A Different Battlefront : Armed forces: Decorated colonel who was honorably discharged is fighting Pentagon’s anti-gay policies. She says the support she has received proves homosexuals do not harm the military.

Virtually nothing has gone the way Col. Margarethe Cammermeyer thought it would since she decided to challenge the military’s policy against gays and lesbians.

She was sure that once the world found out that she is a lesbian, she would be disowned by her family, ostracized by her colleagues and shunned by her nursing patients.

Instead, the decorated Vietnam veteran has become something of a cause celebre, lauded by members of Congress, urged on by family and friends and extolled in newspaper editorials. Hollywood wants to turn her story into a television movie. Veterans groups, patients and even nuns have declared their support. The president of the military board that recommended her honorable discharge from the Army called her “one of the great Americans.”

Although the response has stunned “Greta” Cammermeyer, who lives outside Seattle, it is not really surprising. Her 27-year service record is the kind that sets patriotic hearts aflutter, making her case a particularly compelling one. Her lawyers believe that she has a good chance of toppling the ban on homosexual service members as part of a growing legal and political challenge to the military’s anti-gay policies, adopted in World War II and tightened in 1981.

“Greta’s situation and her stellar career shows most clearly the insanity of the policy,” said attorney Mary Newcombe of the Los Angeles office of the Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund, a co-counsel in the federal law suit Cammermeyer recently filed against the government. “It’s an enormous waste of resources and talent.”

When the Pentagon ended Cammermeyer’s career in June, the only evidence it had against her was her statement that she is a lesbian--given in response to a question in a 1989 security clearance interview. It was a realization she had slowly come to, after a 16-year marriage and the birth of four sons.

A native Norwegian who immigrated with her family as a child, Cammermeyer, 50, joined the Army nurse corps 31 years ago. “There was something I wanted to give back,” she says. She volunteered for duty in Vietnam, where she was awarded a Bronze Star for her care of the seriously wounded in hectic field hospitals.

After her Vietnam tour she left the service to start a family with her husband, an Army officer she had met in Germany. Women with dependent children were then forbidden from being in the service, but she re-enlisted in the Army Reserve in 1972, after the regulations were changed.

“There’s something marvelous about being in the military,” said Cammermeyer, a tall woman with a stern face that belies her warmth and humor. “We’re all there for the same cause and living the same experience. . . . I loved it.”

So thoroughly did the military take hold that even her sons’ bedspreads were camouflage-patterned.

At the same time, Cammermeyer was working as a civilian nurse specialist in Veterans Administration hospitals. In 1985, the VA named her nurse of the year. The next year she transferred to the Washington National Guard and became its chief nurse. She also set her sights on becoming the head National Guard nurse for the entire country, applying to the War College and setting into motion the fateful security check.

Perhaps because she had spent much of her military career thinking of herself as a heterosexual, Cammermeyer says that going into the interview she did not realize how stringent the Pentagon’s anti-gay policies were.

“When I knew I was going to meet with (the security officer), I had this thought in the back of my mind--if he asks about my sexuality, this may be a problem. ‘I’ll deal with it when it comes,’ ” she recalled. “I didn’t spend a whole bunch of time thinking about it.”

What is more, she said, “I am such a believer in what’s going to happen, will happen. It’s naive blind faith that sometimes gets me into trouble, but I think it also is what helps achieve the destiny.”

The question about her sexual orientation crystallized decades of feeling different without understanding why.

“I don’t think it was until I was actually asked the question that I really came to identify myself as being a lesbian,” Cammermeyer said in a speech shortly after she was discharged.

“It’s not something that happens overnight,” she said in an interview while in Los Angeles last month. “For me, the first part was the end of my marriage, because there was something that wasn’t right and I didn’t know what. No matter what I did, I still didn’t feel good, I didn’t feel like a whole person.” After 16 years, she decided “no more. I don’t want to be married.”

The 1980 divorce was painful. Her ex-husband, who still does not speak to her, took custody of the children, although two of them, college student David and high school senior Andy, now live with her. The youngest boy lives with his father and the oldest is married and living in Idaho.

Cammermeyer remembers a “sinking feeling” about her career when she acknowledged her homosexuality in the 1989 security interview. Still, she held out hope that the institution she cherished would bend to accommodate her.

But four months after the interview, she was informed that the Army was starting dismissal proceedings. “I was devastated,” she said. “I just felt like my whole world had collapsed.”

Her achievements were meaningless in the face of military regulations, which are unequivocal on the issue of gays. The Army’s only statement on Cammermeyer’s dismissal is to refer to the rules.

They state: “Homosexuality is incompatible with military service. The presence in the military environment of persons who engage in homosexual conduct or who, by their statements, demonstrate a propensity to engage in homosexual conduct, seriously impairs the accomplishment of the military mission. The presence of such members adversely affects the ability of the armed forces to maintain discipline, good order, and morale, to foster mutual trust and confidence among members who frequently must live and work under close conditions affording minimal privacy . . . and to prevent breaches of security.”

While Defense Secretary Dick Cheney has called the argument that gays are a security risk “a bit of an old chestnut,” Pentagon officials have defended the prohibition on homosexual service members, saying the problem of same-sex fraternization in the ranks would be particularly difficult to control.

“The classic example, of course, is an individual on a ship or in an infantry battalion who winds up deciding, for whatever motives, to proposition or come on to some of his colleagues,” Assistant Defense Secretary Christopher Jehn told the Washington Post last year. “Those kinds of situations inevitably have led to a breakdown in discipline, often fighting or disruption of some kind.”

The military’s inflexibility notwithstanding, Cammermeyer decided she would force the issue. She started looking for legal help, realizing that she had to tell her family. “Having been raised as I was, I knew that everybody was going to hate me. They weren’t going to want to have anything to do with me any longer,” said Cammermeyer, believed to be the highest-ranking officer ever to challenge a discharge for homosexuality. “It was very, very tough.”

One by one she took aside her sons--then ranging in age from 15 to 21--only to find they had figured it out for themselves and it did not bother them. “Each one of them gave me a hug and said it was all right and that I needed to take on the government.”

She told her brothers and her father, her only surviving parent, who just happened to be moving in with her for a couple of years. While not exactly enthusiastic about the news, he accepted it stoically, putting in an appearance at her discharge hearing last year with other family members.

The reaction of the outside world has been more remarkable to Cammermeyer. Since her dismissal, her case has grabbed headlines around the world, prompting calls and 200 letters of support.

The head of a Vietnam veterans group in the Deep South phoned. “We want you to be a member of our organization and I want you to know this is redneck Alabama,” he told Cammermeyer, who said she would be delighted. The nuns in a Seattle area convent wrote that they were behind her 100%.

The television shows “Prime Time Live” and the MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour have produced segments on her and Hollywood has come knocking. More than a dozen entertainment companies have approached her about making a television movie; one firm flew her to Los Angeles for discussions.

At the American Lake Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Tacoma--where she cares for people with seizure disorders--teary-eyed patients have hugged her and co-workers have gone out of their way to express support.

“I was astounded,” Cammermeyer said.

There have been a few hostile comments. Cammermeyer says she has received two “real ugly,” unsigned cards. And when she was finishing a news conference the day of her discharge, a married couple stopped to harangue her. When Cammermeyer confronted them, the woman yelled back: “I wish you had died in Vietnam!”

A few weeks ago, Cammermeyer received a letter from the woman, apologizing for the death wish. “Of all the things that have happened, that is probably the most significant,” Cammermeyer said. “Here is somebody who was as radical anti-me . . . as anyone, and had come far enough to apologize. These are the people we’re trying to reach out to.”

As far as Cammermeyer is concerned, the overwhelmingly positive response she has received underscores the fallacies of the Pentagon’s policy against gays and lesbians.

“All of the things that I had expected, that I had been told for years . . . that (gays are) bad for morale, compromise the mission, that people do not want to follow us in command positions--have not come to pass.”

The military confuses sexual orientation and conduct, she argues, instead of allowing “people to be who they are” and setting down rules for appropriate behavior.

Whatever the outcome of her court case, Cammermeyer says her career is over. Even if reinstated, she “cannot imagine” she would be admitted to the War College or be named to the National Guard’s chief nurse position.

“That’s the reality. So it’s trying to find some redeeming value in my 27 years in the military. . . . I have to try to make some sense out of it by trying to do something.”