Anyone who's trying to pick a fight with the Marines over "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" should have to answer this question, which Gen. James Amos turned on a hostile reporter yesterday: "Have you been out with the Marines in an intense firefight, you personally?" The President certainly hasn't. Nor has his Secretary of Defense. "I don't want to lose any Marines to the distraction," the Commandant warned yesterday. "I don't want to have any Marines that I'm visiting at Bethesda [ Naval Medical Center ] with no legs be the result of any type of distraction... Right now is a very intense period of time for a pretty healthy slice of the United States Marine Corps. This is not training. This is what I call the real deal. And the forces that wear this uniform... came back and told their commandant of the Marine Corps that they have concerns. That's all I need. I don't need a staff study. I don't need to hire three PhDs to tell me [how] to interpret it... [I]f they have concerns, I do too. It's as simple as that." In the end, Gen. Amos is going do what's in the best interest of his Marines and the security of America . If Congress wasn't going to take his concerns seriously, why put him in the position in the first place? "When your life hangs on the line," he told the press, "Mistakes... or distractions cost Marines' lives."
This isn't just hyperbole. In his Senate testimony last March, Gen. John Sheehan (USMC-Ret.), Supreme Allied Commander for NATO, told a shocking story of how one gay soldier almost took out an entire combat patrol (page 16 of the congressional record [2]). "Homosexual marines create problems on the battlefield... [In the] early years of Vietnam, 9th Marines, West of Da Nang, rifle company on a ridgeline combat outpost, the intelligence was that the North Vietnamese were going to attack, that night. The unit was put on 50-percent alert, which meant one slept, one stood on watch. About 1 o'clock in the morning, a fight broke out in a foxhole because the young marine was being molested by his squad leader. To the right of that foxhole, there was a machinegun section that opened [fire] and almost killed a combat patrol that was out in the front [because they thought the unit was under attack]."
By the Family Research Council