Memorial Day or Why One Should Perhaps Not Enumerate Their Flightless Fowl Prematurely

So the "repeal" of DADT has passed and as soon as sixty days have passed after it is signed, as soon as the report is finished and filed as soon as the Chairman of the Joint Chief of Staffs has decided as soon as the Secretary of Defense has agreed. Then by god the President will sign off and something will happen. Probably. Maybe. I'm sure.

I do find it interesting the way that various minority groups fight so hard to get their asses shot in war, or for that matter just to get into the military. Of course the other half of that is that straight white men fight so hard to be the only ones to get to have their asses shot at or off as the case may be.

I remember when I was in the Air Force and basic training and it was explained to me by one of the more knowledgeable airman that in California it was legal to be homosexual, but you did have to register. But then that was three years before Stonewall and ten or twelve years before I started working at Antioch. So my knowledge of the "alternative life styles" of homosexuals was shall we say a little less than complete.

Well at any rate I was more than a little naive at the time concerning all things sexual (although I did learn a great deal from the southern recruit, which each squadron was issued, who would explain his sexual conquests to us every night in the old World War II barracks as the rest of us would lay their trying to get to sleep and wishing we had been as lucky). Once again I guess I was just lucky because when I got out the sexual revolution had started and unlike our colonial war I was in the front lines at college along with the war on [for?] drugs, (I was more successful in the war on drugs as I was able to defoliate large herbal areas by myself if I remember correctly, and I doubt if I do).

Where was I? Oh yes, I think that on the whole young people are more knowledgeable and more able to deal with people who are different than I was when I enlisted back in the winter of '64-65. The Air Force was at the time I think more segregated than the Army, I do not think that there was an African American in my squadron in basic, and it was only after I had been stationed at Randolf for awhile that the first African American was assigned to my squadron. I had been in almost three years before I saw my first black officer.

None the less, I still fully expect Obama to screw this up and that we will end up with a system in place in the military that will continue to screw over the homosexual service people.