“I cried and felt sick, and I had problems looking at the male recruits right in front of my eyes,” said 23-year-old Alice Asplund to newspaper Avis Nordland.
“I can not recommend that other girls go off to the military when it's like that,” she added.
On a September evening, the platoon leader gave the order that everyone should bathe naked together. Asplund’s request to put on sports shorts or bathe at an alternate spot nearby was turned down by the lieutenant in command of the platoon.
Asplund, the air-defence platoon’s labour representative, said a showdown with the lieutenant led to the humiliating scene.
“I said: you can’t force me to bathe naked with all the boys, but then he said that he could,” she said.
Before quitting her military service in the air-defence force she reported the scene to police who could not find evidence of a punishable offence. Local officers of the 132nd Air Wing in Bodø reportedly said the case would be handled by the military’s own system of justice.
The newspaper questioned whether a “moment of field hygiene” required that the woman bathe in the nude with the 30-man platoon.
F-16 fighter-bombers from air force unit 132 in 2011 bombed Libyan targets in support of insurgents attacking forces loyal to Muammar Qaddafi. The squadron’s base, Bodø, is “Norway’s most important defence town,” Defence Minister Grete Faremo said in August.
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