DATE: Tuesday, June 17, 1997                TAG: 9706170003

SECTION: LOCAL                   PAGE: B9   EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: Opinion

SOURCE: PERRY MORGAN

                                            LENGTH:   63 lines

A MEDIA EXTRAVAGANZA CIVILIANS PUSHED THE PANIC BUTTON IN KELLY FLINN AFFAIR

Oh, wow, the political experts on military discipline are going to make a new rule! As a result of the Kelly Flinn case, sanctions against military personnel involved in adultery will be applied with perfect equity. Regarding rank and gender, that is: Never mind the circumstances.

Flinn's advocates deserve a decoration for political manipulation. If she must pay for lying and disobeying orders during an adulterous relationship, then a general officer must also suffer - the general in this case being poised to become chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Air Force Gen. Joseph Ralston had an affair with a civilian woman 13 years ago. He had been confirmed six times to various posts by the Senate. Lieutenant Flinn was sleeping with the husband of an enlisted subordinate who complained. When questioned, she lied; when ordered to desist, she disobeyed.

Ah, but these are circumstances. Should they matter during hot pursuit of political correctness? Well, circumstances are at the core of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, which says adultery is punishable when ``directly prejudicial to good order and discipline and not to acts which are prejudicial only in a remote or indirect sense. . . . ''

Noting the obvious difference between the two cases, Secretary of Defense William Cohen stood up for the man he intended to advance as Joint Chiefs chairman. But the Congress was in full flight toward the high grass into which the commander in chief already had burrowed. Members whined that the Air Force had not found an elegant solution to the problems posed by Lieutenant Flinn's behavior. They seemed to envision a military in which transfer would be the punishment (or reward) for disobedience - at least for a 26-year-old female bomber pilot with a lawyer who used a panting media to paint Flinn as the victim of sexism and discrimination.

But, as circumstance had it, the real victim in the case was a mere enlisted woman whose name never escaped the lips of pols (or the media's talking heads) standing four square for a single standard. Gayla Zigo is the wife of Flinn's lover. She complained that a lieutenant (who could have compelled her salute) was flaunting her affair with Zigo's husband on a small, isolated base where everybody knew everybody else. After the media extravaganza began, Zigo noted her helplessness in a letter to the secretary of the Air Force: ``(Flinn) had power, both as an officer and an academy graduate. She also had status as the first female B-52 pilot.'' While, as Time magazine noted, Airman Zigo was the only contestant in the P.R. battle who played by the rules, she was widely ignored - beneath the notice of congresswomen demanding an application of military justice that is fair (their emphasis) and consistent.

How fortunate for them that Airman Zigo doesn't have rank, status and glamor to make her case. However guilty the Air Force may be of exercising imperfect judgment regarding Flinn, it was on the right side of the facts, the law and the personnel involved. Moreover, the service was acting from conviction - far more than can be said of other players vexed not by the facts of the Flinn case but scared silly by its appearances.

Complaint is made that by discharging Lieutenant Flinn, the Air Force wasted a million dollars invested in her training and career. Willy-nilly, concede the loss; it's small compared with the cost of hysteria that portrayed civilian control of the military as subject to push-button panic and, as regards General Ralston, to unvarnished witch hunts. MEMO: Mr. Morgan is a former publisher of The Virginian-Pilot.

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