Air Force Capt. James Spellman hit an aerobics class every day at dawn and then jogged three miles a day to keep his weight down. But after the holidays last year, Spellman weighed in at 207 pounds - 4 pounds over the maximum weight allowed by the Pentagon for his 5 feet, 10 inches.
Spellman's career was over.Never mind the fact that he scored high on fitness tests or that his record showed eight years of stellar service to his country. The man, who as part of "combat camera" operations in the 1989 invasion of Panama shot the first footage of a captured Manuel Noriega, is now looking for work.
The Pentagon not only demands that its soldiers be fit, it also wants them to look lean. A burly soldier is still a fat soldier in the Pentagon's draconian view. Last year, 4,561 men and women were booted out of the armed forces because of their girth.
The weight-control program goes by various euphemisms, but unofficially everyone calls it the "Fat Boy Program." Violators of rigid height-to-weight ratios enter the stigmatized program of nutritional counseling, exercise and humiliating monthly weigh-ins.
The gauge is a tape measure test of neck, chest and belly to calculate body fat. If a few months on the Fat Boy Program doesn't produce the desired body, then the soldier's career is in jeopardy. Even graduates of the program suffer with the mark on their records.
The military has a right to expect its people to be physically capable of carrying out their rigorous duties, but the slavish devotion to a uniform physique ignores the latest advances in understanding different body types. And, the Fat Boy Program has also become a convenient excuse for getting rid of people when all other things are equal.
One robust officer told our associate Jim Lynch that the military uses the weight standard as a convenient way to fire bad soldiers and troublemakers. Spellman was neither, but he was outspoken. The after-action report he filed on the Panama invasion criticized his own unit, saying that their mission to send back pictures of the battle to the Pentagon was hampered by logistical problems, including the lack of weapons for the camera crew to defend themselves.
After the critical report made the rounds, Spellman's battle with his bulge became of special interest to his superiors at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. Spellman was discharged.
Now, as he tries to begin a new career at the age of 32, he wonders why his waistline cost him his chosen career while national military heroes of the moment, who more than filled the TV screens during the Persian Gulf war, were allowed to be on the hefty side.
One military analyst said of Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf, "I tell you, I was so glad to have a big fat boy in charge. He was out of the mold." That admiration rarely extends down the ranks.
Current plans call for cutting 500,000 men and women from the services by 1997 to meet budget reductions, and the weight requirement will be an easy way to weed out some of those people.