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                                                                                U.S. MILITARY, Page 40

A Mind-Set Under Siege


Plans to open the armed services to admitted homosexuals and
allow women in combat prompt hard thinking about the meaning
of manhood


By WILLIAM A. HENRY III - With reporting by Sally B. Donnelly/Los
Angeles, Todd Nelson/Sioux Falls and Nancy Traver/Washington


    They are the few and the proud, the long gray line, the
Spartans. They practice what they call, in a phrase silky with
unexamined assumptions, the manly art of war. They see
themselves as pursuing a higher calling in terrain where rights
matter less than responsibilities, where the individual must
give way to the corps.

    For the soldiers and sailors and flyers of America's armed
forces, these are especially difficult days. The end of the cold
war has removed the rationale for decades of extreme vigilance;
the much discussed "peace dividend" will probably translate into
military layoffs, equipment cuts, withdrawal from foreign posts
and general retrenchment in prestige. The Tailhook scandals of
sexual harassment have toppled high-ranking Navy officers and
exposed to public scorn a kind of sexism that many in the
military still cherish as "virility" and "blowing off steam."
The one great victory of recent years, Desert Storm, was so
quick and total that it scarcely tested the mettle of troops,
and the persistence of Saddam Hussein makes the triumph appear
almost hollow.

    Now, after generations when military service was a
prerequisite for elective office -- so that ambitious young men
from Harry Truman to George Bush clamored to be in combat -- an
unrepentant draft avoider has been elected President. And Bill
Clinton says one of his first official acts will be what an
agonized hierarchy sees as the gravest challenge ever to
military folkways. Their last refuge of traditional masculinity,
of an orderly and authoritarian world of moral black and white,
is to be opened to admitted homosexuals by Executive Order. The
proposed change comes at the same time that a presidential
report recommends another assault on the masculine mind-set:
allowing women greater access to combat roles. Institutions that
urged generations of adolescents to submit to discipline and
make men of themselves are being forced to rethink just what
manhood means.

    Military leaders denounce Clinton's plan to end the ban on
gays, and some have called on congressional allies to help.
Ordinary soldiers threaten to harass and hobble implementation
or quit their posts en masse -- a tough vow to sustain amid a
recession but politically explosive nonetheless. The Navy's
Reserve Officers Training Corps program on college campuses has
installed, and last week was upholding, a new oath. It requires
student sailors to pledge that they are not homosexual and that
they will return every penny of their training costs (an average
of $52,967 per student) if they are, even if they don't discover
their sexual identity until later during their service.

    Military conflict with the evolving social values of
civilian society is nothing new. The armed services are still
recoiling from the mere presence, let alone the theoretical
equality, of women. While some units have integrated the genders
effectively, in many others harassment remains commonplace, from
sexual taunts to overt refusal to promote women into positions
of authority over men. For every woman who is happy with
colleagues, there is another with horror stories. All the
services continue to preclude women from holding combat posts,
despite Congress's vote in 1991 to drop regulations that
prohibit women in the Air Force and Navy from flying combat
missions.

    One ostensible reason is protection, on the theory that
civilians cannot tolerate seeing women in wheelchairs or body
bags. Another argument is that women lack the strength or
endurance for battlefield tasks, although many jobs from which
they are excluded have no specific standards. In any case, the
practical effect of excluding women from combat, which
contributes to promotion, is to slow their rise up the career
ladder.

    Military service by homosexuals is nothing new either,
although the untold thousands who have served have had to remain
deeply closeted -- or rely on the sympathy and discretion of
superior officers who sometimes risked their own careers in
protecting gays beneath them. Chuck Schoen of Clear Lake,
California, head of a local gay-veterans chapter, last week sent
a letter to President-elect Clinton commending him on the plan
to drop the ban. Promised Schoen: "You will not hear the
explosion of a Mardi Gras celebration but a sigh of relief from
thousands of men and women." Schoen mentioned his own 19 years
of Navy service, which began in World War II and ended with his
forced departure, because of his sexual orientation, in 1963.

    For Schoen, the time for reinstatement has passed, but for
other gay veterans the question is more urgent. Petty Officer
Keith Meinhold, 30, who resumed a 12-year Navy career when a
federal court ordered him reinstated despite his homosexuality
-- which he says he discovered only after years in uniform --
asserted that he was being subjected to unusual daily uniform
and haircut inspections and other close scrutiny. Former Staff
Sergeant Thomas Paniccia filed suit in U.S. District Court in
Arizona last week to salvage his 11-year career, which ended in
October after he, like Meinhold, acknowledged his homosexuality
on national television. Former Naval Academy student Joseph
Steffan is suing to reverse his ouster just weeks before his
scheduled graduation in 1987. Former Army National Guard Colonel
Margarethe Cammermeyer, a Vietnam veteran who served 26 years
until she was identified as a lesbian, is suing to get her job
back.

    Depending on how Clinton's Executive Order is phrased and
how the courts interpret it, many of the gay men and lesbians
forced out during the Reagan-Bush era -- nearly always because
their preference was revealed or suspected by colleagues, not
because of actual sexual misconduct or because they made
statements to the media -- may file similar claims. The problems
of accommodating them, making amends for time lost and
potentially providing back pay and benefits worry even military
leaders who feel temperate about the basic issue.

    The conflict between gays and the military is a tinderbox,
not least because each side sees itself as an embattled
minority culture much misunderstood and views the other as a
privileged beneficiary of special treatment. Further bedeviling
the issue is that each side is partly right. The military case
against openly permitting homosexuals is, in essence, that they
will cause discomfort to the heterosexual majority already in
place, especially if gay soldiers become more open in asserting
their sexual preferences. The progay case, as articulated by
Clinton, is that they can make a contribution and the country
can use the help; in this vision, the military cannot stand in
isolation but must keep pace with the fitfully changing social
attitude toward acceptance of homosexuals that has evolved over
the past two decades.

    Stated in such stark terms, the question seems to revolve
around prejudice, with one side denouncing it and the other
saying it is a fact of life that even a permissive society must
bow to. Not surprisingly, it has become fashionable to equate
the situation of gays now with that of blacks when President
Truman fully integrated the armed forces by Executive Order in
1948. "People said blacks and whites couldn't serve together,"
observes Naval Academy professor Paul Roush. "It was generally
accepted that blacks couldn't do the work and whites wouldn't
serve alongside them. We got beyond that, and now the armed
forces are integrated."

    But homosexuals are different, because sexuality is
different. It can sometimes be a more deeply emotional part of
identity than race -- and a more ambiguous one. Most people
identify with one race, while sexuality can be more complex.
Many heterosexuals have some homosexual experience, frequently
at the young-adult age of military recruits, and the aftermath
is often guilt or fear. Some of the people who are most
uncomfortable around open homosexuals worry that such impulses
are part of their own nature. Moreover, many young men think
that having another man show sexual interest implies something
unwelcome about their own sexuality; often they feel obliged to
answer with violence rather than polite refusal. Sexuality also
has profound religious implications. Expressing it outside
heterosexual marriage is, for millions of Americans, a flat-out
sin; many believers feel they should carry those values into the
workplace, especially a workplace that is itself a life-style,
like the military.

    Above all, sexuality has to do with intimacy, especially
physical intimacy, and military service can be intensely
intimate. Troops share dorm rooms and showers in peacetime and
pit latrines in battle. Says Naval Reserve Lieut. Commander Dave
Frey of Chicago: "You may be at sea for 90 days. If people are
looking over their shoulder wondering, `What is the other person
in the berth or shower thinking about me?' the potential for
problems is great."

    In truth, the everyday military experience is not likely
to change much after the ban is lifted. Just because being gay
will no longer be grounds for expulsion does not mean that
every gay in the military will come out of the closet. Some will
fear harassment; some will simply prefer discretion, the way
gay civilians generally do. In all likelihood the vast majority
of gays in uniform will keep their sexuality largely private.
They will simply stop living in fear that someone may find out
and cost them their future. Those who might wish to be
flamboyant or confrontational would probably not prosper
regardless of sexual preference, because their personalities do
not suit a top-down command structure. For the most part, gays
seek to serve for the same patriotic and pragmatic reasons that
heterosexuals do, and they tend to feel as deeply committed to
the military culture as to their sexuality.

    Similarly, it is unclear that the presence of avowed
homosexuals will adversely affect recruiting. Certainly some
people join the military because it seems an outpost of rigidity
in an increasingly permissive world, and some parents urge sons
to join to toughen them and imbue them with traditional manly
values. But when men and women in the enlisted ranks are asked
why they joined, they cite pay, training and educational
benefits. Those same matters are emphasized in recruitment
brochures; only TV ads still play on male bonding. Says Peter
Morrison, a military demographer with the Rand Corp. in Santa
Monica, California: "Most look at the military as a way to
bootstrap their way up."

    Still, a difficult period of adjustment seems inevitable.
As has been evident in the bumpy transition to involving more
women, changes are hard to make work when the senior officers
responsible for them are openly opposed. The experience with
women underscores another basic problem, succinctly voiced by
Captain Harry Walters of the Army National Guard engineers unit
in Fargo, North Dakota: "In the civilian world you just work
with your peers, but we live with them."

    President-elect Clinton is being urged to go slow, to put
off the effective date of change. Some of that is an attempt to
buy time to lobby so that change will never come. Some is
sincere concern about disrupting the nation's defenses. But
before Clinton agrees to any delay, he must answer a question
implied in his own statements. If it will be wrong in the future
to exclude gays and destroy the careers of those in place, how
can it possibly be right now?