Secret 2: The Private
Don't ask. Don't tell.
It was 2007, and I had been deployed to Baghdad, Iraq. The American base bore the stains of exhaustion– we had only invaded five years previously; Saddam Hussein was only one year dead in his grave.
We slept in tents, behind walls made of plywood boxes, every day tumbling into the next without reprieve. We tiptoed through a brutalised country not yet in recovery, the echoes of previously exploded IED’s still ringing in our ears; death still hovering thick over the Iraqi streets. We understood we were trained for crisis, but that we wouldn’t have a choice when or how a crisis would hit, and whether we would come out of it alive. Each day the base prayed together, asked to live another tour. God Bless America. I always mumbled along with eyes closed, remembering churches I was no longer allowed to walk into. It didn’t pay to discuss those things, here. Don’t ask, don’t tell. I was serving alongside God-fearing Texan boys with twenty-year old pregnant wives at home. They needed to believe the same God who hated gays would shield them from rocket propelled grenades. I knew God was a decent guy, but I also knew nothing would stop an RPG, not while we did more damage than good.
Perhaps that’s why we started it? Perhaps that’s why we didn’t stop?
The first time I really saw Private Costanza’s face was on a routine patrol. Her head turned towards me in a quick whip of terror: she had just spotted her first IED on the side of the road. Even now, passing garbage in the street makes me cringe. I can’t move close to abandoned coke bottles or shopping bags without remembering us there, crouched low in the open trailer of a Humvee, waiting to hear a final bang. She spotted it, before any of us, and raised a gun to stop the surrounding traffic of Adamhiya. Her face was steely. There was no pride, no smug triumph. She quivered with one focus: stopping time.
After that, I found myself looking for her curly black ponytail amongst the crowd of men in khaki. It wasn’t sexual – not immediately. We were two of only a handful of female soldiers, and I wanted a friend. There were only so many times you could overhear boys greedily talk about ‘snatch’ like it was some kind of junk food.
God, I wish I could have given them a masterclass on vaginas. ‘Here, my friends, is a wild truffle. A rare papaya. An oyster on the moon.’
I kept my metaphors to myself. Sex was not a poetic notion on the base, it was a coping mechanism. Battle buddies existed in whatever form you could find them. Some of the men had sniffed around, tried it on a couple of times, but I made up stories about boyfriends or bad exes, and soon scared them off in a way they could compute. Private Costanza had a lot of interested young men staring after that black ponytail, but no smile came for free. At one point I heard her tell someone she was engaged to be married. “That fucker is in for an icy honeymoon then,” someone quipped, and the men with wives at home laughed in solidarity, so deft at turning the rejection back on any woman that dared.
‘Private Costanza’ became ‘Alannah’ to me on the seventh week of deployment. I’d found my way into her orbit, after what felt like a lifetime of watching her shoulders and ponytail walking ahead of me, sitting in front of me in a vehicle. Was she trying to be in front, or did I always walk behind, sit behind? Did she want to be seen by me, or did I insist on always having her in view?
Eventually, I asked to see her engagement ring – attempting an imitation of heterosexual sisterhood that might either protect or reveal me. She paused, frowned, then laughed at me loudly. As it turned out, ‘Private Costanza’ didn’t give smiles for free, but Alannah certainly did.
“I hid it right up my arse in case any of them asked for proof.”
We talked freely after that – in the privacy of empty dorms and shower stalls. Our shared queerness was our secret language, a glinting crystal we had uncovered in the dust-storm of Baghdad. It was a reason to stay human. At first, it was enough to just exist alongside one another, because we certainly weren’t supposed to. It was enough, of course, until it wasn’t.
When we finally became reckless enough to enjoy one another, it was at the worst imaginable moment. Sometimes I wonder if it was God having a joke, due to the finesse of it. We’d seen seeks without any kind of weapon fired. It had almost felt like terrorism was in hibernation (not dead, never dead). It made us too comfortable, too bold. We’d smiled too much. Dreamed with too much audacity. Maybe we wanted the adrenaline of some kind of action? Maybe we wanted to taste the boundaries of mortality?
I was eating an oyster on the moon, hidden in the back of a covered Humvee, when enemy artillery rounds began firing into the base. Bullets into plywood, ricocheting off dinted metal, a black ponytail spread across a tarp like a peacock’s tail. Alannah held a hand over my mouth as I pressed my cheek into her abdomen. Someone screamed in pain, outside. The shots sounded like fireworks for a moment, then stopped. An American voice barked orders, but we couldn’t move, couldn’t dress, couldn’t shoot back. We lay in the vehicle together, unsure what to pray or which God to pray to, focused on nothing but stopping time.
Don’t shoot us. Don’t kill us. Don’t find us. Don’t see us. Don’t ask. Don’t tell.
“Don't ask, don't tell" (DADT) was the official United States policy on military service of non-heterosexual people, instituted during the Clinton administration. The policy was in effect from February 28, 1994, until September 20, 2011 (this secret was submitted me to me on September 20, 2023, exactly twelve years later) . The act prohibited any non-heterosexual person from disclosing their sexual orientation or from speaking about any same-sex relationships, including marriages or other familial attributes, while serving in the United States armed forces. The act specified that service members who disclose that they are homosexual or engage in homosexual conduct should be separated (discharged) except when a service member's conduct was "for the purpose of avoiding or terminating military service" or when it "would not be in the best interest of the armed forces". Since DADT ended in 2011, persons who are openly homosexual and bisexual have been able to serve.