Could Gays Spoil the Special Forces?

Navy SEAL training can be very intimate and dirty. <a href="http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:BUDS_trainees_mud.jpg">DOD photo</a>/Wikimedia Commons

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The Washington Times, for decades a Moonie-owned, money-hemorrhaging adventure in right-leaning reporting, has a most fascinating story today: “Special-operations troops think the elite force is facing difficulties by accepting open gays into one of the military’s more politically conservative communities.” The story’s premise is that gays could wreak havoc on the Green Berets, Navy SEALs, Air Force pararescuers, and Marine recons. “Of particular interest,” the Times‘ Rowan Scarborough writes, “is how Navy SEALs, the macho sea, air and land commandos who put great emphasis on physical prowess, will accept gays.” Um, dude? You just answered your own question.

The story’s evidence is three pages of weird Family Research Council-style rants by anonymous military sources. Well, not entirely. As TPM‘s Josh Marshall points out, one of the story’s few named sources is George Worthington, who retired from the SEALs in 1992, four years before I was even old enough to join the service. A cursory web search reveals that Worthington was the commander of the Virginia-based SEAL Team One…in Vietnam…in 1972-74. Almost 40 years ago. And what a piece of work the old man is:

“If an open gay does his job, I think he’ll be accepted…I don’t think there is going to be that many of them that want to sign up for SEALs anyway because of the closeness and the tightness of the training. My opinion is that they’re probably more clerical oriented. Medical profession. Corpsmen. Stuff like that…”Put the word out. If you hit on somebody, you’re going to get in a fistfight…It just depends on how they comport themselves. If they start breaking out the bows and the earrings in the barracks, that might cause a little trouble.”

Unnngh, eeyah. Right. While we’re on the subject of nonsequiturs, there’s this, from (according to the article) “another Green Beret officer”: “Take the issue of showers. Is a soldier wrong for not wanting to shower with a gay soldier?”

We definitely wouldn't want gays to ruin training moments like this.Well, yes. At the point where you signed up not only for the privations of military life but of the special operations community—that is, at the point where you volunteered to do this, this, this, this, and this in order to become a proficient snatcher-and-grabber, a demolitions expert, a sniper, and a steely-eyed combat killer, then yeah: If you can’t deal with showering with a shipmate because it feels ooky, it’s your damned problem, and you’re probably not specops material. Achieving that level of comfort with your teammates is a basic prerequisite of being a special warrior, albeit a prerequisite that’s rarely highlighted in the recruiting literature. Like being able to poop in the forest, subsist on crappy MRE rations, and deal with NOT showering or sleeping for days. Can’t do it? Don’t sign up.

What’s really strange about this story is that the Times acknowledges—in the final three paragraphs—that it’s a nonstory. It achieves this by quoting the military’s own conclusions from its 2010 Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell survey of the troops, a survey that predicts the specwar community will come around like everyone else:

“These survey results reveal to us a misperception that a gay man does not ‘fit’ the image of a good warfighter—a misperception that is almost completely erased when a gay service member is allowed to prove himself alongside fellow warfighters.

“Anecdotally, we heard much the same. As one special-operations force warfighter told us, ‘We have a gay guy [in the unit]. He’s big, he’s mean, and he kills lots of bad guys. No one cared that he was gay.’ “

On a related personal note, I’ve known and served in the military with many special operators, particularly Navy SEALs. And everything about these guys is homoerotic, from their too-much-is-showing “UDT shorts” to their love of sugar cookies to every single freaking photographed minute of their basic training. My sense is that as long as gay sailors can run 12 miles, do twelve pyramid sets of pullups, withstand two hours of combat side-stroking in some foreign shore’s dark freezing surf, kidnap a terror suspect in a busy village without arousing any suspicions, and take a joke, the majority of operators won’t care who their shipmates are inclined to bed, date, or marry. A guy’s gotta have his priorities.

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WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

Wow.

And it is only because Mother Jones is funded primarily by donations from readers that we can mount ambitious, yearlong—or more—investigations like these two stories that are making waves.

About that: It’s unfathomably hard in the news business right now, and we came up about $28,000 short during our recent fall fundraising campaign. We simply have to make that up soon to avoid falling further behind than can be made up for, or needing to somehow trim $1 million from our budget, like happened last year.

If you can, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones—that exists to make a difference, not a profit—with a donation of any amount today. We need more donations than normal to come in from this specific blurb to help close our funding gap before it gets any bigger.

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