Edward Zasadil, 86: "I was not revealing my gayness to anybody. I did have one or two incidents, but no one noticed it. We were in two-man tents, a good-looking fellow from another platoon was bunked with me, and I woke up at night, finding he was playing with my penis. And we did that every night after that. It was taking a chance. But all in all I just kept everything very straight. There were the usual nasty remarks about gay people—’homos’ and whatnot. But I passed it off. All my life. Acted as straight as possible. Listen, my life was a pretense the whole time."3

JM: "Many of us were in army divisions primarily composed of 17- and 18-year-olds. We tended to be intellectuals, who don’t make good soldiers. We were sent into combat right at the Battle of the Bulge—I was with the 87th Infantry Division and we were the first in the Alsace-Lorraine to cross the border into Germany. And the Germans counterattacked with Tiger tanks and the whole group was either killed or captured. I ended up a prisoner of war within two weeks of arriving at the front. We were literally starved—I went down to about eighty pounds. All we could think of was where the next meal was going to come from. The drive for survival greatly outweighs the drive for sexual fulfillment—under those circumstances, this is not an issue. As soon as I got back and started eating well, the problem was back again."

AW: "In this boxcar going overnight from France to Germany, May of ’45, I had a little romance with a married man next to me. Oh, that was a kick. There we were, sleeping on straw. Absolutely no lights. We wound up next to each other. And it was just easy, it was natural. That was it. Troops that pass in the night. In the morning we opened the boxcar doors and we were in Germany, and very quickly the word came to us that Germany had that morning surrendered. Wow, can you imagine the exhilaration in that boxcar? A day earlier, I could have become a statistic. We were flown out to the Philippines to form a new army to invade Japan. Well, timing. The day my plane landed in Manila, the U.S. dropped the first atomic bomb. We didn’t have to invade. We were brought home, sent to a big camp in North Carolina. In the rec center, the men’s room was so busy—big glory holes in the toilet partitions. Play out in these vast fields at night. Everybody was just waiting to be discharged, so lots of people were taking chances. It just happened, it was spontaneous. Just because: Mission Accomplished."

JM: "I found out right after the war that if someone were discharged as homosexual, a notice of that fact was sent home to their local draft board, so that their whole community would come to know that they were gay. And this led indirectly to the formation of gay ghettos in the major cities, where people who couldn’t go home, because their sexuality had been revealed by the army, had to move into Greenwich Village or the San Francisco Castro. This was the beginning of the huge gay communities in the major cities."

6. An Out American Soldier at War

If sometimes "Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell" has been compromised by persistent asking, then, as Darren Manzella (army, 2002–8) discovered, there have been other times when, curiously, the military shut their ears to what they’d been told.

"I finally accepted that I was gay the first time I went to Iraq in 2004. We were being hit by mortars and rockets every day, we had car bombs going off. A friend of mine was killed the fourth day we were there. That experience made me come out to myself and accept it." It was when he returned to Texas from his tour of duty that the problems started. "I started getting e-mails harassing me, getting phone calls at work. Finally my supervisor said he could tell something was wrong, and I told him: ’I’m getting these e-mails, I have a boyfriend in Austin, and I don’t know what to do anymore—I need some guidance here.’ He was very understanding at first. He said, ’Okay, take the rest of the afternoon off, go home, and we’ll see you tomorrow morning.’ After I left, he went to the legal department and turned me in."