Don't Serve / Don't Tell: "At places like Harvard, the military is a rarity on campus. One January morning last year, I was sitting outside a classroom with some classmates waiting for our Civil Procedure exam to begin. A male student stopped to greet us. He was wearing a puffy vest over
what looked like an old version of the Army physical training sweatshirt--the oatmeal gray cotton zip-up. I asked him if it was an Army sweatshirt (the vest covered his chest where the 'ARMY' logo would be). 'No way,' he scoffed. 'I would never wear that. I hate the Army.'
'Oh,' I replied, 'I am in the Army.' He looked at me as if I had announced I had three legs and was born on Neptune. 'You? In the Army?' He started to laugh, as if I were making a joke. But when I offered to show him my military ID card as proof he finally seemed to believe me.
At the time, I got a bit of a charge out of defeating a stereotype about the military. But during the current law school recruiting period, things took a turn for the worse. I had the sickening feeling that as an individual soldier I was being kicked about in the name of tolerance. Everyday conversations about the military on campus inevitably turned into lectures: 'Don't Ask/Don't Tell is wrong because . . . ' I found that many people who claimed to value diversity and respect difference could not reconcile my presence at Harvard. Often people asked me why Army officers did not speak out against the policy, and why 'liberal' soldiers simply 'accept' discrimination. Some went so far as to imply that they did not feel 'safe' on campus with military officers who did not condemn the Solomon Amendment in their midst."
