The release of the Pentagon report today has brought home a flood of personal memories, many of which I had forgotten about until the frontpage post brought many of them back.
For many, even here at an enlightened Daily Kos, DADT is an abstract concept. Certainly most get the idea of civil rights being violated, and the injustice of a policy actively barring people willing to serve their country solely based upon sexual orientation, but I suspect few here have ever been the focus of such policies personally. Even those who support its repeal can't grasp the emotional toll it takes to live a secret life in the military, and if discovered, what destruction it can do to the psyche.
In the beginning of the front page post thread, a commenter (who was hide rated) opened the conversation with "Who gives a shit?"
I do. I experienced it. Try to see it through my eyes.
The report touched an emotional trigger point for me and I blasted off a comment here and here that was not terribly thought out, perhaps. It was an "off the cuff" response to years of frustration and embarrassment.
I joined the Army in 1989 not too long out of high school. I was 19 and wanted to go to college, but I came from a hardworking lower middle class family who could not afford to send me. My grandfather, an Army man who was a decorated survivor of the attack on Pearl Harbor in WWII, sat me down and talked to me about the Army as an option for paying for college via the GI Bill. Military service was a strong tradition in our family, so it made sense. I decided to enlist not only for the educational perk, but because I so admired my grandfather and wanted to honor him and make him proud by carrying on the tradition. The only sticking point, and one that would come back to haunt me, was the issue of my sexuality.
Yes, I went into the military knowing full well the risks of being a gay man. I even discussed them with my family (including my grandfather), as they were all aware I was gay. The advice from all of them was the same: just don't "be gay" in the Army. To them, well meaning as they were, the idea that I could just "turn off" being gay while I was serving my country was about as probable as Larry Craig claiming his foot tapping under the bathroom stall was accidental. Nonetheless, although I couldn't stop being gay, I could choose to be celibate so as not to put myself at risk. So I enlisted and took my ASVAB tests. I scored well enough to receive a 98G, or Cryptologic Linguist M.O.S. My family was proud and I was excited about the journey that lay ahead of me.
I did boot camp at Fort Leonard Wood in Missouri. We affectionately nicknamed it "Fort Lost in the Woods, Misery" due to both its location the in the middle of the Mark Twain National Forest and the agony of Basic. Despite that, I loved every minute it. The discipline and exercise suited me. After years of high school ridicule for being suspected of being gay (but never directly addressed by me for fear of reprisals), I was earning praise and the fellowship of my peers doing something we needed to bond together to accomplish. I graduated in the top of my training class with a Certificate of Achievement and talk of OCS after I had completed my AIT training.
During Basic several men I had formed bonds with came to learn I was gay. The team building that boot camp instills also instills trust, and I trusted that these men I was training alongside of would not only not "rat me out" but would have my back. I was right. I thought "What was I so afraid of??" repeatedly.
Upon graduation I was shipped off to Defense Language Institute in Monterey, CA to begin an intense year-long language immersion program in Arabic. As (bad) luck would have it, there were rumblings within the military community that a possible strike on Iraq might be in the works, so many of us in the program were nervous about what it might portend for us, but we buried ourselves in our studies and hoped for the best.
War came, and my class and I were 6 months into our DLI language program when it arrived. A decision was made then by the top brass that profoundly altered the course of my life.
It was decided that those in the Arabic training classes would begin the procedure of getting a SCI Clearance earlier than anticipated to assist in the mining of intelligence data filtering in from Iraq upon graduation from the program. In anticipation of this process, we were required to fill out forms and give the names of five "references" that could vouch for our character. This information would be used by background investigators to assess your risk to national security and grant, or deny, a clearance based upon the information gleaned by the process. Not understanding the ramifications, I filled out my form and waited for my clearance. It never came.
Three weeks into the process, I was called into my Commanding Officer's office. Arriving there, I immediately sensed that something was wrong by the look on his face. I was asked to close the door and sit down. What I heard come out of his mouth rocked me.
"Private T...., are you a homosexual?"
I know I must have gone pale because he said, "It's you and me soldier, take a deep breath." I was terrified and he knew it. A million thoughts ran through my head: Would I be going to jail? Did the Army do such things? Would they publicly say something to my peers? "As much as I wish I could control this son, it is out of my hands. People above me know and I have no choice but to sit you here and ask you. So, are you a homosexual?" Shaking, I confirmed that I was. All he said was "Damn. I can't protect you." I will never know what he meant by that, but I like to believe he, in some small way, didn't agree with the policy to get rid of me. I'll never know.
The next week was some of the most horrible I can recall ever experiencing. I was subjected to spending time with an Army psychologist in four two hour long sessions to discuss my sexuality. When did you think you were gay? WHY do you think you are gay? Were you molested? I was asked twice to write explicit papers in my own handwriting about a sexual encounter in GRAPHIC DETAIL, then sign it. Never mind that I had been celibate. Never mind that I had little sexual experience to start with, let alone describe it. To that I was told to "make something up" and satisfy the requirement. I refused. I was told I had to "prove" I was gay and and that I wasn't trying to use this as a reason to get out of serving my country early. After all, anyone can cry "GAY!!!" to get out of the Army if they don't like it, right?? Despite my reminding them repeatedly that they approached me with this revelation, and that I would rather have kept it under wraps, meant nothing. It needed to be demonstrated that I didn't plant the information as a ruse. I also was told how they found me out: the form I filled out listing five references was simply a jumping off point. Of each of those people, they would ask for five more that may have known me, and so on, and so on, until they finally ran across someone that put them on the trail leading to the truth about my sexuality. Invasive? Yes, but necessary to weed me out as a potential security risk. Possible blackmail fodder, I was told. Again never mind that they already had the goods on me and blackmail was now moot. I was a threat to National Security! At the end of that week, I was sent on my way a defeated spirit. I think I cried for a month afterward when my family learned about it. The one I was upset for the most was my grandfather. After all my talk of wanting to honor him, I gave him this shame instead. And remember this was before DADT. Perhaps it is less brutal now. I guess I only have my own experience to fall back upon.
I am not, and was not, alone in any of this shame and fear. Countless numbers of LGBT service members have lived through this, or fear it even now as we debate the ethics of policy. Our lives are chips that are played for political hands on both sides of the game. No matter who wins, there are many of us who have been the losers in this struggle: The taxpayers who footed the bill to train me to protect them only to see their money flushed down the drain, the members drummed out of the military who simply wanted to serve and honor an American populace that often times looks down upon them with suspicion and derision, LGBT teens who see this as one more sign that they are rejected by not only family, but the rank and file establishment.
Can you at least try to see it through my eyes?