THEY ARE THE FEW AND THE proud, the long gray line, the Spartans. They practice what they call, in a phrase silky with unexamined assumptions, the manly art of war. They see themselves as pursuing a higher calling in terrain where rights matter less than responsibilities, where the individual must give way to the corps.
For the soldiers and sailors and flyers of America's armed forces, these are especially difficult days. The end of the cold war has removed the rationale for decades of extreme vigilance; the much discussed "peace dividend" will probably translate into military layoffs, equipment cuts, withdrawal from foreign posts and general retrenchment in prestige. The Tailhook scandals of sexual harassment have toppled high-ranking Navy officers and exposed to public scorn a kind of sexism that many in the military still cherish as "virility" and "blowing off steam." The one great victory of recent years, Desert Storm, was so quick and total that it scarcely tested the mettle of troops, and the persistence of Saddam Hussein makes the triumph appear almost hollow.
Now, after generations when military service was a prerequisite for elective office -- so that ambitious young men from Harry Truman to George Bush clamored to be in combat -- an unrepentant draft avoider has been elected President. And Bill Clinton says one of his first official acts will be what an agonized hierarchy sees as the gravest challenge ever to military folkways. Their last refuge of traditional masculinity, of an orderly and authoritarian world of moral black and white, is to be opened to admitted homosexuals by Executive Order. The proposed change comes at the same time that a presidential report recommends another assault on the masculine mind-set: allowing women greater access to combat roles. Institutions that urged generations of adolescents to submit to discipline and make men of themselves are being forced to rethink just what manhood means.
Military leaders denounce Clinton's plan to end the ban on gays, and some have called on congressional allies to help. Ordinary soldiers threaten to harass and hobble implementation or quit their posts en masse -- a tough vow to sustain amid a recession but politically explosive nonetheless. The Navy's Reserve Officers Training Corps program on college campuses has installed, and last week was upholding, a new oath. It requires student sailors to pledge that they are not homosexual and that they will return every penny of their training costs (an average of $52,967 per student) if they are, even if they don't discover their sexual identity until later during their service.
Military conflict with the evolving social values of civilian society is nothing new. The armed services are still recoiling from the mere presence, let alone the theoretical equality, of women. While some units have integrated the genders effectively, in many others harassment remains commonplace, from sexual taunts to overt refusal to promote women into positions of authority over men. For every woman who is happy with colleagues, there is another with horror stories. All the services continue to preclude women from holding combat posts, despite Congress's vote in 1991 to drop regulations that prohibit women in the Air Force and Navy from flying combat missions.