Don't Ask, Don't Tell, Don't Care

Yes, yes. Another political posting. Skip it if you want to.

They are finally repealing the Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy for the military. Or at least getting around to it. As a former Marine I just have to say, it's about time!

When I served, gays were not allowed to, and women not allowed in combat units. Well, I was a combat field Marine, so I spent lots of time training to blow up the bad guys. The men and women (yep, we had a couple of them) in my artillery unit trained hard and became the best at what we did. When the subject of DA,DT came up, which was pretty rare anyways, it seemed like almost across the board we really didn't care about a fellow Marines status. It was a non-issue. We didn't care if the person next to us was straight or gay, male or female, black, white, asian, native american, purple. It just didn't matter. We were all camo green.

What mattered was if they would stand and fight when the time came. If you could depend on them to do their job and uphold the traditions of the Marine Corps. What mattered was that you knew that when the crap hit the spinning air mover, they would have your back and you would have theirs.

I'm almost certain we had a couple of guys who were gay in our unit. We didn't care. They were good Marines, and that's what mattered. We had a WM (woman Marine) who was in the Comm platoon (communications). She was an awesome Marine. Knew her job and did it very well. But when we had field training, she was not allowed to go with us because of her gender. Ironically, I think most of us felt that we would trade her any day for a couple of the other comm guys that were perpetually lost when it came to their jobs.

It is time for the military to accept those who want to serve for who they are. I am all for the UCMJ, and all for the traditions of my Marine Corps. Our policy was always "Don't Care, Just Do Your Job", and that worked great.

More Later