[SimeyTheLimey]

I don't know if this really belongs in the Pol/War lounge or not, but I just thought I'd mention this article, which I came across in today's New York Times. It's about my old company, who are now in Samarra, Iraq. This one is Second Platoon, I was in third. But this is still odd for me to read.



They are now part of Second Infantry from Fort Lewis, Wash (as a separate brigade, the rest of 2nd Infantry is in Korea). I was with them in 1992-3 when it was part of Third Brigade, First Armored Division in Mannheim, Germany. When the brigade got orders to redeploy to the US, I left the unit and went to work at division HQ. So they left Germany and I stayed. I guess the unit is now the test unit for the Stryker vehicle, it was a Bradley unit in my day.

Ironically, they are probably back under the command of First Armored. There is a lot of rotation in the Army, so they probably don't realize that they are rejoining their old division. By now there would be nobody left in the unit who were in it when I was there.

Anyway, this is probably of no interest to anyone but me. I was just happy to see them and I wish them the best of luck with their mission, and I hope they all come back safe.

[davesimondotcom]

Were you at Fort Lewis, Simey?

That's where my sister-in-law is stationed. She ships out next week for Iraq...

[SimeyTheLimey]

Originally posted by davesimondotcom:
Were you at Fort Lewis, Simey?

That's where my sister-in-law is stationed. She ships out next week for Iraq...

No, I stayed in Germany. The brigade went to Ft. Lewis without me. The stateside bases I was stationed in were Ft. Polk and Ft. Meade, and for training at: Ft. Benning, Ft. Knox, and Ft. Gordon. I was never sent out west.

All the best to your sister-in-law.

[davesimondotcom]

Originally posted by SimeyTheLimey:
All the best to your sister-in-law.

Thanks. She's a bit nervous, but that's expected going into a war zone. She'll be at a hospital somewhere, probably Baghdad.

Maybe she'll get to knock out Saddam. (She's a nurse aneastatist..)

[eklipse]

Originally posted by SimeyTheLimey:

You got to play with light-sabers?

[SimeyTheLimey]

Originally posted by davesimondotcom:
Maybe she'll get to knock out Saddam. (She's a nurse aneastatist..)

If she does, tell her to go just a little light on that anesthetic.

[davesimondotcom]

Originally posted by SimeyTheLimey:
If she does, tell her to go just a little light on that anesthetic.

[davesimondotcom]

Originally posted by eklipse:
You got to play with light-sabers?

[SimeyTheLimey]

Originally posted by eklipse:
You got to play with light-sabers?

Shh!

[vmarks]

Originally posted by SimeyTheLimey:
No, I stayed in Germany. The brigade went to Ft. Lewis without me. The stateside bases I was stationed in were Ft. Polk and Ft. Meade, and for training at: Ft. Benning, Ft. Knox, and Ft. Gordon. I was never sent out west.

All the best to your sister-in-law.

Ft.Meade?

<conspiracy>Simey.... NSA....<conspiracy>

[davesimondotcom]

Originally posted by vmarks:
Ft.Meade?

<conspiracy>Simey.... NSA....<conspiracy>

Does the NSA have the same silly "don't ask, don't tell" policy?

[SimeyTheLimey]

Originally posted by vmarks:
Ft.Meade?

<conspiracy>Simey.... NSA....<conspiracy>

Not quite. That would require math skills.

Davesimondotcom: the intelligence agencies no longer discriminate against gays and lesbians. Or at least, they don't do so officially. Just about the only thing that Clinton did for gays that was positive is he changed the reg on security clearances. Now, as long as you are open and thus unblackmailable, there is no problem. This was long overdue. Then Defense Secretary Cheney called the security clearance risk argument "a bit of an old chestnut" back in 1990.

[davesimondotcom]

Originally posted by SimeyTheLimey:
Not quite. That would require math skills.

Davesimondotcom: the intelligence agencies no longer discriminate against gays and lesbians. Or at least, they don't do so officially. Just about the only thing that Clinton did for gays that was positive is he changed the reg on security clearances. Now, as long as you are open and thus unblackmailable, there is no problem. This was long overdue. Then Defense Secretary Cheney called the security clearance risk argument "a bit of an old chestnut" back in 1990.

Not to turn this into the official "dumb policy" thread - but I recently heard that the military is low on Arabic translators because a number of them were kicked out or discharged because they are gay.

As far as I'm concerned, the only test for whether you should be able to serve your country should be whether you are loyal to it and physically/mentally able to serve.

P.S. Thanks to you for your service, Simey! Cheers.

[SimeyTheLimey]

Originally posted by davesimondotcom:
Not to turn this into the official "dumb policy" thread - but I recently heard that the military is low on Arabic translators because a number of them were kicked out or discharged because they are gay.

As far as I'm concerned, the only test for whether you should be able to serve your country should be whether you are loyal to it and physically/mentally able to serve.

P.S. Thanks to you for your service, Simey! Cheers.

Thank you.

The translator story is true, and dumb. However, I have also heard that the Army turned right around and hired a bunch of them again as civilian contractors -- at considerable extra expense to the government. If that doesn't show just how asinine the policy is, I don't know what does.

[davesimondotcom]

Originally posted by SimeyTheLimey:
Thank you.

The translator story is true, and dumb. However, I have also heard that the Army turned right around and hired a bunch of them again as civilian contractors -- at considerable extra expense to the government. If that doesn't show just how asinine the policy is, I don't know what does.

Exactly, if they are fit to be contractors, they are fit to serve...

Discriminating based on who someone sleeps with is pretty stupid.

[eklipse]

Stupid policy.

If they're gonna demand that the translators must be straight, why don't they just demand that the terrorists speak English?

[lil'babykitten]

What's going on in here, I don't see any flames! Am I in the Politics Lounge?

[davesimondotcom]

Originally posted by eklipse:
Stupid policy.

If they're gonna demand that the translators must be straight, why don't they just demand that the terrorists speak English?

If they don't speak English, just YELL REALLY LOUDLY AND SLOWLY AT THEM until they understand.

[davesimondotcom]

Originally posted by lil'babykitten:
What's going on in here, I don't see any flames! Am I in the Politics Lounge?

Are you lost, lil'kitten?

[lil'babykitten]

Originally posted by davesimondotcom:
Are you lost, lil'kitten?

Yep! under all that snow!

[davesimondotcom]

Originally posted by lil'babykitten:
Yep! under all that snow!

Getting to work has been a challenge!

Maybe we need a flame war to melt the snow...

[SimeyTheLimey]

Originally posted by eklipse:
Stupid policy.

If they're gonna demand that the translators must be straight, why don't they just demand that the terrorists speak English?

Senator Barry Goldwater had a good quote. It was something along the lines of it doesn't matter if the soldier is straight, as long as he can shoot straight.

This policy will get changed eventually. It's just that the military reacts very slowly to change and Congress is very deferntial to what the brass says, and even more deferential to the wider military retiree and association community who vote consistently and who are very visible. The thing is that those groups aren't particularly good spokespersons for the bulk of the current military.

The bulk of soldiers are overwhelmingly the MTV generation. Younger soldiers that I have talked to are on the average substantially less worried about the issue than the older and more senior soldiers. That reverses the justification that is normally advanced about morale. The people most likely to "share a foxhole" with a gay soldier are the very ones that Congress listens to the least. The ones who seem to obsess the most about close living quarters don't live in them, and haven't in decades. In any case, my answer to those concerns is that we ought to work on improving the lot of all soldiers. I've never met a soldier yet who actually prefers open bays and gang showers. Give our troops better conditions! It's the right thing to do, AND it would make this issue go away.

One absurdity is that this linguist story aside, military disharges for homosexuality always go down in wartime. The last Gulf War was particularly absurd. There was a 100% stop-loss policy that meant that all discharges of gay servicemen were delayed for the duration of hostilities. That baffles me. How can people argue that gays can't serve without harming military effectiveness, and then keep gays in during a war? It's completely inconsistent.

It is also inconsistent to discharge people from ordinary military positions because they are gay, but allow them to serve as clandestine CIA officers, intelligence analysts, FBI agents, and so on. None of those services discriminate, and they are mostly more demanding than the average soldier's position.

This kind of sillyness gets harder to justify as more people come out. Just recently, that included three flag officers -- two generals, and an admiral. Link. I guess they were just useless at their jobs.

[davesimondotcom]

Can we manage to find anyone who can speak for the policy of keeping gays out of the military? Or "don't ask"?

<story>

I remember in my senior year of high school we did a mock Congress. Being that my father had served in the Legislature for years, and I had been a page a few times, I knew procedure pretty well. I also knew how to table, ammend, and pretty much rewrite legislation.

My committee had a bill introduced by a student who had already signed up for the Army and been through Basic Training. I wish I had a copy of his original bill so put on here because it was quite hilarious. Basically, it was right after Clinton signed "don't ask" into law, and he was trying to totally outlaw gays in the military through his bill.

It took very little convincing to have this bill tabled in committee. Even the way it was written was bad enough to justify his bill not getting to a floor vote and therefore him getting an "F." Throughout the bill, he made references to "gayists" and "non-gayists." It was incredible, his ignorance!

One day, one of the other members of the committee gathered everyone together and suggested we pass the bill in order to be able to show the entire class how silly it was. (We were in high school, therefore, we were apt to be cruel to this ignorant sod.)

Once the bill got to the whole class, debate was started. Someone made a motion to strike some small section of the bill and replace it with something else, basically a grammatical change, but not a meaningful change to the bill.

I then made a motion to strike the entire bill and to rewrite it saying, basically, "All members of the military should be treated by the same military rules." The author's main complaint about gays in the military was that they were given "special treatment" - I guess he figured that they were in barracks with people they could be attracted to and that that was unfair.

So my ammendment passed. The bill passed, but essentially meant nothing other than the military had to treat everyone equally. But the kid got a passing grade, we all got to show him up, and the teacher laughed his ass off at how we did it.

(Later on, we passed a rule that kicked the teacher out of the room, a law that got us a pizza party (to which I attached a rider that we couldn't have the pizza party unless my best friend's bill passed.))


</story>

[vmarks]

Originally posted by davesimondotcom:

Discriminating based on who someone sleeps with is pretty stupid.

Widening that scope a bit, I wouldn't have a problem with discharges or reprimand/discipline for sexual relations between a soldier and his or her superior, or for adulterous relationships, or for boondoggles like Tailhook- which, after all, are just discrimination (of a kind) based on who people sleep with.

As for gender choice of consenting partner, as long as it doesn't mean engaging in the types of situations described above, why then all soldiers should be treated equally.

[dcmacdaddy]

Originally posted by vmarks:
Widening that scope a bit, I wouldn't have a problem with discharges or reprimand/discipline for sexual relations between a soldier and his or her superior, or for adulterous relationships, or for boondoggles like Tailhook- which, after all, are just discrimination (of a kind) based on who people sleep with.

As for gender choice of consenting partner, as long as it doesn't mean engaging in the types of situations described above, why then all soldiers should be treated equally.

You lost me there with the Tailhook reference. How exactly did those women "choose" to get groped by their male colleagues? As I recall, the men blocked access to the hallways where the women were staying and forced them to run a gauntlet of groping hands.

[vmarks]

Originally posted by dcmacdaddy:
You lost me there with the Tailhook reference. How exactly did those women "choose" to get groped by their male colleagues? As I recall, the men blocked access to the hallways where the women were staying and forced them to run a gauntlet of groping hands.

Keep up, pay attention. I named the circumstances where I believe it is acceptable for the military to discipline it's ranks as a result of sexual misconduct. Adultery, relations between a soldier and his or her superior, and non-consenual relations should be conduct that the military can choose to not honor.

I also stated that this should apply equally to all gender relationships in the military.

[davesimondotcom]

vmarks - in general, my statement about who someone sleeps with assumes that:

a. the relationship is consentual
b. the relationship follows military rules (i.e. Not sleeping with those in your charge, which could be construed as sexual harrassment in the civilian world anyway)
c. the relationship follows the law (which goes back to "a" - must be consentual)

The big misconseption that the student in my previous long story had is that his gay fellow soldiers were apt to just jump someone in the shower or in their bunk. Which is bunk.

[vmarks]

Originally posted by davesimondotcom:
vmarks - in general, my statement about who someone sleeps with assumes that:

a. the relationship is consentual
b. the relationship follows military rules (i.e. Not sleeping with those in your charge, which could be construed as sexual harrassment in the civilian world anyway)
c. the relationship follows the law (which goes back to "a" - must be consentual)

The big misconseption that the student in my previous long story had is that his gay fellow soldiers were apt to just jump someone in the shower or in their bunk. Which is bunk.

I'm not contradicting you- I'm simply widening the scope to illustrate what I think the policy ought to be in practice. With regard to your (c), we're talking about what the law is- currently, don't-ask-don't-tell-and/or-discharge.

[christ]

How does "don't-ask-don't-tell-and/or-discharge" (vmarks take on the current rule), jibe with "Clinton ... changed the reg on security clearances. Now, as long as you are open and thus unblackmailable, there is no problem"?

How can "don't-ask-don't-tell" be "open"?

[SimeyTheLimey]

Originally posted by christ:
How does "don't-ask-don't-tell-and/or-discharge" (vmarks take on the current rule), jibe with "Clinton ... changed the reg on security clearances. Now, as long as you are open and thus unblackmailable, there is no problem"?

How can "don't-ask-don't-tell" be "open"?

The question I was replying to was about civilian employment with agencies such as the NSA. Don't Ask Don't Tell only applies to the uniformed services. Openly gay people serve in all the US intelligence agencies, but only as civilians.

Until Clinton changed the security clearance regulations that was harder because being gay was seen as making you vulnerable to blackmail (this was believed even after President Ford lifted the ban on gays in the Civil Service, which he did in 1975). Now, as long as you are open you can't be blackmailed. In fact, that is one of the questions they ask you.

[christ]

Thanks - I am now more informed than I was this morning!

[Troll]

Originally posted by SimeyTheLimey:
In fact, that is one of the questions they ask you.

Feel free not to answer this if you choose, but I was wondering what your experience of the military was. Were you open about your sexuality from the start of your service or at any point during your service and if so, how do you think that affected your experience of the military? Do you think for example that there were equal opportunities for gay soldiers?

I have a big problem with discrimination on paper, but very often you get a better idea of what the extent of the discrimination is when you speak to someone who has lived through it.

[SimeyTheLimey]

Originally posted by Troll:
Feel free not to answer this if you choose, but I was wondering what your experience of the military was. Were you open about your sexuality from the start of your service or at any point during your service and if so, how do you think that affected your experience of the military? Do you think for example that there were equal opportunities for gay soldiers?

I have a big problem with discrimination on paper, but very often you get a better idea of what the extent of the discrimination is when you speak to someone who has lived through it.

Sure. I don't mind answering the question. I'd just caution that anecdotes are not data. My career may not be like other people's.


I'll try not to ramble too much.

I joined the Army in the late 1980s. That was before the Don't Ask, Don't tell policy was in place. However, when I first joined the Army I was pretty much in deep denial about being gay. It wasn't until a little later that I came out to myself fully, and by then I just decided to stick out the rest of my enlistment.

One of the things about the Army is that it is kind of a cloistered environment. You are very busy, have not much free time, and don't socialize very much. There just aren't a whole lot of women in the Army -- and especially few in a combat division like I served in. That means you get a lot of very close *nonsexual* friendships between soldiers, and not a whole lot of opportunity for anyone to prove their heterosexuality. So it wasn't particularly stressful for a deeply closeted gay soldier to fit in. Of course, I'm speaking here of the younger soldiers who aren't married.

Nevertheless, it was an intensely homophobic environment. There is a lot of talk and banter. Young men are often very insecure about their sexuality, and they tend to overcompensate. However, talk doesn't necessarily initiate anything official in terms of investigations. For some reason, it never happened to me, but I knew several people who were rumored to be gay. Nobody ever investigated them to my knowledge.

That includes one lieutenant I knew who was the queeniest person I have ever met. He was absolutely on fire. But he did his job. That's always been the deal. If you are valuable as a soldier, you generally will be allowed to serve in peace. That's providing, of course, that you behave. There was a First Sergeant I knew and worked for who got caught misbehaving in a huge way. I didn't know he was gay until this happened. He was caught red handed having sex in the recreation center bathrooms. Apparently, that was the cruising grounds on base (clueless me had no idea, and I would have run a mile if I did know). The First Sergeant was discharged as a private and lost his pension. However, I can't condone what he did at all. That was completely inappropriate behavior for anyone, let alone a senior NCO.

In general, though, as long as you did your job, people got on fine. I'd say that is the majority sentiment among soldiers, notwithstanding the often quite homophobic banter that young straight men always seem to engage in when in groups. There was a dividing line, however, between the younger soldiers and some of the "lifers." Most people only stay in for 4 years. People who stay in past that have some markedly different attitudes. They tend to be much more (small c) conservative. Some of them also have a bit of a mania for weeding people out for a variety of reasons -- often quite trivial or personal. That's probably the worst thing about the Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy. it gives the minority of small minded people an easy weapon.

Every now and again, I read the account of someone who gets discharged for being gay. Almost always, there is some small screwup in their careers before they get outed. Civilian journalists never seem to spot the little infraction that they can't discharge you for, but which is a warning sign for some performance problem. For example, missing formations. Being late for work is a huge thing in the Army.

The problem is that everybody makes mistakes at some time. The Don't Ask Don't Tell Policy starts feeling like a sword of Damocles hanging over you. One slip up and some idiot with a vendetta will start a rumor, or start asking why you don't have a girlfriend.

So I guess I'd sum up by saying that there are equal opportunities for gay soldiers if you serve the way most people serve -- that is for 4 years or less. It gets a lot harder if you stay in. You become more visible, and more of an oddity if you remain unmarried. That is probably less of a problem if you are commissioned because officers are able to maintain more of a personal life. One of the ironies aout media coverage is they give all of the attention to officers who get discharged. But those are the people who suffer the least when their careers are trashed. They usually have skills and their educations to fall back on. It's the much larger number of enlisted people who really bear the brunt.