Where Military People Gather, There’s Only One Topic Debated : Morale: Many in service find Clinton plan to lift ban on gays absurd and frightening. Others say they’ll back the President and do their duty.

CLINTON, Md. — On this particular night, the “Decoy Lounge” near Andrews Air Force Base has become a “guy’s bar.” Servicemen are arriving for a few beers.

Unlike most nights, when talk turns to sports, girl friends or jobs, there is only one topic of conversation: President Clinton’s plan to end a decades-old ban on gays in the military service. It is an echo of the anguished debate being waged at military bases all across the country.

To many, the President’s idea is an absurd, frightening, puzzling one that threatens the very core of American military life.

“You know, we like to go to bars and have a good time,” an Air Force captain said. “But if we have a homosexual with us here, how does he fit into this group?” The issue is not about “gay rights,” he asserted, but about the rights of others to live without discomfort or distraction.

But at the opposite end of the bar, an Air Force sergeant from Georgia and an Air National Guard officer from Missouri said that they are not willing to prejudge the effect that lifting the ban would have on morale in the services. Besides, they said, their opinion probably counts for little.

“Being a military member, I work for the President of the United States, and whatever he says goes. . . “ the sergeant said. His friend added: “We are going to stand behind the President and that’s our duty.”

Air Force Sgt. Michael Leon of McGuire Air Force Base was equally willing to trust the decision to the commander in chief. “(He’s) a very intelligent man and he’s going to make the right decision,” Leon said. “I am not concerned about it at all. The only difference is that now, they (gays and lesbians) keep it a secret.”

But another airman was not so certain.

Recalling his days in basic training when men shared the shower five-at-a-time, this lieutenant said that he was better off not knowing if any of his colleagues were gay.

“Our bodies were touching each other. If I had known that one of those guys was homosexual, that would have really been a problem,” he said. “I assumed they were all heterosexual.”

Similar reservations were expressed a generation and a continent away by 54-year-old Jim McGehee, of Laguna Beach, now in the Army Reserve after 16 years of active duty.

“Can you imagine two homosexual soldiers walking down the street holding hands in uniform?” he asked. “I feel it will reduce morale tremendously. . . . How do you separate them like you do with the women? Will you have separate facilities for homosexuals?”

In San Diego, military wives joined the debate on their husbands’ behalf.

At the Gateway Village housing project for enlisted personnel outside the Marine Corps Recruit Depot in San Diego, the word was passed to swamp local congressional offices with phone calls opposing President Clinton’s proposed policy change.

“Our husbands shouldn’t have to share showers and bunk with gays,” said Heather Waite, whose husband is a corpsman at the Balboa Park Naval Hospital. “There’s talk that a lot of guys will just leave the Navy if gays are let in.”

At the Orange County Marine Corps recruiting station in Irvine Wednesday, Gunnery Sgt. Donald Livsey argued that the problem is not the effect gays may have on the military services but the effect the military might have on them. He said that he fears for the safety of gay and lesbian service members in a culture that would be intolerant of their sexual preference.

As a testament to the volatility of the issue, Jerry Hollingshead, a petty officer aboard the Tarawa, a San Diego-based amphibious assault ship, said that a discussion about Clinton’s intentions broke out during a class this week. Central to that version of the debate was the President’s military record.

“Here’s a man (Clinton) who has never been in uniform and he thinks he can tell us what’s best for the military?” said Hollingshead. “If he wants to come out during a six-month deployment at sea and see what it’s like, OK. But as far as I’m concerned, he ran out on the military once (during Vietnam) and now he’s ready to do it again.”

A black sailor, who declined to give his name, said that he resents having Clinton’s action likened to President Harry S. Truman’s 1948 order that ended racial segregation in the military.

“Being gay is a lifestyle,” he said. “Being black is no lifestyle. It’s what we are. There’s a difference.”

An airman from Dobbins Air Force Base in Georgia walked into a Maryland hotel wearing a Clinton-Gore campaign button that was hidden beneath his crew patch. In a show of opposition to the Clinton policy, he stripped away the patch to reveal the button hanging upside down.

“In the air crew, we are supposed to be together. We are supposed to go out and do things together and stay together, that way we can trust each other,” he said. “And I just don’t see how we can be together like that (if one member is gay).”

A person’s sexual preference would threaten the combat-readiness of a cockpit crew, said an Air Force captain who asked not to be identified. “People are trying to use the military as a social experiment. The purpose of the military is to be combat ready and you do not need distractions.”

Others saw the issue as far less momentous.

John Rasmussen, an air national guardsman from Oregon, likened a homosexual’s privacy to relationships that exist between husbands and wives.

“I do not think that anybody is going to approach me unless I give them some reason to. I don’t think it’s going to affect me,” he said.

And Jerome Streeter, a Navy chief petty officer in San Diego, predicted that the Navy would outlast the controversy. “It’s an old joke: The Navy is a 200-year tradition, unbroken by progress,” he said. “The Navy will survive.”

Martinez reported from Maryland and Perry from San Diego. Times staff writers De Tran and Otto Strong contributed to this story from Orange County.