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Last week an openly gay man, Eric Fanning, became secretary of the Army. Read that sentence again and contemplate what it reveals about how much and how quickly American society has changed. Only five years ago, openly gay people were barred from serving in its armed forces. During Mr. Fanning’s lengthy confirmation process, his sexual orientation was simply not an issue. That is a tribute to those who fought so hard to repeal the ban, and a measure of the nation’s at times uncertain, but as yet unfailing, march toward equality.

In retrospect the fight that convulsed this country over whether gay Americans should serve in uniform seems senseless, almost absurd. Yet it is instructive, if only because a Pentagon plan to allow transgender Americans to serve openly in uniform remains stalled by a similar, albeit quieter, debate.

There is broad agreement that prohibiting openly gay people from serving was a cruel policy that abetted bigotry. It legitimized the notion that being gay was shameful and incompatible with the valorous profession of arms. It cut short the careers of talented people who had been performing vital work in wartime, which weakened the military.

It is embarrassing now, even shocking, to revisit the arguments and laments of those who sought to keep the military gay-free.

In 2007, Gen. Peter Pace, then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told The Chicago Tribune, “I believe homosexual acts between two individuals are immoral and that we should not condone immoral acts.” A year later, Elaine Donnelly, who founded an advocacy group that has sought futilely to keep military personnel policy frozen in the mores of the 1950s, warned during a congressional hearing about “a sexualized atmosphere in our armed forces.” She expressed alarm about “forced cohabitation” and the spread of H.I.V.

Two years after that, when Congress appeared to be on the brink of repealing the ban, Gen. James Amos, then the commandant of the Marine Corps, cautioned that openly gay troops would be a distraction that could cost lives on the battlefield. “We’ve got Marines at Walter Reed with no limbs,” he pleaded in a last-ditch effort to keep service members in the closet. Senator John McCain indulged the general’s fearmongering. “Today is a very sad day,” Mr. McCain said somberly during the Senate debate on Dec. 18, 2010, as he acknowledged that he and other like-minded lawmakers had been outgunned.

The policy was repealed without a hitch. It didn’t result in weakened unit cohesion, lower morale or missing limbs. As service members came out to their supervisors, they were embraced. “Millennials just don’t care about sexuality the way past generations did,” said Lt. Col. Paul Larson, a straight Army infantry officer. “The rest of us didn’t care. We all knew gays were serving with distinction.”

The controversy over lifting the exclusion of openly transgender service members has been less caustic and less public. After Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter pledged last July to repeal that ban within six months, a few senior military officials pushed back. They steered clear of framing their misgivings on morality grounds, instead voicing concerns about “military readiness” and unit cohesion. Gen. Mark Milley, the Army chief of staff, has been one of the leading skeptics at the Pentagon. In a recent interview, he said that “serious, significant issues need to be completely vetted and studied” before transgender people are allowed to serve openly. “I have to focus on the readiness of the force,” he said.

Those concerns cannot be indulged any longer at the expense of the civil rights and dignity of Americans who volunteered to serve in wartime. There is every reason to believe that repealing the transgender ban will be seamless. The Pentagon already has a blueprint of what it would take. Mr. Fanning, who was the first senior defense official to endorse military service by openly transgender people, is well positioned to help overcome the lingering misgivings of those upholding the Pentagon’s last discriminatory personnel policy.

“I’m ecstatic,” said Staff Sgt. Patricia King, a soldier in Colorado Springs who was the first person in the infantry to transition on the job.“To know that the secretary of the Army is supportive of open trans service, supportive of me not only as a soldier but as a person, is a comforting feeling.”

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A version of this editorial appears in print

on May 22, 2016,

on page SR8 of the New York edition

with the headline:

An Openly Gay Man Runs the Army.

An Openly Gay Man Runs the Army,
NYT,
May 21, 2016,
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/22/
opinion/sunday/an-openly-gay-man-runs-the-army.html

Lionized for Lightning Victory

in ’91 Gulf War

December 27, 2012

The New York Times

By ROBERT D. McFADDEN

Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf, who commanded the American-led forces that crushed Iraq in the 1991 Persian Gulf war and became the nation’s most acclaimed military hero since the midcentury exploits of Generals Dwight D. Eisenhower and Douglas MacArthur, died on Thursday in Tampa, Fla. He was 78.

The general, who retired soon after the gulf war and lived in Tampa, died of complications arising from a recent bout of pneumonia, said his sister Ruth Barenbaum. In 1993, he was found to have prostate cancer, for which he was successfully treated.

In Operation Desert Storm, General Schwarzkopf orchestrated one of the most lopsided victories in modern warfare, a six-week blitzkrieg by a broad coalition of forces with overwhelming air superiority that liberated tiny Kuwait from Iraqi occupation, routed Saddam Hussein’s Republican Guard and virtually destroyed Iraq’s infrastructure, all with relatively light allied losses.

Winning the lightning war was never in doubt and in no way comparable to the traumas of World War II and the Korean conflict, which made Eisenhower and MacArthur into national heroes and presidential timber. But a divisive Vietnam conflict and the cold war had produced no such heroes, and the little-known General Schwarzkopf was wreathed in laurels as the victor in a popular war against a brutal dictator.

A combat-tested, highly decorated career officer who had held many commands, served two battlefield tours in Vietnam and coordinated American landing forces in the 1983 invasion of Grenada, he came home to a tumultuous welcome, including a glittering ticker-tape parade up Broadway in the footsteps of Lindbergh, MacArthur and the moon-landing Apollo astronauts.

“Stormin’ Norman,” as headlines proclaimed him, was lionized by millions of euphoric Americans who, until weeks earlier, had never heard of him. President George Bush, whose popularity soared with the war, gave him the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Congress gave him standing ovations. Queen Elizabeth II made him an honorary knight. European and Asian nations conferred lavish honors.

In his desert fatigues, he was interviewed on television, featured on magazine covers and feted at celebrations in Tampa, Washington and other cities. He led the Pegasus Parade at the Kentucky Derby in Louisville and was the superstar at the Indianapolis 500. Florida Republicans urged him to run for the United States Senate.

Amid speculation about his future, a movement to draft him for president arose. He insisted he had no presidential aspirations, but Time magazine quoted him as saying he someday “might be able to find a sense of self-fulfillment serving my country in the political arena,” and he told Barbara Walters on the ABC News program “20/20” that he would not rule out a White House run.

Within weeks, the four-star general had become a media and marketing phenomenon. Three months after the war, he signed a $5 million contract with Bantam Books for the world rights to his memoirs, “It Doesn’t Take a Hero,” written with Peter Petre and published in 1992. Herbert Mitgang, reviewing the book for The New York Times, called it a serviceable first draft of history. “General Schwarzkopf,” he wrote, “comes across as a strong professional soldier, a Patton with a conscience.”

All but drowned out in the surge of approbation, critics noted that the general’s enormous air, sea and land forces had overwhelmed a country with a gross national product equivalent to North Dakota’s, and that while Iraq’s bridges, dams and power plants had been all but obliterated and tens of thousands of its troops killed (compared with a few hundred allied casualties), Saddam Hussein had been left in power.

Postwar books, news reports and documentaries — a flood of information the general had restricted during the war — showed that most of Iraq’s elite Republican Guard, whose destruction had been a goal of war planners, had escaped from an ill-coordinated Marine and Army assault, and had not been pursued because of President Bush’s decision to halt the ground war after 100 hours.

“The Generals’ War: The Inside Story of the Conflict in the Gulf” (1995), by Michael R. Gordon of The New York Times and the retired general Bernard E. Trainor, portrayed a White House rushed into ending the war prematurely by unrealistic fears of being criticized for killing too many Iraqis and by ignorance of events on the ground. It cast General Schwarzkopf as a second-rate commander who took credit for allied successes, blamed others for his mistakes and shouted at, but did not effectively control, his field commanders as the Republican Guard slipped away.

He was depicted more sympathetically in other books, including “In the Eye of the Storm” (1991), by Roger Cohen and Claudio Gatti. “His swift triumph over Iraq in the 1991 gulf war came as a shock to a nation that had been battered, by failing industries and festering economic problems, into a sense that the century of its power was at an end,” they wrote. “Schwarzkopf appeared abruptly as an intensely human messenger of hope, however illusory or fragile.”

Old official photographs show a medaled military mannequin, a 6-foot-3-inch 240-pounder with grim determined eyes. But they miss the gentler man who listened to Pavarotti, Willie Nelson and Bob Dylan; who loved hunting, fishing and ballet; and, like any soldier, called home twice a week from the war zone.

Herbert Norman Schwarzkopf Jr. was born on Aug. 22, 1934, in Trenton, one of three children of the man whose name he shared and the former Ruth Bowman. At 18, he dropped the Jr. and his first name but kept the initial. His father, New Jersey’s first state police superintendent, investigated the 1932 Lindbergh kidnapping; he was also a West Point graduate, fought in World Wars I and II, became a major general and trained Iran’s national police in the 1940s.

As a boy, General Schwarzkopf attended Bordentown Military Institute near Trenton. But from 1946 to 1950 he lived in Iran, Switzerland, Germany and Italy with his father. Fluent in French and German at 17, he enrolled at Valley Forge Military Academy in Wayne, Pa., played football and was a champion debater.

At West Point, he was on the football and wrestling teams and sang in the choir. He loved history and dreamed of leading men in battle. “He saw himself as Alexander the Great,” recalled Gen. Leroy Suddath, his old roommate, “and we didn’t laugh when he said it.” In 1956, he graduated 43rd in a class of 480.

After infantry and airborne training at Fort Benning, Ga., he served two years with airborne units in America and Europe, took a two-year assignment in Berlin and a career-officer course at Fort Benning, then earned a master’s in guided-missile engineering in 1964 from the University of Southern California.

Captain Schwarzkopf went to Vietnam as an adviser to a South Vietnamese airborne division in 1965 and once withstood a 10-day enemy siege. He returned a major in 1966, taught at West Point for two years, and as a lieutenant colonel attended the Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kan.

In 1968 he married Brenda Holsinger. They had three children: Cynthia, Jessica and Christian.

A battalion commander in his second Vietnam tour, in 1969-70, he was wounded twice and won three Silver Stars for bravery. Men in his command were killed in two 1970 actions that deeply affected him.

On Feb. 18, an artillery shell aimed at the enemy roared over a hill where one of his companies was dug in. It hit a treetop and exploded, killing Sgt. Michael E. Mullen. Form letters sent over the colonel’s name seemed to implicate him, and the sergeant’s parents held him partly responsible as they crusaded to expose military callousness. The case became an antiwar cause célèbre and tarnished the colonel’s record, perhaps unjustly. A 1976 book, “Friendly Fire,” by C. D. B. Bryan, called the death accidental, but a 1995 memoir by the sergeant’s mother, “Unfriendly Fire,” blamed the military.

On May 28, the colonel ordered his helicopter down to rescue troops who had wandered into a minefield. Some were airlifted out, but he stayed behind with his troops. A soldier tripped a mine, shattering his leg and wounding the colonel, who crawled atop the thrashing victim to stop him from setting off more mines. Three other troopers were killed by an exploding mine, but the colonel led the survivors to safety. The episode sealed his reputation as a commander willing to risk his life for his men.

He came home dismayed at the Army’s leadership and convinced that the peace movement and the news media were prolonging the war. One of his sisters, Ms. Barenbaum, had become a peace activist, and for years they did not speak. He later concluded that politicians had lost the war, and the failure, at a cost of 58,000 American lives, left him devastated. For a time, he considered resigning his commission.

His decision to stay in the service came at a military nadir for America. As historians have noted, the Army during and after Vietnam fell into decay — a conscript force rife with racial antagonisms, drug abuse and disciplinary failures. Soldiers were disillusioned, the uniform seemed tarnished in a nation that no longer cared, and once proud traditions had given way to progress measured by infamous “body counts.” But in the late ‘70s and the ‘80s, reforms in recruitment, living conditions, planning, training and leadership restored much of what had been lost: self-respect and professionalism in an all-volunteer service.

He became a colonel in 1975, a brigadier general in 1978, a major general in 1982 and a lieutenant general in 1986. He moved from personnel and planning to brigade posts in Alaska and Washington State, from the Pacific Command in Hawaii to a division in Europe and back to Washington in charge of personnel.

In 1983, while assigned to an elite tank division at Fort Stewart, Ga., he was tapped to coordinate the task force that invaded Grenada. Revolutionaries had staged a coup, killed the prime minister and, with Cuban aid, were building an airfield, purportedly to supply Latin American insurgents. It was also feared that American medical students on the island might become hostages. Operation Urgent Fury suppressed the rebels, restored order and brought the students home safely.

In 1988, General Schwarzkopf was given his fourth star and named commander of the United States Central Command at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, supervising military activities in 19 countries in the Middle East, the Horn of Africa and the Persian Gulf. He developed contingency plans for war in Iraq, and two years later they were needed.

On Aug. 2, 1990, Iraqi forces occupied Kuwait. General Schwarzkopf moved his headquarters to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, and amassed hundreds of ships, thousands of aircraft and 765,000 allied troops, including 540,000 Americans and large Arab contingents under Prince Khaled bin Sultan of Saudi Arabia, who was co-commander in the gulf war. A trade embargo and warnings failed to force an Iraqi withdrawal from Kuwait, and after a deadline passed on Jan. 15, 1991, the world’s first heavily televised war began.

Audiences saw live missiles striking targets and fighters taking off from aircraft carriers. Cable news delivered continuous reports, and networks anchored newscasts from Baghdad. In Riyadh, General Schwarzkopf controlled the flow of information in briefings. Some reporters were allowed into the field, subject to military supervision and censorship. The result was a dramatic war — and a highly visible commander in fatigues.

The ground war was over in a few days, thanks to what he called his “left hook” strategy, in which he placed forces behind enemy lines for a swift, decisive strike.

The general supported Mr. Bush’s presidential campaigns in 2000 and 2004 and Senator John McCain’s 2008 race against Senator Barack Obama, but he never ran for political office.

Ravi Somaiya contributed reporting.

Lionized for Lightning Victory in ’91 Gulf War,
NYT, 27.12.2012,
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/28/
us/gen-h-norman-schwarzkopf-us-commander-in-gulf-war-
dies-at-78.html

Forgotten Battalion’s

Last Returns to Beachhead

June 6, 2009

The New York Times

By BRIAN KNOWLTON

William G. Dabney could hardly have expected to be spending that ferocious June day in 1944 hunkered on Omaha Beach, struggling to keep aloft one of the tethered silver balloons intended to confound German pilots trying to bomb or strafe exposed Allied invaders in Normandy.

As a member of the only all-black unit in the D-Day landings on Omaha and Utah, the two beachheads assigned to American forces, Corporal Dabney was a rarity in a European war that in its early days was fought almost entirely by whites.

The contributions of his unit, the 320th Antiaircraft Barrage Balloon Battalion, have been largely forgotten over the years. But on Saturday, Mr. Dabney, now 84, will join President Obama near Omaha Beach to mark the 65th anniversary of the invasion. On Friday, he received the Legion of Honor from the French government. Officials of the White House Commission on Remembrance, which organizes services at American war memorials, say he is the only survivor of the 320th they have been able to track down.

At 17, Mr. Dabney, of Roanoke, Va., had chafed to join older friends already at war, and had to persuade his grandmother to let him enlist. Most black soldiers were being given support roles in the United States, but like many young men, Mr. Dabney craved action at the front. He volunteered for “special service,” which he thought would have him loading artillery weapons.

“I didn’t know that it involved flying balloons,” he said in a telephone interview from Roanoke.

He was sent to Tennessee to train with the 320th, a unit intended mainly to deploy blimplike balloons for coastal defense. But he soon found himself bound for England and a role in the invasion of France.

In retrospect, Corporal Dabney and his contemporaries can be seen as pioneers. As late as the mid-1930s, the Army had been less than 2 percent black. The Coast Guard used blacks only as stewards, the Navy mainly for kitchen help. The Marines and the Army Air Forces barred blacks outright. The discriminatory treatment was defended by an Army War College report in 1925 concluding that blacks lacked intellect and courage.

“Blacks wanted to participate” in World War II, “but the position of the military was that wartime is not a time for social experimentation,” said William A. De Shields, a retired Army colonel and founder of the Black Military History Institute of America.

Blacks who did join the services were often assigned to thankless jobs as stevedores, stewards or ammunition handlers. (A single catastrophic explosion of ammunition at Port Chicago, Calif., in July 1944 claimed the lives of 202 black sailors, among a total of 320 people killed.)

Some seeds of change had already been planted, however. In June 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, wary of backlash from whites but pressured not only by groups like the predominantly black Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters but also by his wife, Eleanor, ordered an end to discrimination in war industry employment.

And that March, the Army Air Forces created a unit of black fliers now well known as the Tuskegee airmen. Their achievements, along with those of other black units, helped discredit the War College report.

Still, before the invasion of France, most black soldiers, whose numbers had risen to 700,000, were stationed in the United States. By 1944, however, manpower shortages were acute, and by the end of that year more than two-thirds of black troops were overseas. Corporal Dabney was part of that wave.

So was George A. Davison, another member of the 320th, who died in 2002. In a letter home after D-Day, Sergeant Davison recalled crossing the English Channel on the morning of the invasion, in a landing craft shared with Army rangers. “It was our turn,” he wrote.

Once the landing craft approached shore, the troops had to wade through chest-high waves, then dig in on the beach under extreme fire. That done, the men of the 320th deployed their balloons by filling them with helium.

The balloons, the military newspaper Stars and Stripes reported, “provided a screen of rubber several miles long on the two main beachheads.” Three German planes were downed when they struck balloons, which carried explosives, or hit their cables.

The balloons came in various sizes. Corporal Dabney headed a three-man crew responsible for one balloon, of a type classified as V.L.A., for very low altitude.

Sergeant Davison also worked with V.L.A.’s. “These weren’t the big barrage balloons,” which could be 60 feet long, his son Bill said in an interview. “They were about the size of a Volkswagen.”

“They had only 2,000 feet of line, as opposed to bigger balloons with 10,000 feet,” Bill Davison said. “But 2,000 would keep enemy planes from strafing the beaches.”

Mr. Dabney recalled the intensity of the Germans’ fire. “We thought at one time me and my crew might get pushed back into the English Channel,” he said, “because they were fighting so furiously.”

Sergeant Davison saw a ranger near him blown apart. It was a day, he wrote home, “of ducking bullets and anything that would kill a man.” He was “too afraid to be afraid,” he wrote.

Four members of the 320th died. One who lived showed particular courage. Waverly B. Woodson Jr., a medic, was injured by a mine explosion but went on to work for 30 straight hours treating other wounded men. He received a Bronze Star.

The younger Mr. Davison, who has pledged to keep his father’s story alive, recently sent President Obama a letter about it.

“I hope he reads it,” Mr. Davison said, “and hope he has some sense of the African-Americans who were there.”

So does Colonel De Shields, of the Black Military History Institute. “Obama is a young man,” Colonel De Shields said. “We hope he’ll have an appreciation for the contribution that African-Americans made in World War II, when we were fighting two enemies: the enemy abroad and racism at home.”