An Army for Everyone

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/13/opinion/an-army-for-everyone.html

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Kansas City, Mo. — THE first war stories I heard came from my grandfather’s friend, Redman Callaway, who led a company of 140 black soldiers in Europe in 1944. Like most white men of his generation, when Lieutenant Callaway discovered that he had been put in charge of an African-American company, his first reaction was, “Why me?” followed by “How do I get a transfer?”

I thought of Callaway when the Department of Defense recently announced that it would no longer bar transgender soldiers from military service. Some service members will have a similar reaction to working with these soldiers — not to mention gay and female soldiers, given that the Pentagon also ended its “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy in 2011 and allowed women to assume combat roles in 2015.

In addition, civilian conservatives can’t admit that their recent political attacks on gay and transgender people — via “bathroom bills” and state “religious freedom” acts — now put them in direct conflict with the policies of the United States military, an organization they normally praise.

So they’ll cite concerns about the “readiness” of these soldiers.

These concerns will be as bogus as the concerns about the readiness of black troops in 1944. Callaway and his men drove supply trucks because the white infantry didn’t trust them to fight. So they excelled at their task, delivering fuel and ammunition for Gen. George S. Patton’s advance across France.

“I don’t recall much complaining,” Callaway wrote in his memoir, “although I saw soldiers so worn out they slept standing up leaning against a tree.”

Sixty-two years later, I interviewed an Army captain, Jen McDonough, in Iraq. Like black soldiers in 1944, she couldn’t join the infantry — this time because her sex supposedly made her weak. Her job, however, was as tough as anybody’s. One day, she was given the job of retrieving a heavily armored vehicle called a Buffalo from a muddy Iraqi field. On her first try, the Buffalo’s axle came off. Her best towing vehicle, an M88 the size of a tank, got stuck. Then another. “By the end of it,” she told me recently, “one M88 was buried in mud. All you could see was the gun turret.”

You could use the same image for all the soldiers, over the years, whose skills and stories have been buried because of race, gender, sexual orientation or gender identity.

That’s why the military’s recent, progressive run of decisions should be celebrated. You never could be too poor to serve in the military. Or too rich, too Hispanic, too Jewish or too Italian. Now you can’t be too anything. You will work with people who are different from you. And you might be called on to risk your life for those people, or watch them risk theirs for you.

This experience changed Callaway, who argued that his soldiers’ successes were “more admirable because they were performed under a constant burden of prejudice.”

So why does the military get so little credit for its diversity in the popular imagination? Or for guaranteeing equal pay for equal work? Some of this is self-inflicted. President Harry S. Truman’s order to integrate the United States military in 1948 was progressive for its time. But years of silence about moving women to combat roles and gender identity followed. “Don’t ask, don’t tell” was a disastrous cop-out. The military’s record on sexual assault has been bleak. Minorities aren’t yet proportionally represented in the higher ranks.

But another reason for the lack of credit is that the leads in our war movies about Iraq and Afghanistan look exactly like the leads in our contemporary World War II films. White, straight, cisgender men.

Hollywood should be embarrassed by this. The military doesn’t just look like Tom Hanks or Jeremy Renner. It also looks like Representative Tammy Duckworth, the Illinois Democrat who lost both her legs in Iraq and recently drove her scooter in jubilant celebration in Chicago’s Pride Parade. It looks like Capt. Sage Fox, who legally changed her gender from male to female, then fought to return to the Army Reserves. The true stories of who our soldiers really are need to be rescued from the muck of our contemporary political life.

That doesn’t mean it will be easy.

In June, about 10 years after she rescued that Buffalo, I asked now Lieutenant Colonel McDonough to meet with me in Washington. I’d written a novel about a female soldier in Iraq, based in part on her stories.

“Would it be appropriate,” she wrote back, “if I brought my wife?”

Of course it was appropriate. But that part of her life had remained buried when we’d met. The same could have been said for transgender soldiers like Captain Fox, up until last month.

As for Redman Callaway, in the winter of 1943, he did ask for that transfer. A colonel refused. Instead, the officer told him the story of Gen. John J. Pershing, who had been nicknamed Black Jack for the success he’d had as a commander of black troops early in his career. The colonel told Callaway that he was going to be part of a “new army” that would have “equality for all.”

It took too long for the military to remember this ideal. But we should all be glad it has.