by Matt Kennard
Instead of enabling recruits to vanquish their prejudices and strengthening the individual and the collective spirit, all military training seems to be geared towards invoking the darkest elements in human nature—fear, hatred, pettiness, insecurity and similar aberrations. Under normal conditions, such an orientation legitimizes unacceptable behavior; under harsh and hostile conditions, it makes beasts of men. It is immaterial whether one is at the perpetrating end or the receiving end of unjust behavior. Of greater significance is the general air of violence and inequality that gets normalized in the process.54
It wasn’t just homosexuals, either. The kind of Christian fundamentalism expressed by General Pace’s comments about homosexuality’s “immorality” was prevalent across the military brass, and meant other groups were marginalized as well. Religiosity was increasingly prevalent in the military as it provided a glue to keep together all the disparate groups the loosening of regulations had allowed in, and was abused for this purpose. In 2008, Specialist Jeremy Hall sued the DOD for its “discrimination” against atheists because of the unconstitutional definition of the US military as a “Christian Army.” He revealed a culture of proselytizing among the commanders and soldiers which put atheists in an invidious position. “They don’t trust you because they think you are unreliable and might break, since you don’t have God to rely on,” he said.55 “The message is, ‘It’s a Christian nation, and you need to recognize that.’” The accusations in the lawsuit were shocking. “Immediately after plaintiff made it known he would decline to join hands and pray, he was confronted, in the presence of other military personnel, by the senior ranking . . . staff sergeant who asked plaintiff why he did not want to pray, whereupon plaintiff explained because he is an atheist,” it read.56 “The staff sergeant asked plaintiff what an atheist is and plaintiff responded it meant that he (plaintiff) did not believe in God. This response caused the staff sergeant to tell plaintiff that he would have to sit elsewhere for the Thanksgiving dinner. Nonetheless, plaintiff sat at the table in silence and finished his meal.”
Civil Rights Struggle
As momentum gathered pace and an increasing number of public figures showed support, the gay rights movement found a new hero in the Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama. He took it on as one of his flagship issues and wrote an open letter to the LGBT community promising the repeal of DADT. “I’m running for President to build an America that lives up to our founding promise of equality for all—a promise that extends to our gay brothers and sisters,” he wrote. “It’s wrong to have millions of Americans living as second-class citizens in this nation. And I ask for your support in this election so that together we can bring about real change for all LGBT Americans.”57 But halfway through his term he still had not come through on the promise and the movement turned against him. During one of his speeches in April 2010, the president received an angry response from disgruntled activists from GetEQUAL, an LGBT rights group. “What about ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’?” one protester shouted, to which Obama replied: “We are going to do that.”58 Former army sergeant Darren Manzella had already written an impassioned letter to the new president as part of Stories from the Frontlines: Letters to President Barack Obama, a new media campaign launched to highlight the need for more presidential leadership in the fight to repeal DADT. “I served two tours of duty in the Middle East in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom as a Soldier in the United States Army. I was promoted to sergeant, was a team leader of a medical squad, and conducted over 100 twelve-hour patrols in the streets of Baghdad, treating wounds and evacuating casualties of sniper fire and roadside bombs,” he wrote. “But, today, instead of protecting my fellow Americans, I sit working in a university development office because I was discharged under DADT.”59 Depending on your point of view, Manzella had been either extremely foolhardy or extremely brave. In 2008, he took time out from his duties as a medical liaison specialist with his division in Kuwait to appear on CBS’s flagship 60 Minutes program. He was on his second deployment to the region after serving in a medical field artillery unit in Baghdad in 2005 and receiving a combat medal for giving treatment under enemy fire. Despite his stellar credentials, Manzella was aware that he was still an outsider in the army, not because of his dedication, patriotism, or competence, but thanks to his sexuality. In the thirteen-minute section of the program Manzella talked openly, without permission, about being gay. He told CBS that he had taken his boyfriend out with his army pals and painted a picture of a military that had come to accept gay members for who they were. Nothing happened in the aftermath. But he was eventually the target of another malicious anonymous email campaign that instructed him to tone down his “ostentatious” behavior. He decided to consult his commanding officer who told him that for the crime of telling the truth he would have to report Manzella to his superiors. “I had to go see my battalion commander, who read me my rights,” he said. “What a Catch-22. You go and tell your lieutenant the truth and now you violated the army’s rule.” True to his trailblazing attitude, Manzella held nothing back in the investigation, providing photos of him with AJ, his boyfriend, including pictures of them kissing. But despite all this, Manzella was told to resume work in the military. “The closest thing that I was given by my superiors was, ‘I don’t care if you’re gay or not,’” Manzella said. Even after the CBS show aired on national television Manzella was allowed to stay in the military. Nevertheless, in 2008 he was eventually discharged as the case became too embarrassing for the military to ignore. But they had wanted to ignore it—and there were thousands more Manzellas serving openly in the US military.
Things heated up in September 2010 when the DADT policy was ruled unconstitutional by a judge in California. A lawsuit had been brought by the Log Cabin Republicans which moved to order an injunction against the policy. In conclusion US District Court Judge Virginia A. Phillips wrote forcefully:
The Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell Act infringes the fundamental rights of United States servicemembers in many ways . . . The Act denies homosexuals serving in the Armed Forces the right to enjoy “intimate conduct” in their personal relationships. The Act denies them the right to speak about their loved ones while serving their country in uniform; it punishes them with discharge for writing a personal letter, in a foreign language, to a person of the same sex with whom they shared an intimate relationship before entering military service; it discharges them for including information in a personal communication from which an unauthorized reader might discern their homosexuality. In order to justify the encroachment on these rights, Defendants faced the burden at trial of showing the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell Act was necessary to significantly further the Government’s important interests in military readiness and unit cohesion. Defendants failed to meet that burden. Thus, Plaintiff, on behalf of its members, is entitled to judgment in its favor on the first claim in its First Amended Complaint for violation of the substantive due process rights guaranteed under the Fifth Amendment.60
At the same time, the movement had found another brave and eloquent spokesman in the form of Lieutenant Dan Choi, from the Army National Guard, who had served bravely in Iraq and was a graduate of West Point before being discharged under DADT. Choi was particularly critical of the survey the Obama administration had set up to gauge military attitudes to homosexuality, which he saw as another betrayal on the president’s part. “That the commander in chief [was] the first [from a] racial minority to achieve that rank and that position was a signifying moment for all of us, whether we’re racial minorities, whether we’re sexual minorities, whether we’re American citizens or not even yet American citizens, it was an absolute moment of vindication for a lot of people,” he said. But, he added, “Nobody ever polls the soldiers on whether we should go to war or not. Nobody ever says, ‘What do you think about your commander in chief being African-American?’”61 Choi was adamant about taking advantage of the judge’s verdict and the obvious fact that the policy was becoming untenable for the
military. In October 2010, he went to reenlist in the marines at Times Square in New York City, trailed by a sizeable media contingent. He took advantage of a new Pentagon statement that “recruiters have been given guidance, and they will process applications for applicants who admit they are openly gay or lesbian.”62 There was increasingly nothing the military could do in the face of this tidal wave of activism. In a stunning victory for the gay community in the US and around the world, seventeen years of struggle to get DADT repealed finally came to a head in December 2010 when Congress passed a law repealing the policy. “No longer will our country be denied the service of patriotic Americans who are forced to leave the military, no matter their bravery or zeal, because they happen to be gay,” said President Obama as he signed it into law.63 It was a bittersweet victory: a wonderful civil rights triumph, but one that would have been impossible without the military’s desperate need for troops allowing homosexuals to serve honorably and basically openly for the first time. Obama admitted as much, commenting that the repeal will be introduced “in a way that only strengthens our military readiness” (read: more troops). In the end, homosexual service members got their rights, but it took risking their lives in ever-greater numbers in wars started by an administration that believed their sexuality was a moral abomination. The Bush administration’s lack of principle across the board had ironically laid the ground for the one positive thing to come out of America’s Irregular Army.
The Aftermath
The story didn’t end there, however. President Obama rapidly moved from hero to villain after the bill was signed, coming under intense pressure from gay civil rights groups about the languid pace at which the repeal of DADT was proceeding. Months on from the repeal, gay service members were still being discharged under the policy as all branches of the military remained in the “training” phase aimed at preparing existing service members for the change in policy. For many gay soldiers the “integration process” was bogus because they were already in there serving openly. The SLDN started a clock on their website to count every second that has passed since the repeal was signed until it is finally enforced. “I find it offensive that it takes nearly a year to make the transition,” Aubrey Sarvis, executive director of the SLDN, told me. Many straight troops knew already who was gay or lesbian within their platoon or company so this was not news, which made the delays even harder to understand.
The chorus of criticism from gay groups of Obama and his administration reached fever pitch when the President and his wife refused to invite Servicemembers United, the largest gay military group by members, to an event at the White House in early 2011. “It was the first military event at the White House since repeal and we asked for a representative to be included,” said Alexander Nicholson, executive director of Servicemembers United. “First they didn’t think of it themselves, but when we pointed out and asked to have a representative they specifically refused, which was disappointing and puzzling,” he told me. Many put this down to political calculus on Obama’s part as he tried to leverage his positions on the economy and health care. But snubs like this, alongside the fact it had taken him two years to come through on the campaign pledge, turned the tide of popularity against the president. Criticisms of the fact that the repeal did not go far enough started in earnest. The final repeal, for example, did not include the non-discrimination mandate clause, which would have made gay service members a protected class and had profound legal ramifications. If a gay soldier is discriminated against based on their sexuality in terms of a promotion or another injustice, they still do not have the venue to complain using equal opportunity legislation as someone with a religious or racial complaint would. Without that in place, a new president who wanted to reinstate DADT would have authority to do it. Feasibly there could be an administrative directive from a future White House that curtails open service policy after certification or outright reverses it. In essence, the repeal bill took away the law enacted in 1993, but before that the gay ban was completely regulatory. With the 1993 law gone, the issue was back in regulatory space, which, while most expected the Pentagon to continue an open service policy, left open the possibility that in a decade or so, with troop needs back to being manageable, they could adopt a discriminatory policy again. “Given the doublespeak of the White House, its supportive but never too supportive, people are skeptical, nobody is 100 percent trusting of the fact we are done yet. Everybody is waiting,” added Nicholson.
The Defense of Marriage Act, or DOMA—which the Obama administration had pledged to stop defending in court—also continued to draw ire because it still meant that while gay people can die for their country their spouses or significant others would not be honored in the same way as spouses of their straight colleagues, or receive the same benefits. There are even Republican groups pushing for the Obama administration to go further. “The biggest criticism for us is that President Obama has refused to suspend the discharge proceedings as the certification is taking place,” said Clarke Cooper, executive director of the Log Cabin Republicans, who served openly in Iraq and was later appointed by George W. Bush as a diplomat. In many ways, the military appeared more effusive than the Obama administration about the changes, perhaps because they had seen it operating during the War on Terror with no real drawbacks. General James Amos, a Marine Corps commandant, had been against the repeal initially, but told Congress in the midst of the training process that the repeal was going forward with few problems. “I’ve been looking for issues, but honestly we haven’t seen it,” he said.64 “There hasn’t been the recalcitrant pushback. We haven’t seen the anxiety over it from the forces in the field.” The surprise for progressives was that the only anxiety about it was coming from the White House.
Epilogue: Indiscriminate Trust
On the careful choice of soldiers depends the welfare of the Republic, and the very essence of the Roman Empire and its power is so inseparably connected with this charge, that it is of the highest importance not to be entrusted indiscriminately.
Flavius Vegetius Renatus, fifth century1
You go to war with the Army you have. They’re not the Army you might want or wish to have at a later time.
Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, 20042
Sometime in the early fifth century an aristocratic Roman thinker with no first-hand experience of war sat down to write what would be become the most important military rulebook in history. The short tract, Concerning Military Matters,3 ripped up conventional ideas about military affairs and the art of war, casting a long shadow over the following millennium of fighting. Its lessons were varied, ranging from instructions on how to manage raw and undisciplined troops to notes on legionary musical etiquette. But many were also timeless—centuries later in the war-ravaged Middle Ages the rulebook was still treated like gospel by a rogue’s gallery of despots and their generals. Its author was Flavius Vegetius Renatus, a self-effacing young man who regarded his work as a clarion call to an empire of awesome power but with problems coming into sharp focus on the horizon—particularly, Vegetius believed, concerning the military. He addressed his preface for the first book directly to Emperor Valentinian with typical coyness: “I do not presume to offer this work to Your Majesty from a supposition that you are not acquainted with every part of its contents,” he assured his master.4 While his humble tone and faith in his leader’s intelligence can perhaps be admired, it would prove to be a wrongheaded assumption. Over the next century, Vegetius’s revolutionary lessons on how to run a successful military machine would be spurned by the leaders of the world’s most powerful empire, an oversight that would prove fatal as the Roman colossus fell from a position of unrivalled global dominance to a barely recognizable shell power. It was the biggest fall from grace history has seen to date.
In his classic work The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire, the eighteenth-century historian Edward Gibbon describes the empire’s pinnacle in glowing prose: “In the second century of the Christian era, the Empire of Rome c
omprehended the fairest part of the earth, and the most civilised portion of mankind,” he writes. “The frontiers of that extensive monarchy were guarded by ancient renown and disciplined valour.”5 Yet from this redoubtable position, just three centuries later in 410, Rome, the imperial capital, the symbol of all that was great and good in the empire, was sacked by the “barbarians” who had been its slaves just decades earlier. Historians have spent the last millennium trying to work out why and how this happened with such speed, but despite the amount of painstaking research undertaken there remains significant debate about why the fall came when it did. “Although the topic has been popular, and myriad reasons have been offered to explain Rome’s fall, no consensus has emerged, and historians of the twentieth century have multiplied the variety of explanations many times over,” writes one historian.6 Explanations range from the insidious influence of Christianity from the first century on, to a generalized rupture in the moral fabric of Roman society. But one strain of thought stands out about all others—the military explanation. Vegetius was a pioneer in this regard. In his book, he observed that “so many defeats” as the Romans suffered at the time can “only be imputed” to the “careless choice of our levies.”7 He feared that the careless attention paid to stocking the fighting force with upright and well-trained warriors could prove the death of the empire he loved. He was further alarmed at the “inclination so prevalent among the better sort in preferring the civil posts of government to the profession of arms.”8 At the Battle of Châlons, at around the time Vegetius was writing, Rome’s military had been shown up as a shadow of its former self. The enemy commander Attila had the gall to inform his troops that Rome’s warriors were nothing but a ragtag army of nonentities. It was an unthinkable charge. “The dust of battle overwhelms them while they fight in close formation under a screen of protective shields,” he taunted as his soldiers laughed.9 The descent culminated when the imperial city was sacked for the first time in 800 years, as one of the barbarian Germanic tribes that had been tormenting the empire, the Visigoths, stormed into Rome and looted for three days.