A Mind-Set Under Siege

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

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?

With reporting by Sally B. Donnelly/Los Angeles, Todd Nelson/Sioux Falls and Nancy Traver/Washington