The Call to Duty Tour, which featured frank discussions with young veterans who served under the military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” (DADT) policy, ended its 20-city national tour with a stop at the University of California, San Diego on April 7.

For seven weeks, the tour featured various speaking engagements, meetings and debates at colleges, universities and veteran service organizations with the goal of highlighting the impact the anti-gay DADT policy has on national security and renewing debate on the issue.

Call to Duty Tour founder and director Alex Nicholson said he was honorably discharged from the Army in 2002 when a former friend outed him to his unit after finding a letter he wrote in Portuguese to an ex-boyfriend. Nicholson was a human intelligence collector for the U.S. Army and speaks five languages fluently.

“I went into the military already speaking four languages, yet I was fired because the wrong person knew I was gay,” he said at UCSD.

After being discharged and returning to school at the University of South Carolina, the Department of Defense offered him a scholarship to study Arabic in Egypt as part of a national security education program to train American college students in languages critical to national security yet less commonly taught in the U.S.

Nicholson said after learning Arabic he moved back to the U.S. when the 9/11 Commission Report was released, and he began to read through it.

The report said U.S. intelligence intercepted two messages from conversations in Arabic on Sept. 10 indicating an event was planned the following day, but the communications were not translated until Sept. 12, the day after the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington that killed more than 3,000 people. One of the messages was translated into “Tomorrow is zero hour.”

“It’s one of the easiest phrases to translate from Arabic to English,” said Nicholson, who added that since DADT has been enforced, over 200 linguists have been discharged under the policy, 54 of which were Arabic linguists.

“In 2006, do we really care any more that the person translating the next piece of crucial intelligence is gay or straight as long as he or she gets the done job quickly and accurately and helps save American lives in the process,” Nicholson said.

Rear Admiral Alan Steinman, a member of the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network honorary board of directors and American Veterans for Equal Rights Puget Sound, explained the history and current provisions of DADT, which include “Don’t Harass” and “Don’t Pursue.”

A retired doctor and U.S. Coast Guard rear admiral, Steinman was one of three retired military personnel who came out nationally in a New York Times article in December 2003 to mark the 10-year anniversary of DADT. He is also a retired U.S. Coast Guard two-star admiral and a former Coast Guard health and safety director.

“The assumption was that the presence of a gay or lesbian in the military would disrupt combat readiness, unit cohesion or morale,” he said. “[There is] no data to back it up. In the 12 years since the law was passed, there are a lot of facts and data to show that was wrong. It was wrong then and it was wrong now.”

Steinman cited poll results showing 63 to 79 percent of respondents are in favor of gays and lesbians serving openly in the military. He said a CNN/Gallop poll taken in December 2003 showed 91 percent of young people ages 18-29 believe gays and lesbians in the military should be able to serve openly.

Civilian agencies such as police and fire departments, as well as federal agencies such as the FBI, CIA, Secret Service and the Drug Enforcement Agency do not have restrictions on gays and lesbians serving openly, Steinman said.

“We have the irony that a gay special agent in the Secret Service can guard the life of the president of the United States, but a gay solider cannot guard the defense of the United States,” he said.

Steinman said it is common for gays and lesbians to serve with their peers and their commanding officers knowing their sexual orientation, and that the Department of Defense recently admitted that they send gays and lesbians over to Iraq and Afghanistan.

“The law itself says the defense department can keep gay and lesbian service members on active duty if they think that somebody made a statement in order to get out of service and if they’re useful to the military,” he said. “If that’s the case, why do we need a law that says gays and lesbians can’t serve unless they are silent and celibate?”

Jarrod Chlapowski, assistant director of the Call to Duty Tour and a former U.S. Army Korean linguist, said it was extremely difficult to come to terms with his sexuality, and he wanted to be open about it with his peers, so he confided in them.

“I got a number of surprising responses. I was never punched in the face, never harassed, never called anything derogatory,” he said. “After three months, the whole unit knew I was gay.”

Chlapowski said he closeted himself again after he realized the implications of getting discharged under DADT.

“Before [then] I had found my camaraderie and fell in love with the Army, but because of that paranoia and pressure, I opted not to re-enlist,” he said.

A report from the Urban Institute released in 2004 estimates that 65,000 gay and lesbian Americans are currently serving in the U.S. Armed Forces – on active duty, in the reserves or in the National Guard. The Urban Institute’s estimates are based on an analysis of census data from the year 2000.

“Gays and lesbians are serving openly in today’s military. It is a fact,” Chlapowski said. “You don’t see any decrease in morale. You don’t see any loss in unit cohesion. You don’t see any detriment to combat readiness.”

In 1992, then-presidential candidate Bill Clinton went on record saying he would push to allow gays and lesbians to be allowed to serve openly in the military. Shortly after his inauguration in January 1993, President Clinton suspended the existing Department of Defense policy, which banned gays, lesbians and bisexuals from military service.

But because the Joint Chiefs of Staff and various Congress members opposed lifting the ban, six months of discussions and congressional and administrative hearings followed. The result of those hearings became “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, Don’t Pursue, Don’t Harass,” in which the military said it would not inquire about the sexual orientation of current and future service members unless they declared themselves to be gay, lesbian or bisexual, or if they attempted to marry a person of the same sex or engaged in “homosexual conduct.” Service members who were discovered to be gay, lesbian or bisexual would then be subject to dismissal.

According to a report released in February by the Blue Ribbon Commission, a group organized by the Center for the Study of Sexual Minorities in the Military at the University of California, Santa Barbara, DADT cost the Pentagon at least $363.8 million to implement during the first 10 years of the policy’s existence. The commission, which includes former Secretary of Defense William J. Perry and other military experts, was formed after the Government Accountability Office released a report in February 2005 stating that $190.5 million was spent on training and recruiting replacements for the 10-year time period.