Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, August 15, 1993 TAG: 9309240346
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: D4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Reviewed by JERE REAL
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Several years back, in the second of Clint Eastwood's ``Dirty Harry'' films, there was a telling scene. A fellow policeman says to Harry Callahan that he suspects several Vietman veterans on the force of ``being queer.''
Harry responds, ``If the rest of the department could shoot the way they do, I wouldn't care if the whole department were queer.''
That, in essence, is what Barry Goldwater, the former senator and presidential candidate, said recently of the hoopla over gays serving in the military. ``You don't need to be `straight' to fight and die for your country. You just need to shoot straight,'' the tell-it-like-it-is Goldwater wrote in The Washington Post as he urged an end to the ban on gays serving in the armed forces.
That issue, which has been much in the news in recent months, is the subject of this major new book by San Francisco writer Randy Shilts (whose previous book, ``And the Band Played On,'' is perhaps the best study ever made of the developing AIDS crisis). In this new 784-page work, he catalogs the sorry history of the military's injustices heaped upon well-meaning and patriotic gay men and women in the services when their homosexuality (not any act) was discovered.
Any rational person reading this encyclopedia of shabby treatment given gays in the service would be angry.
The focus of the discussion (engineered largely by Georgia's Sen. Sam Nunn) has been in his sham hearings not on gays' service, but on how uncomfortable heterosexuals might be if they knew gays served. As Shilts says, though, ``What is clear is that the military is far less concerned with having no homosexuals in the service than with having people f\ 1thinko there are no homosexuals in the service.''
That hypocrisy is at the heart of the so-called ``don't ask, don't tell'' alleged compromise. Even worse than the compromise are those in Congress (Virginia's Sen. John Warner and Rep. Bob Goodlatte among them) who would make emotional politics out of what is, after all, a question of fairness.
Adding to the ignorance and emotionalism have been people such as Pat Robertson - who, when he served in the military sought political influence to change his orders, as revealed in his Presidential campaign - and Lynchburg's Jerry Falwell who, though conjuring up political donations out of gay-baiting, never served a day in the armed forces of his country! These are hardly ones to flaunt patriotism and taunt those gays (such as myself) who did serve honorably.
Shilts' study is a revelation of gays' service: ``Today, gay soldiers jump with the 101st Airborne, wear the Green Beret of the Special Forces, and perform top level jobs in the `black world' of covert operations.'' Gays also operate missile silos, fly bombers in SAC, even navigate Air Force One. They ``dive with the Navy SEALS, tend the nuclear reactors on submarines, and teach at the Naval War College.'' They serve on the president's Marine honor guard and ``a gay admiral commanded the fleet assigned to one of the highest profile military operations of the past decade.''
There are gays, too, at command level, Shilts says: ``Recent gay general staff officers have included one Army four-star general, renowned in military circles, who served as head of one of the most crucial military missions of the 1980s.''
President Clinton wisely has said that America cannot afford to waste talent in today's world. Why would any commander deny himself the available talent he might need to win a battle? That is the real issue.
Imagine: You are a commander in a desperate battle but you are short of men, not weaponry. Would you utilize gay men and women - if they were available - to successfully fight the battle? The answer is obvious. Only a fool would not.
This book ought to be read by all members of Congress, including our own. The silly heterosexual fear, baseless as it is, of being ogled in the shower should not take precedence over the nation's military mission. Goldwater says ``It's high time to pull the curtains on this charade of policy.''
As Shilts' book shows, and as Goldwater's integrity reveals, ``In your heart, you know he's right.''
\ Jere Real, writer and teacher, is a VMI graduate and a former Air Force officer.
by CNB