Sailor
- Soldier
Denny Meyer
In the dark late
autumn of 1938 a young Jewish woman fled the heart
of Germany for America. She'd known that it
was time to get out following Kristalnacht (the
night of broken glass) when the Nazi
government sanctioned the sacking of Jewish
property throughout Germany. The windows of
Jewish-owned stores were smashed by gleeful
looting crowds, synagogues were set on fire,
bibles and prayer books were burned to ash, and Jews of all
ages were assaulted on the streets in unspeakable
ways.
My mother arrived in America as a
refugee, essentially illegal, and was interned on
Ellis Island, in New York's harbor, within sight
of the Statue of Liberty holding its torch aloft
as a beacon to those seeking freedom. After
much fussing with paperwork and a bond posted by a
distant cousin, she was admitted into this land of
unlimited promise. Like many immigrants, she
first cleaned toilets to survive.
At about the same time a
young Jewish lawyer fled Berlin, heading west
through relations in London and after a long
journey landing in New York. He worked in
the chaotic wartime offices of The Jewish Agency,
which was frantically trying to relocate Jews out of Europe
to wherever they would be taken in. My
mother came to those offices in New York
desperately hoping for help in getting the rest of
her family out of Germany (alas, at the height of
World War II, in 1941, it was too late).
There they met and married. I was born, just
after the close of the war, to these Holocaust
refugees and reared on the Upper West Side of New
York City. Every conversation there was
multi-lingual, as was every child growing up there
in those heady bustling days of postwar revival.
In those days, in the late 1940s, the refugee
community there was a hotbed of activist advocacy
where every spare moment was spent raising funds
for Jewish refugee rescue and relief. Typewriters
clacked ceaselessly, pounding out letters of
advocacy as fast as possible. Everyone
worked day and night. For want of a
babysitter, my father schlepped me along to
meetings with senators, ambassadors, high
commissioners, and mandarins of every ilk.
At the age of six, I didn't have a clue what was
going on; and yet, somehow I absorbed the fact
that every ever-so-serious adult around me had
escaped from an unspeakable hell and that American
Freedom was the most precious thing that any human
could hope to have. I
carried that thought with me as I grew up, outrageously
gay, until I was at university at the height of
the Vietnam War in the late 1960s, when I saw
students burning the American flag in
protest.
"It's time to pay my country
back," I thought, and signed up with the
United States Navy despite being doubly exempt as
a student and a queer.
"You
WHAT?!" my parents screamed, "You're
supposed to become a doctor or a lawyer, not a
gunslinger, oy vey!" "Relax,"
I told them, "I'll be on a boat." I entered the Great Lakes Naval Training Station
in the dead of winter in 1968, where the Arctic
wind blew night and day as we marched and marched
until our, er, toes froze. It was
rough. I was 5 feet 4 inches and weighed 110
pounds; I'd had to stuff myself with bananas just
to pass the weight requirement of the physical
exam (well, in college, I'd been a founder of the
Great Banana Hoax, but that's another
story). Somehow, I made it through that and
came out as a sailor. True to my promise to
my parents, I was sent straight to a
"boat" --quite
a large one in fact, an aircraft carrier.
For my first five minutes aboard, I was assigned
to the flight deck crew, one of the most dangerous
jobs anywhere. A snapped arresting cable
could slice you in half in an instant; raising
your head to look around at the wrong moment could
get your head blown off into the sea by jet
wash. Then someone noticed in my file that I
knew how to type; I became a yeoman. My
mother was not a religious woman, but she thanked
God that she'd make me take a summer school typing
course in junior high school. That
resulted in the start of a ten-year, two-service,
military career in administration. I hated
typing. One
day aboard ship, during a witch hunt for queers,
my Lt. Cdr. called me in to his office and said,
"Meyer, you're the only one we can be sure of
(who's straight); will you help us find these
people so we can get rid of them." I
grunted, "I dunno nothin' 'bout that,
sir." I didn't know whether to laugh at
how mistaken he was, or cry over the anguish of
having to keep who I was such a deep secret.
The reason they were so 'sure that I was straight'
was that I didn't dare participate in the normal
horseplay common amongst lower enlisted personnel,
knowing that a momentary error would get me tossed
overboard dead. They misunderstood that
caution and assumed that I was just so straight
that I didn't care to mess around even for a
common crude laugh.
I'd
entered the Navy just at the start of the
transition from the 'old Navy' to the 'new Navy,'
under Admiral Zumwalt. They were looking for kids
with brains who could handle technology,
electronics, and those damned typewriters. I
advanced quickly, amidst the new breed of sailors,
and became a Petty Officer Second Class (E-5) in
less than four years. After the carrier
duty, I was assigned to a combined NATO and
Atlantic Fleet headquarters in Norfolk, VA.
Nearly every enlisted person there was a yeoman
working every day in dress whites amidst a sea of
flag officers from around the world. It was
never ever mentioned, but quite a few of us clever
yeoman were gay. Who else could keep those
white uniforms clean, crisp, and pressed?
Please. I loved the Navy; who could have
known! In
Norfolk, I first worked in a multi-service central
files repository that maintained regulations and
instructions from all the U.S. services.
This was in pre-computer days when we kept and
updated millions of printed pages in huge loose
leaf binders on floor-to-ceiling shelves that
filled the office from wall to wall. Each of
us had a specialty; mine was Naval
Instructions. When a call came in requesting
a particular instruction, I could reach to the
shelf behind me, without looking, and pluck the
particular binder before the requestor had
finished saying what he wanted. You don't
get medals for that sort of thing, but we were
still proud of our efficiency. Every single
soldier, sailor, marine, and airman in that office
was queer. Our Chief, a mild mannered
married fellow, knew what was going on; he'd
personally selected every single one of us for the
ability to do the job. And he was a loving
mother hen to us; if someone seemed to have been
about to loose their composure and be a bit
obvious, he'd simply arch an eyebrow, as if to
wordlessly say, "Tsk, hey, control yourself,
Mary!" During
this time my big scare came when I underwent a
routine security investigation for a
clearance. One day I was called into carpet
territory by two agents in suits. They
told me that, "In the course of the routine
investigation for your clearance, we have received
information that you are a........ " I
died a thousand deaths; "Oh My God!" I
thought in horror, "They found out! I'm done
for!" Without
pause, the fellow finished the sentence,
"..that you are a .... user of marijuana." "OH
IS THAT ALL!" I wanted to shout, I
wanted to laugh and cry and jump up and
down. But, in my mind I saw my chief arching
his eyebrow at me, and kept my cool; I simply
looked genuinely perplexed. That was the end
of that, nothing came of it. But, my heart
thumped out of control for the rest of the week;
and to this day, some 40 years later, I remember
that tormented moment as if it had been
yesterday. All that because of an anachronistic
ideology of bigotry. When
I got back to the office, my chief looked at me,
wanting to know what that was all about. I
said, "Oh someone in the barracks must have
told them that I smoke weed." He saw
how rattled I was, he knew what I'd been terrified
about; he pursed his lips and
his eyes twinkled. I knew what he was
thinking, "You wet your panties, didn't
you?" My
next assignment was at a CAG (Carrier Air Group)
headquarters controlling helicopter squadrons up
and down the east coast from Maine to Louisiana.
Aside from falling in love, that was the most
wonderfully exciting time in my life. I had
my own flight suit; we flew around the country
constantly. The officers I worked with were
helicopter cowboys who lived to fly. They
respected me and relied on me to keep things
running smoothly. This was the rare reality
of recruiting posters that portrayed a young
sailor doing a serious job in a military
helicopter hovering over a ship at sea. It
was every boy's, and every girl's, dream of adventure. I loved
it! On
weekends, I'd go to New York to visit my latest
love. Sometimes my commander would fly me up
in a helicopter and drop me off at Floyd Bennet
Field in Brooklyn. He
didn't ask what I'd be doing, and I didn't
tell. That was a pity because in a small
cohesive unit like that we were like family.
But, I had to keep a secret that he wouldn't have
cared about at all. Ultimately,
that was why I didn't reenlist for a second tour
in the Navy that I loved so very much, a Navy that
wanted me to reenlist. I needed to be able
to live freely.
Well, I needed to work and I
got a job as a DAC (Dept. of the Army Civilian);
administering the reserves; they only hired
veterans with an admin background. As it turned
out, it was a dual status, civilian/military
position. You had to join the unit you were
administering, in case they were ever
activated. And so, I continued my military
career in the U.S. Army Reserve. I was with
the Army Reserve for more years than I had been in
the Navy; I achieved the rank of Sgt. First Class
(E-7); and yet, in my heart, I'll always be a
sailor. Anyway, its a good thing that I have
no interest in football.
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Soldier Boy
Among my friends, this
is known as
'The Dukakis photo'
Don't Worry, it wasn't
loaded
I was
generally not allowed near weapons, I
couldn't shoot and I was left handed.
I was an admin tech. When it came time
for me to "qualify" they would clear
the range for the sake of safety; the range
officer "assisted" me, the shell hit me in
the face despite the shell deflector, and
then I was driven back to the office. |
By the time
I was a Sgt First Class, I had a great deal of
responsibility that I'd grown into over the
years. I was expected to be a leader, and to
keep things running smoothly. I had a large
office in which to coordinate the training
schedules and payroll for some two thousand
personnel. And I had to be prepared to
calmly "make things happen" because some young
officer had said, "Can do!" without
bothering about the details. This, at times,
required the sergeants' common mastery of the art
of "relocation" in which certain urgently needed
supplies were "moved" prior to the convenience of
completion of all the proper paperwork.
Relocation required absolute trust between
sergeants who were determined to "get the job
done" without blinking or hesitation. Being
straight or queer, black or white, male or female,
made no difference at all, of course. We
were professionals who solved problems; the
misplaced properly dated paperwork was always
found without fail within a day. They didn't give medals for
that either; and it was a lot less fun than flying
around over big blue waves in a Navy
helicopter. At that time, my
"Pride" was
devoted to efficiently carrying out my duty to my
country, just as it has always been for any NCO
proudly serving as the backbone of the armed
forces. We calmly carried out orders while
at the same time taking care of our subordinate
troops. In
the Army Reserve there were gay people everywhere,
enlisted and officer. We knew who we were,
our gaydar worked just fine. But the mutual
paranoia we shared, of never daring to say a
friendly word, was disturbing, disgusting, and
unnatural. But, there were some funny
exceptions, funny for the fact that our queer
culture was so deep in the closet. The woman
who ran another unit, in the office next to mine,
was a butch lesbian; but to the dull witted
straight reservists she was simply a tough
sergeant not to be messed with. One weekday
a reservist was outside working on his
motorcycle. At one point he came in and
jokingly asked her if she happened to have a
particular wrench that he needed. Without
blinking she said, "Oh I think so," and
pulled the huge greasy tool out of her large
purse. I nearly choked to death trying to
keep from laughing my ass off. After the
reservist left, I started to giggle. She
looked at me deadpan and said,
"What?" For the rest of the day
both of us kept bursting into hysterical laughter
every time we looked at each other. Even
then, we could not dare acknowledge the shared
queer cultural humor. All she said was that
she'd been working on her car that morning and
brought the tool with her in case she needed it
again on the way home. I mean, where else
but in your purse would you put a greasy wrench,
right? Eventually
after ten years of combined service, I decided yet
again not to reenlist. Emerging gay freedom
was just outside the base gates; and I now had a
long term companion whom I loved deeply. As a
senior NCO, I simply could not any longer bear
leading a double life. When I left the Navy,
as a mid-level Petty Officer, I simply had wanted
to be free. When I left the Army Reserve, as
a senior NCO, it was more because I simply could
not bear being dishonest any longer. I took
the respect I had from superiors and subordinates
very seriously and it just felt dirty living a
lie. Outside, I could be open and do things
like go shopping with my lover without having to
worry what an employer or co-worker might think,
because outside it simply wasn't any of their
business in the large cities where I later lived. Now,
I'm an old disabled man who can only wonder what
it would have been like to serve a full 20 years
as an openly gay man in our armed forces.
Hopefully, young people today wont have to wonder
much longer. Last year, at SLDN's grand
Lobby Days Dinner in Washington DC, a reporter
asked me, an old gay vet, if I'd go serve in Iraq
if I were asked to. I hefted up my cane, and
in a warbling voice squeaked, "Yeah, Make my
day!" I was only half kidding; without
any reference to how I feel about the current war,
I've always been ready to serve my country and
still am. That is no different from all
those patriotic American volunteers serving now,
be they gay or straight.
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