Senior Marine now working with Chicago youth after video controversy ended career
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Version 0 of 1. Sgt. Maj. Paul Archie was a well-respected senior member of the Marine Corps when he came across something at the gates of Parris Island, S.C., that infuriated him: a man protesting while wearing the iconic “campaign cover” hat meant for drill instructors who are on base training future Marines. The ensuing June 5 incident escalated quickly — and was captured in a video that went viral online. It showed Archie, wearing his desert tan utility uniform, going toe-to-toe with Ethan Arguello, a former drill instructor who was protesting the controversial U.S. decision to exchange five Taliban leaders for Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, who went missing in Afghanistan in 2009. No punches were exchanged, but Archie could be seen getting close enough to Arguello to knock the cover off his head. Archie snatched it as it fell, and then stormed back to his black Jeep Sahara and drove away. “You’re about to get locked up!” Arguello yelled. As noted in this Checkpoint post at the time, Archie resigned a short time afterward and was charged with assault. Marines and veterans, meanwhile, debated whether Archie was wrong for confronting Arguello, and whether Arguello was violating the spirit of Marine Corps tradition by wearing the campaign cover out of uniform. There’s more to the story, however. Archie, in his first comments since the controversy, said Thursday that he was asked to retire by the senior enlisted member of the Marine Corps within days of the incident. He declined to use his name, but he is Sgt. Maj. Mike Barrett. Archie added that he did not feel like his chain of command at Parris Island was inclined to keep him, either. “He told me, ‘Paul you know you were wrong. You need to step down and resign before your chain of command needs to decide,’ ” Archie said of Barrett’s direction. “I kind of figured that was coming. I’d been let down before, but this time I was really let down.” Barrett could not be reached for comment. His spokesman, Gunnery Sgt. Chanin Nuntavong, said the contents of the conversation between the two sergeants major should stay between them, but he confirmed they spoke at the time of the video. Brig. Gen. Lori Reynolds, then the commanding general at Parris Island, addressed the issue in an interview with the Island Packet newspaper in June. She said that Archie was a great Marine worthy of emulation by others, but that his leaving was “about a very high standard, and that’s what we’re looking for from all our Marines.” Archie, who served more than 25 years and earned a Bronze Star with V for heroism in Iraq, has moved on. The charges against him were dropped earlier this month, and he has moved to Chicago with his family to take a job as a sergeant major with the Marine Leadership Academy, a public high school that has a military curriculum and a strong ROTC program. “It’s a motivating environment, and you see kids grow daily,” Archie said. “I loved my time in the Marine Corps, but the writing was definitely on the wall that it was time for me to move on.” Archie said that “it was a fall from a high-ranking billet” and that he wanted to serve a full 30 years before retiring, but that he won’t look back. He realizes he could have diffused the situation by stepping away when it escalated, he said, but felt that Arguello needed to be corrected. “When I saw his temper going up, hindsight being 20-20, I should have just got in the vehicle and drove away before it just kept escalating,” he said. “That’s the only thing I would say. But I still stand behind, ‘I was doing something for the Marine Corps and the institution.’ I wasn’t doing something for my sole gratification. It was all about the Marine Corps, and what it stands for. I regret not cutting the conversation shorter, but I do not regret what I did.” |