‘Unfriendly Fire’
Brain Drain: Arabic Linguists
On September 10th, 2001, the United States government intercepted two phone calls placed from Afghanistan between Al Qaeda operatives. "Tomorrow is zero hour," said one of the voices. "The match is about to begin," came another ominous line. The National Security Agency intercepts millions of messages every hour, but these calls came from sources deemed to be high priority. They were, of course, spoken in Arabic, so they made their way to a translator's queue, waiting to be interpreted. Unfortunately, in the fall of 2001 our government did not have enough Arabic linguists to translate the messages quickly. The phone calls were not translated until two days later, on September 12, 2001. It was two days too late.
The terrorist attacks of September 11th, as every American knows, changed everything. Almost immediately, a national consensus emerged, if only briefly, that nothing should stand in the way of true reform of the nation's broken intelligence apparatus. Nothing should stop a thorough and efficient re-orientation of our national security perspective, which must immediately be geared toward fending off future terrorist attacks. Nothing, that is, except letting gays in uniform take part in the fight. The story of the ongoing purges of gay soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines with language skills critical to waging the war on terrorism pits political expediency and moral dogma against national security, social scientific research and common sense. It is a story that shines a spotlight on certain truisms that Americans seem to grasp only when it's too late, and then to promptly forget until the next time it's too late: that prejudice is generally self-defeating rather than productive, and that it nearly always has unexpected consequences. But it's a story that should also be told with the hope — perhaps against our better judgment — that maybe this time we will learn from our mistakes, re-order our priorities, and face significant truths before we further compromise the security of our citizens and the safety of our troops.
The shortage of language specialists in the intelligence and military forces has been hobbling national defense since the days of the Cold War. But between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the fall of the World Trade Center, only a few voices in the wind had noted the growing threat of Arab terrorists to American security, and the culture of the armed forces and the intelligence agencies had only just begun to budge from a fixation on Russian language as the essential skill for keeping the country safe from its enemies. Some students had begun to grasp the significance of the Arab world. The number of enrollees in Arabic language courses in colleges and universities nearly doubled between 1998 and 2002. But it wasn't nearly enough. The month before the 9/11 attacks, a major study from the University of Maryland's National Foreign Language Center warned that the country "faces a critical shortage of linguistically competent professionals across federal agencies and departments responsible for national security." Less than a month after the attacks, a House Intelligence Committee report criticized the nation's three intelligence agencies – the FBI, CIA, and National Security Agency (NSA) – for relying on "intelligence generalists" rather than linguists with expertise in a specific foreign language, culture, and geographical area. The report concluded that "at the NSA and CIA, thousand of pieces of data are never analyzed, or are analyzed 'after the fact' because there are too few analysts; even fewer with the necessary language skills. Written materials can sit for months, and sometimes years, before a linguist with proper security clearances and skills can begin a translation." Meanwhile, the intelligence agencies poured funds into advertisements, including internet marketing overseas, to try to lure linguists into the fight against terrorism.
By the fall of 2002, one year after the attacks, CIA director George Tenet warned that the U.S. faced a terrorist threat every bit as grave as it did before 9/11. A week later, the Council on Foreign Relations issued an even more sobering report. Despite bipartisan support for intelligence reform, backed by overwhelming public demand for addressing unpreparedness, the study found that "America remains dangerously unprepared to prevent and respond to a catastrophic terrorist attack. In all likelihood, the next attack will result in even greater casualties and widespread disruption to American lives and the economy" than those wrought by 9/11. Yet during the first year of the war in Afghanistan, the U.S. had 69 intelligence teams on the ground but had a 75% shortfall of daily intelligence reports. This meant that no matter the number of troops sent into foreign territory, and despite the billions of dollars being thrown into our military campaigns, a full three-quarters of the data collected about the looming threats from our enemies was not getting processed. A major obstacle to producing the reports, according to an assessment by the Center for Army Lessons Learned in Fort Leavenworth, was the shortage of Arabic speakers.
The problem was not confined to intelligence agencies, but was felt in the armed forces too. In 2002, the Army reported, it could only find 42 of the 84 Arabic linguists it was seeking to hire. In addition to this 50 percent shortage of Arabic experts, it faced a 68 percent shortage of Farsi translators and a 37 percent shortage of Korean experts. According to a General Accounting Office (GAO) study released the same year, the Army, along with the FBI, State Department and Commerce Department, failed in 2001 to fill all their jobs that required expertise in Arabic, Chinese, Korean, Farsi, or Russian. The Army reported that the "linguist shortfalls affect its readiness to conduct current and anticipated military and other missions." It said, for instance, that it lacked the linguistic capacity to support the prosecution of two major wars at one time, the baseline requirement of American military planners since the end of the Cold War. The GAO study concluded that staff shortages at these agencies "have adversely affected agency operations and compromised U.S. military, law enforcement, intelligence, counterterrorism and diplomatic efforts." And it stated that shortages in language expertise resulted in "less timely interpretation and translation of intercepted materials possibly related to terrorism or national security threats."
Two years after 9/11, the situation had not improved. The shortage of Arabic speakers had become so desperate by 2003 that one of the top Arabic speakers in the Iraqi theater was being used to translate a common housekeeping exchange, taking him away from the critical duties needed to keep U.S. troops safe, mine the Iraqi desert for intelligence and win over Iraqi civilians. On several occasions, the impact of the shortage was downright treacherous. In the summer of 2003, the Wedding Island Bridge in Baghdad was the site of an explosion targeting U.S. troops. The soldiers, part of the 40th Engineer Battalion of the 2nd Brigade of the Army's 1st Armored Division, had crossed the bridge repeatedly in search of their translator. If the Army had been able to hire and retain enough of its own translators, it would have made unnecessary these perilous trips which ended this time with a land mine explosion that sent shrapnel and bits of road into the windshield and body of the engineers' Humvee. It also might have prevented tragedies before they occurred. An Arabic document was reportedly found in Kabul before the murder of journalist Daniel Pearl, describing a kidnapping plot strikingly similar to the one that ended in his disappearance and murder. It was never translated due to a shortage of Arabic speakers.
An Army report released that year by the Center for Army Lessons Learned at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, found that "the lack of competent interpreters throughout the theater impeded operations" in Iraq and Afghanistan. "The US Army does not have a fraction of the linguists required." The 9/11 Commission Report concluded that the government "lacked sufficient translators proficient in Arabic and other key languages, resulting in significant backlog of untranslated intercepts" and the secretary of Homeland Security, Tom Ridge, pleaded that "we need more Arabic-speaking analysts." A Pentagon advisory panel reported in 2004 that the U.S. "is without a working channel of communications to the world of Muslims and Islam." A Justice Department Inspector General Report that same year found that the government "cannot translate all the foreign language counterterrorism and counterintelligence material it collects," due largely to inadequate translation capabilities in "languages primarily related to counterterrorism activities" such as Arabic and Farsi.
In response, President Bush ordered a 50% increase in intelligence officers trained in "mission-critical" languages such as Arabic. But the shortage was a problem that could not be cleared up overnight — precisely the reason that "preparedness" was so important. Despite tens of thousands of responses to post-9/11 calls for more Arabic speakers to join the government's intelligence efforts, actual hires take time, especially for those positions that require security clearances. Background checks can take six months to a year. By the spring of 2005, Sen. Pat Roberts, the Kansas Republican who chaired the Senate Intelligence Committee said the U.S. still had a "broken system."]
The U.S. military is the most powerful fighting force in the history of the world. Its troops are trained to crush the enemy with the sheer strength of superior technological might. But advances in precision warfare also allow commanders to locate and destroy highly specific targets while minimizing collateral damage — an essential feat in a world where the professed moral justification for using military power is not about gaining territory but about expanding security, democracy and markets.
Yet the success of these missions relies on one prime ingredient: intelligence. On the tense streets of Baghdad; in the Sunni strongholds of Ramadi and Falluja, still seething with anti-Western resentment from the errant bomb dropped by a British plane during the first Gulf War; and in the restive outposts of Mosul, where insurgents have mastered the use of car bombs, roadside bombs and rocket-propelled grenades against American forces, nothing is more vital to staving off casualties and ultimately winning the war than information culled from Arabic-speaking natives. Without it, commanders and their troops are crippled in their efforts to protect American forces, plan attacks against the enemy and earn the trust and aid of Iraqi citizens. Poor, faulty or inadequate intelligence plays straight into the hands of guerrilla tactics, as the ignorant behemoth staggers about in the shadows, sets up camp in oblivion or accidentally strikes civilian targets, further alienating the people whose assistance is critical to winning the war. The astounding amount of money the U.S. invests in its campaigns, and the volume of soldiers risking their lives, mean little without knowing when and where and how to deploy.
In the midst of this confusion, what the nation needed more than anything was Ian Finkenbinder. In 2003, Finkenbinder served an eight-month combat tour with the Army's 3rd Infantry Division, which spearheaded the invasion of Iraq with its "thunder run" to Baghdad. He was tasked with human intelligence gathering, one of the most critical ingredients in the effort to battle the deadly Iraqi insurgency. His job as a cryptologic linguist was to translate radio transmissions, to interview Iraqi citizens who had information to volunteer, and to screen native-speakers for possible employment in translation units. His efforts were essential to keeping U.S. soldiers safe and winning support from the from civilians on the streets of Iraq.
Finkenbinder was a rare and coveted commodity. Having attended the Army's elite Defense Language Institute at the Presidio of Monterey, he graduated in the fall of 2002 with proficiency in Arabic just as the U.S. was scrambling to fill dire shortfalls of linguists. After receiving the Army Commendation Medal while in Iraq, as well as the Good Conduct Medal and the Army Achievement Medal, Finkenbinder finished his tour and returned to his unit's base at Fort Stewart, GA. There he was confronted with a "moral and personal question," as he put it, and a practical one as well: could he continue to serve an institution that discriminated against him? Finkenbinder was gay; and though he had done all he could to follow the rules, his life under "don't ask, don't tell" was becoming untenable. He loved the Army, but, as a linguist training in the intelligence community, he had become accustomed to serving amidst educated, tolerant people. The atmosphere at Fort Stewart was different. He got wind of people gossiping about his sexuality. Because of "don't ask, don't tell," he knew he could not confront them and had no recourse with the chain of command. It was a paralyzing, demeaning and worrisome experience. "I reached the point where I couldn't live under fear of retribution," he recalled. So in 2004, he wrote a letter to his commander stating that he would continue serving so long as he could be openly gay.
In January 2005, The 3rd Infantry became the first Army unit to cycle back into Iraq since the war began in March, 2003. Finkenbinder stayed behind, having received an honorable discharge for Christmas. His commander was distraught, but his hands were tied by "don't ask, don't tell"; he was required to initiate discharge proceedings once Finkenbinder had announced he was gay. "There was definitely a feeling of, 'we could really use you,'" Finkenbinder recalled of the moment when his commander learned he would not be staying with the unit. "I was an Arabic linguist, and those are pretty valuable over there."
More damning than Finkenbinder's particular story is the number of similar stories that have piled up since "don't ask, don't tell" took effect. And they were not stories that the military wanted to share. The firing of gay Arabic language specialists during America's war on terrorism is a particularly stark illustration of the gay ban's costs to national security. And so it's no surprise that the Pentagon has not been forthcoming about the number of linguists fired. In 2004, when Palm Center researchers asked the Pentagon for the total discharge figures of gay linguists (including all foreign language specialties), they were told that figures only existed since 1998. It took a Freedom of Information Act request and pressure from members of the House Armed Services Committee to force the Pentagon to release even these incomplete figures, which landed at 73 discharges of language specialists from the Defense Language Institute between 1998 and 2004. Of these, 17 were Arabic speakers, 11 spoke Russian, 18 studied Korean, 6 were training in Persian-Farsi, and the rest studied other languages.
Then in February, 2005, a GAO report was released that included figures dating back to 1994 – the period when data was not supposed to have existed. Those figures were even more troubling. According to the GAO report, 757 troops with "critical occupations" were fired under the policy. These included voice interceptors, interrogators, translators, Explosive Ordinance Disposal Specialists, signal intelligence analysts, and missile and cryptologic technicians. Three hundred twenty-two fired service members had skills in what the military deems "an important foreign language." Fifty-four of them spoke Arabic. Ian Finkenbinder makes fifty-five. And counting.
These loses have torn a hole in the nation's defenses against Arab insurgents in the Middle East, as the thousands of fellow soldiers who relied on these linguists were forced to drift through Iraq and elsewhere with one fewer conduit to the Arabic-speaking world. It has also meant that, eventually, some other infantryman who had dutifully served out his initial obligation with the Army would have to add an additional tour to fill the vacancy, taxing his morale and compromising the readiness of the entire force.
There is no magic bullet solution to the nation's lack of preparedness for the fight against radical Islamic violence, and certainly none that can be implemented overnight. But one tactic seems pretty obvious: beefing up the security forces and the intelligence teams needed the most on the frontlines of the war against terrorism. As we struggle against an enemy whose world most American can scarcely begin to comprehend, the few men and women in the military conversant in that world would seem an invaluable asset. Instead, more than 55 Arabic language specialists are no longer working for the U.S. military because they are gay. In the two years following 9/11 alone, 37 language experts were discharged under the policy, with skills in Arabic, Korean, Farsi, Chinese and Russian. The purging of gay language specialists has seen no respite in the years after 9/11, despite ongoing pleas by military and political leaders to increase the numbers of Arabic translators.
The bulk of these men and women came from the Defense Language Institute (DLI), an elite training school for military linguists. DLI is a "joint service installation," run by the Army but training service members from all military branches. Its campus sits on a hill in Monterey, California, peering over the rocky cliffs that tumble down to the Pacific Ocean. The school teaches 80 percent of the government's foreign language classes, with 1000 faculty members serving 3800 students. Because of the battery of entrance tests and the intensity of its courses, it is known to attract students who are older and more skilled than most enlisted personnel.
Its location — in Northern California, less than two hours from San Francisco — also seems to attract a large share of gay students. "There were way too many gay people at DLI for anybody to fear the 'don't ask, don't tell' policy," said Alastair Gamble, a gay student who arrived at DLI in 2001. While there, he was out to all his gay peers and to any enlisted personnel who seemed gay-friendly. "Nobody cared," he explained. "I knew someone who was a flaming queen in a uniform, and nobody cared. Sometimes we lived on halls that were more than 50 percent homosexual. I never even got a sideways glance." To complete a course in a traditional romance language – Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese – requires a 25-week training regimen. But Arabic is what DLI calls a "category 4" language. Along with Chinese, Japanese and Korean, Arabic is the hardest for English-speakers to learn, and the course lasts 63 weeks for basic knowledge. Because it's not a "cognate" language for English-speakers — not one that shares the roots of the Germanic or Romantic family language trees — most American students hit the books for several hours each night, after taking up to seven hours of class every day. Arabic reads from right to left, has no capital letters and its characters run together like cursive, making it difficult for the untrained to distinguish them without months of practice. The year after 9/11, the number of students graduating from all American colleges and universities with an undergraduate degree in Arabic was a whopping six. Six.
Because of its difficulty for native English speakers, and because of how long and challenging the course is, only the strongest students at DLI are selected to take Arabic. Most students make their language choices under the considerable sway of their teachers. Many are told to take an easier course of study.
But Patricia Ramirez was up to the challenge. "It's always a matter of what the military needs from you," she said, expressing a common sentiment among those who look forward to military service. Ramirez was hoping to use her language skills to serve the Army. She saw it as an opportunity to thrive in a realm that could build self-confidence while also giving back to her community. In October, 2000, she entered the Army and completed basic training at Ft. Jackson, South Carolina. The following January, she entered DLI.
Ramirez was only nineteen. She knew she was a lesbian but, at that age, she didn't believe she was going to meet someone who would make her want to "turn my world upside-down." After she enlisted, two things changed. She met Julie Evans. And she found it harder than she had imagined to deny her identity. And then: 9/11. Her first reaction to the terrorist attacks was that now, she would be useful.
But thoughts of war — the values and ethics behind it, the usefulness she felt in being part of it — coincided with a re-evaluation of what it meant to serve that cause under a false identity. "Great soldiers are honest and have integrity," she thought. "It was a terrible way to live," to be forced to violate the code of ethical conduct in order to remain a soldier. It was, in fact, a logical impossibility: to remain a soldier, you had to lie; but to truly be a soldier, you had to tell the truth. In February 2002, Ramirez and Evans, also a soldier at DLI, decided to tell their commander that they were lesbians.
Why did they tell? Why did a pair of lesbians — who knew full well what the policy on gays dictated, who understood the likely consequences of announcing their sexuality to their commanders — choose to come out?
"It was a decision we made about what mattered and how much we felt like hypocrites," said Ramirez. But there were other reasons. The military is an environment which affords few protections to gays and lesbians, not just from harassment but from violence. If you hear derogatory terms aimed at gays, the urge is to protect yourself, and yet you have to go out of your way to appear unconcerned, lest someone suspect you're gay. The mandate of silence is a double bind because if you say anything, you immediately become suspect, and once you're suspect, you have even less room to say anything.
At DLI, Ramirez remarked, the students were well-educated and open-minded. But she wasn't confident that everywhere in the military would be like that. Facing war meant enduring a dread all too familiar to gays approaching a high school locker room: defending yourself in a potentially hostile and unsupervised climate meant calling attention to your sexual difference, which meant risking further revelation and indictment.
Then there was a practical matter: when the Arabic course ended, Ramirez and Evans would be placed at the military's discretion. A married couple would be placed together, but a gay couple earned no such consideration. The two were simply not willing to tolerate a separation that would not befall an equivalent heterosexual couple. "If you would like us to continue to serve in the military," they wrote to their commander, "we would like nothing more. Our sexual orientation has nothing to do with our capacity to serve."
Their announcement was a disaster. To Ramirez's dismay, after mustering the courage to face the consequences of revealing her true identity, her commander wrote a blunt reply, deeming her statement "not credible." In rejecting her statement, he claimed there were no other signs of homosexuality on her record. He also argued that the time frame, two weeks before completing her studies in Arabic, looked suspicious. The implication was that since she had completed her government-subsidized training, she sought to skip out on her obligations and use her skills elsewhere. Finally, her commander noted that many people at DLI have trouble adjusting to military life and some try to get out of service before making the transition out of school.
Ramirez was incensed. How could there be any other evidence of her homosexuality when it was prohibited by law? Any such "signs" – including, as we have seen, things as ridiculous as posters of Melissa Etheridge – are mandated to be kept carefully from coming to the attention of commanders. And the idea that she would exploit government training only to bail out and take her skills to the private sector was similarly ludicrous. She would need much more training to work for a high-paying company, and her skills were nowhere needed as they were in the world of national security, where Americans had no idea what Arab terrorists and Arab housewives alike were saying. Most absurd of all, Ramirez had risked everything in deciding to come out. She went from speaking to her family every day to barely speaking with them at all. "I was willing to lose them, and for a while I thought I had," she said. "I had to make a choice and this was my choice."
For the first time, Ramirez was actually telling the truth about her life, and she didn't like being called a liar. She considered ignoring the situation and letting it pass, but that would not resolve the likely separation that would be imposed on her and Evans. She began putting statements together from peers and family who were willing to say she was gay. She also had lawyers write letters indicating violations that may have been committed by the investigators, making clear that the investigations might be investigated. Her efforts are a remarkable testimony to the inane situations created by "don't ask, don't tell": she had to hire a lawyer to help her "prove" her sexual identity, while other soldiers got the boot for merely mentioning that they had desirous thoughts about the same sex.
Her labor began to pay off. She soon got word that, finally, investigators were pursuing a discharge. But she also got word that they were pursuing something else: dirt for a smear campaign. A friend alerted her that investigators had asked her whether Ramirez and Evans had ever been seen kissing. They were also trying to determine if she had violated visitation policies. Investigators, it turned out, were threatening other soldiers at DLI with courts-martial if they did not disclose material about Ramirez and Evans, including details about their sex lives. The word "jail" was even mentioned.
Soon after, Ramirez learned that her commanding officer was leaving the military. On his last day, he took her aside. He told her he felt strongly that, by choosing to come out, she was being selfish and putting herself above the ideal of selfless service to the group. He said that if every soldier he had was like her, there wouldn't be an army.
That same day, Ramirez's commander gave a parting speech. In it, he said how grateful he was for having a wife, and what an important difference she made in making him a better commander. "It was so hypocritical that he stood up there in front of all those people to say how grateful he was for having her and chided me for wanting the exact same thing," Remarked Ramirez. Many service members, she suggested, wouldn't tolerate this. "How many fewer soldiers would we have if everyone came in thinking they could not fall in love?"
With her commander gone, the smear campaign against Ramirez evaporated. She and Evans were both honorably discharged for "homosexual conduct" in October 2002. Even after her whole ordeal, Ramirez was not bitter. "I love it even now," she said of the Army, in an interview a month after her discharge. Then she changed her verb to the past tense: "I loved my life there." When she first joined, she believed that "don't ask, don't tell" made sense. She understood that there had to be limitations placed on all soldiers, and she didn't think it would be too hard to abide by the regulations placed on lesbians and gays. She thought, "basic training, taking community showers, I felt, they're probably better off not knowing. But that was the last time I felt that way." And this is precisely the point: if the law hadn't meddled in her personal life, she would have had the freedom to navigate her interpersonal relationships as necessary, just as straight soldiers do. If she felt some people should not know, she could remain silent. If concealing her identity became awkward, conspicuous or detrimental to her ability to be a good soldier, she could tell. After living under the thumb of the law, the policy suddenly made no sense to her at all. "Now for the life of me I don't understand it; being in the military I saw how unbelievably ridiculous it is and how it is hurting the military more than it is benefiting it."
Patty's case was typical. Hers was one of the large majority of "tell" discharges. That is, it resulted not from a witch hunt or a surprise inspection or a covert investigation, but from a "voluntary" admission that she was homosexual. But as we've seen, "volunteer" has a funny kind of meaning when you're living under "don't ask, don't tell."
There were those at DLI, however, who never volunteered to disclose their sexuality at all. Like Alastair Gamble. Gamble was always drawn to languages. His mother was an English professor, and by the time he entered Emory University, he had already studied German for seven years. In college, he continued German and took up Latin. He knew he wanted to do something "functional" with his knack for language, but he hadn't yet realized the Army would offer that opportunity, even after he had joined. "I tried to enter as a Navy officer," he recalled, "and was told my eye sight was too bad." Then someone suggested Arabic. Or Korean. Though Gamble still envisioned himself entering the service as an officer, perhaps an Army officer, he was quickly convinced that if he began as enlisted personnel, with a specialty in languages, the Army would pay off his student loans, and he could finally make his skills functional. "I was sold on the language issue," he said.
Gamble started out as a human intelligence collector, a position the GAO report cited as one of the Army's "greatest foreign language needs." Once in the Army, he completed interrogation training, a nine-week intelligence course that trains a small number of soldiers to collect information through direct questioning techniques. He then spent six weeks working for the Foreign Area Officer program, which trains officers to work with U.S. allies, where his performance won him a Certificate of Commendation from his commander. He entered DLI in June 2001 to study Arabic and earned a perfect 300 on his physical fitness test. His grades placed him at the top of his class and several teachers told him they thought he was the strongest student they had.
On April 20, 2002, Gamble was finishing his second semester of the Arabic basic course at DLI when he awoke to a pounding on his bedroom door. "This is a health and welfare inspection," came a rousing voice from the hallway. It was 3:30 a.m. These routine barracks sweeps were designed to enforce discipline for matters such as drugs, drinking and curfew. But any legitimately-discovered material that might indicate a "propensity to engage in homosexual conduct," as Gamble knew, could launch an investigation into someone's sexuality.
On this evening, after eight long months of scrupulously avoiding late-night contact, Gamble and his boyfriend, Rob Hicks, a 27-year-old Korean linguist from Colorado, had decided to spend the evening together. Hicks was nearing the end of his course and preparing to relocate to Goodfellow Air Force Base in Texas. As their separation approached, they decided they could risk one night of sleeping side by side. The move violated curfew regulations, and meant risking exposure. But who knew this would also be the night for a "health and welfare?"
Hicks climbed out the window, and was literally scaling the wall of the dorm building, when a dozen non-commissioned officers shoved open the door. The men rummaged through photographs, letters and video tapes while Gamble was shipped off to his First Sergeant's office. The search turned up a gay-themed, non-pornographic film, photographs showing affectionate, but not sexual, behavior between Gamble and his boyfriend, and several gift cards expressing romantic sentiments. Two weeks later, Gamble was officially notified that his unit was initiating an investigation into his sexual orientation. He was pulled from class and honorably discharged on August 2. About eight weeks later, Hicks was discharged as well.
When Charlie Moskos heard what happened, he said of Gamble and Hicks that they brought their punishment on themselves, and that gays should abide by the policy and remain celibate and silent. "It's disgraceful," he told the Associated Press. "These guys betrayed the gay cause. They put their own self interest above fighting al-Qaeda."
Gamble remembers the episode as one of the most humiliating moments of his life. "I was just absolutely embarrassed," he recalled in an interview. "There's really nothing like having someone who's your age, but a slight rank above you, discussing whether or not lube is sufficient evidence to prove homosexuality. It's like getting felt up; it's horrible." After his discharge, Gamble took a job with a government contractor, a job where his sexuality didn't matter, but neither did his valuable skills as a linguist.
The Army cast the DLI firings as routine enforcement of military regulations. Harvey Perritt, a spokesman for U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command, said late in 2002 that the expulsions of Arabic linguists were "not relevant" to the nation's war against largely Arabic-speaking terrorists. He insisted that discharges resulting from "don't ask, don't tell" were consistent with those for other violations of Army regulations. "If someone is enrolled somewhere and they don't pass the P.T. [physical training] standards," he said, by way of comparison, "they'll be discharged. There are policies and they are always in effect."
Actually, not always. The week after the twin towers were felled, the Pentagon looked around and noticed it would need as many soldiers as it could get its hands on for the wars it was about to wage. Under the authority of President George W. Bush, the Defense Department issued an order giving each military service the authority to suspend administrative discharges (called "stop-loss" in military speak). In explaining the decision, the folks in the Pentagon's public affairs office showed that no one was more confused than they were about how to retain badly needed gay troops while reassuring the public that the military was abiding by the law that required their discharge. "Stop loss has been authorized," spokesperson Maj. James P. Cassella told the San Francisco Chronicle, referring to the status of the gay discharge policy. "However, consistent with past practices, administrative discharges could continue under stop-loss." To clarify what the military really intended to do, Cassella said that "Commanders would be given enough latitude in this area to apply good judgment and balance the best interests of the service, the unit and the individual involved."
Just in case that didn't make it clear, a Pentagon spokesperson told the Advocate magazine soon after that there had been no shift at all in the status of gay troops: "There is no policy that would generate a change in the standards or in the administrative due process for [Pentagon] programs," he said, "including the department's management of homosexual conduct policies as prescribed in law." Though officially there was no change with regards to the implementation of "don't ask, don't tell," the authorization of stop-loss implied an obvious concern with discharging troops just as U.S. forces were preparing to land in Afghanistan.
To further complicate matters, in September 2005, the Palm Center obtained an army commander's handbook for reserve soldiers, which left no room for ambiguity about whether gay troops would be mobilized when they were needed. Under the section entitled "Personnel Actions During the Mobilization Process," it says that in cases of homosexuality, "if discharge isn't requested prior to the unit's receipt of alert notification, discharge isn't authorized. Member will enter AD [active duty] with the unit."
The handbook was from 1999, but was still in effect in the years following 9/11. When the media confronted the Army with the document, the Defense Department admitted that it knowingly sent gays to war in the Middle East. Kim Waldron, a spokesperson at the U.S. Army Forces Command at Fort McPherson, told the Washington Blade that the reason was to deny soldiers a "get out of jail free" card. "The bottom line," she said, "is some people are using sexual orientation to avoid deployment. So in this case, with the Reserve and Guard forces, if a soldier 'tells,' they still have to go to war and the homosexual issue is postponed until they return to the U.S. and the unit is demobilized." True to form, the Pentagon then tried to take it back. Lt. Col. Ellen Krenke, a Department of Defense spokesperson, said that the "don't ask, don't tell" policy remained in effect. "Our policy has not changed," she said.
Two weeks later, a worried public affairs official from the headquarters of the U.S. Army Forces Command contacted the Palm Center to say that media reports had been "somewhat in error" and he wished to "clarify and amplify the story." He explained that if a soldier is activated and says he is gay, it can take several months to corroborate the claim. During that inquiry, the soldier can indeed be mobilized. However, while the initial spokesperson "may have been accurately quoted" in saying that gay soldiers "still have to go to war and the homosexual issue is postponed until they return to the U.S.," that spokesperson was wrong. In fact, the soldier's case "is not postponed until the unit returns. The review process continues while the unit is deployed and there is no delay in resolving the matter or discharging the soldier if that is the resolution."
The honesty of this clarification was perhaps admirable. Here was a top Army spokesperson admitting that a gay soldier is not so threatening to cohesion that he can't be deployed with his unit; however, when the bureaucrats back home finally "resolve" that the soldier is gay, they'll immediately pull him from the frontlines. What we are left with is this: gays were indeed sent to war, and were removed not because they threatened cohesion but because they disappointed officials in Virginia and Washington. Even David Burrelli, the Congressional Research Service researcher who had testified at Nunn's hearings about the "causes" of homosexuality along with "asexuality, fetishes, and other paraphilias," admitted the military sent known gays to war: "The situation that arises during a time of deployment place[s] homosexuals in a no-win situation. They are allowed or ordered to serve at the risk of their own lives with the probability of forced discharge when hostilities end if their sexuality becomes an issue. By deploying suspected homosexuals with their units, the services bring into question their own argument that the presence of homosexuals seriously impairs the accomplishment of the military mission."
In fact, there is no question that the military delays and neglects gay discharges during the current wars in the Middle East. In 2006 and 2007, the Navy twice deployed a gay Hebrew linguist, Jason Knight, to duty despite his public acknowledgement that he was gay. His dismissal form was marked "completion of service" rather than homosexual conduct, thus allowing the Navy to re-deploy him in the future. Only after the sailor became the subject of an article in Stars and Stripes, a military newspaper, did the Navy finally and swiftly discharge him for homosexual conduct.
There could be no clearer proof than the story of Jason Knight, along with the discovery of the army commander's handbook that when it comes to real life, the military has no trouble sending gays to war. According to the Boston Globe, following 9/11 the military allowed an increasing number of service members identified as gay to remain in uniform — 12 gays and lesbians to continue to serve in 2003, 22 in 2004 and 36 in 2005. And these were only the reported ones. Despite the devastating cuts to linguists and other critical personnel, and despite the continued discharges of gays and lesbians throughout the armed forces, there were certain instances where known gays were allowed to remain, clearly violating the purpose of "don't ask, don't tell." The pattern raises serious questions about the elaborate rationale that the presence of open homosexuals would undermine unit cohesion. After all, if gays impair cohesion, and if cohesion is most critical during wartime, then the years following September 11th would be the last time you would want to relax the ban.
And yet, wartime is exactly when the ban has long been relaxed and sometimes totally ignored or officially suspended. In every war America has fought over the last century gays have been knowingly retained. During World War II, the Army ordered commanders to "salvage" soldiers who were facing the boot for sodomy, to review pending cases with the aim of "conserving all available manpower," and to cancel discharges and make convicted "sodomists" eligible for reassignment after prison. Indeed, a psychiatric study during the war found that it was unofficial policy in the Army and Navy to permit virtually all gay troops to serve.
In the peacetime years between World War II and the U.S. involvement in Korea in 1950, the ousting of gays more than tripled. Yet during the Korean war, discharges in the Navy fell by half. In 1953, the year the truce was signed at Panmunjom, they more than doubled again. Ditto Vietnam, when discharges plummeted during the biggest buildups of troop strength in the second half of the 1960s.
During the first Gulf War, the Pentagon resumed its pattern. Even before the air assault began to drive Saddam's forces out of Kuwait, a Defense Department spokesperson said that in case of a war, gay discharges could be "deferred" based on "operational needs" and indicated they could resume when the soldiers were no longer needed. "Any administrative procedure is dependent on operational considerations of the unit that would administer such proceedings," the spokesperson said. "Just because a person says they're gay, that doesn't mean they can stop packing their bags." He added that the action "doesn't abdicate the rules,'' but that in war, "you just have to establish priorities."
Despite the clear indications that gays would be knowingly sent to war, on the eve of our invasion of Iraq, a Defense Department spokesman, Bill Caldwell, somehow managed to stammer that "the policy on gays continues that homosexuality is incompatible with military service." Lest this particular round of doublespeak leave you unclear on exactly what the policy or practice was during the first Gulf war, a similar directive to the 1999 army commanders handbook revealed that commanders were being instructed to mobilize known gays during this conflict, too. Lawyers and gay-rights advocates cited at least seventeen cases of service members during this period who told their superiors they were gay but were informed they would still have to deploy. One lesbian reservist was even told she would have to provide documentation that she tried to marry another woman if she was to prove she was gay, a particularly tough trick to pull off given that same-sex marriage was not legal anywhere in the world. In the six months after the war, over 1000 gays were discharged, many of whom were known to be gay at the time they were sent to fight.
One almost feels sorry for the Pentagon, or at least the poor creatures who staff the public affairs office, and who routinely have to defend the indefensible. But instead of ignoring the law, military leaders had another option: they could have tried to change it. After all, the military leadership routinely presses the legislature to enact laws it deems essential to military readiness. In November, 2002, for instance, the office of the undersecretary of defense ordered a comprehensive review of the military's language programs — requirements, training, personnel — with an eye toward radically revamping how the government provided language expertise for the war on terrorism. The result was a "Defense Language Transformation Team" which ultimately produced a "roadmap" to identify appropriate actions needed to create a new "global footprint" for the Defense Department and a "new approach to warfighting in the 21st century."
The roadmap instructed that language personnel policy be updated "given the lessons of current operations and the Global War on Terrorism." The objective was to "reinvigorate the Defense Language Program" and to "maximize the accession, development, and employment of individuals with language skills." It also provided for the creation of a database with the names of former military personnel who had been separated so they could be tracked for possible "recall or voluntary return." The objective was to be able to trace the accession and separation of military linguists so that they could be "developed and managed as critical strategic assets." This would include tracking trends in the "accession and retention of individuals" with critical language skills and "explor[ing] innovative concepts to expand capabilities."
Here's one: stop firing gay linguists. In none of the dozens of recommendations included in the roadmap's extensive appendix did there appear any reconsideration of the gay policy. If ever there were a time to recommend re-visiting a personnel policy that was ill-suited to our nation's defense, surely this was it. Could the silence be a factor of the Pentagon's inability to lift the ban without Congressional action? Not judging by its other recommendations. The roadmap did not shy away from counseling several other actions that would require prior approval by lawmakers, such as its support for a Civilian Linguist Reserve Corps which, said the Roadmap, would be "subject to legislative enactment."
Nor did the Pentagon's February, 2005 white paper, entitled, "A Call to Action for National Foreign Language Capabilities." The paper "urgently recommended" that the President appoint a National Language Authority to oversee a new foreign language strategy coordinated by the federal government. Like the Defense Language Transformation Team's roadmap, "A Call to Action" stressed the need to "move the Nation toward a 21st century vision" of cultural insight and strategic effectiveness.
The white paper was explicit about calling for Congressional action. It recommended the formation of a National Foreign Language Coordination Council which would "advocate maximum use of resources," and "recommend policy and legislation to build the national capacity in language ability and cultural understanding." The Coordinating Council, it said, should have its work "enabled and funded through legislation proposed by the Administration and approved by Congress." Elsewhere in the report appeared a hearty endorsement of proposed legislation in Congress to address the need to increase American language expertise. The pending laws, it said, "are welcome signs of the emergence of [national-level] leadership."
The need for legislative action was clearly no cause for pause in taking strong stands for radical change. Beyond calls for legal change, both papers sought, to their credit, to change those cultural components in the national security and educational communities that served to hamstring real progress in American language expertise. And they gestured toward policies and practices that could incorporate re-visiting the wisdom of kicking out gay linguists. "Government agencies," said "A Call To Action," "should review current personnel positions to ensure that foreign language, cultural understanding, and crisis preparedness needs have been identified" and addressed.
Could these calls for reform prompt a re-visit of the gay ban? Perhaps, if prejudice and inertia were not standing in the way. But what about the sentiments of the civilian leaders in charge of the military? It sometimes seems they're getting the picture. "We must identify the critical nodes in our culture that can be influenced most effectively and we must identify the means to influence them — to cause a shift, now," said Under Secretary of Defense David Chu, in announcing the release of the white paper. "We must find where and how we can best concentrate our effort in order to produce significant change." Donald Rumsfeld also weighed in. "We simply must develop a greater capacity for languages that reflect the demands of this century," he said. "No technology delivers this capability; it is a truly human skill that our forces must have to win, and that we must have to keep the peace." Indeed, as Rumsfeld has been saying whenever anyone would listen, the 21st century is different than the one before it, and it brings with it a different culture. But when asked if the gay ban should survive the end of the 20th, Rumsfeld said there were no plans to re-examine the policy.
Given the enormous energy spent over the last several years addressing how to stem a recruitment and retention crisis that is undermining the war on terrorism, the general unwillingness to re-visit the gay ban can seem like a comical misunderstanding of the policy's title. It's as if officials believe that "don't ask, don't tell" means they're not allowed to even raise the issue. More probable is that the same sentiment that lay behind the initial policy continues to characterize the outlook of those who might otherwise have the moral authority to ask the hard questions; most people simply wish the issue would never come up. The question now is whether the military – and the nation – can afford to remain silent about a policy that is needlessly undermining the readiness of the armed forces.
With no action to review the policy, unable to keep up with a backlog of Arabic documents, and understaffed in its interrogations of Middle Eastern detainees, the government turned increasingly to private contracting companies at much greater financial cost and far lower oversight. As a result, quality suffered. One company, the San Diego-based Titan Corporation, was ordered in 2005 to pay $28.5 million for violating the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act barring bribery of foreign leaders. Another, Worldwide Language Resources, hastily hired a former Army intelligence specialist to translate Arabic responses from detainees at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base. The translator, William Tierney, had used his translations skills as a chief warrant officer in the Army, but had left the service in 2000 amid tensions with superiors. His tenure at Guantanamo met a similar fate. Just six weeks after he began, Worldwide relieved him of his duties because of complaints from military officials who worked with him. They said he was insubordinate, "divisive" and a "burden to the mission."
When Arabic speakers like Tierney didn't work out, the pool of replacements looked grim indeed. In October, 2003, Pentagon officials acknowledged to Congress that the military had relaxed its security standards due to a need to fill linguist positions, even hiring people without conducting proper background checks. A Defense Department official admitted that "in our rush to meet the requirements… folks were brought on with sort of interim level checks" since there wasn't time to worry about all the details until after they were hired. The results, said Charles Abell, undersecretary of defense for personnel and readiness, in testimony before Congress, included cutting corners at the notorious Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba, where U.S. military translators serve as essential intermediaries to facilitate communication, logistics and counterintelligence between interrogators and prisoners. "We found a couple who were not as trustworthy as we had hoped initially," said Abell. Three translators that year faced espionage charges.
While overall discharge numbers have fallen since September 11th, the firing of Arabic language specialists has not stopped. In January 2006, the Army booted an Arabic linguist who graduated from DLI and was outed by a string of anonymous emails. The decorated sergeant, Bleu Copas, who was serving in the 82nd Airborne Division, was not open about his sexual orientation, but believes he was targeted by vengeful acquaintances that he confided in unwisely. Inquiry officials wrote in their investigation notes that Copas was "dealing with at least two jealous lovers," and they theorized that one was behind the emails. The email author threatened to "inform your entire battalion of the information I gave you" if commanders did not take action against Copas. They launched an investigation in December and Copas was discharged shortly thereafter.
Then, in the spring of 2007, three more Arabic linguists were fired after military officials listened in on conversations conducted on a government computer system which allows intelligence personnel to communicate with troops on the frontlines. The total number of Arabic linguists fired under "don't ask, don't tell" stood at 58.
Stephen Benjamin was one of the three. Graduating at the top of his class at DLI, he became a cryptologic interpreter, responsible for collecting and analyzing signals and assigned targets to support combatant commanders and other tactical units. In October 2006, the Army Inspector General conducted an audit of a government communications system and investigated seventy service members for abusing the system — primarily using it for personal communications. Benjamin was called in for questioning, and was asked about a comment he made in which he said, "That was so gay — the good gay, not the bad one." Out of the seventy people, a small number, including Benjamin, were eventually investigated for violations of the "don't ask, don't tell" policy. The worst abuses of the computer system involved people using it to have cyber sex, but those violators retained their jobs.
Benjamin was already out to nearly everyone he worked with. "The only harm to unit cohesion that was caused was because I was leaving," he said. "That's where the real harm is, when they pull valuable members out of a team." His commanding officers were sorry to lose him. His Judge Advocate General officer told him the policy was "politically unpopular," and that military attorneys didn't like enforcing it. His Captain's evaluation read: "EXCEPTIONAL LEADER. Extremely focused on mission accomplishment. Dedicated to his personal development and that of his sailors. takes pride in his work and promotes professionalism in his subordinates."
When he was discharged, Benjamin was preparing to re-enlist for another six years. He volunteered to deploy, hoping to serve in Iraq so he could work in the environment — and with the soldiers — he had directly assisted as an Arabic translator at Ft. Gordon, GA. "I wanted to go to Iraq so I could be in the environment with the soldiers I was protecting," he said. Though he could not discuss the details of his intelligence work because many were classified, he said it involved sending reports with critical information out to the frontlines, and he knew that in his work, he "made a difference."
In response to his ouster, Benjamin created a blog, on which he posted a Navy administrative memo. It read:
DIVERSITY IS CRITICAL TO MISSION ACCOMPLISHMENT. EVERYONE IN OUR NAVY CONTRIBUTES TO MISSION SUCCESS AND EVERYONE BRINGS TO THAT COLLECTIVE EFFORT UNIQUE CAPABILITIES AND INDIVIDUAL TALENT. HOW WE HARNESS THOSE CAPABILITIES AND FOSTER THAT TALENT BEARS CONSIDERABLE EFFECT ON OUR ABILITY TO SUCCESSFULLY ACCOMPLISH THE MISSION.
There were also talented linguists who escaped the clenches of the homosexual discharge machine, but who took themselves out of the picture because the added burdens, that gays alone had to bear, were too much. Jarrod Chlapowski was so proud of finishing the army's basic training just months before September 11th, 2001, that he had the Chinese character for "honor" tattooed on his shoulder. "That's the main army value," he says in the 2007 documentary film, Ask Not. Chlapowski studied Korean at DLI and graduated as a cryptologic voice interceptor, finishing second in his class. He served in Korea as an interpreter for the 3rd Military Intelligence Battalion on sensitive reconnaissance missions. Eventually he earned the Army achievement medal and an Army commendation medal for leadership and training.
Chlapowski was out to nearly everyone in the Army. Because he didn't fit stereotypes, he said people were often shocked when he mentioned it, "but I never got a negative response." He estimated that 80 percent of his unit knew he was gay by the end of his time at DLI. "And no one cared," he added. On the few occasions he heard crass comments, he recognized that it mostly amounted to people "just kind of ribbing each other." Still, as time wore on, Chlapowski watched friends and other soldiers get caught up in the clutches of the gay ban, and it led to a deepening paranoia. "You're always going to be paranoid," he said, that someone who knows your open secret could "take issue with it." When he transferred to a new unit at Ft. Lewis, WA to train soldiers, he didn't know anyone there and was unsure of the climate. "I opted to put myself back in the closet and I was miserable," he said. "Within a few months I knew this was something I couldn't continue." Chlapowski chose not to re-enlist and left the army in November, 2005.
The loss of critical talent that results from "don't ask, don't tell" is undeniable. It is damaging to the mission and integrity of the armed forces, and by extension, it weakens our security as a nation. But perhaps most maddening of all, it is unnecessary. Why, then, do we let it continue? Unlike world poverty, ethnic conflict in the Middle East or brain cancer, all of which lack a simple, straight-forward solution, the ban on openly gay troops in the military could be ended if a couple hundred men and women decided to heed both a growing body of evidence and public opinion polls and vote for its demise. In fact, a few public statements by just a tiny handful of men who have the ear and respect of the military and political establishment, could virtually seal the deal, greatly aiding those men and women in Congress to cast the vote that most know is right but are too timid to cast. Yet they don't speak out and Congress doesn't overturn the policy. Why? Many simply don't care. Others worry they would face criticism from colleagues or backlash at the polls. Still others genuinely believe that, despite overwhelming evidence that military readiness does not require closeting gay and lesbian soldiers, letting them serve openly would needlessly saddle military commanders with dangerous new burdens.
Running through all these reasons is a commitment not to face the truth. And this, every bit as much as the wasted Arabic linguists, counterintelligence officers, artillery operators, pilots and surgeons, is the insidious nature of "don't ask, don't tell." There is something deeply embarrassing about the most powerful nation in the world imposing a gag rule on itself; we have voluntarily shackled ourselves in order to deny what we know to be true, all in the name of protecting our supposedly fragile soldiers from a phantom gay menace. The gay ban marks no less than the stalling of the Enlightenment project. The last three centuries of Western civilization have celebrated the ideals of freedom, truth, reason and self-understanding. In America, we often consider ourselves to be a world beacon for these efforts. We hallow our Constitution for its use and protection of these traits; we broadcast and praise our commitment to liberty and free speech.; and we have framed our war on terrorism as a struggle against sectarian, anti-intellectual and illiberal forces who are trying to overturn all we hold sacred. Yet "don't ask, don't tell" demonstrates that the American government is helping these forces along, to our own detriment. Americans should be asking themselves: what is gained and what is lost by sticking our collective head in the sand?
Excerpted from Unfriendly Fire by Nathaniel Frank. Copyright © 2009 by the author and reprinted by permission of Thomas Dunne Books, an imprint of St. Martin’s Press, LLC. Source
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