If we all do this, we can be a force that cannot be ignored. We will be a force that will be heard from small town to large.

Get involved and urge your friends too :) We can make a difference!

Thank you, Richard, for your kind and generous remarks!

For the record, I’m not a vet either, but even had I not been friends with the first person to battle the ban, I would still agree with you that the issue is both “central and critical.”

The two Servicemembers United organizers featured in “Call to Duty” I referred to are Jarrod Chlapowski and his partner Alex Nicholson.

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Here’s a brief history of “stop-loss” [as Obama could and should do now]:

It goes back for more than half-a-century and didn’t just, as some claim, apply to those in the process of being discharged…. Decade after decade, WHENEVER the military has gotten to a point where they, as Candidate Obama phrased it when he promised to fight for DADT repeal…”need all hands on deck”…THEY have ignored the ban both when it was only “policy” and after it became “law.”

Based on research by Allen Berube for “Coming Out Under Fire,” in World War II it once even took the extreme form of “the adjutant general ordered the commanding general of the West Coast Air Corps Training Center in California to review the cases of some men ALREADY CONVICTED OF SODOMY “to determine their respective availability for military service” with “the view of conserving all available manpower for service in the Army.” He canceled the men’s dishonorable discharges and made them eligible for reassignment AFTER COMPLETING THEIR PRISON SENTENCES!

In 1945, facing manpower shortages during the final European offensive in Europe, Secty of War, Harry Stimson, ordered a review of all gay discharges and ordered commanders to “salvage” homosexual soldiers for service whenever necessary.

Only 5000 men were screened out of entering the military for being gay in WWII. The number of men discharged for being gay during WWII is also only in the low thousands out of 16 MILLION men who served. That’s A LOT of “looking the other way” however low a statistical incidence one ascribes to “numbers of gay men.”

Before and after both the Korean and Vietnam wars, gay discharge #s revealed an obvious stop-loss pattern.

1950, during Korean War – 483 discharges.
1953, when the Armistice was signed – 1353 discharges.

1966 – the Navy ALONE discharged 1708 gays.
1970 – when the US was deep in Vietnam, the Navy only discharged 461.

During the first Gulf War, a Pentagon spokesman said in relation to gay discharges, “Any administrative procedure is dependent on operational considerations of the unit that would administer such proceedings.” [And they will do whatever the President tells them to, formally or informally.]

After 9/11, President Bush signed executive Order #13223 that authorized the individual service branches to initiate a stop-loss which allowed them “to suspend certain laws relating to promotion, involuntary retirement, and separation” of military personnel.

In the “Army Commander’s Handbook,” updated in 1999 and still in effect, under the criterion of homosexuality: “if discharge is not requested prior to the unit’s receipt of alert notification, discharge isn’t authorized. Member will enter active duty with the unit.”

In 2005, a military spokesperson acknowledged they were sending openly gay service members into combat in Iraq.