Can the Marine Corps force you to go to an event and pay for it?

Short answer... no. Longer answer... still no.

It's also a quick way for the command to end up with an ethics investigation.

I've been to the Marine Corps Ball, I've never paid for anything that the Marine Corps put together. Even beer bust it was all free. Of course, I was in the Marines way long before most of you were born.

I have never heard of such a thing, the only problem I've ever had was when those civilians in the travel office tried to short-change me. Maybe he should have told his SNCOs, and SgtMAJ, problem solved, trust me!!

I have seen this many times. Never anything like bad paperwork but more like guess who has staff duty every other day for the month and will never get released on time.

I would recommend that he use the commander's open door policy because his NCO's are about to get themselves as well as the Commander jacked up. Because what they are doing is not only against all DoD regulations. I could make the arugment they are probably breaking state law.

This sounds phony.

We want to obey the 'law', but a law must be in good standing with the conscience. There are many times we are commanded to do things, but what if the command was given without regard to what we knew was right or wrong? If, for example, I was told to go 70 MPH in a residential area where children were playing, I would know in my heart that such a command was not in good standing with what I knew was right. Each person must judge for himself whether the intention of the law is right or not.

A Communist soldier was thrown into prison for his misdeeds in the same cell with a Pastor who believed in God, so naturally the Pastor asked him if he was a believer. When he heard the soldier's reply, tears ran down his cheeks: "I will believe if I have orders to believe." How utterly tragic to be so brainwashed that a man could no longer think for himself. He had lost his own individuality; he was no longer able to distinguish right from wrong! We were not created robots.

What negative paper work?never heard of the Marines making you go to the Marine ball.

I there an update as to what happened with this Marine and the Marine Corps Ball?

I will readily admit that I don't know how things work in the Marine Corps as I served in the Army. But it sounds familiar to what I and other paratroopers had to deal with in the 82nd Airborne Division at Fort Bragg. Certain leadership has tried to force many a paratrooper to attend a military formal or the annual 82nd Airborne Division Association Convention wherever it was being hosted. Personally, it seems like they're trying to give your Marine a hard time for no reason. My leadership on Bragg tried that as well. When they couldn't get (insert paratrooper's name here) to buy a ticket and attend a ball or go to Convention (especially if said paratrooper already had important plans), they'd try to make that paratrooper's life miserable by denying passes or putting them on details involving those events. I'll defer to LtCol Robert Quinter's response as it seems pretty sound. In my own experience, I let my "leadership" give me the negative counseling and filled out the Session Closing portion with my own remarks and explained how my "leadership" tried to coerce me into attending an event when I already had a paid civilian training to go to. I couldn't bring it to my FO or Team Chief because they were part of the problem. My Team Chief was the acting Platoon Sergeant and the Chief of the Firing Battery was the acting First Sergeant...who sided with my "leadership", anyway. I tried the open-door policy anyway and got cursed out. So I used the Command Sergeant Major's open-door policy before going to IG or Legal (those would have been my next stops). When the CSM found out what my civilian training was, he was cool with it and my "leadership" got butt-hurt, but didn't retaliate. Especially when they saw that my APFT scores went from 250 plus a consistent 270 plus and that I was outworking most of the battery. Any other time that some shenanigans like that came up, I was sure to establish a paper trail so that I had PROOF whenever I brought it to the appropriate authority.