Breach of Trust: How Americans Failed Their Soldiers and Their Country (9 page)

In effect, Webb and his fellow traditionalists found themselves in the position of segregationists in the 1960s, still citing states’ rights as a basis for maintaining racial separation. Except among diehards, the argument no longer retained any standing.

Like the other services, a reluctant army found itself with little choice but to cede to the politics of gender. Incrementally, over the course of several decades, restrictions on the duty positions open to women fell away. By 9/11, few such limits remained apart from a prohibition on specialties associated with close combat, primarily crewing armored vehicles and assignment as infantry.

Not surprisingly, during the Iraq War of 2003–11, women soldiers played a prominent role, both on and off the battlefield. They engaged the enemy. They were shot down. They were taken prisoner.
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They suffered grievous wounds. They won awards for gallantry.
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They succumbed to barbarity, Private Lynndie England becoming the face of the Abu Ghraib scandal. They were found wanting, Brigadier General Janis Karpinski, Abu Ghraib commander, enjoying the unhappy distinction of being the only U.S. general officer to be demoted for poor performance in Iraq. Yet overall they performed admirably, even if sometimes their very best efforts were not good enough. When my son was killed in Iraq, one of the medics attending him was a woman.

Increasing the number of women in the war zone and assigning them to duties on or near the front lines has this added consequence: when the United States goes to war, the list of those making the ultimate sacrifice now inevitably includes women. During the Iraq War, for example, 110 female uniformed personnel died for their country (that total including both those killed in action and fatalities from nonhostile causes).
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For friends and family of the deceased, that statistic signifies 110 individual stories of crushing, irreparable loss. Yet in a perverse sense, it also represents progress—one measure of the fruit borne by the progressive elimination of gender discrimination within the armed forces.
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Still, even if more female soldiers were dying, they were not yet doing so at a rate remotely equivalent to that of their male counterparts. Roughly 15 percent of the total force, women made up a mere 2.5 percent of the fatalities sustained in Iraq.
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(In Afghanistan, as of May 2012, 1.5 percent of total U.S. military losses were female.)
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From the perspective of ensuring full equality, these figures showed that there remained work to do, with the signs of the times all suggesting that a gender-neutral fighting force was in the offing. “We are the most civilized nation in the world that still formally excludes women from combat,” the
Boston Globe
columnist Juliette Kayyem complained.
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That the United States would soon catch up with the rest of the civilized world in this regard seemed a foregone conclusion. To hasten that day, female officers in 2012 sued the army, charging that barring them from combat violated their constitutional rights, above all the right to exercise individual choice.
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“We all should be able to choose how we pursue our careers and what conditions we want to subject ourselves to,” one of the plaintiffs explained. “We can’t have a policy that says I’m not allowed to compete.”
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As if in direct response, that very same year army chief of staff General Raymond Odierno signaled his interest in enrolling women in the army’s elite Ranger School, a preliminary step toward gender integrating infantry units. Women Rangers, he explained, would be more “competitive with their male counterparts as they move through the ranks.”
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Given the convergence of gender politics, emphasizing empowerment and self-actualization, with the imperative of sustaining the all-volunteer force, where women have become essential, ensuring “competitiveness”—that is, prospects for individual advancement—had become an overriding priority.
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General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, concurred. Emphasizing the imperative of every member of the military, regardless of gender, being “given the opportunity to succeed,” Dempsey urged Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta in January 2013 to abolish all remaining restrictions on where women would serve. Panetta issued the necessary directive forthwith.
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Once upon a time, feminists had believed that breaking the bonds of patriarchy might contribute to war’s elimination, the liberation of women making the world not only a different place but also a better place, to the benefit of all humankind. The closer women come to the goal of full equality, the less likely any such outcome appears. In the case of the United States, with the supply of male volunteers insufficient to sustain the nation’s armed forces, militarists who care about little apart from sustaining a capacity for global military action and feminists obsessed with eliminating all vestiges of discrimination have forged an improbable alliance. As a consequence, the ongoing campaign for gender equality sustains rather than undercuts America’s propensity for war. Hitherto a blight laid at the feet of men, war is becoming an activity that allows women a full share in the bloodletting, this constituting, in the words of one
Washington Post
columnist, “the painful and real price of true equality.”
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DON’T (EVEN) ASK

If army leaders responded with something less than enthusiasm to demands for full gender equality, there was no doubting the position they staked out in response to the possibility of allowing homosexuals and lesbians to serve. It was an emphatic no: negative, no way, no how, never.

In fact, this particular issue ranked as a nonissue until the presidential election of 1992. From a martial perspective, that contest featured the most radical mismatch since 1900, when William McKinley, Civil War hero and architect of a seemingly “splendid little war” against Spain, had faced off against William Jennings Bryan, possessing negligible soldierly credentials. Ninety-some years later, George H. W. Bush, World War II hero and architect of a seemingly “splendid little war” with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, faced off against William Jefferson Clinton, the governor of Arkansas. Although inclined toward pacifism, Bryan in 1898 had impulsively enlisted in the Nebraska National Guard, hoping to participate in the liberation of Cuba. He got no closer to the war zone than Florida. No such warrior impulsiveness ever got the better of Bill Clinton, who exerted himself strenuously, successfully, and without evident remorse to avoid military service during the Vietnam War.

Yet Clinton was an exceedingly gifted politician who, with the fortuitous assistance of a mild economic recession, turned an election that incumbent Bush should have won in a walk into an upset victory. As part of his political strategy, Clinton emphasized his resolute commitment to equal opportunity for all Americans, the definition of
all
now encompassing not only race, creed, ethnicity, and gender but also sexual orientation.

Gay rights was becoming a hot-button issue, the heat arising in considerable part from the fierce hostility of American conservatives toward anything that smacked of normalizing homosexuality. By no means incidentally, the post–Cold War officer corps was as shot through with cultural conservatism as any major group to the left of Bible Belt evangelicals. So when Clinton at a Seattle campaign stop in the summer of 1992 promised to restore to duty a former reservist forced to leave military service after she had admitted to being a lesbian—and by extension to lift the prohibition on gays serving openly in the military—he unwittingly put himself on a collision course with the armed forces of the United States.
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Once elected, Clinton immediately signaled his intention to keep this particular campaign promise.
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The officer corps wasted no time in indicating its displeasure with that prospect. General Colin Powell, the highly regarded chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, bluntly stated that removing the ban on gays serving openly in the military “would be prejudicial to good order and discipline.”
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By Clinton’s inauguration, gays-in-the-military had displaced ongoing crises in Bosnia and Somalia as issue number one in the eyes of senior U.S. military leaders. The question dominated the first meeting between newly appointed Secretary of Defense Les Aspin and the Joint Chiefs, who immediately (if anonymously) shared with reporters their conviction “that repealing the ban would wreck morale, undermine recruiting, force devoutly religious service members to resign and increase the risk of AIDS for heterosexual troops.”
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As the controversy mushroomed, a dispute over policy took on wider significance, raising questions relating to civilian control of the military and posing a test of character for the newly elected president. Here, the
New York Times
editorialized, was “a chance for Mr. Clinton to show that the anti-war student from Arkansas has the spine to be Commander in Chief.”
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As it turned out, Clinton passed on the opportunity, opting instead to back away from a fight that he seemed destined to lose. The result was “don’t ask, don’t tell,” a compromise brokered by congressional Democrats not sharing the president’s commitment to gay rights. The new policy—making explicit a practice that had hitherto been implicit—permitted gays to serve in the armed forces as long as they concealed their sexual orientation. In a remarkable display of political muscle-flexing, the brass had bested their commander in chief.

Matters did not end there, however. For the gay rights movement, “don’t ask, don’t tell”—or DADT, as it came to be known—turned out to be the defeat that planted the seeds of ultimate victory. Setback became springboard. DADT provided a rallying cry that mobilized supporters, pried open wallets, and ultimately recast the terms of debate, both morally and politically. Alone among the population of able-bodied Americans, out-of-the-closet gays were prohibited from volunteering for military service. In a culture that increasingly celebrated individual autonomy as the supreme value, this proved to be an untenable proposition.

So the issue refused to go away. On otherwise somnolent college campuses DADT became a bona fide cause, the basis for considerable posturing by senior administrators. Deans and presidents demonstrated their opposition to DADT by steadfastly refusing to allow ROTC on campus or by barring the Pentagon from official participation in on-campus job fairs. “I abhor the military’s discriminatory recruitment policy,” future Supreme Court justice Elena Kagan assured Harvard Law School students and faculty upon becoming dean in 2003. “This is a profound wrong—a moral injustice of the first order,” one that “tears at the fabric of our own community, because some of our members cannot, while others can, devote their professional careers to their country.”
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Yet at Harvard and elsewhere, efforts to redress this profound moral wrong were pursued in ways that carefully protected the university’s access to federal research funds. Although opposing DADT on principle, elite institutions like Harvard were not going to allow principle to impede their harvesting of taxpayer dollars.

Arguably more influential were the efforts of organizations such as the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network (SLDN), founded in 1993, and the Center for the Study of Sexual Minorities in the Military, founded in 1998 and subsequently renamed the Palm Center. SLDN provided free legal assistance to military members subjected to harassment or discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, its client list eventually numbering in the thousands. It also lobbied Congress to repeal “don’t ask, don’t tell.” For its part, the Palm Center critically scrutinized General Powell’s hypothesis (shared by other senior officers) that allowing uncloseted gays to serve would undermine military effectiveness. Not too surprisingly, its researchers reached different conclusions.
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Meanwhile, in the larger culture, the normalization of homosexuality continued apace. In remarkably short order, homophobia joined anti-Semitism, racism, and sexism on the short list of unforgivable sins. However modestly, the continuing controversy engendered by DADT helped promote this change. To a perhaps greater degree, growing popular discomfort with any form of discrimination targeting gays made their exclusion from military service seem an outrageous affront. In 1992–93, generals opposed to allowing gays to serve openly could portray themselves as shielding the United States military from assault by the forces of political correctness. Hardly more than a decade later, DADT’s defenders came across as wildly out of touch, if not positively un-American—latter-day George Wallaces reenacting the Alabama governor’s infamous 1963 stand in the schoolhouse door.

The requirements of waging the never-ending Global War on Terrorism also played a role in undermining DADT. With Arab linguists in desperately short supply, how could it make sense to discharge soldiers studying Arabic simply because of their sexual orientation?
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Booting gays out of the army was not enhancing national security. If anything, the reverse appeared true. An army dependent on volunteers could no more do without lesbians and homosexuals than it could do without blacks and women. To pretend otherwise was to play into the hands of America’s enemies. Such was the argument anyway. Almost overnight, the mantle of patriotism passed from those who supported DADT to those who opposed it.

By 2010, military leaders were ready to throw in their heteronormative towel. Allowing that “attitudes and circumstances have changed,” General Powell, now retired, reversed his position and declared his support for repealing “don’t ask, don’t tell.”
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Admiral Mike Mullen, Joint Chiefs chairman at the time, concurred, as did Secretary of Defense Robert Gates. When a TV reporter asked where he stood on the matter, General David Petraeus, then as well regarded as Powell had once been, professed not to understand what all the fuss was about.
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