Instead, the army announced it would throw more money at the problem and further lower standards. That summer new recruits were offered the option of earning over $100,000 in incentives. At the same time, the military asked Congress to raise the age limit for new enlistees to forty-two. The previous age limit had been thirty-nine for Army Reserves and National Guard and thirty-five for active-duty.10
Even so, General Peter Pace, a former recruiter who had just been selected as the new chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, acknowledged that enlistees could not simply be bought; they had to be enticed with words of respect and approval. “This is not about money and benefits,” he told reporters. “This is about message. If we let our young folks and middle-young folks know how much we appreciate their service to their country—there are thousands and thousands of young men and women out there who want to serve this country.” Despite the emphasis on “message,” the Pentagon continued to project an increasingly unpopular image of intolerance with its support for the gay ban—precisely the kind of image it should have been shedding as it reached further and further into civilian society to attract new recruits. Pace did not help matters when, that same year, he told a Wharton student conference: “The U.S. military mission fundamentally rests on the trust, confidence and cooperation amongst its members, and the homosexual lifestyle does not comport with that kind of trust and confidence.” It was an odd way to “let our young folks and middle-young folks know how much we appreciate their service to their country.” His initial remarks were little noticed, but in March 2007, he repeated his anti-gay stance to the Chicago Tribune, saying homosexuality was “immoral” and likening it to adultery. “I believe homosexual acts between two individuals are immoral,” he said, “and that we should not condone immoral acts.” Six months later, he was forced to step down, primarily because of these remarks, which were widely seen as a gaff. It was a telling commentary on how American attitudes toward homosexuality were leaving people like Pace behind. (His successor, Admiral Mike Mullen, suggested the American people, through Congress, should decide whether to lift the ban and promised the military would oblige.)11
What happens when the military cannot fill its slots with qualified people? It fills them with unqualified people, if it can fill them at all. In 2005, reports emerged of recruiters concealing police and medical records of recruits, doctoring paperwork, helping applicants cheat on tests, and cleaning up evidence of drug use, all in an effort to reach their goals and enlist enough bodies to fill the ranks. Recruiting agents also engaged in threats, coercion, and lies to attract people. According to the army, the number of “recruitment improprieties” shot up by over 50 percent from 2002 to 2004.12
While recruiting spokesmen claimed there was no official policy to lower standards, the army that year increased by nearly 50 percent the number of new recruits it granted “moral waivers”—an invitation to enlist despite a prior record of criminal activity or substance abuse that would have normally been a barrier to entry. In general, the story goes, the Pentagon seeks recruits “of good moral character,” in order to avoid hiring people whose past behavior would make them more likely “to become disciplinary cases or security risks, or [to] disrupt good order, morale, and discipline.” Though “don’t ask, don’t tell” does not characterize gays as having character defects, it does borrow the language of “good order, morale, and discipline” to argue that gays who don’t hide their identity somehow imperil all three, despite a complete absence of evidence for that case. Yet between 2003 and 2006, thanks to the military’s moral waivers program, 4,230 convicted felons, 43,977 individuals convicted of serious misdemeanors, including assault, and 58,561 illegal drug abusers were allowed to enlist. Between 2004 and 2007, the number of convicted felons nearly doubled, rising from 824 to 1,605. Allowable offenses under the program include murder, kidnapping, and “making terrorist threats.”13
In 2008, an army spokesman, Paul Boyce, defended the latest round of moral waivers, which included an 88 percent rise of convicted felons over the previous year in the Army and Marine Corps. Hundreds of waivers were granted for serious crimes, including burglary, aggravated assault, sex crimes, and making bomb threats. “We are a reflection of American society and the changes that affect it,” Boyce explained. But the military, it appeared, remained deaf to the revolution in attitudes toward gays and lesbians.14
INDEED, WHILE THE military regards gays as dispensable, its drug abusers and underachievers have become prized possessions, warm bodies to be kept at great cost. In the spring of 2005, the army reported it was recruiting higher numbers of ex-convicts, drug addicts, and high school dropouts; it acknowledged that they were being advanced even when they failed basic training and that they had “performed poorly” and become a “liability.” “Even if they graduate,” said one drill instructor, “they may not have Army values.” By March, the army had doubled its share of recruits without a high school diploma from 2004, as well as the number of new members who scored at the lowest level on the aptitude test, bringing that figure to the highest level since 2001. In 2005, the army hired 667 soldiers who fell into Category 4, those who scored in the lowest third of the military aptitude test. That number is fourteen more than the military discharged the previous year under the anti-gay policy.15
Part of the reason officials were retaining underqualified members was that rising attrition rates were also cutting into their numbers. Indeed, that summer, the military sent a memo to commanders in all four service branches instructing them to buck high attrition rates by retaining drug addicts, alcoholics, and those who failed to perform adequately or pass physical fitness tests. “We need your concerted effort to reverse the negative trend,” said the memo, referring to the slide in personnel. “By reducing attrition 1%, we can save up to 3,000 initial-term soldiers. That’s 3,000 more soldiers in our formations.”16
At the time, this number was less than all the gays discharged since 9/11. Advocates of the gay ban have long dismissed gay discharges as a tiny portion of the overall force, but the numbers here are too obvious to ignore, and quality is, of course, the bottom line. Yet the Pentagon was willing to accept drug addicts, alcoholics, and others—who by definition are more likely to threaten discipline and morale—just to get “3,000 more soldiers in our formations.” When it comes to gays, over 12,000 unnecessary discharges is a drop in the bucket; when it comes to those who are truly a risk to military readiness, the Pentagon will sacrifice quality to hold the numbers. As the memo concludes, “Each soldier retained reduces the strain on recruiting command and our retention program, which must replace every soldier who departs the Army early.”17
The Pentagon, in short, hired less competent recruits to fight our wars rather than hire or retain fully competent gay troops. The risks of this path are far higher than any risks associated with letting gays serve. While no evidence has ever tied gay service members to impairing military operations, plenty of evidence shows that people who have not graduated from high school have higher dropout rates from the service and are more difficult to train. They are also more prone to disciplinary problems and are less likely to serve out their contracts. According to one GAO study of soldiers who leave service early, those who were granted moral waivers were more likely to be discharged for misconduct than those who were not.18
Or worse: They’re not discharged soon enough. One of the most damaging developments in the American effort to combat terrorism and stabilize the Middle East was the string of war crimes that came to light at Abu Ghraib, Haditha, and other notorious sites of American abuse. On March 11, 2006, four U.S. soldiers from the army’s 101st Airborne Division were manning a checkpoint in a residential area of Mahmudiya, a town twenty miles south of Baghdad; these men were liquored up and armed with M4 rifles. According to reports, the soldiers began plotting to rape a civilian in a nearby home. Assigning one man to monitor the radio, the others changed into black clothes and raided the home of Abeer Qasim Hamza, a young Iraqi girl. According t
o allegations, Private Steven Green shot and killed the girl’s parents and sister, raped and murdered the teenager, and then set her body on fire. The nineteen-year-old Green was a high school dropout with three misdemeanor convictions and a history of drug and alcohol abuse.19
When Green was arrested, it marked the fifth atrocity the Pentagon investigated just in the spring of 2006. The developments spawned strenuous debate about what causes such war crimes and where responsibility should lie. But the question the military is most loathe to answer is also the most obvious one: What was Steven Green doing in Iraq in the first place? After all, he had enlisted literally days after leaving his jail cell in Texas, where he was serving time for his third misdemeanor conviction, this time for alcohol possession. He had a history of difficulties and disruptions and, not surprisingly, only lasted in the military for eleven months before being booted out in April for a personality disorder, one month after the killings. His arrest came three months later.20
The answer is that Green was admitted on a moral waiver. That year, 733 ex-convicts who would not otherwise have been accepted into the armed forces were allowed to wear the uniform and represent their country. The same year, the Pentagon booted 742 troops under “don’t ask, don’t tell.” It might not have had to hire a single ex-convict if it had let gays serve.
In the case of Abu Ghraib, it is not known if any of the alleged perpetrators were hired on moral waivers. It’s clear, however, that undertrained and underqualified personnel worked at the prison. It’s also clear that the military traded competent gays away and filled their slots with those who perpetrated abuse. Private Lynndie England, a chief perpetrator of the Abu Ghraib abuses, was a file clerk who did not “have any reason to be handling prisoners,” according to a military prosecutor. The head of the prison’s interrogation center was a civil affairs officer and had no experience with interrogation. He even had to ask military intelligence soldiers to show him the ropes so he could figure out what he was supposed to be doing. In 2004, the Fay Report, a high-level army investigation examining the causes of the Abu Ghraib scandal, identified forty-four instances of abuse committed by military police, military intelligence soldiers, and civilian contractors. (One incident was an alleged rape committed by an American translator.) The report found that “systemic problems,” including “an acute shortage of M.P. and M.I. soldiers,” contributed to the climate that produced Abu Ghraib.21 So what does the military do? In the six years before Abu Ghraib, it fires 268 intelligence personnel and 232 military police and security troops because they’re gay.
In 2007, a federal government study found that gang members were entering the military at alarming rates. Between 2003 and 2006, incidents of gang-related activity in the armed forces quadrupled. Some experts estimated 2 percent of all new recruits had gang affiliations. “Officials do not want this topic spoken about because it uncovers how the Army, in its rush to recruit more soldiers, has had to lower its security standards, allowing in volunteers with criminal backgrounds,” said Gregory Lee, a former supervisor of the national Drug Enforcement Agency. “We don’t have enough soldiers and the army has strict orders to increase the number of enlisted troops nationwide, even if that means recruiting criminals.”22
PERHAPS COMMANDERS SHOULD have thought twice about hounding Derek Sparks out of the navy just after the United States invaded Afghanistan. Sparks, who enlisted in 1987, was a signalman seaman recruit specializing in visual communications. As a command career counselor, Sparks had his own office aboard the USNS Bridge, a combat logistics ship, where one night he and two other gay friends were socializing while deployed off the coast of Pakistan. After leaving his two friends behind in his office, he learned the next morning that they had been caught by the command master chief in violation of the homosexual conduct policy.
The first report of the master of arms made no mention of Sparks, but his report statement tried to implicate Sparks in the violation, despite dozens of witnesses who saw him elsewhere at the time of the incident. Rumors began to fly and Sparks heard that his master of arms might try to call him up on more serious charges than homosexual conduct. At this point, he admitted he was gay. “I was tired of playing, I was tired of hiding, I was tired of all the bullshit,” he recalled. “The only reason the command master chief tried to implicate me was because he knew I was gay and had something against me.” In 2002, four months into Operation Enduring Freedom, Sparks was pulled off his ship in Bahrain, airlifted to Dubai, and deposited in Seattle.23
THE AIR FORCE might also have been missing Beth Schissel. Like any step-mom, Schissel worried about the health and safety of her twenty-four-year-old son, James, while he finished his first tour of duty in Iraq. A first lieutenant in the army, James was tasked as a transportation officer, responsible for ferrying supplies through hostile terrain that was often bombarded with RPGs and littered with IEDs. “There’s no front line over there,” said Schissel. “You’re in harm’s way no matter what you’re doing.”24
But Schissel was not like most stepmoms. If her instinct to shield James from harm seems familiar, her predicament was not. As a former air force officer and a physician specializing in pediatric emergency medicine, Schissel felt she should have been there with him, helping to ensure that he and anyone else needing medical treatment got the best care possible. And she would have been, if it weren’t for one thing: She was gay.25
After graduating from the Air Force Academy in 1989, she entered active duty and eventually joined the reserves while she completed medical school, which she hoped would be a route to a military medical career. But during medical school, a male civilian began to stalk and harass her, threatening to out her as a tool of vengeance against someone they both knew well. Terrified, Schissel decided her only recourse was to come out in hopes of blunting the stalker’s weapon. She was discharged on September 10, 2001.
In the first ten years under “don’t ask, don’t tell,” the Pentagon fired 244 surgeons, nurses, dentists, ophthalmologists, and other highly trained medical specialists. The consequences of shortfalls in military medical specialists during wartime are grave. According to a Senate report issued in 2003 by Senators Christopher Bond and Patrick Leahy, hundreds of injured National Guard and Army Reserve soldiers received “inadequate medical attention” while housed at Fort Stewart because of a lack of preparedness that included “an insufficient number of medical clinicians and specialists, which has caused excessive delays in the delivery of care.” The situation created the perception among soldiers that they were receiving care that was inferior to that received by active-duty personnel, which had a “devastating and negative impact on morale.”26
The firing of badly needed medical personnel also made things worse for those who stayed. When the military lacks enough specialists to serve, it must increase the rotations of those it has under contract, adding burdens which make service less appealing to new recruits and to those already in uniform. In the years between 2001 and 2006, more than half of the nonstudent population of the Army Medical Department had deployed to the Middle East. Many were rotating back into the theater for the second and even third time in four years.27 Such frequent rotations compound stress, lower morale, and increase the risk of injury or death. The unexpected extension of military service was a particular burden to the National Guard and reserves, who had on average less training, higher stress levels, and lower morale than full-time soldiers and whose civilian jobs can be difficult to maintain in the face of combat tours with unknown end points.
This was particularly true for doctors. According to 2005 Senate testimony of Lieutenant General Kevin Kiley, surgeon general of the army, the potential for repetitive deployments is a special challenge for physicians, especially reservists, who cannot afford to leave their practices for years at a time. As a result, many are “very reluctant to sign up,” further exacerbating the shortage. For homeland defense operations, said Kiley, “we may be stretched very thin” by relying on medical reservists. Vice Admiral
Donald Arthur, surgeon general of the navy, echoed Kiley’s concern in the same session, citing the “difficulty retaining those specialties who tend to have more deployments than others: the surgeons, the nurse-anesthetists, the perioperative nurses, the combat medic equivalents in the Navy.”28
These difficulties are quantifiable. A November 2005 study released by the GAO on recruitment and reenlistment shortfalls concluded that the military had “failed to fully staff 41 percent of its array of combat and noncombat specialties.” One of the specialties is the medical field. Between 2000 and 2005, according to the report, the army fell short of its target for special forces medical sergeants, as did the reserves with their medical logistics and laboratory specialists. The report warned that “the recruiting environment will become even more challenging in fiscal year 2006.” In testimony before Congress, Major General Joseph G. Webb, Jr., army deputy surgeon general, told lawmakers that, for the first time since before the attacks of September 11, 2001, the army did not meet its goal for health professions scholarship applicants, the “bedrock” of medical department accessions. Both the army and the air force, he said, were straining to recruit enough physicians, nurses, dentists, and other medical specialists to treat service members who are wounded in combat and to provide adequate ongoing care when they return home.29
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