Bill
Farrell
A vets View
When Military Intelligence
Isn't an Oxymoron |
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When I first offered to tell
my story, I didn't realize the difficulty of putting
my military experience to post. It isn't that
I went through trauma or embarrassment. It
wasn't that my career was suddenly snatched out from
under me. It was the quality of being
completely ordinary that seemed to stand in the way
of a good story.
Then it occurred to me, that this is exactly the
point. GLBT people do and have served in the
military since the concept of a military. When
we offer our service, we do it in the same patriotic
spirit as anyone else. All too often we do our
particular jobs better than our cohorts -- because
we fear we must.
It is irritating to me that so many GLBT people have
given their time, energy and patriotic love to this
country, yet we are not accorded most of the
benefits of citizenship. It irritates me even
further that there are so many in the current regime
who refuse to serve the country in any way, shape or
form, yet reserve unearned rights and privileges to
themselves.
The rest of us try to lead by example.
I volunteered for the Army in 1975; just young
enough to miss Viet Nam but old enough to be
mentored in my profession by those who had been
there and in Korea. At that time, the Army was
making weary transition to peacetime mode, yet the
Cold War was still going on. There was still a
need for people who could pick up languages easily.
There were still enough of an older generation who
taught us the things you could never learn either in
Basic or in school, like how life really worked in
the military and how not to get dead needlessly.
When I left high school, I was comfortably fluent in
Spanish and French by grace of two fine teachers;
one, a native speaker; the other went to university
in France. After that amount of
self-application, I was most certainly not going to
spend my life in a mill town. Going into debt
for college was certainly not an option, either.
After a chat with several of the recruiters in town,
the most attractive choice was offered by the Army
recruiter who suggested the Army Security Agency. We
went through the extensive list of
do-you-now-or-have-you-evers including any
homosexual behavior.
Uh. Um.
Truthfully, I answered, "no" -- being gay
or being suspected of being "like that" in
a tiny mountain community was begging for an
"unfortunate accident". Doing gay
things was almost certain death. It's easiest to
avoid trouble by trying not to get into it to start
with. Swallowing my innermost self deep down inside,
I went forward through life, accepting my lot as one
of poverty, chastity and obedience, to purloin a
phrase. I really felt that offering my service
to the Constitution and my fellow citizens was not
only the duty of every citizen, but a rite of
passage into adulthood as well. That's how I
was raised -- one should give back to one's country
and I still feel that way.
I took the same oath of induction as every other
recruit and, because I promised upon G'd's help,
meant every word of it. I'm indisposed to
"swearing", but if I ask G'd's help to
keep a promise, I should keep my end of the bargain.
It means much to me.
As I recall, we promise our defense of the
Constitution before all else. Most especially,
I think, because it is America's contract with her
people, the contract beyond all others and from
which all others extend. The dignity we gave
it in signing our military contracts, we have a
right to expect to be returned in kind. If I
interpret the Bill of Rights correctly, we are
guaranteed that much. Off to the Army I went,
expecting that my government would keep its end of
the deal as seriously.
After my initial schooling, I was assigned to my
first company in Colorado. Until then, that's
as far as I had been from North Carolina. It
wasn't long before this naive country boy figured
out (ever so slowly) that there were quite a few gay
people in the military. Most were motivated by
the same sense of duty and the same pride in
performance as I was. Some, also like me,
needed a way to college. All of us were
soldiers in every meaningful sense of the word.
We were proud to be craftsmen, straight, gay or
indifferent.
That went doubly when I was assigned to duty in
Germany. I must say I have never worked with a
finer group of technicians and analysts but once
since then. Many of them were gay. Pretty much
didn't care who knew because that wasn't what they
were at work. Everyone, every single one, was
OD green at work. We had to be close and
reasonably close friends. In MI, we were
already "somehow different" from the rest
of the Army, at that time with a separate chain of
command from everyone else. Not telling
anything meant not. Telling. Anything. That
attitude seemed quite natural to a hillbilly like
myself.
Given the cost of our training, what we were
expected to do with it, and (most importantly) the
stewardship of our national responsibilities, the
senior officers were loathe to put someone out of
the military. The Army had a right to expect
their money's worth, one way or another. The
biggest threat over anyone's head was, "you'll
lose your clearance and before you can say 'amen'
you'll be in an infantry unit". From
there, it was either "adapt" or be removed
from service with a discharge under unpleasant
conditions. That went for everyone in our
units. At that time, the front-line units
weren't particularly gay-friendly path to being
drummed out, which is essentially what reassignment
was.
When a mind is lost to from the intelligence
community, no matter how low a position, it's a
double shame when the only reason is that the person
was discovered (or coerced into admitting) that are
GLBT. Qualified or qualifiable analysts are
always in short supply. Military bias against
GLBT people wastes a resource that doesn't just grow
up out of the ground.
I started out life poor, hence the thought of
wasting money makes my teeth itch. The thought of
wasting anything is not even considered in this
household. Even now, while I make what would
otherwise be good money, I'm taking care of my
partner of 10 years (he has been poz for 23), it's
extremely difficult to make ends meet. Besides not
being welcome to serve our country, we don't get the
tax breaks a hetero married couple get.
Wasting money just isn't something either we or our
government can afford to do. Wasting clearly
irreplaceable resources like willing human beings is
unconscionable and wholly preventable.
To add some more of my perspective, my partner was
was tossed out of the Navy long ago for being gay --
excellent work record notwithstanding. That's
bigoted AND wasteful, a double shame. There's
another fine mind that came to serve gladly and
willingly.
Though we served before DADT, we feel that we
probably had it a bit better, not having to deal
with witch-hunts and too much sudden public
recognition. We live in a college and "gayborhood",
so it's not like our neighbors don't know and
obviously don't care. We're amazed that
they're amazed that things would be any other way.
But my partner and I remember a time when there were
many reasons to be quiet and unremarkable as
possible. We both grew up in the Appalachians
and understand the consequences of being too
different.
When resources are rare enough and the military is
under duress saying "Your patriotism is no good
here" is the same as saying, "You're
money's no good here." Except we keep
paying money in tax dollars when our own dollars do
so much less, these days. As I was saying, wasting
willing human resources is followed by the wasting
of what we have ever-less to give:
Hard-earned taxpayer money is being spent to find,
recruit, and train qualified personnel. Yet we all
lose when a trained professional is turned out of
the military because of bigotry. Not because
they couldn't or wouldn't do the job. The
monetary loss is compounded when the professional is
a member of intelligence services -- background
investigations are extremely expensive and hard to
get. Moreover, the training is far more extensive
(thus far more costly). Most folks have no idea how
extremely expensive it is to train and retain these
particular professionals. It's an appalling
waste of resources any way you look at it.
DoD is happily pissing away millions per year on
DADT and pissing away desperately-needed resources:
people who are dedicated to making and keeping our
nation safe. Little wonder the intelligence
community is so screwed up. As a gay man, I say
"ouch" for my patriotism being treated as
not welcome. As a taxpayer, I say
"ouch" for the huge lists of waste for
which we're paying. Waste upon mismanagement upon
insult. To add witch-hunts to the anxiety we
already experienced in the military makes DADT even
more of an insult.
Long ago, when I served, the anxiety alone kept me
as closeted as one can be in a "small
town" type group. So long as "nobody
actually saw anything" nobody could lie about
it, either. I grew up in a series of small
southern towns so I know how to wear a mask as well
as anyone else. Fortunately, part of the
culture in the intelligence community is
"neither confirm nor deny" and that
extended a long way past just keeping national
secrets. In order to protect those, often, we
protected one another. This is also the nature
of mountain folks, something my partner and I both
are.
DADT only adds to the problem; it does nothing for
the public benefit. It shouldn't have to be that
way, this nowhere-land state of existence, this
culture of silence and anxiety that surrounds
the service that all of us GLBT people gave.
Several countries are already ahead of the United
States in returning the honor of service to their
country with equal dignity and recognition. GLBT
people serve and even get married in other modern
countries. There haven't been any big soap-dropping
shower scenes (damn!), no big uproars, no crowds of
people praying for their salvation outside the
barracks. Our younger folks don't seem to have
a problem here, either. Those would be the
same age folks as are already serving, and from what
I hear, don't care, either.
If there's "no big whoop", then why are we
intentionally making only certain people's lives
hell, wasting human resources, and money that's
stretching ever-thinner? The only people I see
from here who benefit from having a forever
higher-taxable class of people are mostly ones who
didn't or wouldn't serve at all.
Being GLBT is part of the human condition, like
being brown-haired or green-eyed. DADT neatly
removes any hope of dignity for either GLBT people
or our hetero counterparts. When people serve
their country, they have the right to expect full
citizenship with all of the benefits.
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