by Matt Kennard
In fairness to the critics, it was true that the entrance of foreigners from far-flung countries—from Pakistan to Malaysia—into the US military posed serious concerns about the security of the troops—a priority extremely low down on the Pentagon’s list when compared with bolstering the number of soldiers. With the evident US military insouciance towards extremism—including Islamic fundamentalism—it was the perfect opportunity for terrorist elements or foreign intelligence agents to penetrate the force. Egyptian double agent Ali A. Mohamed, who had served in the army as a supply sergeant at Fort Bragg in North Carolina in the late 1980s, did exactly that, providing Osama Bin Laden and his Al-Qaeda network with high-level information for terrorist attacks against US targets. The military had been extremely slow to come alive to his threat and it would end tragically. “Mr. Mohamed’s story . . . is one of appalling oversights by American national security, including the C.I.A., the F.B.I. and the Army,” said the New York Times.36 His role in the September 11 attacks is unclear, but he has been charged with helping to plan the 1998 car bombing of the US Embassy in Kenya, which killed 224 people and injured 4,500. It appeared the army hadn’t learned its lesson. During the War on Terror, a new program was designed that specifically targeted immigrants skilled in medicine and languages: the first time since Vietnam that those on temporary visas would be allowed to serve. Recruits would receive US citizenship within just six months of service. The fact that the military was desperate for Arabic speakers added to the perceived risks. Of course, the Bush administration didn’t care. In fact, they were getting so desperate that it wasn’t just their natural right-wing aversion to immigrants that was being compromised. Even homosexuals, who had for decades been the target of discrimination by the Republicans, were enjoying a quiet renaissance. There was, however, one American patriot, fluent in Arabic himself, who would be among the last hauled from the military for the “crime” of being gay.
ASK, TELL
People will look at Afghanistan and Iraq as the moment when lesbian and gay service members proved themselves to be part of the US military.
Victor Maldonado, Servicemembers Legal Defense Network, 2008
Bleu Copas had always been a patriotic American but on September 11, 2001, that changed. As the carnage unfolded on his television screen that morning he moved from being simply a patriot—he now wanted to be a warrior. “I decided right then that as I had the ability and desire I would go ahead and serve my country, that I would act on my patriotic flair,” says Copas, a twenty-four-year-old from Johnson City, Tennessee. At the time, he was studying for his masters in counseling at East Tennessee State University, but he decided to put his studies on hold. “I felt like my country needed me then, and it couldn’t wait,” he tells me. Copas was young, educated, well built, and passionate about serving his country. He was the perfect candidate. There was only one problem: he was gay. “I was prepared to lie and keep it secret,” he says. At the time the military operated a “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” (DADT) policy which dated back to 1993. It stipulated that homosexuals in the military must keep their orientation secret and if they bucked this rule or were “outed” by colleagues they would be discharged. It all went according to plan for Copas. He was put on active-duty service and, via the Defense Language Institute in California, he arrived at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, in 2004 and became part of the Eighty-Second Airborne division. He didn’t even have to be overly private. “Throughout this whole time in the military, my colleagues realized my orientation but it was never a problem,” he says. Until 2005, that is. Then an anonymous email campaign targeting Copas started up, circulating correspondence in which Copas had divulged his sexuality. Even then he was shown sympathy by his superiors. “My command tried to sweep it under the rug, they tried to get rid of it because they wanted to keep me, I had been promoted very quickly when they realized my skills,” he says. But the emails continued unabated and spread to his colleagues. Eventually the command gave Copas an honorable discharge with health benefits. “They had no choice, they had to discharge me then,” he said. But Copas realizes he was just very unlucky after his easy start. “I think, ironically, everything now is falling into place regarding discrimination against homosexuals,” he said in 2008. “I was just the victim of a very aggressive campaign, I would have been fine otherwise,” he added. He was also lucky to get an honorable discharge, which meant holding on to the benefits he was entitled to—a luxury not everyone enjoyed.
Figures obtained through the Freedom of Information Act support Copas’s claims about the military turning a blind eye. The DADT policy had resulted in hundreds of discharges every year since it was enacted, but in the period of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the numbers of discharges fell precipitously. In 2001 there were 640 discharges for homosexuality; in 2006 it was 282—a 56 percent reduction.37 Homosexuals were serving almost without hindrance. “I think that people will look at Afghanistan and Iraq as the moment when lesbian and gay service members proved themselves to be part of the US military,” said Victor Maldonado of the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network (SLDN), an organization which campaigns against military discrimination against homosexuals. “The conflict will be the Rubicon for gays and lesbians in service and there will be no going back. More and more service members are serving openly and having no repercussions, they simply are gay, and it evidently does not affect their relationship with their colleagues or command.” The situation was so open that, Copas added, “At one point in the barracks in Monterrey [California] I was staying on a floor with eight rooms, and gay people were in half of them. In fact they were everywhere, especially at the language institute. And there are several that I know serving openly in the desert right now.”
Before the DADT legislation, the extent of regulation on homosexuals was a 1982 DOD directive which stated that “homosexuality was incompatible with military service,”38— around the same time it was decided that being a Nazi was not compatible with military service. When he first came to power in 1992, President Clinton announced an executive order designed to completely overturn the discriminatory policy. In response, the Republican-controlled Congress put forward legislation that would have enshrined the existing directive in federal law, making it impossible for any president to overturn. The 1993 DADT policy was the resulting fudge. Clinton can’t be blamed for the intransigence of his Republican opposition, and the compromise was a huge improvement on what went before; but it was still one more twist in the long history of formalized discrimination against homosexuals in the armed forces. In the Korean and Vietnam wars homosexuality had been labeled a “mental defect,” and the military barred recruits based on medical examinations, much like modern-day Turkey does. But troop needs ebbed and flowed: during wartime the military quietly ignored its strict regulations on gays, only to revive them again in peacetime. This is why the gay civil rights movement was so intent on achieving its goal (repeal of DADT) during a period when the War on Terror—with its de facto repeal of the law—had shown gays could serve openly at no detriment to the military.
Arguments Against
The case against homosexuals serving openly is primarily a moral one derived from religious dogma, a dominant feature of the Bush administration. The strength of deep-seated moral opposition even within the military brass was strong throughout the war years. In 2007 one of its top commanders came out in favor of DADT and likened homosexuality to adultery. “I believe homosexual acts between two individuals are immoral and that we should not condone immoral acts,” said Marine General Peter Pace, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “I do not believe the United States is well served by a policy that says it is OK to be immoral in any way.”39 Although that was the real reason for opposition to the repeal, the critics invented logistical problems in an attempt to give their opinions legitimacy. Some said, for example, that enlisting openly gay service members would be detrimental to morale and cause problems with shared bedding in the barracks and bases. It was implied that gay so
ldiers would be unable to handle the living conditions, with military guidelines noting that the armed forces are a “specialized society” where the same laws for civilian society don’t apply—military service, of course, is “characterized by forced intimacy with little or no privacy.”40 Critics of the repeal also pointed to attrition rates. In a 2009 article for the Washington Post a group of retired military officers wrote that the “repeal of this law would prompt many dedicated people to leave the military,” citing a Military Times poll that indicated 58 percent were opposed to the repeal and that 10 percent wouldn’t reenlist if it went through.41 They didn’t mention that the new Irregular Army meant many homosexual soldiers were serving openly anyway—estimates put it at 65,000. But with a tenuous bit of extrapolation they arrived at a figure of 228,600 for the potential loss of military personnel. “We don’t need a study commission to know that tensions are inevitable in conditions offering little or no privacy, increasing the stress of daily military life,” they concluded.
But what they should have been more worried about was the attrition rate of gay service members themselves, who comprised a significant portion of the fighting force. Many of them could not understand why they had to hide their identity and personal life while risking their lives for their country. Jennifer Hogg, a New York National Guard Member, said, “Being a lesbian on 9/11 is what initially led me to begin to question my involvement in the military and the military’s involvement in the world,” before adding, “If on 9/11, I did not have the freedom to hug my girlfriend goodbye before we left as a unit for NYC, then what freedom was I protecting? What freedom could we offer to the world if we treat it so restrictively based on who a person falls in love with?”42 During the War on Terror this struggle for freedom took the same form as the civil rights struggle in the 1960s, when young black men were being sent to fight for a democracy they couldn’t vote in. Patriotic homosexuals had served in all of America’s wars anyway, bypassing the persistent efforts to disenfranchise them. Some of America’s most revered fighters, like Baron von Steudben, were reportedly gay. He had been a Prussian military officer who served as inspector general during the American Revolutionary War, passing on his expertise to guide the Americans to victory. Navy doctor Tom Dooley was another: his humanitarian mission in Southeast Asia made him a legend in his lifetime.
The available evidence also contradicted the arguments of the critics of the repeal of DADT. A 2010 poll of veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan by the Vet Voice Foundation found that 41 percent of service members under the age of 35 favored gay and lesbian soldiers being able to serve openly, to 35 percent against.43 Over-thirty-fives came in 36 percent against, to 31 percent in favor. A Zogby poll in 2007 found 73 percent of troops who had served in Iraq or Afghanistan were comfortable in the presence of gays. They had also proved themselves particularly loyal and fastidious in duty. Lesbians serve proportionally more than the rest of the female population. Between 1990 to 2000 lesbians aged eighteen to twenty-seven had three times higher rates of service than their straight peers. And they served longer, too: 82 percent report serving for two or more years, compared to 74 percent for the wider population.44 Attitudes were changing in the general population as well, as the de facto repeal of DADT proved it could work. In early 2010 a poll by CNN and the Opinion Research Council found that 69 percent of the public were in favor of allowing homosexuals to serve openly, with just 27 percent against.45 That was a big step forward. In 1994, the year after DADT was instituted, the figure had stood at 53 percent in favor. Around the world, the experience of the US’s closest allies was adding further pressure. In 2000, the UK lifted its ban on gay soldiers after a ruling from the European Court of Human Rights called it a “grave interference” into people’s private life.46 Israel was even further ahead of the curve, ending its restriction in 1993, the same year as DADT was instituted. Research has shown that serving openly had no detrimental effect on the morale or effectiveness of the Israel Defense Forces. “It’s a non-issue,” said David Saranga, a former IDF officer. “There is not a problem with your sexual tendency. You can be a very good officer, a creative one, a brave one, and be gay at the same time.” There had been many attempts to overturn the policy within Congress, most effectively from Representative Patrick Murphy, who was the first Iraq war veteran elected to Congress. His experience there with British forces convinced him that open serving would only improve the service. He sponsored a bill for the repeal. “I take it as a personal affront to our warriors,” he said. “To say that other countries’ soldiers are professional enough to handle this and American soldiers aren’t is really a slap in the face.”47
Faced with this mass of evidence, attitudes in the military establishment were slowly thawing, with probably its biggest name, former Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Colin Powell, who had originally supported DADT, coming out in support of its repeal in 2009. “The policy and the law that came about in 1993, I think, was correct for the time,” he said. But, he added, “Sixteen years have now gone by, and I think a lot has changed with respect to attitudes within our country, and therefore I think this is a policy and a law that should be reviewed.”48 John M. Shalikashvili, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from 1993 to 1997, and formerly a staunch supporter of DADT, wrote an op-ed in the New York Times in which he described a similar Damascene conversion. “I now believe that if gay men and lesbians served openly in the United States, they would not undermine the military efficacy of the armed forces,” he concluded. But unlike Powell he subtly revealed the real reason for his change of heart. “Our military has been stretched thin by our deployments in the Middle East,” he wrote, adding “we must welcome the service of any American who is willing and able to do the job.”49 It was, in other words, a numbers game. Gays would get their rights: but only because it was too costly to keep them out. Although happy with the sea change, the gay community was not fooled as to the reasons for their newfound acceptance. “Now that the Army needs recruits for a violent, unpopular war, we are more welcome,” wrote Andrew Hiller in a bitter letter to the New York Times in response to Shalikashvili’s article.50 “It is more apparent than ever before that, as we conduct a global war on terror and face tremendous personnel shortages, that the ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ law is undermining our military readiness,” chimed Democrat Representative Martin Meehan (D-MA), who introduced a bill to repeal DADT.51 In the Bush administration’s order of priorities, a commitment to bigotry seems to have ranked pretty high, but meeting army recruitment targets was even more important. Money was also a factor. It was calculated in a 2005 GAO report that the DADT policy had cost the military 9,488 service members since 1993 with 322 of them highly skilled linguists the military could ill afford to lose (like Bleu Copas).52 In fact, 757 of them were deemed “critical.” The cost of training a soldier is between $90,000 and $150,000. For this reason, the SLDN didn’t take any particular joy in the figures from the War on Terror. “We don’t necessarily recognize it as a success,” said Maldonado. “During a time of war, when the military needs men and women to fight in Afghanistan and Iraq, lesbians and gays deserve basic rights because they are among the frontline defending our country. But during times of peace when threats are not proximate dismissals under DADT increase.”
But what should have been more concerning for Powell and Shalikashvili than all this was that the DADT policy had created a climate of rampant homophobia in the US military during the War on Terror. The Pentagon’s own inspector general released a report in 2009 which showed the horrendous treatment being meted out to gay service members and the climate of fear in which many lived. It found that “offensive comments about homosexuals were commonplace and the majority believed these offensive comments were tolerated to some extent within the military.”53 The secrecy necessitated by the DADT policy meant many were targeted by McCarthyite-style witch-hunts. A full 40 percent of soldiers “felt they had witnessed, or been a target of, harassment for perceived homosexuality.” Eighty percent s
aid they had heard offensive speech, derogatory names, jokes, or remarks about homosexuals in the last twelve months. Even more—85 percent—thought this abuse was tolerated by the military brass. “This behavior is not acceptable and will not be tolerated in the military,” said a Pentagon spokesman. “We need to do more work on this policy,” he added, but didn’t blame DADT explicitly. SLDN did. A report it authored documented 968 cases of anti-gay harassment—including murder and assault—in the period from February 1999 to February 2000, an increase of 142 percent on the previous year. As the military was opened up to extremists and gangs, this hit an all-time-high level. The alleged Wikileaks source, Bradley Manning, was one gay soldier who reported being a victim of the rampant abuse during the War on Terror—bullying that may have been a factor in his alleged whistle-blowing. “It took them a while, but they started figuring me out, making fun of me, mocking me, harassing me, heating up with one or two physical attacks,” Manning wrote to his friend on a chat website. He continued, “The army took me, a web dev, threw me into a rigid schedule, removed me from my digital self. The army . . . threw me in the forests of Missouri for 10 weeks with an old M-16, Reagan-era load-bearing equipment and 50 twanging people hailing from places like Texas, Alabama, Georgia, and Mississippi . . . joy. What the hell did I put myself through?” It was a good question. Independent journalist Dahr Jamail, who did much important work on the subject, believed that homophobia had in fact become the worst kind of discrimination in the military during the War on Terror. “Homophobia arguably manifests itself in the worst form of discrimination in the military, surpassing even racism,” he wrote.