The Green Beret
JULY 10, 1975
CAMP JACKSON
NEAR SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA
Specialist Perry Watkins’s efficiency amazed just about everyone with whom he worked. Therefore, when the job of mail clerk became open, it was agreed that Perry could do it along with his other duties as company clerk. The job did not require much—a daily drive to pick up the mail at Camp Red Cloud, a post made famous in the current television show “M*A*S*H,” sorting, and distributing the mail. But the job did require a cursory check of records at the Criminal Investigation Division to ensure that a prospective mail clerk had never engaged in theft or mail fraud. When the check came back, Watkins’s commander, Captain Albert J. Bast III, was troubled to find the records of the 1968 investigation into Watkins’s homosexuality when he was assaulted at Fort Belvoir.
Bast was a tall, strapping man with thick dark hair and chiseled features. He reminded Watkins of Tyrone Power. Because of Bast’s easy disposition, Watkins also counted him as one of the best officers with whom he had worked in his seven-year Army career. The admiration was mutual. As he would testify later, Bast considered Watkins one of the best clerks he had encountered in the United States Army and he had never heard of Perry making any untoward advances to other men. But as Bast read the CID report and reviewed Army regulations concerning homosexuality, he had to conclude that Perry Watkins, who had acknowledged being gay years earlier, should not be serving in the military. Bast did not really want Watkins out, but regulations were regulations. “I don’t have any choice,” he told Watkins.
No matter that the regulations were not enforced when Watkins was drafted in 1968, nor when he reenlisted in 1971. Perry respected Captain Bast and he did not bicker. He did insist, however, on doing all the paperwork himself. “I want to make sure it’s done right,” he said, and Bast agreed.
Watkins worked directly out of Bast’s office; to relieve the captain of any potential embarrassment, Perry offered to work somewhere else until the discharge board began its machinations. Bast would not hear of it. Of course he wanted Watkins to remain in his office. Nobody was saying Perry Watkins was not good at his job.
JULY 29, 1975
ABOARD USS LITTLE ROCK
GAETA, ITALY
As an officer, Ensign Copy Berg frequently interacted with agents from the Naval Investigative Service, so he did not consider it unusual when NIS agent Parker called him into his office on a sunny day while the ship was at port. From Parker’s office, Berg was escorted to an old apartment house that the Navy had converted into a warren of offices and classrooms. Once there, Parker introduced another NIS agent. “We’re here to talk about your homosexuality,” he said.
“What homosexuality?” Berg asked.
The NIS later said it could not locate Agent Parker for an interview, but the way Berg recalled the afternoon, the agents alternated their questions. One was confrontational and hostile; Parker was kind and understanding.
“You can tell us everything,” Parker said. The NIS already had the names of all the Naval Academy officers, midshipmen, and faculty members with whom Berg had had sex and the dates when these assignations had taken place. They knew everything already, he said. He recited a long list of names. Berg recognized some as Academy faculty members, but he had never even met most of them. He refused to admit to anything.
The interview continued by the script, the good cop/bad cop dialogue, the crudely detailed questions about Berg’s sexuality. When Berg still would not respond, the pair played their trump card.
“Mr. Gibson says that you did have sexual relations,” the belligerent agent said, and then described a particular intimate act as Gibson had presumably described it to him. “Do you deny it?” he asked.
That morning, Lawrence Gibson had been removed from his classroom aboard the USS Little Rock as he prepared to teach his second class and was escorted to a small room where he met with two agents of the NIS.
According to Gibson’s later account of the morning, one agent, who identified himself as R. W. Bartlett, was hostile; the other, S. I. Eisenson, was understanding. Neither Bartlett nor Eisenson were later made available to give their versions of what happened that morning, but Gibson said he held out for a while, through Bartlett’s crude insinuations and impertinent questions, through Eisenson’s assurances that anything he said about Berg would be held in the strictest confidence—they weren’t after Gibson. He was Civil Service and the NIS had no jurisdiction over the Civil Service. They were simply trying to ensure national security.
Bartlett read Gibson a list of a dozen or more names from the Naval Academy—civilian teachers, midshipmen, senior officers—and said Ensign Berg had had sex with all of them, according to Gibson. Agent Eisenson asked Gibson how he had liked Annapolis. Wasn’t it a beautiful setting? Bartlett wanted to know who fucked whom. Who was the “inserter” and who was the “insertee”?
Eventually, they broke Gibson down. He admitted that he was gay and that he and Berg were having a sexual relationship.
But this was not enough. Precisely when had they engaged in oral copulation? Anal copulation? How many times? When? The agents also wanted all correspondence between the two men. When Gibson refused, they asked him to sign a statement reiterating all he had told them. He refused again, pointing out that Agent Bartlett had taken copious notes all morning. He did agree to take an oath attesting to the truth of what he had said. They then asked him to sign a waiver allowing them to search his apartment. It was his “patriotic duty” to sign the waiver; Berg might have documents that would compromise national security. Gibson would not. Finally, he was permitted to leave.
The Nis Agents told Berg what Gibson had said, including a number of specifics that convinced Berg that Gibson had indeed talked to them. Nothing Berg had learned at the Naval Academy had prepared him for this kind of interrogation. Gay issues had never even been discussed in his education. Now, with Gibson’s confession, Berg saw no use in denying that he was gay. It seemed more significant that innocent names from the Naval Academy were being bandied about. It appeared that scores of careers were threatened. To define what was not true, Berg admitted to what was.
At the end of the interrogation, Berg figured his Navy career was over. He was very surprised, therefore, when he returned to the Little Rock and Vice Admiral F. C. “Fox” Turner’s chief of staff asked him to replace the head of public affairs, who was going on vacation. They would sail for North Africa the next morning. Berg was to report aboard the Little Rock at 0730. There was no need to revoke his security clearance or to do anything “unusual” until further orders came from Washington.
It was the most responsible post Berg had ever held during his Navy career: managing public affairs for the fifty ships of the Sixth Fleet. But then, no one was questioning Berg’s ability to do his job.
Berg was still not home when Gibson made his way back to the villa they shared. He was still waiting for Copy when Lieutenant Thompson appeared at the apartment door to summon Gibson to the office of the ship’s executive officer, Commander Kent Siegel. Siegel ordered Gibson to pack up his books and get off the ship within a half hour, Gibson later recalled. “You’re never to set foot on this ship again,” he ordered and demanded Gibson submit his letter of resignation and return to the United States immediately. Gibson noted that he worked for the Civil Service, not the Navy, and that he would do nothing without talking to a lawyer first. He told Siegel that his “uncivil manners” were a discredit to the Navy, then left the stateroom.
The sun was blazing when Berg returned to the villa late in the afternoon. Blackness greeted him inside. Gibson had closed all the shutters and drawn the drapes. His bravado had been just that; he was convinced their lives were over.
But after all the years of hiding his homosexuality, Berg was ready to let the world know, if it really cared. The younger man went through the house pulling back the drapes, throwing open the shutters, letting the sunlight flood in. Just think, he said, they would, not have to hide anymore. To Berg’s eyes, Gibson did not seem reassured. Copy had long known that there was something in Lawrence that hearkened from generations past, from an era when it seemed as if homosexuals suffered almost eagerly to expiate their guilt. Copy had never felt particularly guilty and did not believe in suffering. In truth, he felt relieved.
The next morning, Gibson took Berg on the back of the couple’s Vespa scooter down Mount Orlando and into Gaeta for the departure of the USS Little Rock. Gibson was grave. Berg was filled with optimism. He could get on with his life now, maybe move to New York and go to art school. His life was beginning again.
AUGUST 4, 1975
SPECIAL FORCES DETACHMENT, AIRBORNE EUROPE
BAD TÖLZ, WEST GERMANY
When First Lieutenant Joseph “Jay” Hatheway, Jr., lost his father shortly after his eighteenth birthday, the younger Hatheway was in his first semester at Claremont College, on a full four-year ROTC scholarship. He had been a straight-A high school student and National Merit Scholar. He always knew he would go to college, but his father’s long struggle with heart disease had drained all the family’s resources; ROTC had made his education possible.
Hatheway had been commissioned as an infantry officer in 1971 and promptly earned the silver wings of a parachute jumper before going on to advanced training with the Special Forces at Fort Bragg. Only at Fort Bragg did he discover the meaning of Special Forces—these were the famous Green Berets, the most macho of the Army’s macho infantry units. This is not going to be fun, Jay thought, but by then he had been offered a European assignment, which was a plum. So he stuck around and went to Germany.
There was one perplexity. Physically, he fit in well enough. With dusty blond hair, blue eyes, and a muscular, compact body set on a five-seven frame, he looked the part of a fit warrior. But at least since college, he had had these attractions to other men. No one suspected he was gay. In his first Special Forces duty station in Germany, he had been too busy to think much about such things. In 1973, however, had been reassigned from his Special Forces A-team to the battalion headquarters for the Special Forces in Europe. Though his work in an intelligence position kept him busy, he had more free time, and the leisure offered opportunities for encounters with other servicemen with similar interests.
Hatheway thought he was behaving discreetly, but in 1974 people started whispering faggot. When one young enlisted man got drunk in the NCO club and called him queer publicly, word got back to the Criminal Investigation Division, which began an investigation. In the process, Jay lost his security clearance, which meant he could not perform his intelligence job. In CID interrogations, he denied everything. Two months later, the probe concluded that Hatheway’s record was “a clean slate,” and he returned to work. The episode left Jay terrified. He knew he had to get out of the Army.
Bad Tölz was a strange place, anyway. The base was housed in what had been a headquarters of the Nazi SS. A number of former SS men now worked for the Army there, occasionally showing young officers a peek at their collections of Nazi memorabilia. It all gave Jay the creeps. He requested an early separation for August 1975, which would give him time to move back to Los Angeles and prepare for his fall term at UCLA. President Ford was downsizing the military anyway, so any voluntary resignation was usually accepted as part of the overall reductions in force. Hatheway got his early out.
By August 4, Hatheway had seven days left before his departure. His car and belongings had all been shipped to Bremerhaven for return to the States, except for the civilian clothes he could carry with him and his airline ticket home.
Perhaps he was unduly optimistic, perhaps it was his devil-may-care attitude, knowing his Army days were numbered. But on that afternoon in August, Jay accepted an invitation from Robert, a fellow Green Beret, for a good-bye drink in Robert’s room. Unfortunately, Robert’s roommate, who was to have been gone for the day, returned early. This occurred before the two had consummated their farewell but in time to elicit an “Oh my God” from the roommate, after which he turned on his heel and walked out.
The next morning, Jay received word to report to the commander’s office. He figured the request meant one of two things: either a standard going-away talk from his boss or something very horrible was about to happen.
At the opening of the meeting, Jay Hatheway was being read his rights. He stood charged with violating Article 133 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, the article forbidding “conduct unbecoming an officer and gentleman.” Based on the statement of the interloper in the previous day’s dalliance, Hatheway was also charged with violating Article 125 of the UCMJ, the provision outlawing sodomy.
Jay’s commander asked him to sign an admission to avoid a court-martial. The Army later said it could not locate the commander or military judge in Hatheway’s case, but, according to how Jay recalled the morning, he would receive a less than honorable discharge, of course, and lose all his VA benefits, which he needed in order to pursue his graduate degree at UCLA; if he signed, however, he would not embarrass himself, the Army, his parents, or his President. Jay decided he was not so embarrassed that he would give up his chance at a master’s degree. He refused to sign.
The commander looked stunned. The JAG lawyer in attendance was astonished and started shouting, “Sign this. Sign this.”
The next morning, Jay found a JAG lawyer in Munich, who called the charges “outrageous.” The lawyer said he would certainly like to take the case but added, “In order to do it right, maybe I shouldn’t.”
Jay did not understand, so the military lawyer explained: He was not sure that he could mount an aggressive defense against the folks who signed his paycheck. Maybe Jay needed a civilian lawyer, he said, “in order to do it right.”
The lawyer recommended a civilian counsel working with the Lawyers Military Defense Committee, an affiliate of the American Civil Liberties Union. That same day, Jay collected his paperwork and drove his Ford Opel to Heidelberg to meet him.
“Welcome to the oppressed,” Chris Coates commented after hearing Hatheway’s story. A 1972 graduate of the University of North Carolina Law School, Coates had moved to Heidelberg with his wife in November 1974 to work with the ACLU. Defending enlisted men usually meant going up against officers and the hard-ass attitude of the military establishment. As an officer for the intelligence section of the hardest-ass branch of the Army, Jay Hatheway was everything Coates had been accustomed to fighting. But Coates was also intrigued with the case. The only other gay case Coates had defended was a specialist four whose mail had been opened by an Army captain. Reading romantic allusions in a letter to another man, the captain had promptly reported the enlisted man to the CID, which led to separation proceedings against him on grounds of homosexuality. All of this annoyed the libertarian in Coates, who moved not only to defend the officer but to press charges against the snoop. In the end, all the charges—including those against the suspected sodomite—were dropped. All this left Coates eager to challenge the more fundamental underpinning of the Army’s gay policies.
“Given the merits of the case, you may be convicted in a trial,” Coates told Jay. “But there’s another issue here. We can begin laying the groundwork to challenge the constitutionality of Article One Twenty-five.”
At issue here was not what Hatheway had been doing in Robert’s bedroom, he said; the issue was what the Army was doing there. The case might go all the way to the Supreme Court.
Hatheway was not opposed to such a challenge, but he was much more concerned with getting this over with. He still had an airplane ticket to Los Angeles dated a few days hence. He did not really care about the Uniform Code of Military Justice and he did not really care about the Army anymore. He just wanted to get on with his life. He still hoped the Army would forget the charges and the whole mess would go away.
AUGUST 1975
ABOARD USS LITTLE ROCK
TUNISIA
Tunisia is a French-speaking country and there was only one person aboard the USS Little Rock who spoke any language other than English: Ensign Vernon Berg. Berg had already been honored by the Navy for his fluency in French, so he spent much of the tour translating for dignitaries and foreign press touring the ship, then returned to his office to translate French cables and telegrams for the admiralty. So much for being a threat to national security, he thought.
His future weighed heavily on his mind. He made several visits to the chief of the admiral’s Judge Advocate General’s staff, whom he had met in his days at Annapolis. As Berg later remembered, the attorney suggested that Berg should resign “for the good of the service.” The most important thing was not to embarrass the admiral, he said, or the Navy, or Berg’s family. Wasn’t his father a Navy commander? Also, the lawyer added, if he resigned and behaved cooperatively, he would most certainly get an honorable discharge.
For his part, Berg was eager to get out of the Navy, anyway. His job did not challenge him, he did not like Italy, and he wanted to get on with his life. Putting aside the Navy’s form-letter resignation, Berg wrote: “I truly feel that my own sense of duty is such that if I ever thought my private affairs or personal ambitions in any way endangered or conflicted with the United States, her Navy or the well-being of her ships at sea, I would have at that moment tendered my resignation.”
In Gaeta, Gibson refused to resign his job. His boss promised to go to bat for him, muttering, “It’s like something out of the Middle Ages.” But shortly, she stopped returning his phone calls.
Under the new Civil Service regulations, Gibson could not be fired for being gay, of course. But he could be fired for not showing up at work; since he was no longer allowed aboard the Little Rock to conduct his shipboard classes, he lost his job.
AUGUST 10, 1975
SPECIAL FORCES DETACHMENT, AIRBORNE EUROPE
BAD TÖLZ, WEST GERMANY
Lieutenant Jay Hatheway was among three Special Forces officers slated to leave the intelligence command within a few days, and his co-workers had organized a going-away party weeks before. Word had not gotten around about Jay’s possible court-martial and he wondered what people would say the next day when he was still on the post, even though he was supposed to be flying to Los Angeles.
His attorney, Chris Coates, had given him the bad news. He had not been able to make the charges disappear and the Army would proceed with a court-martial if Hatheway did not resign. Chris also said he had talked to his ACLU colleague David Addlestone in Washington, who was challenging the regulation against gays on behalf of another gay man named Leonard Matlovich. A dual challenge to the administrative regulation and the UCMJ statute against sodomy made sense to Coates; Addlestone agreed. How did Jay feel about it? Jay said okay. Getting on with his life, he realized, was going to take a while.
The going-away party was filled with good cheer and fond farewells. Jay received a plaque from his A-team and a hand-carved wooden statue of a Green Beret soldier with backpack and weapons. There was even the approximation of writing on the soldier’s patch that bears the motto of the Special Forces: “De Oppresso Liber,” “To Free the Oppressed.”