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Overview
Published during the same year the American military instituted Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, and eighteen years before President Barack Obama repealed it, Conduct Unbecoming is a landmark work of social justice and a searing indictment of the military establishment’s historic bigotry toward its gay servicemen and women. Randy Shilts’s eye-opening book describes the bravery, both exceptional and everyday, not only of gay soldiers throughout history, but also of gay men and women serving in our modern military. With each anecdote and investigation, Shilts systematically dismantles the arguments against allowing gays to serve in the military.
At once a history of the American military and an account of the gay rights movement, Conduct Unbecoming is a remarkable testament to the progress achieved for gays in the military—and a revealing look at how far we have yet to go.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781497683150 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Open Road Media |
| Publication date: | 12/16/2014 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 793 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Conduct Unbecoming
Gays & Lesbians in the U.S. Military
By Randy Shilts
OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA
Copyright © 1993 Randy ShiltsAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4976-8315-0
CHAPTER 1
What Tom Dooley Really Wanted: A Prologue to Vietnam
August 1954
On a balmy August morning in 1954, it was not only the story of Tom Dooley's life that lay beyond the bow of the USS Montague, it was the story of the next quarter century of American history. But this was not what Dooley saw as he stood at the rail, contemplating his Temporary Assignment Duty (TAD) as medical officer of the Montague. Ahead, shimmering in the morning sun like an emerald, was a country few Americans had heard of then, a place variously called Tonkin or Annam or Cochin China, but which in the past dozen or so years had become known by a new name, Vietnam.
A twisted tale lay behind Dooley's abrupt transfer from his job in the American military hospital at Yokosuka, Japan, but the twenty-seven-year-old was not aware of it at the time. When orders for the first TAD of his career came through for the Montague, Dooley had taken them to be propitious, since his initials were TAD. Friends credited Dooley with an uncanny kind of prescience: Dooley claimed to know two things about his future—that he was meant to accomplish some great task in his lifetime and that he would die young.
Dozens of small gray landing craft pulled alongside the Montague. Slowly, hundreds of weary Vietnamese took their first steps up the gangplank. Within a few hours, the ship held more than two thousand refugees, clutching their belongings close while they warily eyed the strange American sailors. Operation Passage to Freedom had begun.
The division of Vietnam had been announced, carving out one Vietnam that would be comprised of two "zones of temporary political influence" divided by the 17th parallel. In the north, the Vietminh would run things "temporarily"; in the south, the government would be aligned with the West. The plan called for free elections in both sectors by 1956, and a reunited Vietnam.
The West had reneged on numerous promises to their colonials, so the Vietminh never believed they would willingly let go of South Vietnam. And the Communists had as bad a record for providing free elections, so the West never believed they would willingly let go of North Vietnam. Therefore, a lot of people in the new "temporary zone" of North Vietnam were eager to flee to South Vietnam. This was particularly true of anyone who had links to the French, whom the Vietminh detested.
Catholics were especially nervous, since they were suspect to the nationalists for having taken up the colonizers' religion. The Catholic solution was Operation Virgin Mary, a campaign coordinated by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency and the Catholic Church in which priests told their congregations that the Virgin Mary was leaving the north to live in the south, and if they wanted to be saved they had better go south, too. Getting all these people south became the mission of the United States Navy's Operation Passage to Freedom.
One million refugees were expected to board the handful of Navy ships supplied for the task. The Navy quickly converted the cargo holds of a half dozen auxiliary cargo attack, or AKA, ships into huge warehouses with food, sleeping, and toilet facilities for their human cargo. They did not anticipate the miserable health problems that attended their passengers. Tending these health problems became the job of the Montague's health officer, Lieutenant (junior grade) Tom Dooley.
As he watched the first refugees crawl over the gang rail of the USS Montague on the morning of August 14, 1954, he was stunned to see how many were diseased. Though he had not been a stellar medical student, he soon recognized symptoms of tropical maladies he had studied just two years before at St. Louis University medical school: yaws and smallpox, leprosy and elephantitis, malaria, and, of course, malnutrition. The voyage from Haiphong to the mouth of the Saigon River took two days. Among the 2,061 refugees, Dooley recorded four births and two deaths. In his meticulous diaries, he also recorded many worries. The operation threatened to expose American sailors to a panoply of microbes to which they had no immunity. As more Catholics crowded into Haiphong, their squalid living conditions were bound to create even more health problems. Already 150,000 had come to Haiphong to board the American transports; hundreds of thousands more were expected. The prospects of epidemics of bubonic plague and cholera headed the list of Dooley's fears.
At the end of the first voyage, he pleaded for better medical screening of refugees before they were loaded onto ships from the south. The admiralty saw the wisdom of the suggestion and appointed Dooley medical officer for Task Force 90, the unit that would monitor the refugees' health conditions. Dooley set up his medical shop at the refugee camps and burst into a flurry of activity that astounded his Navy colleagues and would leave him revered for decades by hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese.
Deciding it was his job to define his mission, Dooley resolved that no refugee should leave Haiphong until he or she had been thoroughly screened for all tropical diseases and appropriately treated. He wrote to American pharmaceutical companies for cases of antibiotics. Pan Am Air lines sent ten thousand bars of soap. Seeing the publicity value in helping the young doctor, corporations across the country soon began donating supplies. To ensure that the pesky chain of command did not interfere with his plans, Dooley always sent his requests and solicitations through Red Cross mail runs rather than by military mail delivery.
Every time a new American ship entered Haiphong harbor, Dooley launched out to greet it, demanding every available bandage, hemostat, and medication. Dooley's most effective tool was his chutzpah. If he needed equipment that a ship commander was reluctant to turn over, Dooley blustered that he spoke for the admiral and that was an order—whether it was true or not.
Though the Navy had intended for Dooley to run a single processing station, he quickly established a network of clinics that treated between three and four hundred people a day. At his various camps, a population of fifteen thousand refugees was always waiting for vaccinations, antibiotic treatments, and screening for communicable diseases. Before long, Dooley insisted on offering surgery to those refugees in need of urgent treatment. Meanwhile, he directed his staff to collect stool samples, insects, and even rats for laboratory studies of indigenous diseases. The United States "never knew where it had to fight next," he said, and the studies of local ailments could benefit troops in the future.
To give the entire effort a patriotic spin that the military brass would have to endorse, Dooley repeated the same phrase with each pill he dispensed and every disease he cured: Dai la My-quoc Viet-tro. "This," he told his patients, "is American aid." To the Vietnamese, he became known simply as Bac Sy My, "the American doctor."
In his off-hours, Dooley also started writing long letters about his work to his widowed mother in St. Louis, who passed a few of them on to local newspapers. His easy style and dramatic flair soon caught the attention of newspaper editors nationwide, as well as Navy Commander William Lederer, who was working as public-affairs aide to Admiral Felix Stump. When he stumbled across Dooley in Haiphong, he suggested the young lieutenant keep a diary of his Vietnam experiences and stop by Lederer's home in Honolulu on his way back to the United States. There might be a book in Dooley's experience.
Haiphong was to be an "open zone," allowing debarkation only until May 1955, and with each month the area in which the Vietminh would allow Americans to operate grew smaller. In the last months, Dooley was down to three Navy corpsmen to tend the thousands of ailing Vietnamese under his care. After supervising the treatment of 610,000 refugees in nine months, Dooley left on one of the last boats out of Haiphong, with his diary and the Vietnamese who now venerated him.
By now, the Navy realized that it had gained a precious public-relations asset with Bac Sy My. Operation Passage to Freedom had failed to garner the publicity the U.S. government had expected, but the memoirs of the young Navy doctor offered a rare chance to recoup. Dashingly handsome, with a square jaw, sparkling blue eyes, and thick black hair, Dooley also made a striking appearance when giving public lectures and on the new medium of television.
On a visit to South Vietnam before returning to the United States, President Ngo Dinh Diem awarded Dooley the highest honor South Vietnam could bestow on a foreigner, the "Officier de l'Ordre National de Vietnam." The only other two Americans so honored were a general and an admiral, the commanders of Operation Passage to Freedom. On the tarmac of Hickam Air Force Base in Honolulu, Dooley received the Legion of Merit, the youngest doctor in Navy history to be so honored. Navy Surgeon General Lamont Pugh wrote what was for Dooley the most meaningful praise: "It is my earnest hope that some day you may become Surgeon General of the Navy, not merely because you say that is what you want to be, but because I will leave that office soon with a sense of contentment that it will be in the most worthy and 'can do' hands if it ever reaches yours."
In Hawaii, Lederer, who would gain greater fame a few years later as coauthor of The Ugly American, helped Dooley fashion his diary into a book, Deliver Us from Evil. Early drafts did not please the publisher, who complained they were not dramatic enough, so later drafts included colorful embellishments. Dooley's devout Catholicism also influenced the book. Refugees streamed into the harbor in little sampans that flew the golden-keyed flag of the Vatican, Dooley wrote. As biographer Diana Shaw later noted, Dooley's readers could come away from his writing with the impression that the Vietnamese were overwhelmingly Catholic.
Even more troubling were the book's unsubstantiated allegations of Communist atrocities. According to one story, Vietminh soldiers crammed chopsticks into the ears of children who had heard a priest recite the Lord's Prayer, tearing their eardrums. In another account, Dooley related that Catholic teachers who had taught the Gospel had had their tongues pulled out with pliers.
All these episodes were news to everyone who had worked with Tom Dooley. As people associated with the refugees' medical treatment later pointed out, the tales of atrocity were inarguably fiction.
They were fiction, however, that played very well in the frenzied anti-Communist mood of the mid-1950s. Few words could have been more pleasing to the American Catholic establishment, which was, to a large extent, the domestic American patron of President Diem. Dooley soon struck up a personal relationship with New York's John Cardinal Spellman, the most vociferously anti-Communist cleric in the nation. More than promoting anticommunism and rhapsodizing about heroic Vietnamese Catholics, the book was a paean to the United States Navy. "Everything we did because the Navy made it possible for us to do," Dooley wrote in the book's afterword. "A finer lot of men cannot be found on this earth."
The Navy reciprocated the admiration. Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Arleigh Burke wrote in his foreword to the book, "Today's naval traditions have been built by men like young Dr. Dooley who have served their country well under arduous and challenging circumstances.... It is a story of which the United States Navy is proud."
After being excerpted in Reader's Digest, Deliver Us from Evil shot up the best-seller list. Dooley made Gallup poll's list of the men most admired in the United States. Much in demand as a speaker, he repeated the stories of Communist aggression in hundreds of personal appearances around the country, but he offered his own, very nonmilitary prescription for solving them. Only American kindness could "wash away the poisons of Communist hatred," he argued. The efforts in Haiphong had built "a quiet pride in our hearts at being American.... We brought not bombs and guns, but help and love."
These recommendations were rather sentimental for the cold warriors in the Pentagon, but such ideas were easily overlooked. Many were girding, even then, for an armed confrontation with Communist aggressors in Southeast Asia. From their point of view, President Roosevelt had given away Eastern Europe at Yalta, and President Truman had "lost" China to the Communists. Korea had been saved, but aggression continued in Laos and Vietnam. Vietnam was the place to draw the line against the enemy, and most Americans had heard of Vietnam by now because of Tom Dooley.
And this was what made the events in the first months after Tom Dooley's return from Vietnam so problematical.
Dooley's friend Navy Lieutenant Commander Ted Werner had seen the paperwork on the desk of the crusty old admiral who headed the military hospital in Yokosuka. Homosexuality was running rampant on the medical staff and an investigation was demanded. The admiral wanted nothing to do with the messy business of a homosexual purge. Rather than have such revelations come to light on his watch, he proceeded to transfer the suspects elsewhere, where somebody else would have to deal with it. That was how one of the suspects, Tom Dooley, had ended up on the USS Montague.
Once Dooley was back from Vietnam, however, the rumors surfaced again. Though a stirring speaker, Dooley was, in private, extraordinarily effeminate. Rumors streamed into the Office of Naval Intelligence that the famous young doctor was homosexual, and this time a very thorough investigation followed. Of course, it had to be handled delicately. This was a man who, according to what the Chief of Naval Operations said in a book now a best-seller, was the epitome of what was good in the U.S. Navy. Any publicity would be as embarrassing to the Navy as to the doctor himself.
The Navy fretted over how to rid itself of Dooley without bringing undue attention to the circumstances. The Office of Naval Intelligence suggested two possible routes of obtaining his severance from the Navy. First, the Navy could attempt to obtain a straightforward confession. "While there is always the possibility that interrogation will fail to bring forth a confession of guilt, past experience indicates that few homosexuals refuse to admit their activities when skillfully interrogated," the ONI said. The other option was to plant an ONI agent at the hotel bar where Dooley was staying so he could be solicited by the doctor. "A trained and skillful agent, carefully avoiding any possibility of entrapment or homosexual involvement, would be a capable witness to verbal statements and overt actions by subject ... (which) would most probably result in the latter's complete confession of homosexual tendencies and activities."
The details of the confrontation between the ONI and Tom Dooley have been lost to history. Within two weeks, however, Dooley announced that he was resigning his commission in the Navy to return to Southeast Asia and continue his work tending the sick. He arranged a mission with the Laotian government and the Navy flew medical supplies to the remote outpost of Muong Sing, where Dooley opened his first hospital.
Tom Dooley's story did not end with his forced resignation from the Navy; it had only begun. In the following years, he would become more famous than he had ever been in the service, much to the chagrin of the military, which always worried that the secret of his resignation might become public. Dooley worried about it, too, and he worried that others might learn of the words spelled out, all in capital letters, on his separation papers: UNDESIRABLE DISCHARGE. Changing these words and getting his discharge upgraded to honorable became a crusade for the rest of his life.
Like so many others of his generation, Tom Dooley had done everything he could to overcome the singular defect that in his eyes made him less than human. His entire life, it seemed, was an effort to compensate for this, and everything good and everything evil that he did can be traced back to the shame he carried over his homosexuality. The Catholic Church had said he could not see the face of God because of his sin, so he struggled to be the best Catholic he could be, performing acts of kindness and obediently following the ideology of the Church. He had been told he could not be a good sailor if he was homosexual, so he set out to be a great sailor, and, it seemed, nearly succeeded. He had been told he could not be a great American, so he had tried to be the best American he could, fighting his country's enemies and gaining the United States new friends. He would even lie if his lies would be good for the country, and lie he did. He did all of this—for his God, for the Navy, and for his country—and, in the end, it did not help.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Conduct Unbecoming by Randy Shilts. Copyright © 1993 Randy Shilts. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
- Cover Page
- Title Page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Author’s Note
- Epigraph
- Prologue: The Dangerous Difference (1778–1954)
- Book One: The Sanction of the Victim (1954-1969)
- 1. What Tom Dooley Really Wanted: A Prologue to Vietnam
- 2. Manhood
- 3. Rules
- 4. The Spy
- 5. A Name on the Wall
- 6. Convenience of the Government (Part I)
- 7. Days of Future Passed
- 8. Home Front
- 9. The Sanction of the Victim
- Book Two: Interrogations (1969-1975)
- 10. National Security
- 11. Endings
- 12. Interrogations
- 13. Indoctrination
- 14. Dykes and Whores
- 15. In Country
- 16. Back to the World
- 17. Winners
- 18. STRAC
- 19. Politics and Prejudice
- 20. The Letter
- Book Three: Trials (1975-1976)
- 21. The Color Purple (Part I)
- 22. The Green Beret
- 23. Freedom
- 24. The Mile-Wide Word
- 25. Triangulates
- 26. Adjectives and Nouns
- 27. The Next Generation
- 28. Transitions
- 29. The Secret Report
- Book Four: The Family (1977-1980)
- 30. The Family
- 31. Reaction
- 32. The Gayest Ship in the Navy and Other Stories
- 33. Women at Sea
- 34. Angry Gods
- 35. Memorial Day
- 36. Glory Days
- 37. “Until After November”
- 38. Interregnum
- 39. Future Imperfect
- Book Five: Lesbian Vampires of Bavaria (1981-1985)
- 40. Thoughtcrimes
- 41. Surrender Dorothy
- 42. Railroading
- 43. Doreen
- 44. Lesbian Vampires of Bavaria
- 45. Straights
- 46. In the Midnight Sky
- 47. Heroes
- 48. Exiles
- 49. Blanket Parties
- 50. Costs
- 51. HTLV-III
- 52. Dykebusters
- 53. Friends of Helga
- 54. Where It All Begins
- Book Six: Homovac (1986-1996)
- 55. Tom Dooley’s Undesirable Discharge
- 56. The Unquiet Death of Michael W. Foster
- 57. Countertrends
- 58. The Color Purple (Part 2)
- 59. At the Buccaneer Motel
- 60. HOMOVAC: Prisoner Number 73343
- 61. Foreign Affairs
- 62. The Escape
- 63. Naming Names
- 64. The Soesterberg Affair
- 65. Funerals
- 66. Malleus Maleficarum
- 67. The Release of Prisoner Number 17
- 68. Embarrassments in the Making
- 69. Explosions
- 70. Mockingbirds
- 71. Official Government Sources
- 72. Hearings
- 73. Holding Actions
- 74. Vindication
- 75. The Fag Killer
- Epilogue: Promises to Keep
- 76. Convenience of the Government (Part 2)
- 77. Tom Dooley’s Honorable Discharge
- Notes on Sources
- Selected Bibliography
- Index
- Acknowledgments
- About the Author
- Copyright Page