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Boot Camp Tale a Horror Story

14-year-old died in bizarre version of ‘tough love’

Originally published in The Arizona Republic, July 7, 2001

You need not endure the horrific stories of kids being forced to eat dirt, of kids being beaten, kicked and shackled to each other through the night, to recognize that a bizarre madness reigned at the American Buffalo Soldier camp near Buckeye.

You wouldn’t even have had to know that 14-year-old Tony Haynes died at the camp last Sunday, thrashing in agony in 112-degree heat, likely of dehydration and exposure.

Rather, the fact of the camp’s very existence is evidence enough of unrestrained lunacy. Why were 45 kids ages 7 to 17 even out there in the blistering Arizona heat, scarcely supervised and with virtually no refuge from the elements and little nourishment?

The answer simply is that there was no oversight of this “tough love” abomination. There was no one to tell “Colonel” Chuck Long, the camp’s operator, that he wasn’t exercising “tough love.” He was exercising sadistic brutality.

Arizona law specifically exempts oversight by its child-welfare agencies of camps such as the American Buffalo Soldiers program.

Laws that periodically have threatened the operating license of facilities like the Arizona Boys Ranch near Queen Creek over abuse allegations cannot touch the likes of Buffalo Soldiers, one of countless organizations around the nation that are able to skirt child-welfare regulations by slipping between the letters of the law.

Language in Arizona Revised Statute 8-501 (b) excludes from regulation several types of institutions housing children, including “camps operating less than twelve months per year,” which is the category under which the Buffalo Soldiers program fits.

The reason for the exemption, according to officials of the Department of Economic Security, which licenses most group homes in Arizona, is that a law requiring state regulation of all group camps also would envelope untold thousands of church and Scout camps, sports camps and private weekend camps.

According to David Matthews, licensing manager for DES, nearly every state in the Union qualifies a camp for regulation according to its days of operation. And if a clever, monomaniacal supersalesman with a “tough love” scheme that he has sold to desperate, end-of-their-rope parents wants to tiptoe around such laws, few states appear to have found a way to stop him.

None of which suggests that the time hasn’t come to try. For inspiration, lawmakers need only consider the guilt-wracked family survivors of Tony Haynes, whose plaintiff cries of grief ring from this tragedy. If only we’d known, they cry.

If only they’d known.

We live in an age in which families with troubled, out-of-control kids turn to strangers—reputed “experts”—more and more for help. Gone is the era of narrow-eyed judges packing errant youths off to learn discipline in the Marines.

If state lawmakers are clueless as to how to isolate camps such as Buffalo Soldiers as meriting regulatory oversight, they might consider any organized camp that incorporates some version of “tough love” in its advertising literature.

There is a way to make this work. Perhaps the recollection of a boy spitting up mud while in the ghastly throes of heat-induced death will help lawmakers find it.