Unfriendly Fire

by Dr. Nathaniel Frank

  Whatever the judgment of history about the behavior of political, military, and cultural leaders at the dawn of “don’t ask, don’t tell,” the fact remains that the fracas of 1993 was a world away from today. Back then, overwhelming majorities of military members objected stridently to opening up the ranks to known gays. But as retired NATO commander Wesley Clark put it a decade later as he questioned troops on gay service, the “temperature of the issue has changed” since then. “People were much more irate about this issue in the early ’90s than I found in the late ’90s, for whatever reason, [perhaps because of] younger people coming into the military. It just didn’t seem to be the same emotional hot button issue by ’98, ’99, that it had been in ’92, ’93.” The most dramatic and relevant changes, as Clark mentioned, were in the attitudes of young people. An October 2004 poll by the National Annenberg Election Survey found that 42 percent of service members generally believed that gays and lesbians should be allowed to serve openly. But for the first time, 50 percent, a statistical majority, of junior enlisted service members supported gay service.59

  Interviews with straight service members bear out the polls. Brett Keen, a former E4 army specialist, served in Afghanistan as an intelligence analyst. He said that people’s homosexual orientation was no secret. “When you live in close quarters with someone for months or years, you learn a lot about them,” he said. “You’re obviously going to learn their sexuality.” He added that it’s often “obvious” who is gay even when they don’t say. “It’s just part of who you are,” he said. “No one really cared.” Of course, there was joking about the matter, perhaps as a way to defuse any discomfort people might have had. “It was just like ribbing on someone for dressing funny,” he said. “It wasn’t hate-related.” Keen even described a new sensitivity to those who clearly don’t wish to talk about their homosexuality. If you have a gay coworker, “you know not to ask him how his girlfriend’s doing, because that would be insensitive.60

  Keen also found that the gay ban, to the extent that it stifled people from being open, caused a strain. “They’re asking you to hold back a crucial part of who you are,” he said. “I think it’s impossible.” As for opponents of gay service, Keen said he wouldn’t want to serve with someone who is “so wrapped up in their own bigotry and judgment that they don’t really have time to focus on the mission.” Privacy? In Afghanistan, Keen’s unit spent months in primitive barracks where everyone showered together. “It was never an issue,” he said, even though it was widely known that at least one of the men in his unit was gay. “No one was ever like, he’s in there, I’m not going in.”61

  Sean May is a straight machinist mate in the navy’s Pacific Fleet who spent eight months on a forward-deployed ship in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom. “It’s becoming more and more common now that you hear about people coming out of the closet,” he said. “If civilians can do it, why can’t they. If they’re comfortable with that, that’s who they are. I don’t care, just as long as they know where we are.” Some of the chiefs, May said, were “straight-up homophobes.” But May’s view was different. “If a person wants to live the way they want to live, everyone else can eat shit.”62

  Another straight sailor said that there will always be those who oppose gays in the military, but they are increasingly a minority. “You got your homophobes who are up in arms that someone’s looking at your wanker,” he said, and they try to say that gay people are “lesser.” But to him, “it’s just a preference. To me, it’s look but don’t touch. And if they want to say some guy has a nice this or that, fine, and if they come on to me, I just say I’m not into that.”63

  Stephen Jay Vossler joined the army as a nineteen-year-old in 2002, became a Korean linguist, and served as a voice signals interceptor. Vossler came from a small town in southeastern Nebraska where it’s still okay to call people “fag.” Yet he insists that trust and cohesion only increase when his gay and lesbian coworkers are allowed to be themselves. “Right now,” he said, “the policy forces gay people, if they’re not open, to lie about their personal life, or to not talk about it.” As a result, Vossler said, “you don’t get that sort of personal cohesion that is really beneficial in the military. The gay service member always feels at a distance, and that drives a wedge between you and your peers.” Vossler spoke of fundamentalist Christian friends who came to the military with cool or even hostile feelings about homosexuality and changed once they met gays in their unit. “The military,” he concluded, “would become better” if there were no ban. “It would be more cohesive and would be a really great work environment because it would force people to accept more people.”64

  Straight opinions like these do not just come from young liberals. Some older veterans are also changing their tune. Dan Rossi, a straight fifty-eight-year-old former Marine who belongs to a New York coalition of veterans organizations, says his children would probably call him a “homophobe.” He strongly opposes same-sex marriage. But recently, he struggled with the issue of gays in the military in some tough conversations in his veterans groups. And now his position is clear. “If I’m standing next to a Marine and he is a better shot than me, I don’t care if he’s gay or not,” he said. “If a person goes into the service to make a career out of it, as long as they’re good at what they do, let them do it.” In a moving testimony before New York City Council in January 2008, Rossi shared his thoughts publicly: “I come from the old school,” he said, “Italian, macho, all that stuff. But we have to face facts.” About “gender and all this stuff,” he said, “what the hell’s the difference? Let’s let these people alone and let’s go to work.”65

  EVENTUALLY EVEN CONSERVATIVE political leaders began to get the picture. In 2007, after Shalikashvili made his statement calling for repeal, two prominent former Republican lawmakers came out publicly for repealing “don’t ask, don’t tell,” both citing Shalikashvili’s stance. Bob Barr was a staunch conservative Georgia congressman from 1995 to 2003. He still opposes same-sex marriage and efforts to classify gays and lesbians as members of a constitutionally protected minority class. But “service in the armed forces,” he wrote in a Wall Street Journal piece entitled, “Don’t Ask, Who Cares,” “is another matter. The bottom line here is that, with nearly a decade and a half of the hybrid ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy to guide us, I have become deeply impressed with the growing weight of credible military opinion which concludes that allowing gays to serve openly in the military does not pose insurmountable problems for the good order and discipline of the services.” Barr argued that treating gay and lesbian troops equally was actually “about as conservative a position” as there is, because the gay ban was an invasion of individual freedom and privacy; it harmed the military by mocking meritocracy, spurning the talents of skilled individuals and replacing them with unqualified ones; and it wasted taxpayer money with unnecessary government spending. “For all these reasons, many conservatives and other former supporters of the policy have concluded it’s time to change,” he wrote.66

  Alan Simpson, an army veteran and former Republican senator from Wyoming, voted for “don’t ask, don’t tell” in 1993. But in 2007, he reversed course. “My thinking shifted,” he wrote that spring in The Washington Post, “when I read that the military was firing translators because they are gay.” Simpson wondered: “Is there a ‘straight’ way to translate Arabic? Is there a ‘gay’ Farsi? My God, we’d better start talking sense before it is too late. We need every able-bodied, smart patriot to help us win this war.” For Simpson, so much had changed since his 1993 vote that it had become “critical that we review—and overturn—the ban on gay service in the military.” He cited a 2003 Gallup poll showing that 91 percent of Americans between ages eighteen and twenty-nine favored lifting the ban, again a key finding considering these were the people cited as the very reason a ban was needed. “Let us end ‘don’t ask, don’t tell,’ ” concluded Simpson. “This policy has become a serious detriment to the readiness of America’s
forces.”67

  And perhaps even more remarkable, especially for Washington, D.C., is that the talk of these politicians has actually been translated into action. In 2005 (and each year thereafter), Congress has introduced the Military Readiness Enhancement Act to repeal “don’t ask, don’t tell.” Initially spearheaded by Marty Meehan of Massachusetts, who has long protested the gay ban, it had little chance of even getting out of committee, but the act soon gained over 140 cosponsors, including several Republicans. In the spring of 2005, a group of eight retired generals and admirals announced their support for the repeal bill, becoming the highest-ranking military members to do so. Then, in 2007, a group of twenty-eight retired flag officers released a statement urging Congress to repeal the ban. The officers said that replacing “don’t ask, don’t tell” with a policy of equal treatment “would not harm, and would indeed help, our armed forces,” and it pointed to foreign militaries as good examples of effective policies of equal treatment. “Our service members are professionals who are able to work together effectively despite differences in race, gender, religion, and sexuality,” said the statement. “Such collaboration reflects the strength and the best traditions of our democracy.” By the next year, the number of signatories had grown to one hundred.68

  In July 2008, a bipartisan panel of retired flag officers released a report through the Palm Center that represented what John Shalikashvili called “one of the most comprehensive evaluations of the issue of gays in the military since the Rand study” in 1993. The panel found that lifting the ban is “unlikely to pose any significant risk to morale, good order, discipline, or cohesion.” It marked the first time a Marine Corps general ever called publicly for an end to the gay ban. “I believe this should have been done much earlier,” said Brigadier General Hugh Aitken, one of the authors. Another was Lieutenant General Minter Alexander, the former chair of the Military Working Group that helped create “don’t ask, don’t tell.”69

  Later that month, the first hearings since 1993 were held on “don’t ask, don’t tell” by the House Armed Services Military Personnel Subcommittee. The Pentagon declined to send anyone to defend the policy, and pro-ban forces were only able to supply two witnesses to argue their case. One was retired sergeant major Brian Jones, who, echoing the moral angst of Maginnis and Wells-Petry in the early 1990s, dwelled on the fragile climate of “selfless service” and “esprit decor” [sic] in the military. He argued that the “introduction of homosexual men under these conditions would create unnecessary tension and potential for disruption that would be disastrous in terms of increased risk to individual soldier’s [sic] lives as well as mission-accomplishment.” Although Jones had volunteered to testify, he found it “surprising that we are here today to talk about this issue of repealing the 1993 law.” Using the charged language of special rights, he explained why it was a waste of time for the lawmakers and witnesses to gather together that day: “With all of the important issues that require attention, it is difficult to understand why a minority faction is demanding that their concerns be given priority over more important issues.” Jones insisted he was comfortable around gays and lesbians and was not anti-gay even though he resorted to the basest stereotypes of homosexual indulgence. In a subsequent radio interview he asserted—falsely—that the fired Arabic linguists were discharged because they were having orgies and warned that lifting the ban would result in wild parties hosted by gay couples living on bases.70

  The other anti-gay witness was Elaine Donnelly, a Michigan-based social conservative who runs the Center for Military Readiness, which is dedicated to opposing women and gays in combat. Donnelly’s testimony revealed just how morally and intellectually bankrupt opposition to gay service had become by 2008. Her testimony was so confused and shocking that normally staid lawmakers blurted out that it was “dumb,” “bonkers,” “inappropriate,” and an “insult” to the army. Donnelly spoke of “HIV positivity” and “exotic forms of sexual expression,” including “passive/aggressive actions” that she claimed were common in the homosexual community. She charged that letting gays serve openly would introduce “erotic factors” into the military and “sexualize the atmosphere.” It would amount, she said, to a policy of “relax and enjoy it.” Her evidence that gay service would undermine the military was a lurid tale of a band of “black lesbians” who allegedly “gang-assult[ed]” a fellow soldier. The story was thirty-four years old.71

  The only other evidence Donnelly presented, which she took from a companion article she wrote the previous year, was an assertion that Britain was having more trouble than reported with its eight-year-old policy of allowing openly gay service. “They do have recruiting and retention problems,” she said, implying that the presence of gays was the culprit. But the articles she cited as evidence said nothing about gays, stating simply that the Iraq War was straining recruitment. The one article she cited that did discuss a same-sex assault—an incident that, if used to ban gays, would also require banning straights—described an episode that occurred well before Britain lifted its ban. Incredibly, she claimed that Britain had a problem with “homosexual bullying,” except that the article she mentioned actually described “homophobic bullying.” She had turned gay victims into gay menaces.72

  Representative Chris Shays, Republican of Connecticut, was appalled. He pointed to Captain Joan Darrah, a lesbian veteran who had given thirty years of service to her country and became chief of staff and deputy commander at the Office of Naval Intelligence. “Would you please tell me, Ms. Donnelly, why I should give one twit about this woman’s sexual orientation when it didn’t interfere one bit with her service?” Representative Nancy Boyda, Democrat of Kansas, looked at another gay veteran testifying that day, Staff Sergeant Eric Alva, a Marine who lost his leg in Basra and became the first American service member wounded in the Iraq War. Speaking to Jones, she said incredulously: “I know that you were not implying that Staff Sergeant Eric Alva didn’t perform selfless service in his line of duty, did you?”73

  WITH EACH PASSING year, the evidence becomes clearer and further exposes the fault line between the main assumption of “don’t ask, don’t tell” (that gays cannot serve openly without undermining cohesion) and the reality on the ground—that thousands of gay U.S. troops already serve, including openly on the front lines of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. This disconnect is held together by another reality: A policy affecting tens of thousands of American troops is propped up by a small group of removed military and political leaders whose most basic assumptions are totally at odds with what really goes on in the barracks, at training camps, and on the front lines of U.S. military campaigns. While thousands of gays in uniform are probably out to their peers, with no damage to unit cohesion, an old guard is stuck in an earlier era, either unaware of or unwilling to acknowledge this reality, and thus unable to command their troops from a position of understanding and insight.

  These defenders of the ban, like intransigent dictators bewildered when their people rise up against them, continue to insist that openly gay service would be detrimental to the military—and remain blind to the existing reality of openly gay service. The story of “don’t ask, don’t tell,” then, is the story of what happens when a gathering flood of evidence and criticism begins to wash over an old guard that is unwilling to respond to a new world: Badly needed Arabic translators are sacrificed to the prejudice of military brass, a vocal minority of social conservatives, and their allies in Congress; reservists are dragged from civilian life to replace them, and stop-loss and forced contract extensions—made necessary by an overstretched force—lower the morale and effectiveness of deployed troops; taxpayers spend over $360 million to replace ousted service members; and our military and our nation are increasingly isolated and embarrassed as our allies lurch past us in liberalizing their policies on gay troops.

  Listening to the voices of the troops themselves yields a portrait of a military in transition, in which the fears, discomfort, and dislike reported during
the time when “don’t ask, don’t tell” was formulated are not nearly as pronounced. To be sure, terrible fates still befall gays and lesbians who wear a military uniform, particularly those who dare to be honest about who they are in climates that remain hostile. There are still significant pockets of prejudice and even bigotry in this country, furthering the stain on the U.S. military. But alongside incidents of hostile behavior is a much quieter and far more significant story of integration and compromise. Relations between gays and straights create negligible disruptions, and the rapport between gays and straights—even in the bastion of traditionalism that is the U.S. military—can actually provide a positive source of bonding and social cohesion. When gays are out, they report greater success in bonding and professional advancement, as well as increased levels of commitment, retention, morale, and access to essential support services.74

  The simple fact is that younger people are substantially more tolerant of gays and lesbians than older people are. The positive responses from younger service members to the presence of open gays and lesbians in the military reflect that the armed forces are no exception, and that, indeed, a marked liberalization of attitudes toward gays and lesbians has been underway for some time. Service members who served both before and after the current policy was adopted say a significant evolution in feelings about homosexuality has occurred since 1993. Nevertheless, many gay service members remain afraid of the consequences of being out or of being outed, as well as the harm that can come from anti-gay harassment in the military. Consequently, many remain closeted, to the detriment of their own well-being and that of their comrades. Though the realities of our world are so very different from the world as seen by the creators and promulgators of “don’t ask, don’t tell,” far too many gay men and women—and along with them, our military as a whole—are hamstrung, trapped, and wasted by this useless and harmful creation of a bygone era.