What a precarious position for Jones! He's lucky he had the three of you in charge instead of somebody like that chief at Bethesda. Luck of the draw, I guess.

You know, it's funny. Hemorrhoids are not particularly prevalent among gay men who like receptive anal sex. If I understand things right, anal sex doesn't cause hemorrhoids but can irritate them and make existing ones more uncomfortable and sometimes more of a serious problem.

But if that corpsman had raised a stink, I don't suppose Jones would have been able to dispell suspicion about being gay with mere facts.

That's why I left the Air Force during the same era. I was fine. I had good relationships with everybody I worked with, all the way up the chain. But I knew it would take only one homophobic busybody to change things.

And, in fact, my command, the Electronic Security Command, went into full witch-hunt mode a few years after I left, or at least that's how some of my friends who stayed in tell it. (Supposedly the command had not had enough "warrior mentality," per new leadership, and one of the reforms they enacted was getting rooting out gay people, because, you know, we're all so meek, passive, and unwarrior-like, kind of like me. You know how gentle and accepting I am. 😂)

Anyway, I don't know if you've been following, but the Biden administration and the Pentagon have done a lot in the last couple of years to make whole service members who were discharged for being gay. Unfortunately, there's still more work to do, because not everybody in those circumstances has been helped, and I don't suppose the Trump administration is about to dive in and finish the job.

Thanks for this story to help people remember the way things used to be! And not all that long ago in the scheme of things.