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What This Army Officer's Exemplary Life Tells Us About Gays In The Military

What This Army Officer's Exemplary Life Tells Us About Gays In The Military

If you are a regular reader of this column, you are no doubt aware that because of what we might call the state of the world, I end up writing about a lot of unpleasant stuff. Just yesterday, I filed two stories about people getting shot when all they did was make a common mistake like going to the wrong address or losing your car in a supermarket parking lot. I write about truly terrible court decisions that threaten rights we as citizens have exercised for decades. I have written extensively about Ukraine’s war against Russian aggression and the number of civilians that have been killed, whole blocks of cities that have been bombed and rocketed out of existence.

I guess if you’re going to write a column like this one, bad news and ugliness comes with the territory.

But every once in awhile something comes to pass that is truly wonderful. Today is such a day, because it gives me great pleasure to tell you that my West Point classmate, Stewart Bornhoft, will be awarded the Legacy Award by Knights Out, the association of West Point LGBTQ graduates and cadets. After leaving the Army, Stewart became a member of Knights Out and joined the advisory board of the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network (SLDN) and worked to overturn the odious don’t ask, don’t tell (DADT) policy.

Stewart and I were early members of Knights Out when it was founded back in the 1990’s to oppose the DADT policy that existed for nearly two decades before it was overturned by Barack Obama in 2011. DADT, as the policy was called, forced LGBTQ service members to hide their sexuality, the “don’t tell” part, and in return, military commanders were not supposed to hunt them down and kick them out of the military, the “don’t ask” part.

It was a bullshit compromise created by a coalition of conservative members of Congress led by Georgia Senator Sam Nunn, who passed the policy to outflank President Bill Clinton, who had said he was going to overturn the military’s ban on gay servicemembers with an executive order similar to the one President Harry Truman issued that racially integrated the military in 1948.

DADT was a disaster for the military and for the LGBTQ people who sought to serve their country openly and without shame. More than 13,000 service members were discharged during the 18 years DADT was in effect, belying its stated purpose of allowing gay people to serve if only they remained quiet about their sexual orientation. It cost the nation hundreds of millions of dollars to train people and allow them to serve and then go through the expensive process of discharging them. The DADT policy not only didn’t work the way it was supposed to, it hurt the military by having severely negative effects on morale and readiness.

I received the Knights Out Legacy Award in 2016 for the work I did to oppose DADT by writing op ed articles, making speeches, and appearing on shows like CBS' 60 Minutes, the Today Show, and even on Fox News in its early days, before the network fell into its rabbit hole of right wing paranoia, conspiracy-mongering, and endless lies.

When Stewart receives his Legacy Award tomorrow at West Point, I will be there by his side, along with his husband, Stephen McNabb. Stewart and Stephen have been married for 14 years and together for 25. Stephen is a former Navy lieutenant who flew H60 Seahawk helicopters onboard the aircraft carriers Nimitz and Constellation. Stephen left the Navy because he no longer wanted to serve under the DADT policy.

After graduating from West Point in 1969, Stewart served in the Army Corps of Engineers for 26 years, including two tours in Vietnam and many assignments both stateside and overseas. During his career, Stewart was awarded the Legion of Merit (with 3 Oak Leaf Clusters), the Bronze Star (with OLC), the Meritorious Service Medal (with 2 OLCs), the Air Medal (with 3 awards), the Army Commendation Medal (with 2 OLCs), the National Defense Service Medal, the Vietnam Service Medal, the Humanitarian Service Medal, the Parachutist Badge and the Ranger Tab.

All the above is necessary to tell you, at least in part, who Stewart Bornhoft is, and how he served his country. Think of Stewart serving in an Army that said he wasn’t wanted, solely because he is gay. I don’t know how he did it. Nor have I ever been able to understand how the other gay men I knew in the army were able to serve their country, knowing that their country had passed laws banning them from serving, making being gay essentially illegal.

I never understood while I was at West Point and in the army, and I still don’t understand today, why for so long the U.S. government and its military could not bring themselves to recognize that LGBTQ Americans have served in the military for the same reasons everyone did: they are patriots, they feel a sense of duty and honor, and they want to help protect their country and its freedoms. What’s so hard about that? Does who you get into bed with at night affect any of that? Of course not. Are LGBTQ people supposed to be somehow incapable of serving because they are gay? That fiction was tolerated for far too long. All you have to do is look at Stewart’s awards and decorations to know that he was very, very good at being a soldier. Graduating from Ranger School and earning the coveted Ranger Tab alone is evidence of that.

People with their senses turned on half way have known forever that there have been LGBTQ service members along side them in the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, and Coast Guard. Everyone has known forever, even if they haven’t admitted it, that there have been gay people and trans people serving in militaries since long before the time of Alexander the Great.

Now that DADT is gone and the Obergefell Supreme Court decision legalized same sex marriage, there is exactly zero evidence that either the military or the institution of marriage has collapsed. So, was prejudice the problem all along? Well, yes it was. But there was another problem as well: the unwillingness of people to stand up and say that the entire edifice of discrimination in the military was wrong and had to stop. Truman did that with a stroke of his pen in 1948 when he integrated the military from top to bottom. Prior to that, there was a large school of thought, primarily among Southerners in the military, that Black people can’t fight. Can you imagine? A version of the same prejudice was held against LGBTQ people, utterly without evidence.

Here is how absurd and wrong the military was: My father told me a story when I was still a cadet about an incident that happened in his Infantry battalion the week before they were shipping out to Vietnam in 1966. He got a call late at night from the Manhattan, Kansas, police department in the town next to the Fort Riley army post. They had arrested a second lieutenant in his battalion for cross-dressing at a bar downtown. If dad would come down to the station and collect him, they wouldn’t press charges.

My father got out of bed and drove downtown and picked up his second lieutenant, who was in full make-up, a wig, wearing a dress and high heels. He took him back to battalion headquarters, and as he told me later, asked him a simple question: given his current attire, could he lead soldiers in combat in Vietnam? The lieutenant answered that he could. My father drove him home. The next day, the lieutenant showed up in uniform, and they shipped out to Vietnam a few days later.

“Son,” my father told me, “he was the best platoon leader in the whole damn battalion. I didn’t want to lose him, and I’m glad I didn’t.”

In 1993, while the DADT policy was being debated in Congress, Dad and I and several other straight veterans went to Capitol Hill and spent several days lobbying against the bill and for the complete integration of gay people into the military. Dad was invited to testify at the Senate Armed Services Committee, and gave a moving opening statement about his cross-dressing lieutenant and a gay machine gunner in his company in Korea who had given his life in battle, holding off a Chinese human-wave attack with his machine gun, saving the entire company.

Dad, who was a 1945 graduate of West Point, died before DADT was overturned, but I’m telling you for a fact that he will be with me and Stewart Bornhoft tomorrow when he receives his Legacy Award, and I know Dad will be smiling and proud that we won.

Lucian K. Truscott IV, a graduate of West Point, has had a 50-year career as a journalist, novelist, and screenwriter. He has covered Watergate, the Stonewall riots, and wars in Lebanon, Iraq, and Afghanistan. He is also the author of five bestselling novels. You can subscribe to his daily columns at luciantruscott.substack.com and follow him on Twitter @LucianKTruscott and on Facebook at Lucian K. Truscott IV.

Please consider subscribing to Lucian Truscott Newsletter, from which this is reprinted with permission.

Ukraine Or Vietnam: This Is What Losing A War Looks Like

Ukraine Or Vietnam: This Is What Losing A War Looks Like

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Writing about the madness of war reminded me of my first months as a second lieutenant in the Army. I was stationed at Fort Benning, the “Home of the Infantry,” to attend the Infantry School, a beginner course for lieutenants destined for platoon commands.

If you drove onto the post, located on the edge of Columbus, Georgia, you wouldn’t know anything was wrong. The first thing you saw was a gigantic wooden thermometer with its red indicator almost to the top, indicating 99 percent participation in the United Way fund drive on the post. Then came immaculately groomed grass along the sides of the road and sidewalks lined with white painted rocks and headquarters buildings with American flags flapping atop white flagpoles and platoons of trainees in fatigues and spit-shined combat boots marching in formation along the roadsides.

Looking at Fort Benning’s obsessive neatness and the discipline of the troops and the neatly lined-up vehicles in the motor pools, you would be forgiven if you forgot that the war in Vietnam was raging thousands of miles away across half a continent and the Pacific Ocean.

Beneath the placid surface of things at Fort Benning and outside its gates, however, things were coming apart. In June, Life magazine had published its ground-breaking cover story, “The Faces of the American Dead in Vietnam: One Week’s Toll.” Inside were 10 pages of the photographs and names of 242 American soldiers who had been killed in a single week in Vietnam. Local papers around the country had been publishing photos of the boys from the small towns who had been killed as the deaths were announced, but this was the first time photographs of the war dead had been collected in a single place, and it was stunning.

It was as if the editors at Time-Life in New York City had finally decided to take a stand against the war. The dead were 19 years old, or 25, a few were in their 30’s, but their faces looked impossibly young. In the coming months and years, the Life cover with the faces of the dead would mark a turning point in support for the war. Richard Nixon, who had run for president saying he had a “secret plan” to end the war, had been in office only a few months, but even by then it was obvious there was no plan. We were losing the war in Vietnam, and more people were realizing that nearly every day.

On the post at Fort Benning, life went on as normal. At the Infantry School, we marched to and from classrooms and training areas with student platoon leaders marching alongside their platoons calling out the defiant cadence of the young and the doomed:

If I die in a combat zone

Box me up and ship me home

Tell my girl I done my best!

Lay my medals across my chest

Lay my body six foot down

Until you hear it touch the ground!

We rode in deuce-and-a-half trucks to the firing range; we spent rainy nights soaked to the skin on training maneuvers; we studied how to formulate mission statements and ops orders in classrooms in old World War II-era wooden buildings; we ate C-rations in the field and cold sandwiches and Cokes from food trucks on the post. Nobody talked about Vietnam. Nobody had orders yet; soldiers would be sent to brief stateside assignments, and then they’d get orders. It was far away in the future, the war, months away at least.

We read in the papers that in May, a great victory had been won at Hamburger Hill in Vietnam. A battalion from the 101st Airborne Division had driven a large unit of the North Vietnamese Army from a hilltop in the A Sau Valley near the border with Laos. The battle was part of the famed, or infamous, “search and destroy” tactics in the war, where U.S. army units basically went out into the boonies until they encountered the enemy and fought them. The battle of Hamburger Hill was supposed to interdict North Vietnamese supply routes into Vietnam from the Ho Chi Minh trail.

Back home, there were hints, rumblings that all was not well. Just before we graduated West Point in June, the Academy administration did something it had never done before. They brought a group of young officers back from the war, straight to West Point, and put on a panel in an auditorium to talk to my entire class about what it was like to be a young officer in combat.

During questions after their presentation, which could charitably be described as dispirited, someone I was sitting near asked about stories in the paper about drug use among soldiers over there. One of the older officers, I think he was a captain or a major, said the stories were false, liberal propaganda against the war. When the panel was over, one of the second lieutenants came down the steps from the stage straight over to where the questioner was sitting. A bunch of us gathered around as he said they had been ordered to deny stories of drug use, but it was a lie. Drug use was rampant in Vietnam he told us, sotto voce. Believe the papers, not the army.

One day at Fort Benning, I ran into a classmate at the PX and we stopped to talk. He told me something strange had happened recently. He was sharing an apartment off-post with another lieutenant he had found advertising for a roommate on a bulletin board somewhere. A few days before as he and his roommate were getting ready to drive onto the post, his roommate had been arrested by the MP’s and taken away. He didn’t know what for, and he hadn’t seen his roommate since. I asked him what the guy's name was. “Rusty Calley,” he answered. I forgot about it, writing it off as some goof who was probably picked up for coming on to a colonel’s wife at a bar and run out of the army.

It wouldn’t be until November that Seymour Hersh’s stories about the massacre at My Lai hit the press. We were gone from Fort Benning by then.

There were rumblings in my student company at the Infantry School as well. A few weeks into the course, they started putting pressure on us to contribute to the United Fund drive. The battalion commander was demanding 100 percent participation. Just for the hell of it, a friend and I drove down to the United Fund offices after getting off that afternoon. We asked to see something that told us how the United Fund money was being used in the Columbus community. They gave us a list of organizations – Boys and Girls Clubs, Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, a small community theater group, that sort of thing.

We checked the United Fund documents we were given and saw that four Boy Scout troops were getting funds, a thousand dollars or something like that. We found the number for the local Boy Scouts office and learned that there were eight scout troops in the town. We went back to the United Fund and asked why four Boy Scout troops were getting United Fund money, but four weren’t. Unabashed, they told us those were the Black scout troops. We looked a little further into what the United Fund supported and what it didn’t and found that no Black organizations in Columbus received United Fund support.

The next day, we got our student company commander, who was Black, to announce to the whole company at morning formation that no money from the United Fund was going to Black organizations in Columbus. The United Fund was nakedly racist. He said he wasn’t contributing to the United Fund. We spread the word that we weren’t either. A few days later, the battalion commander came down and said only one guy in the company had contributed to the United Fund. Our lunch hour was canceled and we were marched over to an old World War II-era movie theater.

We were all seated when a major walked out on the stage and announced that Lt. Col. Weldon Honeycutt, the hero of Hamburger Hill, would be addressing us on why we should contribute to the United Fund. He was on some kind of tour giving speeches around the country to counter the bad reviews the battle of Hamburger Hill was getting in the press. With that, Honeycutt, a rather squat figure with a crewcut and thick neck in starched fatigues, strode across the stage into the spotlight. He made some short remarks about the big win at Hamburger Hill and then launched into a speech about discipline and morale and good order and how an army wasn’t an army unless everyone was on the same page, and on he went with boilerplate we had all heard a dozen times at West Point. And then he ended by banging on the podium and telling us that we wouldn’t be able to be good combat commanders unless we followed orders and gave to the United Fund!

The place erupted in applause. Honeycutt took it as applause for him and his speech, but the major who had introduced him got it that we were applauding for another reason. He signaled to Honeycutt from the wings to cut it short, but Honeycutt ignored the major and growled, “Questions, gentlemen?” There was a long silence, and then the guy sitting next to me, Strosher, got to his feet.

Strosher was a former sergeant who had been given a battlefield commission to first lieutenant two months previously in Vietnam because he had been the only guy in the 25th Infantry Division to blow an ambush in a year. Yes, that means exactly what you think it does. Soldiers had basically stopped fighting the war by the summer of 1969, and when they were sent out on night ambush patrols, they would just sit there. They wanted to stay alive more than they wanted to fight the VC.

Strosher said the ambush he commanded had been blown when one of his soldiers fell asleep and his head accidentally fell onto the trigger for a Claymore mine and set it off. A VC patrol happened to be walking past their position, and the rest of the patrol started firing and blowing their claymores and they killed a dozen enemy, and Strosher was a hero. He didn’t want to be promoted. He was happy as a sergeant, he told me, but the division commander insisted he take the commission, and he was sent back to the states to attend the Infantry School.

Strosher, who despite the silver bar on his collar, still looked and sounded like a sergeant and had the cocky attitude of a guy with 10 years in the service and two tours in Vietnam under his belt, knew the answer to the question he would ask Honeycutt before he asked it. He paused a moment and then introduced himself. “Sir, First Lieutenant Strosher. Can I ask where you were during the battle of Hamburger Hill?” He remained standing.

Honeycutt looked confused, as if he hadn’t been asked that question before. “Uh, I was in my C&C ship at my assigned altitude.” Honeycutt was referring to his command and control helicopter. Thinking to himself, doing a mental calculation, Honeycutt continued: “Uh, 2,500 feet as I recall.”

Strosher lifted a hand in a little wave and said, “Thank you, sir. That’s all I needed to know.” The place erupted in laughter. Honeycutt had done what we would today call saying the quiet part out loud. While 72 of his men were killed 2,500 feet below him, and 372 were wounded, he was circling the battlefield in a helicopter wearing a headset and microphone giving orders.

Wars aren’t lost on the battlefield alone. They’re lost in the countries that wage them with politics and posturing and lies and sending out puffed-up buffoons like Honeycutt to transform tragedy into heroism, loss into victory. Wars are lost by exercising racist policies and permitting, even rewarding, racist behavior and expecting no one to notice. Wars are lost by mistaking technology for genius, tactics for strategy, means for ends. If we take this hill and that town and kill that number of enemy soldiers and blow-up apartments and destroy hospitals and explode power stations and burn villages and kill civilians and damage and poison crops and call it a victory, then it will be, or so they think.

One year after I was at Fort Benning, I went back there to cover the trial of Lieutenant William Laws “Rusty” Calley for The Village Voice. He was charged with the premeditated murder of 109 civilians in the hamlet of My Lai in 1968. Calley put up the classic defense that he was just following orders. I was in the courtroom on the day that he testified. As I sat there, I heard whole paragraphs of the Infantry Manual come out of his mouth as he described the “standing assault” he and his platoon conducted that day.

Lieutenant Calley was a product of his times. He had been drafted into the army during Project 100,000, a program instituted by Robert McNamara to induct substandard men into the service at a time when they weren’t getting enough recruits and too many young men were dodging the draft. They lowered the IQ level necessary to serve, did away with the requirement for a high school diploma, and gave anyone serving less than two years in jail for minor offenses the opportunity to get out early if they would sign up for the army. Calley, who had dropped out of junior college, was one of the more stellar recruits and was sent to Officer Training School and became a second lieutenant in the Infantry.

This is what Calley told the jury in answer to a question from his own attorney on the day I was in the courtroom: “Well, I was ordered to go in there and destroy the enemy. That was my job on that day. That was the mission I was given. I did not sit down and think in terms of men, women, and children. They were all classified the same, and that was the classification that we dealt with, just as enemy soldiers. I felt then and I still do that I acted as I was directed, and I carried out the orders that I was given, and I do not feel wrong in doing so, sir.”

This is what losing looks like. This is Hamburger Hill. This is My Lai. This is Bucha. This is Mariupol. This is Kyiv. This is Odessa. This is Lviv.

This is the United States of America. This is the Russian Federation. This is war. There are no winners. Only the dead, and memory, if you can keep it.

Lucian K. Truscott IV, a graduate of West Point, has had a 50-year career as a journalist, novelist, and screenwriter. He has covered Watergate, the Stonewall riots, and wars in Lebanon, Iraq, and Afghanistan. He is also the author of five bestselling novels. You can subscribe to his daily columns at luciantruscott.substack.com and follow him on Twitter @LucianKTruscott and on Facebook at Lucian K. Truscott IV.

Please consider subscribing to Lucian Truscott Newsletter, from which this is reprinted with permission.

At West Point, Obama Argues For Restraint In Use Of Military

At West Point, Obama Argues For Restraint In Use Of Military

By Lesley Clark, McClatchy Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama called Wednesday for a foreign policy that downplays military intervention in favor of diplomacy and international partnerships, defending his approach as better suited to a world grappling with global threats of terror.

“This is American leadership. This is American strength,” Obama said of efforts to work with Europe to isolate Russia for its intervention in Ukraine and to persuade Iran to abandon its nuclear pursuit. He acknowledged that neither crisis has yet been resolved, but argued there’s an opportunity to resolve them peacefully.

In a speech before graduating cadets at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, the president sought to rebut criticism that his foreign policy has been one of retrenchment, even as he declared that the U.S. remains indispensable and will strike if its interests are threatened.

“America must always lead on the world stage. If we don’t, no one else will,” he said, telling the cadets that the U.S. military “is and always will be the backbone of that leadership.”

The speech comes amid criticism that Obama’s cautious approach to conflict has emboldened U.S. adversaries such as Russian President Vladimir Putin, who annexed Ukraine’s Crimea region earlier this year despite the threat of sanctions.

But Obama argued that a military response “cannot be the only or even primary” solution to every conflict.

“Just because we have the best hammer does not mean that every problem is a nail,” he said.

Since World War II, he said, “some of our most costly mistakes came not from our restraint, but from our willingness to rush into military adventures — without thinking through the consequences.”

The speech came a day after Obama unveiled his plan to end combat operations in Afghanistan by the end of the year. Cadets cheered as the president said they would be the first graduating class since Sept. 11, 2001, not to be sent into combat in Iraq or Afghanistan.

The president did pledge to work with Congress to ramp up support for moderate Syrian opposition groups, but he defended his decision not to send U.S. troops, saying there’s “no military solution that can eliminate the terrible suffering anytime soon.”

A senior White House official said the administration wanted to discuss with Congress the “potential” for a U.S. military role in helping Syrian rebels.

Obama said the U.S.’s biggest threat was no longer a centralized al-Qaida capable of a large-scale attack on the U.S., but decentralized affiliates and extremists. Many have agendas focused in countries where they operate, the president said, but they can target U.S. personnel overseas, “as we saw in Benghazi.”

Obama, who was elected in 2008 in part because of his opposition to the war in Iraq, called it “naive and unsustainable” to invade every country that harbors terrorist networks, instead arguing that the U.S. should partner with countries fighting insurgents.

To that end, he called on Congress to support a proposed $5 billion counterterrorism fund to help countries in the Middle East and North Africa that are fighting extremists, including Yemen, which is battling al-Qaida.

Republicans said U.S. allies were already concerned with what they said were Obama’s failures to live up to his threats.

“Too often, strong words have been followed by weak actions or no actions,” said Rep. Ed Royce (R-CA) who chairs the House Foreign Affairs Committee. “President Obama’s diplomatic efforts cannot work if our allies lack confidence in U.S. commitments, and our opponents do not fear U.S. warnings.”

AFP Photo/Jim Watson

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Obama, At West Point, Plays Down Military Power, Emphasizes Diplomacy

Obama, At West Point, Plays Down Military Power, Emphasizes Diplomacy

By Christi Parsons, Tribune Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama praised the potential of American leadership around the globe on Wednesday while laying out a new definition of that term, downplaying military might and emphasizing diplomacy, alliances and the will to “lead by example.”

Standing before a crowd of 1,000 new Army officers at the U.S. Military Academy’s graduation ceremony in West Point, New York, Obama commissioned them to be part of a team that extends beyond the armed forces to include diplomats and development experts.

“America must always lead on the world stage. If we don’t, no one else will,” Obama told the cadets. “The military that you have joined is, and always will be, the backbone of that leadership.

“But U.S. military action cannot be the only, or even primary, component of our leadership in every instance,” Obama said. “Just because we have the best hammer does not mean that every problem is a nail.”

In the sweeping commencement speech, Obama rejected critics’ suggestions that he is an isolationist because of his unwillingness to commit military force to end the crisis in Syria or to threaten anything more than sanctions to limit the Russian aggression in Ukraine.

Instead, Obama embraced the label “interventionism” even as he cited presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, Roosevelt and Truman in making a case that the U.S. should think long and hard before committing its military.

In discussing the U.S. response in Syria, Obama announced that he will work with Congress to ramp up support for moderate factions in the opposition that are opposed not only to President Bashar Assad but also to extremist rebels.

But he also seized on the case of Syria to underscore his principle of using the military only when American core interests are at stake, defining that as when “our people are threatened, when our livelihood is at stake or when the security of our allies is in danger.”

On the other hand, when such issues don’t pose a direct threat to the U.S., he said, the threshold for military action is higher and requires American leaders to mobilize allies and partners to take collective action.

Just a day after announcing that he will complete the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan at the end of 2016, Obama described for the graduating cadets the new threat he says the country is now facing from the Middle East to the Sahel region of Africa.

The principal threat to the U.S. no longer comes from a centralized al-Qaida leadership, Obama said, but rather from a diffuse array of affiliates and extremists, many of them with agendas focused on the countries where they operate.

“This lessens the possibility of large-scale 9/11-style attacks against the homeland, but heightens the danger to U.S. personnel overseas, as we saw in Benghazi; or less defensible targets, as we saw in a shopping mall in Nairobi,” Obama said. “We need a strategy that matches this diffuse threat; one that expands our reach without sending forces that stretch our military thin, or stir up local resentments.”

That strategy, he said, depends on using a range of tools including diplomacy, development, sanctions and isolation, along with appeals to international law and, where “necessary and effective,” multilateral military action.

“We must do so because collective action in these circumstances is more likely to succeed, more likely to be sustained, and less likely to lead to costly mistakes,” he said.

Photo via Junko Kimura-Matsumoto/Jana Press/Zuma Press/MCT
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