Conduct Unbecoming

Costs

JANUARY 1985

WURTSMITH AIR FORCE BASE

OSCODA, MICHIGAN

Captain David Marier’s major point, which he repeated again and again when he reviewed the events of 1985, was how much it cost the Air Force to train him. Though only twenty-nine years old, Dave Marier flew with the Strategic Air Command. Training required extensive piloting of an aircraft whose fuel costs alone were five thousand dollars an hour—and by 1985, Captain Marier had accumulated 212 flying hours on the KC-135As. Altogether, Dave had logged fifteen hundred flying hours. Though a good share of the time was spent in less expensive planes, he conservatively estimated that his training had cost the Air Force between $4 and $5 million. The statistic was not difficult to believe.

Dave’s instruction had taken nearly two years, beginning with training Cessnas in his first Air Force days to training in T-37S and T-38S, and finally in the huge refueling planes he piloted with SAC. He had completed his parachute training and ejection-seat instruction and his survival courses, in which he was left alone in the remote wilds of Washington State and had to kill squirrels and eat ants to survive. The grueling instruction was part of an arduous winnowing process to select those few pilots who would be entrusted with the crucial SAC component of the national defense. Of the thirty-six officer candidates in his class of the Flight Screening Program, only half got their wings. Of twenty trainees in Dave’s squadron at Officers’ Training School, only three became pilots in the end.

None of this protected him, however, during the purge of gays at Wurtsmith Air Force Base in 1985. It began with the most inconsequential of moments. According to the scuttlebutt around the base, an effeminate airman had gotten into an argument with a civilian woman with whom he worked at the base mess hall. The woman called the airman a “fag”; the airman called the woman a “cunt.” The woman marched over to the Office of Special Investigations to report the airman as a homosexual. OSI agents were disinterested; they had already heard about the mess specialist.

“What about all the other gays?” the woman said. The airman knew lots of other gay Air Force personnel on the base, including some officers.

The OSI was very interested in this and began the usual round of interrogations and threats that led to the inevitable confessions and list making, which led to Dave Marier being called into a small room and asked whether he was a homosexual.

“Yes, I am,” Dave said, his blue eyes never blinking.

It was the end of Dave Marier’s Air Force career.

By then, the Air Force was losing many expensively trained personnel because of the investigation. One of the base’s most expert navigators was on his way out, too. This captain’s job entailed navigating so well as to enable dropping nuclear warheads on specific enemy targets, which required training estimated to cost the Air Force at least $8 million. Five other enlisted men whose training had cost in the hundreds of thousands of dollars were being jettisoned, too. Those were just the costs at Wurtsmith. In a desperate effort to get an honorable discharge, one airman had turned in a Marine and two Army soldiers at other bases, and they, too, were being separated. No one was able to track what other pilots and enlisted men were being swept away at other installations.

Keeping the services a for-heterosexuals-only club was a very expensive proposition. Captain Dave Marier hoped that the high cost, among other reasons, would help save his career.

Dave Marier had always known he would tell them he was gay if asked. He had known even before he signed on with the Air Force in 1979. He had been working as a bartender late one night in the summer of 1978 when, after much delay, the made-for-TV movie about Sergeant Leonard Matlovich aired. The fact that the attitudes toward gays in the military were so much like the attitudes toward blacks in the segregated armed forces of the early 1940s struck Dave profoundly. Those attitudes had changed once whites got the chance to work side by side with blacks; straights’ attitudes would change once they worked side by side with gays. He believed that. All the Air Force needed was the example of some exemplary pilots who were gay and the old rules would fall, Dave thought, and he intended to be one of those pilots who helped make things change.

That Dave would go into the Air Force instead of the Army or Navy was not in doubt. His dad had served in the Air Force during the 1950s and had sometimes taken his son along on reserve weekends. After the service, the elder Marier took a job as a maintenance man at a trailer park outside St. Paul, Minnesota. His wife was a waitress at the little diner near the mobile home where the family lived. Dave was the third of six children, but, as the oldest boy, he handled the lion’s share of chores. Though his family had always been poor, he knew he was headed in another direction, and he had absorbed the midwestern certainty that hard work would take him there. Dave delivered the St. Paul Pioneer-Press in the morning and milked cows by hand before going off to school. After school, he tended the garden and sold tomatoes and corn from a roadside stand to pay for school supplies.

His father walked away from the family when Dave was in ninth grade, so Dave’s mom took two jobs while Dave worked nights in a pizza parlor. Still, he kept up his grades and earned a place in the National Honor Society. Like many other Middle American gay men, Dave had his first sexual experience on a Boy Scout camping trip. He thought he would go into farming, so he accepted scholarships to attend the University of Wisconsin in River Falls. Dave persevered in his studies, earned degrees in both agriculture and economics, and made the dean’s list almost every quarter.

Before settling into a life of farming, however, Marier decided to serve time in the Peace Corps. In the Philippines, he met other gay people for the first time. He also realized his homosexuality was intrinsic to him. Hungry for more travel, Dave joined the Air Force in 1979.

He planned to be the best officer and the best pilot. When the Air Force knew he was gay, they would understand the folly of their ways and things would change. After Dave had finished his pilot training, he was assigned to the 920th Air Refueling Squadron at Michigan’s Wurtsmith Air Force Base along the remote Lake Huron coast. The squadron was among those SAC wings kept on twenty-four-hour alert in the event it was necessary to launch a nuclear attack on the Soviet Union. Dave piloted the huge KC-135s, the refitted Boeing 707s that carried 20,000 gallons of gas for refueling B-52 bombers.

Each flight remained on alert for a week, with its crews in perpetual rotation. This meant endless games of Trivial Pursuit among bored team members, lots of repeat episodes of “Fame,” and plenty of time to do homework on graduate courses, which the more ambitious officers always took. Marier was enrolled in correspondence courses for the Squadron Officers School and was working on a master’s degree. He used his courses to hone more carefully the arguments he one day planned to use against the Air Force’s policy on gays. In 1983, he had studied the court cases of Vernon Berg III and Leonard Matlovich in order to write a paper, “Air Force versus Homosexuality.” By then, some officers’ wives were gossiping about him. He was so handsome and yet at twenty-nine he was not married, they noted, and he never seemed to date.

On leaves, Dave traveled to San Francisco and enjoyed gay life. When he met other gay military men on Castro Street, he asked them the details of their careers and honors, collecting more ammunition with which to challenge the gay exclusionary policy. By then, he had had a relationship with an airman first class at Wurtsmith and had been introduced to others in The Family at the base—the accused mess specialist, for one, and several other enlisted men who in the first few months of 1985 were bargaining with the Air Force for honorable discharges.

Evidence other than Dave’s admission was sparse. The mess specialist said he had photographs of Dave participating in an act of sodomy, but no such photos ever surfaced. In a search of the apartment of Dave’s old boyfriend, OSI agents found a photo Dave had signed. There was no sexual content in the inscription, but any expression of affection between men was considered homosexual by the OSI. In any case, none of this evidence mattered; Marier’s admission of homosexual thoughts was enough.

Agents pressed him for names. Dave said he would not give any, and he told them he intended to go to the press. The interrogation ended abruptly. The Air Force put Marier on restriction and ordered him to stay away from his squadron and to speak to no one on his flight crew about what was happening to him.

The Air Force was in a bind. It wanted Marier out, but it did not want publicity. Since Marier would not resign quietly like everyone else, the military pulled out its ultimate weapon—the threat of jail time—and began putting together evidence to advance a sodomy court-martial.

The plans had been made at the highest levels of the Air Force. On December 31, 1984, Lieutenant General Kenneth Peek, Jr., commander of the Eighth Air Force, ordered that Airman First Class Marc Mione be granted immunity for his testimony against Marier and a navigator under investigation. A week later, Mione gave OSI agents a statement asserting that he had had sex with Marier on two occasions. The picture inscribed to Dave’s former enlisted boyfriend became evidence for fraternization between the two.

The latter charge took some legal juggling to justify. Their relationship fell well outside the time limit proscribed by the statute of limitations for a fraternization prosecution. The Air Force argued that they might have had contact more recently, so their fraternization could be viewed as “a continuing offense” deserving of a felony prosecution—with a possible prison sentence of two years.

The cost of purges such as that at Wurtsmith Air Force Base was the issue of the moment in late 1984 and early 1985 because of a study conducted by the General Accounting Office, the independent and nonpartisan research arm of Congress. The report found that the policy of separating gays from the military cost the Department of Defense at least $22.5 million a year in lost training and recruitment expenses. In the course of a decade, that figure would approach a quarter of a billion dollars.

Although these were impressive numbers, the actual costs of ejecting two thousand soldiers a year for being gay—as the military had been doing throughout the late 1970s and early 1980s—were much higher. The GAO arrived at its estimates through Pentagon figures designed to obfuscate the actual expense of the antihomosexual policy. The lost training costs, for example, were based on the Army’s estimate that they spent $12,299 to train a soldier for his or her first duty station. The entire annual cost multiplied this figure by the 1,796 enlisted personnel whom the Defense Department ejected in fiscal year 1983.

By using the Army’s numbers, the Pentagon went with the least-expensive branch of the service rather than with the more technical and expensive training to be found in the Air Force, for example. By including only the amount it took to get soldiers to their first duty stations, the Defense Department did not count the training expenses accrued as soldiers’ careers developed. The typical soldier dismissed for homosexuality was not separated at his or her first duty station, but more than three years later, the study found. The costs of highly specialized training, such as piloting or translating, were altogether ignored.

The Pentagon’s estimated expenses for investigating gay cases were so low as to be ludicrous. The Navy, for example, claimed to spend only $111 per gay investigation, a sum that would barely pay staff time for one interrogation. The Army claimed $365 per investigation; the Air Force said it spent $529. Given the common use of almost round-the-clock surveillance of suspected homosexuals, the truth had to be much different.

However, the GAO’s report on the subject did offer a revealing glimpse into the enforcement of the ban against gays. Over the previous decade, the armed forces had separated 14,661 soldiers and sailors under the provisions of Department of Defense Regulation 1332.14. The report affirmed the arguments of gay activists that the Pentagon was relying increasingly on massive purges of gays. The statistics revealed that even though discharges were increasing in the early 1980s, the number of investigations was decreasing. Still, it was clear that the Pentagon was mounting impressive numbers of investigations. In 1983 alone, for example, the various branches conducted 1,619 gay probes.

Perhaps most striking were the statistics on officers separated for homosexuality. According to the Pentagon, all the branches of the service combined discharged only 191 officers in the ten years between 1974 and 1983, clearly only a fraction of the real numbers. Unlike enlisted men, who were subjected to discharges with the word HOMOSEXUALITY emblazoned across them, officers were allowed to resign without a notation of their offense. By underestimating the numbers of officers discharged for homosexuality, the Pentagon could substantially understate the expense of the antigay policy. An officer trained in ROTC, for example, might well cost the government as much as fifty thousand dollars before seeing a first duty station. The estimated cost for schooling an officer at one of the service academies was between $100,000 and $150,000. None of these numbers made it into the GAO estimates.

Though the reports of the expense of the antigay policy gave new ammunition to liberal congressmen who opposed the gay exclusion policy, it did little to deter its continued enforcement. This was the era of all but unlimited budgets for the military, a period that would be remembered for the Defense Department’s $140 screwdrivers and $880 toilet seats. Money was no object. The purges that had begun during the last years of the Carter administration continued to mount through 1984, 1985, and early 1986.

As at Wurtsmith, the most bizarre situations could lead to an investigation and purge. In late 1984, Navy brass at the office of the Commander Ocean Systems Pacific at Pearl Harbor distributed an anonymous survey among enlisted personnel about their working conditions. Several sailors complained that there were too many gays in the office, so the Naval Investigative Service launched an investigation that resulted in four discharges.

In 1985, Petty Officer Third Class Darren Gomez was the object of unwelcome attention from a married crew member of the aircraft carrier USS Carl Vincent, who had decided that he was gay and in love with Gomez. When Gomez did not return the crewman’s affections, the frustrated suitor went to the NIS with a long list of gays, hoping that Gomez would be among those kicked out—so that he and Gomez could then begin a life together. According to Gomez’s account, that list resulted in sixteen discharges, though Gomez himself was not among them.

At about the same time, a dozen men were ousted from the Air Force during a 1985 purge of gays at another SAC installation, F. E. Warren Air Force Base in Wyoming.

Purges continued overseas, as well. A gay investigation started in the remote Naval base of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean after a cryptographer was caught in bed with the lead singer of a rock group on the island for a USO show. This led to more names being collected.

Purges were now occurring among the most elite and honored units of the armed forces. In 1985, Army officials launched a purge of suspected gays from the service’s Old Guard, the unit that guarded the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and performed ceremonial functions at the White House and Pentagon. This probe began when Specialist Lionel Esclovon was called in by investigators who had heard a rumor that he slept with someone named Theodore. Yes, Esclovon said, he did sleep with Theodore—that was what he called his teddy bear. Though that interrogation yielded no charges, Esclovon and at least six others became the subject of further investigation, according to the Washington Blade. At least four Old Guard members were discharged as a result of the investigation.

The large numbers of gay crewmen came to the attention of the Constitution’s command in late 1984, and the NIS launched an investigation. Barracks rooms were searched; the entire crew was questioned. In the end, the probe netted at least three discharges, including Landzaat’s and that of one of the most highly honored crew members.

All the investigations resulted in broken lives and suicides. Petty Officer Second Class Phil Zimmerman did his duty at the Naval Air Station at Jacksonville, Florida, and knew a nineteen-year-old named Jamie being drummed out for being gay. Before the processing was complete, however, Jamie was found dead in his bathtub, with his wrists sliced open. Another unrecorded cost of Defense Department Regulation 1332.14.

Zimmerman’s own career also demonstrates what it cost to eliminate an entire classification of people, regardless of their skills or performance. A native of Philadelphia, Zimmerman had shown an acuity for languages since he was a child. He had taught himself how to read ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics in high school—by which time he had also learned the complicated Arabic alphabet. After surviving the 1980 purge of linguists at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey—which cost the Navy some of its top Russian- and Korean-language specialists—Zimmerman went on to learn Arabic cryptology and the dialects necessary to break Syrian and Egyptian codes. Upon graduating, he delivered a final speech to the class entirely in Arabic.

Phil also studied Farsi, the language spoken in Iran. He helped avert an international incident in 1982 when he alone was able to decipher Iranian radio traffic. For this, he won the Navy Achievement Medal, an unusual accomplishment for someone with the lowly pay grade of E-3. In the next few years, Zimmerman was given meritorious promotion to petty officer second class and a Navy Commendation Medal for his work. In Navy lingo, Zimmerman was a “golden boy,” a sailor likely to have a blessed career.

None of these accomplishments mattered to the NIS agents who pulled Zimmerman off his assignment at the National Security Agency to quiz him about his sex life. He got the full treatment—the usual threats of prison and informing his parents he was gay. The NIS also advised him that they could not guarantee his safety if he was sent back to the Navy barracks. “It’s a fact that known homosexuals tend to have accidents,” an agent said. So Zimmerman signed a statement acknowledging he was gay. One Navy captain, who commanded Zimmerman at the Naval Security Group Activity at the NSA headquarters, shook his head when he learned Zimmerman was being discharged. “It’s not your loss,” he said. “It’s the Navy’s.”

The loss was more serious than anyone could imagine then. Zimmerman was only one of several Arabic linguists discharged from the services in the late 1980s for being gay. A few years later when the United States went to war again, the military found itself without enough Arab-speaking personnel. National Security Agency officials actually contacted some of those gay interpreters who had been discharged in earlier purges to beg for their services.

Dave Marier made up his mind to resign his commission after a preliminary hearing in April 1985, in advance of his pending court-martial. Marier’s Air Force lawyer had argued an arcane legal issue that could have ended the proceeding immediately: Marier’s commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel Robert Ogden, Jr., had put Marier on restriction in October 1984. Under Air Force regulations for speedy trials, the military must then commence its court-martial within 120 days. Since the 120 days had long since expired, the Air Force had lost its ability to try Marier.

The law of the matter was so clear that Dave’s lawyer was sure the hearing would end with the dismissal of all charges. Lieutenant Colonel Ogden took the stand, however, to say that while he had put Marier on restriction in early October, he had lifted the restrictions ten days later. Dave had not been on restriction for more than 120 days, he said, just 10.

The assertion angered Dave’s lawyer, who had had personal conversations with Ogden indicating that Marier had indeed been restricted for months. Dave’s lawyer then put himself on the stand, swore himself in as his own witness, and testified under oath as to what Ogden had told him on the phone. The military judges ruled against Marier, anyway. His trial would commence on June 6, 1985. With all the charges leveled against him, Dave faced twelve years at hard labor at Fort Leavenworth.

He was convinced he did not have a chance. Marier had hoped to challenge the regulation in civilian courts, but President Reagan’s reelection and the prospect of an even more conservative judiciary had ended that dream. Dave had followed the gay-rights controversy that had cost Jim Dressel his career in the state legislature a few months earlier. If lawmakers would not support gay rights in a heavily Democratic state like Michigan, Dave doubted that he had much chance of success on the national level.

And he had begun applying for jobs at the airlines. An extended court case would hurt his chance for employment in those firms, where most management positions were held by ex-military officers who supported the Air Force’s gay exclusion policy. In May 1985, Dave offered his resignation and it was accepted.

The Wurtsmith Air Force Base purge of 1984 and 1985 offered an intriguing standard by which to judge the accuracy of the Defense Department estimates of the costs of the gay exclusion policy, as reported by the General Accounting Office. The Defense Department figures indicated that in all of fiscal year 1984, the entire cost of the policy was about $22.5 million. Yet in just this one investigation, the Air Force lost at least $12 million on two officers alone. Of course, since the pilot and the navigator were both pressured into resigning—threatened with many years at hard labor at Fort Leavenworth—their departures were counted as resignations and not as discharges due to homosexuality. Nor did these costs include the other $125,000 or so it took to train the five enlisted men who were also discharged during the investigation.

And the Wurtsmith purge was a rather modest witch-hunt by the standards of the day, certainly far smaller than many of the other investigations during the same period. Nor did it include the lost training dollars spent on those sailors and soldiers and airmen who decided that it was not worth the risk to stay in and who did not reenlist. Given all this, it is doubtful that the annual cost of the gay exclusion policy could be counted in the millions or tens of millions of dollars. The real cost probably exceeded hundreds of millions of dollars every year.