"So when are you back on active duty?" wrote a straight intelligence officer who served with him in Iraq in 2009.

"LOL. I dunno," the captain responded.

"Let me know so I can get stationed there," the intelligence officer wrote back. "I work with a lot of morons. It'd be nice to have a battle [buddy] with some common sense and discipline again."

Some service members wondered how the military will implement the repeal and how straight troops will react to the change, particularly in combat units, which tend to be more conservative.

"The majority of younger, rank-and-file guys will be fine with it," said Marine Capt. Tom Garnett, who is straight and a reservist at a Virginia law school. "But we are a conservative service, and one angry Marine makes a lot more noise than 30 ambivalent Marines."

At the outpost in eastern Afghanistan, the lieutenant appeared undisturbed about not having all the answers right away as he and the specialist sat in the outpost's tactical operations center.

"I have no idea how the process is going to be," he said. "But we know what the end state is. There's not a whole lot of ambiguity."