A Few Good People

This all began one day when I was talking to a Marine who said he didn’t want gays in the military because he feared being groped in a foxhole.

I said, “Why do you feel if a guy is gay he is necessarily going to grope you? I don’t think they’re always in a groping mood.”

He said, “That’s just the way they are. They can’t help it. Like, you can’t help being born Mexi . . . French or something.”

Saying Mexican would have made him feel uncomfortable. I might be one.

“I grant you,” I said, “if you are born MexiFrench you will always be MexiFrench. But it doesn’t follow you will always be doing something that is typically ethnic.”

“Gays are different,” he said. “It’s their powerful biological secretions.”

The discussion was beginning to sound like something out of “Dr. Strangelove.” I can still see Gen. Jack D. Ripper, a mad gleam in his eyes, saying the Russians are out to steal our precious bodily fluids.

I said, “Notwithstanding different secretions, would you serve with a woman in a foxhole?”

“I suppose I would if I had to.”

“Would you object if she groped you?”

“That’s different,” he said.

“Now we’re getting someplace,” I said. “It isn’t the grope, or even the situation of the groping, it’s the groper.”

He pulled himself upright, campaign ribbons gleaming on his barrel chest, and replied in a voice that challenged chain saws, “Women do not grope!”

I was a Marine myself once during a forgotten war in Korea. And that discussion with Capt. Gung Ho made me wonder how other Marines might feel about allowing what is known as O.G.s into the Corps. Open Gays, that is.

I asked Gunnery Sgt. Bob Torres, who is still in the Marines, to gather some jarheads for a round-table discussion. He did. They covered American conflicts going back to World War I.

There was Harrold Weinberger, who drove horse-drawn artillery across the fields of France three-quarters of a century ago; Bud Lesser and Eddie Kafafian, both World War II Marines; Bob Suhosky, a Korean era Marine, and Torres, a Vietnam War Marine.

Weinberger was the first to speak up. At 93, he’s a retired major whose leathery voice can still wither recruits at a hundred yards. He made ordering a crab sandwich sound like a command to fix bayonets.

I expected the old guy to do a takeoff on queers and fruitcakes, but he fooled me. Age is no barrier to new thinking.

Weinberger favors Clinton’s current policy of no questions asked of enlistees when it comes to sexual preference. He would also brook no code names in their records to secretly identify gay Marines, and would hang gay-bashers by their . . . well . . . testis.

“On the other hand,” he boomed, not to be labeled all politically correct, “a person deviant in any way should restrict his activities to a private time and place. Or else.”

Bob Suhosky is campaigning against open gays in the military. No one ought to be discharged for being gay, he says, but why can’t it stay the way it is, without anyone knowing it? He shook his head. “It’ll lead to all kinds of problems.”

“I wouldn’t like the thought of anyone being forced upon me who is actively gay,” Bob Torres was saying.

“What choice will you have?” someone asked.

“I might not have any choice,” he said, “but I wouldn’t like it.” Then: “By serving a select group, Clinton is downgrading the military.”

Bud Lesser: “I had six women reservists attached to me at Quantico. One got hysterical when her boyfriend was transferred. No one thought anything about it. But would her behavior have been acceptable if it were two guys?”

He added, “The country is changing, and if it’s changing toward a new kind of acceptance, so must we.”

What I had here, I realized, was what the Corps had always wanted: a few good men. They weren’t out there embracing homosexuals, but they weren’t bashing them either. They were just trying to come to grips with new ideas.

Eddie Kafafian, like Weinberger, doesn’t believe anyone ought to have to state his sexual orientation to enlist in the military. “You mean women shouldn’t declare they’re women?” Suhosky needled. Kafafian ignored him.

“Everyone’s behavior ought to be up to the moral standard of the Marine Corps,” Kafafian said.

Then, softly: “I was in show biz for many years. Does it sound like a cliche to say some of my best friends are gay? And that I lost some friends to AIDS that I cared for very much?”

We disbanded quietly, like Marines going home from a war, each with his own thoughts of what the future would bring.

You could almost hear the bugles.