Cpl. Richard Abril, did not consider the workout to be incentive physical training, because the security company was already scheduled to perform PT that day and because one NCO was participating in the training with Canham.

An earlier report stated that Canham was performing incentive PT mainly to boost his odds for a promotion.

“[The superior] did not want to punish [Canham] for the rock- hrowing incident because he planned to recommend him for meritorious corporal,” the report states. “A Page 11 entry would have made him less competitive.”

An initial autopsy determined Canham died as a result of an enlarged heart, a condition known as hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, characterized by a thickening of the heart muscle and responsible for several thousand deaths per year in young people nationwide, according to information provided by Johns Hopkins University. The Baltimore-based medical center said many cases go undiagnosed because a young person’s healthy appearance can hide symptoms.

The condition gained attention in 1990, when 23-year-old Loyola Marymount University basketball star Hank Gathers collapsed and died on the court.

Findings by the Corps and NCIS both deny foul play or hazing but acknowledge that Canham’s death occurred during an unsanctioned disciplinary action. Diaz and Abril received nonpunitive letters of reprimand, the equivalent of a stern lecture that isn’t technically considered punishment.

“Despite the physical training session being conducted outside the parameters of applicable orders, procedures and regulations, the training was not harsh nor abusive and was not the cause of [Canham’s] death,” the final report states.

Canham’s family members don’t buy it. They said they believe an injury to his eye suggests he may have been assaulted immediately before his death, despite the Corps’ findings otherwise.

“Only four people really know what happened in that tent,” said Mark Canham, the Marine’s father. “Abril, Diaz, my son and God.”

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