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Finkenbinder was a rare and coveted commodity. Having attended the army’s elite Defense Language Institute at the Presidio of Monterey, he graduated in the fall of 2002 with proficiency in Arabic just as the United States was scrambling to fill dire shortfalls of linguists. After receiving the Army Commendation Medal while in Iraq, as well as the Good Conduct Medal and the Army Achievement Medal, Finkenbinder finished his tour and returned to his unit’s base at Fort Stewart, Georgia. There he was confronted with a “moral and personal question,” as he put it, and a practical one as well: Could he continue to serve an institution that discriminated against him? Finkenbinder was gay; and though he had done all he could to follow the rules, his life under “don’t ask, don’t tell” was becoming untenable. He loved the army, but as a linguist training in the intelligence community, he had become accustomed to serving amid educated, tolerant people. The atmosphere at Fort Stewart was different. He got wind of people gossiping about his sexuality. Because of “don’t ask, don’t tell,” he knew he could not confront them and had no recourse with the chain of command. It was a paralyzing, demeaning, and worrisome experience. “I reached the point where I couldn’t live under fear of retribution,” he recalled. So in 2004, he wrote a letter to his commander stating that he would continue serving so long as he could be openly gay.10
In January 2005, the 3rd Infantry became the first army unit to cycle back into Iraq since the war began in March 2003. Finkenbinder stayed behind, having received an honorable discharge for Christmas. His commander was distraught, but his hands were tied by “don’t ask, don’t tell”; he was required to initiate discharge proceedings once Finkenbinder had announced he was gay. “There was definitely a feeling of, ‘we could really use you,’ ” Finkenbinder recalled of the moment when his commander learned he would not be staying with the unit. “I was an Arabic linguist, and those are pretty valuable over there.”11
More damning than Finkenbinder’s particular story is the number of similar stories that have piled up since the policy took effect. And they were not stories that the military wanted to share. The firing of gay Arabic language specialists during the war on terrorism is a particularly stark illustration of the gay ban’s costs to national security, so it’s no surprise that the Pentagon has not been forthcoming about the number of linguists fired. In 2004, when Palm Center researchers asked the Pentagon for the total discharge figures of gay linguists (including all foreign language specialties), they were told that figures only existed since 1998. It took a Freedom of Information Act request and pressure from members of the House Armed Services Committee to force the Pentagon to release even these incomplete figures. There were seventy-three discharges of language specialists from the Defense Language Institute between 1998 and 2004. Of these, seventeen were Arabic speakers, eleven spoke Russian, eighteen studied Korean, six were training in Farsi, and the rest studied other languages.12
Then in February 2005, a GAO report was released that included figures dating back to 1994, the period when data was not supposed to have existed. Those figures were even more troubling. According to the GAO report, 757 troops with “critical occupations” were fired under the policy. These included voice interceptors, interrogators, translators, explosive ordnance disposal specialists, signal intelligence analysts, and missile and cryptologic technicians. Three hundred and twenty-two fired service members had skills in what the military deemed “an important foreign language.” Fifty-four of them spoke Arabic.13 Ian Finkenbinder made fifty-five. And counting.
These loses have torn a hole in the nation’s defenses against Arab insurgents in the Middle East, as the thousands of fellow soldiers who relied on these linguists were forced to drift through Iraq and elsewhere with one fewer conduit to the Arabic-speaking world. It has also meant that, eventually, some other infantryman who had dutifully served out his initial obligation with the army would have to add an additional tour to fill the vacancy, taxing his morale and compromising the readiness of the entire force.14
THERE IS NO magic bullet for the nation’s lack of preparedness in the fight against radical Islamic violence. But one tactic seems pretty obvious: beefing up the security forces and the intelligence teams needed the most on the front lines of the war against terrorism. As we struggle against an enemy whose world most Americans can scarcely begin to comprehend, the few men and women in the military conversant in that world would seem an invaluable asset. Instead, more than fifty-five Arabic language specialists are no longer working for the U.S. military because they are gay. In the two years following 9/11 alone, thirty-seven language experts were discharged under the policy, with skills in Arabic, Korean, Farsi, Chinese, and Russian.15 The purging of gay language specialists has seen no respite in the years after 9/11, despite ongoing pleas by military and political leaders to increase the numbers of Arabic translators.
The bulk of these men and women came from the Defense Language Institute, an elite training school for military linguists. DLI is a “joint service installation,” run by the army but training service members from all military branches. Its campus sits on a hill in Monterey, California, peering over the rocky cliffs that tumble down to the Pacific Ocean. The school teaches 80 percent of the government’s foreign language classes, with 1,000 faculty members serving 3,800 students. Because of the battery of entrance tests and the intensity of its courses, it is known to attract students who are older and more skilled than most enlisted personnel.16
DLI also seems to attract a large share of gay students. “There were way too many gay people at DLI for anybody to fear the ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy,” said Alastair Gamble, a gay student who arrived at DLI in 2001. While there, he was out to all his gay peers and to any enlisted personnel who seemed gay-friendly. “Nobody cared,” he explained. “I knew someone who was a flaming queen in a uniform, and nobody cared. Sometimes we lived on halls that were more than 50 percent homosexual. I never even got a sideways glance.”17
To complete a course in a traditional Romance language—Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese—requires a twenty-five-week training regimen. But Arabic is what DLI calls a “category 4” language. Along with Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, Arabic is the hardest for English speakers to learn, and the course lasts sixty-three weeks for basic knowledge. Because it’s not a “cognate” language for English speakers—not one that shares the roots of the Germanic or Romance family language trees—most American students hit the books for several hours each night, after taking up to seven hours of class every day. Arabic reads from right to left; it has no capital letters and its characters run together like cursive, making it difficult for the untrained to distinguish them without months of practice. The year after 9/11, the number of students graduating from all American colleges and universities with an undergraduate degree in Arabic was a whopping six. Six.18
Because of its difficulty for native English speakers, and because of how long and challenging the course is, only the strongest students at DLI are selected to take Arabic. Most students make their language choices under the considerable sway of their teachers. Many are told to take an easier course of study.
But Patricia Ramirez was up to the challenge. “It’s always a matter of what the military needs from you,” she said, expressing a common sentiment among those who look forward to military service. Ramirez was hoping to use her language skills to serve the army. She saw it as an opportunity to thrive in a realm that could build self-confidence while also giving back to her community. She entered the army in October 2000 and completed basic training at Fort Jackson, South Carolina. The following January, she entered DLI.19
Ramirez was only nineteen. She knew she was a lesbian, but at that age, she didn’t believe she was going to meet someone who would “turn my world upside-down.” After she enlisted, two things changed. She met Julie Evans. And she found it harder than she had imagined to deny her identity. And then came 9/11. Her first reaction to the terrorist attacks was that now she would be useful.
But thoughts of war—the values and ethics behind it, the usefulness she felt in being part of it—coincided with a reevaluation of what it meant to serve that cause under a false identity. “Great soldiers are honest and have integrity,” she thought. “It was a terrible way to live,” to be forced to violate the code of ethical conduct in order to remain a soldier. It was, in fact, a logical impossibility: To remain a soldier, you had to lie; but to truly be a soldier, you had to tell the truth. In February 2002, Ramirez and Evans, also a soldier at DLI, decided to tell their commander that they were lesbians.20
Why did they tell? Why did a pair of lesbians—who knew full well what the policy on gays dictated, who understood the likely consequences of announcing their sexuality to their commanders—choose to come out?
“It was a decision we made about what mattered and how much we felt like hypocrites,” said Ramirez. But there were other reasons. The military is an environment that affords few protections to gays and lesbians, not just from harassment but from violence. If you hear derogatory terms aimed at gays, the urge is to protect yourself, and yet you have to go out of your way to appear unconcerned, lest someone suspect you’re gay. The mandate of silence is a double bind because if you say anything, you immediately become suspect, and once you’re suspect, you have even less room to say anything.21
At DLI, Ramirez remarked, the students were well-educated and open-minded. But she wasn’t confident that everywhere in the military would be like that. Facing war meant enduring a dread all too familiar to gays approaching a high school locker room: Defending yourself in a potentially hostile and unsupervised climate meant calling attention to your sexual difference, which meant risking further revelation and indictment.22
Then there was a practical matter: When the Arabic course ended, Ramirez and Evans would be placed at the military’s discretion. A married couple might be placed together, but a gay couple earned no such consideration. The two were simply not willing to tolerate a separation that would not befall an equivalent heterosexual couple. “If you would like us to continue to serve in the military,” they wrote to their commander, “we would like nothing more. Our sexual orientation has nothing to do with our capacity to serve.”23
Their announcement was a disaster. To Ramirez’s dismay, after she had mustered the courage to face the consequences of revealing her true identity, her commander wrote a blunt reply, deeming her statement “not credible.” In rejecting her statement, he claimed there were no other signs of homosexuality on her record. He also argued that the time frame, two weeks before completing her studies in Arabic, looked suspicious. The implication was that since she had completed her government-subsidized training, she sought to skip out on her obligations and use her skills elsewhere. Finally, her commander noted that many people at DLI have trouble adjusting to military life and some try to get out of service before making the transition out of school.24
Ramirez was incensed. How could there be any other evidence of her homosexuality when it was prohibited by law? Any such “signs”—including, as we have seen, things as ridiculous as posters of Melissa Etheridge—are mandated to be carefully kept from coming to the attention of commanders. And the idea that she would exploit government training only to bail out and take her skills to the private sector was similarly ludicrous. She would need much more training to work for a high-paying company, and her skills were nowhere as needed as they were in the military, where Americans had no idea what Arab terrorists and Arab housewives alike were saying. Most absurd of all, Ramirez had risked everything in deciding to come out. She went from speaking to her family every day to barely speaking with them at all. “I was willing to lose them, and for a while I thought I had,” she said. “I had to make a choice and this was my choice.”25
For the first time, Ramirez was actually telling the truth about her life, and she didn’t like being called a liar. She considered ignoring the situation and letting it pass, but that would not resolve the likely separation that would be imposed on her and Evans. Ramirez began putting statements together from peers and family who were willing to say she was gay. She also had lawyers write letters indicating violations that may have been committed by the investigators, making clear that the investigations might be investigated. Her efforts are a remarkable testimony to the inane situations created by “don’t ask, don’t tell”: She had to hire a lawyer to help her “prove” her sexual identity, while other soldiers got the boot for merely mentioning that they had desirous thoughts about the same sex.26
Her labor began to pay off. She soon got word that, finally, investigators were pursuing a discharge. But she also got word that they were pursuing something else: dirt for a smear campaign. A friend alerted her that investigators had asked her whether Ramirez and Evans had ever been seen kissing. They were also trying to determine if Ramirez had violated visitation policies. Investigators, it turned out, were threatening other soldiers at DLI with courts-martial if they did not disclose material about Ramirez and Evans, including details about their sex lives. The word “jail” was even mentioned.27
Soon after, Ramirez learned that her commanding officer was leaving the military. On his last day, he took her aside. He told her he felt strongly that, by choosing to come out, she was being selfish and putting herself above the ideal of selfless service to the group. He said that if every soldier he had was like her, there wouldn’t be an army.28
That same day, Ramirez’s commander gave a parting speech. In it, he said how grateful he was for having a wife, and what an important difference she made in making him a better commander. “It was so hypocritical that he stood up there in front of all those people to say how grateful he was for having her and chided me for wanting the exact same thing,” remarked Ramirez. Many service members, she suggested, wouldn’t tolerate this. “How many fewer soldiers would we have if everyone came in thinking they could not fall in love?”29
With her commander gone, the smear campaign against Ramirez evaporated. She and Evans were both honorably discharged for “homosexual conduct” in October 2002. Even after her whole ordeal, Ramirez was not bitter. “I love it even now,” she said of the army, in an interview a month after her discharge. Then she changed her verb to the past tense: “I loved my life there.” When she first joined, she believed that “don’t ask, don’t tell” made sense. She understood that there had to be limitations placed on all soldiers, and she didn’t think it would be too hard to abide by the regulations placed on lesbians and gays. She thought, “Basic training, taking community showers, I felt, they’re probably better off not knowing. But that was the last time I felt that way.” And this is precisely the point: If the law hadn’t meddled in her personal life, she would have had the freedom to navigate her interpersonal relationships as necessary, just as straight soldiers do. If she felt some people should not know, she could remain silent. If concealing her identity became awkward, conspicuous, or detrimental to her ability to be a good soldier, she could tell. Having lived under the thumb of the law, the policy made no sense to her at all. “Now for the life of me I don’t understand it,” she said, “being in the military I saw how unbelievably ridiculous it is and how it is hurting the military more than it is benefiting it.”30
Ramirez’s case was typical. Hers was one of the large majority of “tell” discharges. That is, it resulted not from a witch hunt or a surprise inspection or a covert investigation, but from a “voluntary” admission that she was homosexual. But as we’ve seen, “voluntary” has a funny kind of meaning when you’re living under “don’t ask, don’t tell.”
There were those at DLI, however, who never volunteered to disclose their sexuality at all. Like Alastair Gamble. Gamble was always drawn to languages. His mother was an English professor, and by the time he entered Emory University, he had already studied German for seven years. In college, he continued German and took up Latin. He knew he wanted to do something “functional” with his knack for language, but he hadn’t yet realize
d the army would offer that opportunity, even after he had joined. “I tried to enter as a navy officer,” he recalled, “and was told my eyesight was too bad.” Then someone suggested Arabic. Or Korean. Though Gamble still envisioned himself entering the service as an officer, perhaps an army officer, he was quickly convinced that if he began as enlisted personnel, with a specialty in languages, the army would pay off his student loans, and he could finally make his skills functional. “I was sold on the language issue,” he said.31
Gamble started out as a human intelligence collector, a position the GAO report cited as one of the army’s “greatest foreign language needs.” Once in the army, he completed interrogation training, a nine-week intelligence course that trains a small number of soldiers to collect information through direct-questioning techniques. He then spent six weeks working for the Foreign Area Officer program, which trains officers to recruit U.S. allies, where his performance won him a Certificate of Commendation from his commander. He entered DLI in June 2001 to study Arabic and earned a perfect 300 on his physical fitness test. His grades placed him at the top of his class, and several teachers told him they thought he was the strongest student they had.32
On April 20, 2002, Gamble was finishing his second semester of basic Arabic at DLI when he awoke to a pounding on his bedroom door. “This is a health and welfare inspection,” came a rousing voice from the hallway. It was 3:30 A.M. These routine barracks sweeps were designed to enforce discipline for matters such as drugs, drinking, and curfew. But any legitimately discovered material that might indicate a “propensity to engage in homosexual conduct,” as Gamble knew, could launch an investigation into someone’s sexuality.33