What Straight Soldiers Do : Military and gays: The sexual misconduct of servicemen stationed overseas is legendary; it should be ‘dishonorable.’

When asked about the integration of acknowledged homosexuals into the armed forces, some military men have hidden behind such statements as “It would be detrimental to good order and discipline,� and “It would harm the national defense.�

I don’t understand why the spokesmen for the military can’t just say that they think homosexuality is immoral, or that sex acts between men are evil, or sinful or whatever it is they think, and stop using the security of this nation as a crutch for their arguments. (I use the phrase “sex acts between men� because I think that most men are completely indifferent about physical contact between lesbians.) And who are these military men to judge anyone’s morality or immorality? The coarse behavior of many of them that I have witnessed certainly does not qualify them to judge the morality of others.

In the early 1960s, I was assigned as the G3 or operations officer of an infantry division of 15,000 men in Korea. It was a choice assignment except that my family couldn’t be with me on the year-long unaccompanied tour, as we called it.

One night shortly after I got there I was in the officers’ club and a major came up, introduced himself (I’ll call him Smith) and asked if he could have a word with me alone. He then called over a stunning young Korean woman whom he introduced as Kimiko, and I shook hands with one of the most beautiful women I’d ever seen.

Smith proceeded to inform me that he was leaving for the States, ending an arrangement he had with Kimiko. She had picked me out, he said, and I could buy her for $150 a month. He further explained that she owned an apartment in Seoul. I could go down every Friday afternoon, get back to division early Monday morning, and in effect be married three nights of the week. He even guaranteed that she would be “faithful,� as he put it, not sleeping with anyone else while I “owned� her. She smiled, and I felt as though I were being visually seduced, but I told Smith that I didn’t think I was interested in his offer. I later found out that “buying a broad,� or whatever they called it, was a common practice.

A few months ago, I wrote a column about the death of a gay soldier in my company in the Korean War in 1951. In response, I received a letter from a West Pointer who graduated in the late 1940s. He told me of being assigned to 8th Army Headquarters in Seoul about the time I was being introduced to Kimiko. He found that several of his superiors were habitually sleeping with women--enlisted servicewomen as well as Koreans.

He wrote that he had decided to follow his own “inclination�--to be with men rather than women. For this he was discharged under “other than honorable� conditions when his gay behavior came to the attention of his superiors a couple of years later. But before that, the Army had promoted him to major and then to lieutenant colonel ahead of his contemporaries. Twice the Army had considered him an outstanding officer before determining that he was “other than honorable.�

Soldiers, from private to general, have sexual intercourse with local women when they are overseas away from their families. Is this moral and honorable conduct? How can we damn a man with an “other than honorable� discharge for being gay and condone and even encourage adultery? We have even been known to facilitate it, as we did with “approved� whorehouses in the occupation of Japan shortly after World War II. Why, as I recall, we even segregated them by rank: one each for the lower ranking soldiers, the top-grade enlisted men, the company-grade officers and the field-grade officers.

Recently, Japan’s behavior in that respect came under scrutiny when several Korean women came forward with testimony about how they had been conscripted as “comfort girls� for the occupying Japanese troops. Was it any more legitimate for us to direct our men to whorehouses in Japan?

For years, the abandoned children of American servicemen and local women have been a problem in every Asian country our armed forces have served in. Yet we have never owned up to our responsibility to these Amerasian orphans.

How can we be so hypocritical? We damn a man (or woman) for being homosexual, and we ignore the uncounted living examples, those forsaken progeny, of all those sordid affairs.

At least the gays and lesbians haven’t contributed to this legacy of shame.