Gays Serving Proudly

Serving in the United States Army at the young age of nineteen, I learned a lot. One of the things that I will take with me for the rest of my life was diversity and how it affected myself, my peers, and the military. I met a brood of interesting people traveling all over the world and the hardest working people were actually gay. It was a new beginning for me and I had never met anyone who was gay before. These people were hard workers and they were proud to serve in the United States military. Unfortunately, they were not allowed to serve because of their sexual orientation. The United States military frowns upon openly gay men and women who don a military uniform and fight for their country. Homosexuals should be allowed to serve openly in the military because the Don't Ask Don't Tell policy is costing the military too much money.

After my initial enlistment in 1997, I got on an airplane and flew to Fort Jackson, South Carolina for the beginning of my boot camp. After the first few weeks is when I started to notice that some of the young men and women around me might be different when it came to their sexual orientation. As a sheltered young woman who grew up in a small town in Oregon, I never had the chance to meet a gay person before. There were many other men and women who were in the same predicament as I was, but I knew they were not as open minded as some people were when it came to human differences. These young men and women who seemed different were polite and worked very hard during their training. I found out that they were very intelligent as well so I quickly adopted their differences and accepted them without ever questioning their sexual orientation. All service members were briefed on the Don’t Ask Don’t Tell Policy that is currently in place in all branches of the United States military as part of their initial training.

The Don’t Ask Don’t Tell is the common term for the policy regarding homosexuals in the U.S. military which was...