On this eve ning, after eight long months of scrupulously avoiding late-night contact, Gamble and his boyfriend, Rob Hicks, a twenty-seven-year-old Korean linguist from Colorado, had decided to spend the evening together. Hicks was nearing the end of his course and preparing to relocate to Goodfellow Air Force Base in Texas. As their separation approached, they decided they could risk one night of sleeping side by side. The move violated curfew regulations, and meant risking exposure. But who knew this would also be the night for a “health and welfare”?34
Hicks climbed out the window, and was literally scaling the wall of the dorm building when a dozen noncommissioned officers shoved open the door. The men rummaged through photographs, letters, and videotapes while Gamble was shipped off to his first sergeant’s office. The search turned up a gay-themed, nonpornographic film, photographs showing affectionate, but not sexual, behavior between Gamble and his boyfriend, and several gift cards expressing romantic sentiments. Two weeks later, Gamble was officially notified that his unit was initiating an investigation into his sexual orientation. He was pulled from class and honorably discharged on August 2. About eight weeks later, Hicks was discharged as well.35
When Charlie Moskos heard what happened, he said of Gamble and Hicks that they brought their punishment on themselves, and that gays should abide by the policy and remain celibate and silent. “It’s disgraceful,” he told the Associated Press. “These guys betrayed the gay cause. They put their own self-interest above fighting al-Qaeda.”36
Gamble remembers the episode as one of the most humiliating moments of his life. “I was just absolutely embarrassed,” he recalled in an interview. “There’s really nothing like having someone who’s your age, but a slight rank above you, discussing whether or not lube is sufficient evidence to prove homosexuality. It’s like getting felt up; it’s horrible.” After his discharge, Gamble took a job with a government contractor, a job where his sexuality didn’t matter, but neither did his valuable skills as a linguist.37
THE ARMY CAST the DLI firings as routine enforcement of military regulations. Harvey Perritt, a spokesman for U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command, said late in 2002 that the expulsions of Arabic linguists were “not relevant” to the nation’s war against Arabic-speaking terrorists. He insisted that discharges resulting from “don’t ask, don’t tell” were consistent with those for other violations of army regulations. “If someone is enrolled somewhere and they don’t pass the P.T. [physical training] standards,” he said, by way of comparison, “they’ll be discharged. There are policies and they are always in effect.”38
Actually, not always. The week after the twin towers fell, the Pentagon looked around and noticed it would need as many soldiers as it could get its hands on for the wars it was about to wage. Under the authority of President George W. Bush, the Defense Department issued an order giving each military service the authority to suspend administrative discharges (called “stop-loss” in military speak). In explaining the decision, the folks in the Pentagon’s public affairs office showed that no one was more confused than they were about how to retain badly needed gay troops while reassuring the public that the military was abiding by the law that required their discharge. “Stop-loss has been authorized,” spokesperson Major James P. Cassella told the San Francisco Chronicle, referring to the status of the gay discharge policy. “However, consistent with past practices, administrative discharges could continue under stop-loss.” To clarify what the military really intended to do, Cassella said that “commanders would be given enough latitude in this area to apply good judgment and balance the best interests of the service, the unit and the individual involved.”39
Just in case that didn’t make it clear, a Pentagon spokesperson told The Advocate soon after that there had been no shift at all in the status of gay troops: “There is no policy that would generate a change in the standards or in the administrative due process for [Pentagon] programs,” he said, “including the department’s management of homosexual conduct policies as prescribed in law.”40 Though officially there was no change with regard to the implementation of “don’t ask, don’t tell,” the authorization of stop-loss implied an obvious concern about losing troops just as U.S. forces were preparing to land in Afghanistan.
In September 2005, the Palm Center obtained an army commander’s handbook for reserve soldiers, which left no room for ambiguity about whether gay troops would be mobilized when they were needed. Under the section entitled “Personnel Actions During the Mobilization Process,” it said that in cases of homosexuality, “if discharge isn’t requested prior to the unit’s receipt of alert notification, discharge isn’t authorized. Member will enter AD [active duty] with the unit.”41
The handbook was from 1999, but was still in effect in the years following 9/11. When the media confronted the army with the document, the Defense Department admitted that it knowingly sent gays to war in the Middle East. Kim Waldron, a spokesperson at the U.S. Army Forces Command at Fort McPherson, told the Washington Blade that the reason was to deny soldiers a “get out of jail free” card. “The bottom line,” she said, “is some people are using sexual orientation to avoid deployment. So in this case, with the Reserve and Guard forces, if a soldier ‘tells,’ they still have to go to war and the homosexual issue is postponed until they return to the U.S. and the unit is demobilized.” True to form, the Pentagon then tried to take it back. Lieutenant Colonel Ellen Krenke, a Department of Defense spokesperson, said that the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy remained in effect. “Our policy has not changed,” she said.42
Two weeks later, a worried public affairs official from the headquarters of the U.S. Army Forces Command contacted the Palm Center to say that media reports had been “somewhat in error” and he wished to “clarify and amplify the story.” He explained that if a soldier is activated and says he is gay, it can take several months to corroborate the claim. During that inquiry, the soldier can indeed be mobilized. However, while the initial spokesperson “may have been accurately quoted” in saying that gay soldiers “still have to go to war and the homosexual issue is postponed until they return to the U.S.,” that spokesperson was wrong. In fact, the soldier’s case “is not postponed until the unit returns. The review process continues while the unit is deployed and there is no delay in resolving the matter or discharging the soldier if that is the resolution.”43
The honesty of this clarification was perhaps admirable. Here was a top army spokesperson admitting that a gay soldier is not so threatening to cohesion that he can’t be deployed with his unit; however, when the bureaucrats back home finally “resolve” that the soldier is gay, they’ll immediately pull him from the front lines. What we are left with is this: Gays were indeed sent to war, and were removed not because they threatened cohesion but because they disappointed officials in Virginia and Washington. Even David Burrelli, who had testified at Nunn’s hearings about the “causes” of homosexuality along with “asexuality, fetishes, and other paraphilias,” admitted the military sent known gays to war: “The situation that arises during a time of deployment place[s] homosexuals in a no-win situation. They are allowed or ordered to serve at the risk of their own lives with the probability of forced discharge when hostilities end if their sexuality becomes an issue. By deploying suspected homosexuals with their units, the services bring into question their own argument that the presence of homosexuals seriously impairs the accomplishment of the military mission.”44
In fact, there is no question that the military delays and neglects gay discharges during the current wars in the Middle East. In 2006 and 2007, the navy twice deployed a gay Hebrew linguist, Jason Knight, to duty despite his public acknowledgment that he was gay. His dismissal form was marked “completion of service” rather than homosexual conduct, thus allowing the navy to redeploy him in the future. Only after the sailor became the subject of an article in Stars and Stripes, a military newspaper, did the navy finally and swiftly discharge him.45
Th
ere could be no clearer proof than the story of Jason Knight, along with the discovery of the army commander’s handbook, that when it comes to real life, the military has no trouble sending gays to war. According to The Boston Globe, following 9/11 the military allowed an increasing number of service members identified as gay to remain in uniform—twelve gays and lesbians to continue to serve in 2003, twenty-two in 2004, thirty-six in 2005.46 And these were only the reported ones. The pattern raises serious questions about the elaborate rationale that the presence of open homosexuals would undermine unit cohesion. After all, if gays impair cohesion, and if cohesion is most critical during wartime, then the years following 9/11 would be the last time you would want to relax the ban.
And yet, wartime is exactly when the ban has long been relaxed and sometimes totally ignored or officially suspended. In every war this country has fought over the last century gays have been knowingly retained. During World War II, the army ordered commanders to “salvage” soldiers who were facing the boot for sodomy, to review pending cases with the aim of “conserving all available manpower,” and to cancel discharges and make convicted “sodomists” eligible for reassignment after prison. Indeed, a psychiatric study during the war found that it was unofficial policy in the army and navy to permit virtually all gay troops to serve.47
In the peacetime years between World War II and 1950, the ousting of gays more than tripled. Yet during the Korean War, discharges in the navy fell by half. In 1953, the year the truce was signed at Panmunjom, they more than doubled again. Ditto Vietnam, when discharges plummeted during the biggest buildups of troop strength in the second half of the 1960s.48
During the first Gulf War, the Pentagon resumed its pattern. Even before the air assault began to drive Saddam’s forces out of Kuwait, a Defense Department spokesperson said that in case of a war, gay discharges could be “deferred” based on “operational needs” and indicated they could resume when the soldiers were no longer needed. “Any administrative procedure is dependent on operational considerations of the unit that would administer such proceedings,” the spokesperson said. “Just because a person says they’re gay, that doesn’t mean they can stop packing their bags.” He added that the action “doesn’t abdicate the rules,” but that in war, “you just have to establish priorities.”49
Despite the clear indications that gays would be knowingly sent to war, on the eve of the invasion of Iraq, a Defense Department spokesman, Bill Caldwell, somehow managed to stammer that “the policy on gays continues that homosexuality is incompatible with military service.” Lest this particular round of doublespeak leave you unclear on exactly what the policy or practice was during the Persian Gulf War, a similar directive to the 1999 army commander’s handbook revealed that commanders were being instructed to mobilize known gays during this conflict, too. Lawyers and gay rights advocates cited at least seventeen cases of service members during this period who told their superiors they were gay but were informed they would still have to deploy. One lesbian reservist was even told she would have to provide documentation that she tried to marry another woman if she was to prove she was gay, a particularly tough trick to pull off given that same-sex marriage was not legal anywhere in the world. In the six months after the war, over a thousand gays were discharged, many of whom were known to be gay at the time they were sent to fight.50
One almost feels sorry for the Pentagon, or at least the poor creatures who staff the public affairs office and have to defend the indefensible. But instead of ignoring the law, military leaders had another option: They could have tried to change it. After all, the military leadership routinely presses the legislature to enact laws it deems essential to military readiness. In November 2002, for instance, the office of the undersecretary of defense ordered a comprehensive review of the military’s language programs—requirements, training, personnel—with an eye toward radically revamping how the government provided language expertise for the war on terrorism. The result was a “Defense Language Transformation Team,” which ultimately produced a “road map” to identify appropriate actions needed to create a new “global footprint” for the Defense Department and a “new approach to warfighting in the 21st century.”
The road map instructed that language personnel policy be updated, “given the lessons of current operations and the Global War on Terrorism.” The objective was to “reinvigorate the Defense Language Program” and “maximize the accession, development, and employment of individuals with language skills.” It also provided for the creation of a database with the names of former military personnel who had been separated so they could be tracked for possible “recall or voluntary return.” The objective was to be able to trace the accession and separation of military linguists so that they could be “developed and managed as critical strategic assets.” This would include tracking trends in the “accession and retention of individuals” with critical language skills and “explor[ing] innovative concepts to expand capabilities.”51
Here’s one: Stop firing gay linguists! In none of the dozens of recommendations included in the road map’s extensive appendix did there appear any reconsideration of the gay policy. If ever there were a time to recommend revisiting a personnel policy that was ill-suited to our nation’s defense, surely this was it. Could the silence be a factor of the Pentagon’s inability to lift the ban without congressional action? Not judging by its other recommendations. The road map did not shy away from counseling several other actions that would require approval by lawmakers, such as its support for a Civilian Linguist Reserve Corps, which, said the road map, would be “subject to legislative enactment.”52
Nor did the Pentagon’s February 2005 white paper, entitled, “A Call to Action for National Foreign Language Capabilities.” The paper “urgently recommended” that the president appoint a National Language Authority to oversee a new foreign language strategy coordinated by the federal government. Like the Defense Language Transformation Team’s road map, “A Call to Action” stressed the need to “move the Nation toward a 21st century vision” of cultural insight and strategic effectiveness.53
The white paper was explicit about calling for congressional action. It recommended the formation of a National Foreign Language Coordination Council, which would “advocate maximum use of resources” and “recommend policy and legislation to build the national capacity in language ability and cultural understanding.” The Coordination Council, it said, should have its work “enabled and funded through legislation proposed by the Administration and approved by Congress.” Elsewhere in the report appeared a hearty endorsement of proposed legislation in Congress to address the need to increase American language expertise. The pending laws, it said, “are welcome signs of the emergence of [national-level] leadership.”54
The need for legislative action was clearly no cause for pause in taking strong stands for radical change. Beyond calls for legal change, both papers sought, to their credit, to change those cultural components in the national security and educational communities that served to hamstring real progress in American language expertise. And they gestured toward policies and practices that could have incorporated revisiting the wisdom of kicking out gay linguists. “Government agencies,” said “A Call to Action,” “should review current personnel positions to ensure that foreign language, cultural understanding, and crisis preparedness needs have been identified” and addressed.55
Could these calls for reform prompt a revisit of the gay ban? Perhaps, if prejudice and inertia were not standing in the way. But what about the sentiments of the civilian leaders in charge of the military? It sometimes seems they’re getting the picture. “We must identify the critical nodes in our culture that can be influenced most effectively, and we must identify the means to influence them—to cause a shift, now,” said Undersecretary of Defense David Chu, in announcing the release of the white paper. “We must find where and how we can best concentrate our effort in order to produce significant change.” Donald Rumsfeld also we
ighed in. “We simply must develop a greater capacity for languages that reflect the demands of this century,” he said. “No technology delivers this capability; it is a truly human skill that our forces must have to win, and that we must have to keep the peace.”56 Indeed, as Rumsfeld had been saying whenever anyone would listen, the twenty-first century is different from the one before it, and it brings with it a different culture. But when asked if the gay ban should survive the end of the twentieth century, Rumsfeld said there were no plans to reexamine the policy.
Given the enormous energy spent over the last several years addressing how to stem a recruitment and retention crisis that is undermining the war on terrorism, the general unwillingness to revisit the gay ban can seem like a comical misunderstanding of the policy’s title. It’s as if officials believe that “don’t ask, don’t tell” means they’re not allowed to even raise the issue. More probable is that the same sentiment that lay behind the initial policy continues to characterize the outlook of those who might otherwise have the moral authority to ask the hard questions; most people simply wish the issue would never come up. The question now is whether the military—and the nation— can afford to remain silent about a policy that is needlessly undermining the readiness of the armed forces.
WITH NO ACTION to review the policy, unable to keep up with a backlog of Arabic documents, and understaffed in its interrogations of Middle Eastern detainees, the government turned increasingly to private contracting companies at much greater financial cost and far lower oversight. As a result, quality suffered. One company, the San Diego–based Titan Corporation, was ordered in 2005 to pay $28.5 million for violating the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, barring bribery of foreign leaders. Another, Worldwide Language Resources, hastily hired a former army intelligence specialist to translate Arabic responses from detainees at Guantánamo Bay Naval Base. The translator, William Tierney, had used his translations skills as a chief warrant officer in the army, but had left the service in 2000 amid tensions with superiors. His tenure at Guantánamo met a similar fate. Just six weeks after he began, Worldwide relieved him of his duties there because of complaints from military officials who worked with him. They said he was insubordinate, “divisive,” and a “burden to the mission.”57
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