Of Lust and Arms

The Debate about gays in the military is really about sex in the military, and it has two fundamental flaws: It's dumb when it talks about sex and it's dumb when it talks about the military. The debate ignores the complexity of human sexual behavior and insists on classifying people as either hetero-or homosexual. Even more important, it fails to understand the sexually repressed, homoerotic nature of the bond that in combat prevents soldiers from fleeing and allows them to fight--the bond, in other words, that keeps them alive.

War without sex is like war without death. It took about five minutes into the first morning I spent in the Marine Corps for sex to assume the central place it would occupy for the rest of my training and, in fact, my three years on duty. It was still dark outside when we lined up in what passed for order. Our drill instructors paced up and down, staring at each recruit a few inches from his face. Then one of the recruits, a slightly effeminate Marine I'll call Brown, made a big mistake: He looked back.

"Why are you looking at me, maggot?" the drill instructor screamed.

"He's queer, I knew it. Queer," the other drill instructor piped up from the end of the line.

"You a peter puffer, Brown? Is that why you were looking at me?"

"I wasn't--" Brown began.

"Eye? Are you a private eye?" the drill instructor screamed. "Are you some sort of special individual? There are no individuals in my Marine Corps. You will refer to yourself as 'the private.'"

"Sir, the private wasn't looking at you," the hapless Brown ventured.

"Ewe? Am I a female sheep? Do you fuck sheep?" The drill sergeant was enraged.

"He does, I can tell," the other drill instructor chimed in helpfully. "Fucks cows, too. He's got that cow--fucking look."

"So that must mean you want to fuck me?"

"Sir, no sir."

"I'm not good enough, is that it? Not as good as those cows and sheep you usually fuck."

"Sir, no sir. I mean, sir, yes sir."

"Which is it, maggot?"

Brown looked very pale.

"You'd rather fuck my wife, is that it?"

"Sir, no sir."

"What's wrong with my wife, then?"

At this point someone else began to laugh--perhaps it was even me--and the focus of this torture switched away from poor Brown. His reprieve was only temporary. Every squad has someone who is the butt of harassment, and Brown filled that role for us. Eventually even some of his fellow recruits joined in, particularly a tough, squared-away Marine I'll call Stanley, who rode Brown mercilessly.

Harassment is part of training. New recruits get their heads shaved for a reason. Combat units are the opposite of democracies. The individual no longer matters. The group is everything. Recruits are referred to only in the third person. "I" and "me" disappear from their vocabulary. Harassment is brutal and universal. Every recruit is under intense pressure at all times. Any personal detail is cruelly exploited. Heaven help the poor recruit who is overweight, stutters, wets his bed, can't tell right from left or has a little dick.

Is this stupid, sexist and degrading? Yes, but so is war, which is what we were being trained for. And so is being captured. We were being trained to kill and to avoid being killed, to be overwhelmed by horror and blood and terrible chaos and not let our buddies down. War is at bottom a horrible profession, glossed over with spit-shined shoes and gleaming buttons. But its reality is primitive and repugnant.

Gay activists like to quote what Vietnam hero Leonard Matlovich had inscribed on his gravestone. "They gave me a medal for killing two men and a discharge for loving one." Allan Berube writes in Coming Out Under Fire: "It is one of the many tragic ironies of the war that gay soldiers and officers had to kill, risk their lives and see their buddies die in order to gain some respect and a sense of belonging as men among men."

Both these attitudes are fundamentally at odds with what war is about. It is about killing people, which is precisely why you get medals for doing it. And the tragic irony Berube writes about is no less tragic or ironic if you eliminate the word gay from his sentence. The rite of passage for soldiers of any race, age and sexual background has always been performance under fire, which means performance in the face of death.

General Colin Powell argues that integrating acknowledged homosexuals is different from integrating blacks. Race, Powell claims, is a "benign" condition while homosexuality is defined by behavior. Not so, claim gay advocates. "Gay sexual orientation," say the editors of The New Republic, "like straight sexual orientation is constitutive of someone's deepest personal identity and in the opinion of the vast majority of psychologists and even of the Roman Catholic Church essentially unalterable." Being gay is a matter of biology and deepest psychology. It just is.

But as a basic human function, sexuality is not always discerning. Some people, homosexual to their essence, have heterosexual sex; some heterosexuals have homosexual sex. "There is probably no sensitive heterosexual alive," writes Norman Mailer, "who is not preoccupied with his latent homosexuality." When someone is hungry enough he or she will eat almost anything. T. E. Lawrence wrote about how the men of his Arab legion would slake their desires in one another's bodies and then depart the wars to become family men and raise children. The traditions of the Royal Navy, Winston Churchill said, were "rum, sodomy and the lash." Otherwise heterosexual sailors, like inmates in prison, make do with what is at hand--and are not much more particular when they hit land.

People exist along the entire spectrum of behavior, from absolute hetero through bisexual to absolute homo. At some point what you are is less important than what you do, when you do it and with whom. Essence doesn't always predict behavior; behavior is not always a clue to essence.

One argument against gays in the military is that men would be subjected to unwanted advances--in other words, that they would be subjected to the same harassment that women in the military are, from the rowdy gantlets of Tailhook to the mundane lechery of daily duty. Men would, in short, risk being treated like women. And that, particularly in combat units, is not a fear taken lightly.

To introduce acknowledged homosexuals into combat units is in some respects different from introducing women, but not in one important way: It brings in the possibility of consensual sex. In every other area of a democratic society based on individual freedom this is good. But for a communal organization, sex presents different challenges than it does for a democracy made up of individuals. Almost every communal experiment has stumbled over the issue of sexuality: How does everyone love the group when some within the group love one another? In other words, if you fuck your buddy, do you fuck your buddies?

The New Republic's editors argue that the military disavows homosexuality because the military has a secret: It doesn't want to admit that the bond that holds military men together is homoerotic. When I was in the Marines, I bonded with a group of men I would never have met otherwise. We trained together, ate together, slept together, fought together. We shit, bathed, and--off duty--fucked in front of one another. We loved each other with a deep, undying love. Supporters of allowing homosexuals to be open with their sexuality insist that this close bonding, this communal identity or love, would thrive if it included open homosexuals. They may be right, but it's along way from a sure thing. And that's important for one reason: The other thing we did together was die. The military is not just an organization. It goes to war. In combat, soldiers must bond together. Their lives depend on it.

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Anna Simons, an anthropologist at UCLA, spent more than a year studying a 70-man special-forces unit. Her conclusions are an academic validation of whatevery combat soldier knows. Simons concludes that allowing gays to serve openly would destroy "small-unit cohesion." Simons suggests the debate is backward: It starts from acknowledging gays and then adjusting to combat conditions, when in fact "you need to understand what being in combat is all about and then work backward before you begin your social engineering."

The bond that holds men together in combat is most like the love between parents and their children--an unselfish, undemanding love more powerful than life itself. I would give my life for my children and for my buddy, and for no one else. The paradigmatic act for winning the Medal of Honor is giving your life to save your buddies. There are taboos against injecting sex into the love between parent and child. The taboos against injecting it into combat units spring from the same source.

Homosexuality and homoeroticism are incompatible precisely because they are so closely linked. In The Symposium, Plato has Phaedrus argue that homosexual lovers make the best soldiers because they fight more bravely for fear of disgracing themselves in front of their beloved. No one since has described the combat bond any better. But homosexual love can't hold together a unit of more than two men, unless everyone fucks everyone else. Not even the most outspoken gay activist has suggested that.

The essence of combat training is to expand the power of that homosexual love to the entire unit. Everyone becomes lovers, but without sex. That is precisely why all soldiers fight in combat: It takes more courage to run, the natural response, than to fight because to run would be to betray your buddies. That bond is homoerotic, not homosexual. Homoeroticism is the more fragile. It survives only if the homosexuality that lies deeper beneath it is suppressed. It strengthens men in combat only if they can love their fellow soldiers without fear of undermining their own sexuality. It is an exuberant, powerful, raunchy, vicious, deadly but ultimately innocent love. The moment the men who share it begin to ask themselves, "What did he mean by that?"--the moment they have to interpret actions and not simply live them--the power of homoeroticism slips away. Without that power, soldiers can't fight as effectively.

America Online, a computer bulletin board, has been lighting up on this topic for months. I quote two of many observations from combat veterans. From MtCowboy: "In many ways combat is more intimate than livingwith your spouse. People who haven't served haven't a clue what the life is like." And from JohnS426: "A sex act between any two consenting adults in a combat unit is like the mess sergeant feeding only two of the troops."

With civil rights we gave up trying to change people's hearts and decided what mattered was to change behavior. It didn't matter whether you loved blacks, just so long as you would serve them a meal or rent them a room. But in a combat unit behavior isn't enough. You have to love your buddies. Sure, you can hate them, too, and know in your heart that away from the unit you wouldn't even like them. But combat bonding is like sorcery. The ingredients have to be right, you have to say the right words and your heart has to be pure.

I come from a time when straights pretended to be gay in order to get out of the military. Now gays pretend to be straight in order to get in. During Vietnam it was hard to imagine which required more courage: to deny your (continued on page 172)Of Lust and Arms (continued from page 96) sexuality in order to fight or to affirm it publicly in order not to fight. There is, however, something to be said for the old way--for hypocrisy. As the old joke used to go in the Soviet Union, we pretend to work and they pretend to pay us. In the military, the hypocrisy has been that gays pretend to be straight and straights pretend to believe them.

As for hypocrisy, it is, like sex, central to war. We dressed in uniforms and ate polite dinners, followed by toasts where we swore undying loyalty to the task of protecting our wives, mothers and daughters. Then we went to places where we could get drunk while getting blow jobs from women under the table. And we saw absolutely no contradiction in any of this.

We joined to defend our country, but we also had high hopes of getting laid in ways we had not even dreamed of as we grew up. The military is often composedof young men and women who are away from home for thefirst time. Sexual adventure is part of the ticket. Mademoiselle d'Armentieres, of doughboy fame, lured many a GI to France. According to the Brits, the Americans in England in World War Two were "overpaid, oversexed and over here." The tens of thousands of Amerasian children from Vietnam are living testimony to the sexual sideline of war, as is the Gulf war's famous Love Boat, a supply ship on which 27 sailors became pregnant. Sex is going to happen.

The brutal expression of sexuality during war is part of the dehumanizing process. How else could knights schooled in chivalry rape and mutilate so many women and children in Jerusalem that the streets ran with blood? How else could Serbs, who are no more evil than anyone else, use rape as a tool of national humiliation? How else to explain My Lai? The rape of Belgium? Of Nanking? Even the word is perfect, for rape isthe use of power to humiliate and destroy. It is taking the most sacred act, the act of making life, and turning it into something brutal, degrading and murderous.

The dark fact is that soldiers are trained to killas a group, and the darker secret is that sexual energy is deeply related to killing. The aggressiveness of combat comes from adrenaline, self-preservation, love and sexual tension. The combat unit shoots off at its enemies and not into each other. The sexual imagery is precise and learned in basic training. "This ismy rifle," the drill instructor said, holding his M-16. "This is my gun," he continued, holding his dick, "this is for fighting, this is for fun."

The truth about combat is that it is only possibleif the mind is prepared, if other human beings are transformed into enemies--into things. That is thecrucial step in combat training. What makes a man a soldier is not simply that he knows how to use a rifleand a bayonet, a rocket or a torpedo, but that he can. His mind is his most powerful weapon. That word, enemy, is what fuels it. It's what lets otherwise decent men pull triggers, drop bombs and pull down their pants to rape children. In war that power, once unleashed, has to be rigidly controlled or atrocities happen. The wildness that made Tailhook such a blight comes from the same sexual repression in which combat behavior is isolated. We want those pilots to fight withutter aggressiveness, to kill without mercy, but all within certain rules.

What to do? My feeling is to keep combat units as they are, but that won't happen. The force of law andpolitics is too strong. We do owe it to the men and women who will have to live with these changes to think hard about what they mean, and not to talk in slogans or to parade sensitive knowledge about sexuality that has little to do with the reality of combat. The Dutch and other small military organizations have hadfew problems with acknowledged homosexuals in their ranks, but few armies that actually have to fight admit them into combat units. Gay activists often cite the Israeli army as an example of homosexual acceptance, but in fact, acknowledged homosexuals are subjected to psychological tests and extra security checks andare often excluded from frontline combat units.

Sexual preference, of course, has nothing to do with combat performance. Gays, like straights, can be heroes or cowards. I found that out in the Marines. There was absolutely no way to predict who would do well in combat. Some of the most all-American, squared--away marines fell apart under fire, while some of the worst shitbirds were incredibly brave. You learn quickly who can be counted on and who can't. At that level no one cares whether the grenadier is male, female, gay, straight or Tasmanian; you care about only whether he or she can lay a round in front of enemy soldiers trying to kill you and if he or she will stand fast and carry you out of harm's way if you are wounded.

Some actions could be taken immediately. Military snoops, particularly the infamous Naval Criminal Investigative Service, should stop prying into the private lives of Armed Forces personnel off base. The sodomy statute in the Uniform Code of Military Justice needs to be abolished: It is an insult to the commonly accepted sexual practices of adults of every sexual persuasion. Rules regarding sexual harassment should be tightened dramatically, with careful attention to defining harassment in ways that leave open sexual give and take. Acknowledged homosexuals, like women, should be allowed in the Air Force, most areas of the Navy and much of the Army and Marines: To deny them would be like denying them the right to serve in the Postal Service. It's the combat units that remain the problem.

In those units, we should settle only for combat arms staffed with soldiers picked solely on performance: the best people available--men or women, straight or gay, black, brown, yellow, white. Anyone who can cut it stays in, anyone who can't gets booted out. If women or gays can shoot straighter, run faster, carry more and kill with less hesitation than straight men, sign them up. As former Mayor Ed Koch once said, he didn't care whether a firefighter was male or female so long as he or she could carry a 200-pound mayor from a burning building.

Let's get the best. But that doesn't just mean the best at physical tests. The best soldiers are the ones who fit in with the unit, who submerge their identities into the group, who embody its code of courage and selflessness. The best soldiers meet high standards of behavior under stressful conditions, including high standards of sexual behavior.

We are asking a lot of 19-year-olds when we turn them into soldiers, which means, plainly put, when we turn them into killers: Can they come to accept homosexuals and/or women in their units and still function? The power of combat training can overcome a lot. It obliterates race, class, region and religion. Can it obliterate sexuality, too? You don't create a unit by emphasizing individual rights. You do it by destroying them. To announce that you are homosexual would have to be no different than announcing you are black or Catholic or left-handed. The only correct response is "What the fuck difference does it make? Give me twenty!"

The chant of the drill instructor is "There are no blacks or whites in my Marine Corps, no Jews or Catholics, no rich or poor people, only Marines." Can he say, "No straights or gays, no men or women?" Would they believe it? Would the power of sexual repression--the power that unites soldiers and gives them the strength to fight--bleed away in the many sexual possibilities with homosexuals and women around, no matter what the rules say?

To exert the power that will be needed to obliterate sexuality in a combat unit will require tough authority and merciless training--the kind usually opposed by the advocates of integrating gays and women into the military. We'd better be ready for that. I am not saying it can't be done. I am glad I will not have to try to make it work when my own life depends on it. That is, bottom line, what we are talking about. On the one hand, highly qualified homosexuals and/ or women could bring skills and talents to keep their buddies alive. On the other hand, they could inject the serpent of sex into the dark garden where courage lives.

As for poor Brown, years later I learned that he was, in fact, straight and that his tormentor, Stanley, was gay. Both went on to Vietnam and served, so far as I know, with distinction. But the story reminds me of how sexuality goes deeper than any of us knows, and how the ultimate truths about people are usually buried deep in the reaches of the human heart.

The principle to be upheld right now is that individual sexual freedom, like all our civilized freedoms, must be protected until it conflicts with the needs of the military unit. Combat units in particular are not democracies. The individual counts for nothing. The group is everything. The bonds that hold soldiers together in combat are homoerotic. The power to fight comes from sexual repression. The only way to allow women and acknowledged homosexuals into such conditions is to recognize the absolute necessity of a taboo against sexual contact. It is no less important than the taboo against incest. Lives absolutely depend on it.

What Will Be The Impact Of Gays In Battle? A Veteran Of Combat In Vietnam Has Some Surprising Answers

"We joined to defend our country, but we had hopes of getting laid in ways we had not even dreamed of."