Weird? Yes. Controversial? Not really. Improper or dangerous? I fail to see how. It looks to me like a group of people thrown into a very stressful situation who were just having fun. It's just like hazing that goes on in the police and fire departments and many sporting clubs. Replace the woman with a place kicker of equal weight and the tape with some toilet paper and you have a yearly occurance in the NFL. And the woman was laughing the whole time and the tickling happened only in the last 15 seconds of the video. I don't see this as anything more than harmless fun where nobody was hurt. It's not like they were choking her with pig intestines as happened at some high school somewhere. There wasn't even any inappropriate touching or groping going on, as one would expect to see given the build up that I read on here before watching the video, it's not like they gang raped her or anything. As for the "I can't breathe!" comment at the end, let me tell you a story. Earlier in the year I was already in bed (lofted, it's a dorm afterall) and my roommate walked over to the fridge, since he was up I asked him to grab me a bottle of water and he did. What he did next was quite unexpected. My roommate partially shouts, partially giggles out "Here's your damn water bottle!" and throws the bottle at me hitting me right in the stomach and winding me. I thought it was funny as hell and I kept laughing, since it was so unexpected the hit kind of knocked the wind out of me, the more I laughed the more it hurt which made me laugh even more. I too was shouting "Dammit, I can't breathe!" but like the lady in this video I was laughing at the time too.
My final conclusion: Innocent fun taken out of context, possibly on purpose, that one who reads the posted article without watching the video would assume to be inappropriate but is really just harmless fun and the only thing possible controversial about this is that the people on the video were in uniform. Heaven forbid we see a picture of our soldiers as people and not just faceless entities walking down a deserted street with an M-16 in hand.