Gays Serving in the U.S. Military

* I find it very hard to understand the reasoning (if that’s what it can be called) of those who insist that gays can serve in the military only if they don’t tell. What are they using for logic? Are the straights suddenly going to be harmed by finding out that people they have worked with for years are gay? Is it safer to shower, bunk, or share a foxhole with a gay when you don’t know it? It would make more sense for these homophobes to want to know who the gays are so that they could avoid them as much as possible.

There seems little doubt that there are currently many gays in the service and always have been. I wonder how many of them have been decorated, have saved the lives of, and are greatly respected by those who are now so fiercely denying them dignity.

There is one ray of hope, however. Perhaps everyone in the military will be held to the same strict code of conduct and we will no longer have the likes of the Tailhook scandal or leave any fatherless babies behind in foreign countries. Or is that too logical?

ANNE JOHNSON

Long Beach

* In all the shouting about gays in the military a critical point has been all but forgotten. The purpose of a soldier is to kill. Not to feed little babies, not to draw ethnic groups closer together, but to inflict death and defeat upon enemy forces at the order of his commander, and to thereby achieve the political and economic goals of his leadership not otherwise attainable through peaceful means.

I object to homosexuals in the military, not because of moral concerns, but because a volunteer army composed people who are culturally alienated from the mainstream are less likely to disobey an order to fire on their own people. The Russian army passed that test. Will ours?

In the aftermath of the Cold War our massive military/security/industrial system is desperately looking for enemies to justify its existence. So far it has found a couple of Third World thugs who we ourselves created, some Marxist incompetents on a teeny Caribbean island, a bunch of religious nuts in Texas, and eight social failures in the Los Angeles suburbs. Pray to God that the next enemy they find is not us.

DANIEL PALACIOS

Pasadena

* Regarding Column Right, “President Was Checkmated on Gay Ban,” July 22:

James Pinkerton errs when he states that President Lincoln did not serve in the military. He served approximately three months in the Illinois State Militia attached to the U.S. Army during the Black Hawk War in 1823.

In response to a call for volunteers by Gov. Reynolds of Illinois, Lincoln promptly volunteered for a term of 30 days in the state militia during the Black Hawk War in April, 1832. His company was sworn into federal service on May 9, 1832. When his term of enlistment expired, he re-enlisted and was mustered into the Third U.S. Artillery on May 26, 1832. When this enlistment expired, he re-enlisted for another 30 days and was honorably discharged on July 16, 1832.

One should not be so confused as to compare a great leader like Lincoln with either Roosevelt or Clinton.

B. D. HALL

Anaheim