Gay leaders don’t know what to expect from the surprise addition of a candidate with an openly gay daughter to the Republican ticket. While both Cheney and George W. Bush have been opposed to many gay rights measures, some advocates think the presence of Mary Cheney can’t help but advance the cause of social acceptance for gays in both parties.

Judging from her efforts on behalf of Coors, Cheney will go the extra mile for a cause she believes in. To get gay advocates to drop their support for a Coors boycott, for instance, she traveled the country with the winner of the International Mr. Leather 1999 competition — a hugely popular event on the gay-bar circuit — meeting with gay leaders to advance the Coors cause.

Friends describe Cheney as extremely close to her father and fiercely loyal to the family. She takes frequent hunting and fishing trips with him; they recently returned from an excursion to South America.

“Family trumps everything,” said Bob Witeck, chairman of a public relations firm specializing in gay marketing. He has worked with Coors on its gay strategy, been a close advisor to Cheney and spoken with her since the announcement. “They will close ranks and succeed together,” he said. “All other considerations go aside.”

On Sunday, the issue of Cheney’s sexuality took an odd twist, when her mother Lynne denied ABC’s Cokie Roberts’ assertion that Mary Cheney has “declared that she is openly gay.” An irritated Lynne Cheney shot back: “Mary has never declared such a thing. I would like to say that I’m appalled at the media interest in one of my daughters. I have two wonderful daughters. I love them very much. They are bright; they are hard-working; they are decent. And I simply am not going to talk about their personal lives. And I’m surprised, Cokie, that even you would want to bring it up on this program.”

Lynne Cheney’s outburst raises a crucial question: Will Mary Cheney be as open about her sexual orientation on the campaign trail as she has been in Denver?

The blond, athletic Cheney stands only medium height, but strikes a commanding physical presence. “She comes across as a cross between a young businesswoman and tennis star,” said Human Rights Campaign spokesman David Smith.

She has been open about her sexuality for years, living with her partner in the quiet mountain town of Conifer, southwest of Denver. She plays a highly visible role in the gay community through her work, but retires to the mountains nights and weekends, and isn’t widely seen on the Denver social circuit. She’s an avid hockey player and golfer and enjoys hiking and outdoor activities.

“She’s pretty mainstream American,” one friend said. Friends and colleagues describe her as bright, direct and “universally respected.” Most spoke on condition of anonymity, and Cheney did not return calls seeking comment on her new role.

“She’s tough, very tough,” a colleague said. “She’ll look you straight in the face and tell you how she feels. No sugar-coating.” The direct approach didn’t sit well with everyone, and she was respected at Coors but also made a few enemies.

Cheney left Coors in May, and was accepted to the MBA program at the University of Colorado. She was set to begin classes next month, but friends say she has already decided to defer school to work for the campaign. “How often does your father run for vice president?” a friend asked her. The dean’s office reports that she has not yet signed up for classes, though that process is still underway for incoming students.

Some gay activists wonder how Cheney can stump for a ticket considered antagonistic to gay rights. Bush opposes workplace anti-discrimination laws, supports a ban on gay adoptions and says he wouldn’t allow gays to serve openly in the military. In May he killed the Texas hate crime law because it included sexual orientation. And earlier this year he refused to meet with Log Cabin Republican leaders during the primary campaign, though he later met local Log Cabin leaders at a widely hailed reconciliation meeting.

Dick Cheney has also had a dubious record on gay rights issues. In Congress, he voted against the Hate Crimes Statistics Act of 1988, and was one of 13 House members to oppose the first major AIDS testing/counseling bill the same year. He was a vocal opponent of open gay military service, both as defense secretary and later during congressional hearings which led to the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy of the Clinton administration.

But Cheney publicly supported his defense spokesman Pete Williams when he was outed by the Advocate in 1991. “I have operated on the basis over the years with respect to my personal staff that I don’t ask them about their private lives,” Cheney said. “As long as they perform their professional responsibilities in a responsible manner, their private lives are their business.”

Mary Cheney is used to walking a twisting political line. Working for Coors, she was representing a company hated by many gay activists, trying to burnish its image. But she was also charged by Coors with promoting the gay cause with the company’s beer distributors, hardly the most gay-friendly group in America.

“Beer distributors aren’t the most educated on the gay and lesbian market,” a Cheney colleague said diplomatically.

Until she left Coors, Cheney was a powerful advocate for advancing gay rights through corporate America — the “market” point of view in the “market vs. movement” debate. Market-oriented gays believe they may have more power as consumers than as voters, and think that once they become coveted targets of corporate America, mass acceptance will follow.

Thus some gay leaders are thrilled by the way companies like American Airlines, Subaru and Miller Brewing have aggressively courted their community. But left-wing activists charge that they’re being exploited and co-opted. “We’re a movement, not a market,” has become the battle cry of the other side, and the fight may be the bloodiest battleground within the gay rights movement today.

At the heart of that controversy stands Coors Brewing Co., one of the most hated corporations in gay America since the 1970s. Once synonymous with right-wing causes, it was accused of spying on its workers and discriminating against a variety of minorities, including gays, blacks and Latinos. The most infamous charge was that the brewery forced employees to take polygraph tests about their sexual orientation.

Labor unions organized a boycott in 1974, and California gay rights pioneers Harvey Milk and Morris Knight called on gays to join the boycott, which has raged for more than 20 years.

Coors spokesman David Taylor says the company aggressively worked to change both policies and image in the late ’70s and early ’80s, when Coors began expanding and developing a national marketing strategy. The company added sexual orientation to its non-discrimination policy in the ’80s and offered domestic partnership benefits in 1995. “They have become one of the most gay-friendly companies in the country,” HRC spokesman David Smith said Wednesday.

The emergence of gays in the Coors family is widely believed to have helped moderate its views. Dallas Coors, grandson of company founder Adolph Coors, was a co-founder of HRC, though he did not work for his family’s brewing company or the foundation. The real breakthrough came with the next generation, in the person of Scott Coors, son of Bill Coors, who retired as chairman of the brewery earlier this year and remains chairman of the holding company. Scott Coors has been openly gay in the Denver community for years, with no public resistance from the family. He serves as Coors’ director of product damage prevention, and is active in the gay employee group.

Coors has also been battling Miller and Anheuser-Busch for the lucrative gay beer market. Cheney’s job was to rebuild gay acceptance and gradually increase market share in Coors’ target markets. That task took her all over the country, but Coors has arguably made its most ambitious pitch for gay support in its backyard, in Denver (Coors’ brewery and headquarters in Golden sit on the outskirts of the metropolitan area).

During Cheney’s tenure, the company pumped hundreds of thousands of dollars into local and state gay groups, from Equality Colorado to the Colorado AIDS Project. It has contributed $54,000 to Denver Pridefest over the past three years, currently the “presenting sponsor,” meaning its bottle-cap logo appears on every related sign, banner and T-shirt strewn about the region for months.

“She opened a lot of doors at Coors for us,” says Mike Smith, executive director of the gay community center that organizes Denver’s Pridefest. He said a three-year agreement she negotiated will “substantially increase” its support and make it the largest corporate contributor to the organization. (Full disclosure: I sit on the Pridefest steering committee, but was uninvolved in the negotiations.)

Coors spokesman Taylor says the company has contributed about $500,000 to gay organizations over the past decade, most generously in Denver, Atlanta, Miami and Boston.

But the stigma lives on. Coors has been rebuffed by the gay community in markets such as San Francisco, according to sources familiar with the company’s marketing plan. The Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation faced an avalanche of abuse within the gay community when it accepted a $110,000 donation — under Cheney’s tenure — in 1998. The L.A. Coors Boycott Committee threatened to award them a “Coors Whore Award.”

The conflict erupted even more bitterly this February, when the Denver HRC chapter hit Cheney up for a $5,000 donation from Coors as a corporate sponsor for its annual fundraising dinner. Cheney quickly came through with the approval, but the problems surfaced on the receiving end. HRC’s national chapter got wind of the donation in February, and called the locals to inform them the money must be returned. An acrimonious struggle erupted, with the national office lined up against Coors and the local chapter.

The national office won. HRC was already under attack within the gay community for its association with the gay Millennium March, and couldn’t afford any more controversial moves, explained Joe Barrows, who negotiated on behalf of the locals.

Cheney’s friends say she was infuriated by the response, and particularly angry at HRC executive director Elizabeth Birch. HRC agreed to reexamine the issue this spring, and on July 7, Birch flew to Colorado for a private meeting with Coors. Barrows and David Smith said the parties have moved closer to reaching an understanding, but are not ready to make an announcement yet. One member of the board of governors predicted Coors will eventually make a large corporate donation to HRC, which will be embraced in a high-profile press conference, applauding Coors as a leading company in acceptance of gays in its workforce.

But HRC was hardly the toughest opponent Cheney has faced. The crux of her job has been cracking open markets antagonistic to a Coors-gay alliance on both sides. Coors targets specific markets and then sends in a team of specialists in key niches — such as blacks, Hispanics and gays — to do outreach to those communities.

Cheney would then fly out to the market to win over both distributors and gays, explained one source who was familiar with her work. She would frequently find herself in a small town in the South, for instance, trying to convince a local good-ol’-boy distributor how great it would be to set up promotions at the local gay bar and spend some time hanging out with the gay managers and bartenders there. The next morning she might spend with a hostile gay organization, trying to convince them to accept what many still perceived as blood money.

Frequently, the distributors — many franchise operations independent of Coors — would try to brush Cheney off, saying they’d already tried, and the gay market was resistant to Coors. “Mary’s trick is to say, ‘Well I think times have changed,’ and then kind of hold their hand to reintroduce themselves,” her colleague said. “And then she goes into the community and starts identifying groups where Coors money can have an impact.”

Much of Cheney’s work involved outreach to various gay subcultures, from drag queens to cowboys on the gay rodeo circuit. She spent a great deal of time trying to learn about the leather phenomenon, because it has a tight national network of aficionados who maintain close links through the Internet as well as annual events like the International Mr. Leather competition.

Cheney spent months researching the leather phenomenon, attending events some would find distasteful and carting home stacks of books from the library and bookstores. “My partner wants me to get rid of all these books,” a friend quoted her as saying. “I’m so tired of looking at hairy men in leather!”

But the research paid off. Cheney teamed up with a powerful ally to spearhead the effort: International Mr. Leather 1999. Bruce Chopnik lives in Denver and took the crown just about the time Cheney’s efforts were getting underway. They flew to San Francisco to meet with leaders of the boycott, and to Chicago to powwow with the owners of the International Mr. Leather competition, which Chopnik said draws 20,000 to 25,000 participants a year to its convention.

“It caused a lot of political unrest on my side,” but Cheney was constantly by his side to support and advise him, he said. “Whenever I got slammed with a question, Mary was just a phone call away.”

Chopnik said Coors sponsored several leather events around the country, and was considering a donation to the National Leather Archive Museum in Chicago when Cheney left. When he stepped down from his title this May, Coors footed the bill for his farewell roast in Chicago.

He said the leather community was extremely resistant to Coors in the beginning, but now describes them as “highly supportive.” He concurred with the assessment of other gay leaders that the impact had rippled out far beyond the leather community.

“In the long run, she’s opened the doors to a lot of people’s minds,” he said. “We worked together to dispose of the mystique about Coors in the gay community,” he said. Chopnik said he was also approached by representatives of Procter and Gamble, to ascertain how Cheney made such inroads so quickly.

Cheney is respected in the gay community, yet strangely enigmatic for someone in such a visible role. She conscientiously avoids trading on her family name and plays her political views fairly close to the vest, sources throughout the community report. One activist after another said she seemed to support gay rights causes, but come to think of it, she rarely expressed those opinions directly. There have been occasional glimpses: “She always talks about how important the domestic partner benefits are,” one said.

She is considered active, but not necessarily activist. “It’s hard to tell how much of it is her and how much is part of her job,” one friend said. She is registered as an independent.

Local and national gay leaders are preparing for a fresh blast of attention thanks to Cheney, but their opinions on how it will play out vary widely, with an intricate web of benefits and risks.

So far, the Bush team appears to be welcoming its new gay member with open arms. Its first response leaked out in the Drudge Report Tuesday, in a piece titled, “BUSH SAID TO EMBRACE CHENEY DAUGHTER’S SEXUALITY.” It quotes an unnamed “top Bush source” saying: “Being gay or lesbian is not a liability in this campaign. The governor embraces both of Mr. Cheney’s daughters and will invite them to campaign with him.”

“If the Bush campaign is saying that, that is a positive step,” HRC’s David Smith said. “It’s not something they’ve articulated before in very clear terms.”

Bush spokesman Ray Sullivan said the campaign could not verify those statements.

“Secretary Cheney has asked that the private lives of his family be left private,” Sullivan said Friday. He was unaware of any role Mary Cheney would play at the convention, and noted that Bush’s daughters had no official role either. He could not say whether Mary Cheney’s partner would accompany her to the convention, or onto the podium during the traditional family gathering.

Local gay leader Mike Smith, also co-founder of the Names Project, sees the chief benefit in social acceptance rather than electoral politics. “There’s a lot of social positives from this for a vice presidential candidate to have an openly gay child and have that not perceived as a negative in choosing that person,” he said.

This week’s events seem to contrast to the 1996 campaign, when Cheney decided not to run for president at least partly because of the exposure to his daughter.Lynne Cheney’s comments to Cokie Roberts on Sunday, however, suggest that the Bush-Cheney team does not entirely have its story straight about the importance of Cheney’s sexuality.

However, some leaders were afraid that an articulate poster child for gay Republicanism might bolster Bush’s compassionate conservative appeal, and neutralize some of Gore’s expected charges of intolerance.

“There is a danger, and we can back it up with numbers,” said National Gay Lesbian Task Force spokesman David Elliot. He said voter research showed 5.5 percent of the electorate identified as gay, lesbian or bisexual, and typically voted from 29 percent to 33 percent Republican. But that percentage dropped to an all-time low of 22 percent after the 1992 convention, best known for Pat Buchanan’s vitriolic speech, he said.

“Gays and lesbians watched the Republican Convention in ’92 and were scared to death,” Elliot said. “The number of [gay, lesbian and bisexual] voters plummets when Republicans bash our community, but then some of them drift back when they soften the rhetoric a bit.”

He foresees large defections from this Democratic base if the Bush campaign visibly embraces Mary Cheney, and markets her as effectively as they’ve used Bush’s Hispanic nephew George P. Bush in that community.

HRC sees it differently. David Smith said gay issues frequently lie dormant for years with much of the population, until an event like Matthew Shepard’s murder, or the killing of PFC Barry Winchell last year, temporarily focuses attention on hate crimes.

Mary Cheney’s emergence will force the spotlight onto those issues and embarrass the campaign with intolerant positions, Smith said. “It presents all sorts of difficult questions.” He scoffs at the notion that voters will accept what he calls “Trojan horse politics — all those hard-right positions, packaged as conservative.”

“That’s not going to happen,” he said. “The fact that [Bush] opposes Mary Cheney adopting a child — it’s not going to happen.”

Army captain Brett grumbles through the show along with his pack, a mix of military officers and civilians. He enjoys a good drag show, but nobody on this stage is ever going to challenge RuPaul. For a man born in Manila, the Philippines, raised in Seattle and stationed on three continents since joining the Army, Colorado Springs can feel a bit like Mayberry sometimes. But it isn’t the unintentional comedy that bothers them — Ginger’s miniature-football breasts popping out of her lime-green Saran Wrap tube top actually is the highlight of the show — it’s the constant repetition of the same tired routines from the same dozen drag queens, nearly every Friday and Saturday night in the only gay bar in town.

The last diva waves goodbye after last call, just before 2 a.m. The lights go down, the house music goes up and the T-shirts come off. All week they’ve been waiting for this moment, and nobody’s holding back now. Brett sidles up behind a trim young Hispanic, wraps his enormous arms around the thick, sweaty torso, arching the spine back to lower the mouth toward his lips.

And then the strangest thing happens. Straight kids pour in — hundreds of them, small-town girls and boys lined up across the parking lot and around the corner, hyped up for the hottest after-hours, underage club for 70 miles in any direction. No one appears disconcerted. Pretty soon Brett and his buddies are surrounded by swarms of young, tattooed straight couples, writhing unabashedly around bare-chested soldiers grinding in tight little gay-boy clusters.

The scene plays out every Friday and Saturday, with a handful of GIs almost always there. One wrong soldier strolling in with the straight kids could make Brett forget his painful decision to remain in the combat arms. In March he spotted a sergeant from Fort Carson prowling the bar. He kept his distance from his date all night: no close dancing, no holding hands, definitely no making out. But the sergeant was back the next week and several more times, and it has really started to piss Brett off.

“Five weeks he’s been showing up there, and he won’t make a frigging move on anyone,” he says. “I’m not moving till he does.” And months later, toward the end of May, three Air Force sergeants from Marine captain Alex’s unit showed up for after hours.

The after-hours mixed club raises the same puzzling questions as the Thursday Night Club, but ratchets up the stakes several notches. With so many opportunities available for anonymous gay sex, why would the men possibly risk this?

“Personal happiness,” Alex explains. “Optimism for meeting somebody that I can’t bear to be more than 2 feet away from. Finding a soul mate.” Sex is the easy part. Ironically, Brett, Alex and Army captain Drake feel free to revel in all the raunchy gay sex they please. They can find it online, they can find it in Denver, they can quickly stalk Hide & Seek and drag home a trick in a manner of minutes — it really doesn’t take long in a gay bar if sex is all you’re after.

Initially, sex was all they were after. They were perfectly happy with their military lifestyles and had no desire to hang out with a bunch of homos. Except for those urges, increasingly insistent urges, driving bolder and starker fantasies, which they finally had to acknowledge. All three captains put off the urges well into their late 20s. Each one finally sneaked off to a gay bar, touched a man, kissed a man, slept with a man — and eventually returned for another. They were quick, targeted missions — get in, get out, grab your prey and don’t get caught — the standard modus operandi of adult-onset homosexuality.

But once they satisfied those cravings, a whole new set of urges sprang to the surface. The captains have to struggle with the usual social challenges of adulthood — finding a satisfying relationship, developing a close, supportive circle of friends, being all that they can be on the job — from deep inside a closet. This requires a level of secrecy and deception that makes happiness in love, friendship and work virtually impossible. And, cruelly, it also makes promotion through the ranks virtually impossible.

Marine captain Alex’s romantic feelings for men surfaced very quickly. The thoughtful, lean intellectual never touched a man until 1997, but within weeks he broke off a relationship with a woman to pursue the first love of his life. He played it very safe, driving all the way up from San Diego to West Hollywood, Calif., just to have drinks or go dancing. “He was the first person outside my family to say ‘I love you,’” Alex says. But he had nearly completed his assignment, and he found himself shipped out to Colorado before the boyfriend was ready to commit.

Alex attempted the same long-distance tactic in Colorado Springs, essentially setting up a 70-mile, gay-free perimeter around the city. “I completely separated my life,” he says. “Everything I did here was straight-oriented, and I’d go to Denver and it was gay. My friends here at work think I have a completely separate life in Denver.”

His first year fit the classic “slut phase” commonly experienced by gay men just coming out to themselves. “I was a hound dog,” he says. “I was just a predator. I would readily do it again, but there’s no emotional or spiritual satisfaction. It’s purely physical and I’d like more out of it.” He began looking for more, but the distance was too great a barrier. “I wasn’t finding Denver people interested in dating someone living in the Springs,” he says. He discovered a casual weekly dinner group in Boulder that he enjoyed immensely. But though he made the 200-mile round trip frequently, there was no apparent enthusiasm for commuter friendships. Early last year, his frustration drove him to a decision to make his first trip to a gay bar, dropping the gay perimeter. He ventured into Hide & Seek, stopped avoiding locals in the gay-sex chat room and eventually even initiated a Thursday Night Club based on the Boulder model.

Oddly enough, the real breakthrough came in the chat room. He met Brett there one night, hunting for sex. Brett was characteristically cautious. “He had lied to me about who he was and where he worked, and I had been honest,” Alex says of the time they met. “He had a plausible denial or some con game going to avoid detection. He was very suspicious about people and was concerned there was some criminal investigative authority out looking for people.” Alex wasn’t fooled. GIs have their own military version of “gaydar” — the stance, the walk, the bearing and, of course, the haircut — and they rarely have trouble picking one another out of a crowd.

The encounter quickly developed into a tight friendship that dramatically changed both their lives. Brett has developed into a hub of the local gay social scene, and Drake has also entered the social circle through Brett’s continuing online adventures. Drake was scoping out the Springs while still stationed at Fort Bragg last summer, and Brett then served as Drake’s entree into the community when he arrived, acting very much like a commander does for new arrivals in his unit.

Military life is inherently lonely, regardless of sexuality. Brett has relocated six times in nine years, interspersed with 20 extended field trainings and five combat or peacekeeping deployments, from Kuwait to central Europe. Traditionally, soldiers respond by bonding tightly within their units, developing a profound esprit de corps vital to the success of an army. “We tend to be very close-knit,” Brett says. “It’s totally your social circle. We’re a lot like tight immigrant groups or some religious orders. You have an immediate extended family when you arrive.”

But gays often pull away from such circles to guard their secret. “The policy imposes severe isolation by prohibiting them from forming friendships with their straight friends,” says Michelle Benecke, executive director of the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network. “A service member plays Russian roulette with their career every time they have a conversation with a friend that straight people take for granted. ‘Hey, what are you doing this weekend? Where do you go to church?’ You can’t say MCC [Metropolitan Community Church, a federation of gay Christian congregations].”

Alex never grasped the full measure of his loneliness until he met Brett. He still speaks wistfully about the early days. “We hung out all the time together, because it was such a relief to find somebody else,” he says. “We talked about military pasts and boyfriend pasts, and optimistic futures. And it was normal, it was nice, it was like having a wingman around.” They introduced each other to entirely new circles of friends — Brett’s in the Springs, Alex’s in Denver — and instilled a mutual confidence in each other that spurred them fully into the gay social scene.

“That was kind of [Brett's] way of getting out,” Alex says. “He was a Net hound. He predominantly did stuff online and didn’t go out. He was very paranoid. And I think he’s eased up quite a bit in the year and a half I’ve known him. He’s not looking over his shoulder all the time. He’s not quite as concerned about being out or being seen out or doing some things that might suggest that he’s gay.”

Less paranoid, but still careful. A dinner party broke up early one night, and I rode to Hide & Seek with Brett, following Drake’s Pathfinder. Drake pulled into the lot and Brett smacked his palm against the steering wheel. “Damn! He pulls right up to the club! And he’s got that freaking vanity plate, screaming out that he’s airborne!” Brett drove around the corner and parked his truck on a dark side street.

They’re all highly active in the local gay scene now. Brett still cruises the chat rooms nearly every day, using a separate account, withholding descriptions until he’s comfortable and sending only headless photos. But that’s fearless compared with some of the soldiers he meets there: Many are still afraid to venture out in public or into Hide & Seek. Brett can’t imagine crawling back into a closet that cramped.

Ironically, the captains have begun to develop a form of the very gay ghettos Drake and Alex disdain so much. They have all reached the conclusion that they’re unlikely to find their soul mate in bed the morning after a night cruising for anonymous sex. Romantic relationships appear near the top of their priority lists, but two other themes keep recurring as they discuss their progression from predator-sluts to gay social butterflies: fulfillment of the camaraderie that drew them to military life and an emerging sense of their own identity.

“I was trying to learn what I was, and what characteristics of men I liked,” Alex says. “It’s not like growing up Hispanic and having a grandmother who teaches you about who you are and where you’ve come from. There is no Hispanic grandmother to teach you about gay culture; each one of us has to learn it for ourselves.

“Some of it has to do with how gay men deal with each other,” he says. “It’s different from the military. I know how men deal with each other in the military.”

Alex has learned a great deal about what it means to be a gay man, but considerably less about being a gay Marine. “I’m really looking forward to the day I meet another Marine in my situation,” he says. “I want to see how [Marines] have adapted to it, how successful they are, if they’re thinking about getting out or staying in, if they agree with the policy or not. How do they maneuver through the obstacles and the lies?

“I feel lonely,” he says. “It doesn’t have to do with the gay thing; it has to do with the Marine thing. How does that change being a Marine for them? Can they contain both ideas in one philosophy and one approach to living?”

Say they do find a boyfriend: then what? The captains have seen several gay peers struggle with relationships but very few success stories.

“Relationships are already difficult in the military,” SLDN’s Benecke says. “Even married heterosexuals who enjoy the full benefit of all the military support services — in recognition that deployments and military life can be so stressful for a relationship — have difficulty making it. Add to that the need to hide your relationship every hour of every day while you’re at work — it makes it extraordinarily difficult to have a healthy relationship over time.”

As hard as it is for a soldier to juggle two separate lives, the strain can be much greater for his partner, who can experience only half of his mate’s life. The captains foresee having to exclude future boyfriends from military social functions — such as poker nights and pool games — having to be careful not to walk the dog together too often or share a cart at the grocery store. “I [will be] making him go back into the closet as well,” Brett says. “He might get tired of it: ‘I don’t have to deal with this!’”

All three captains agree that their boyfriends will have to keep a separate apartment, to which they’ll be relegated from time to time. They’ll have to maintain their guard as strictly as the captains do. One false move in answering the phone when the soldier isn’t home could raise difficult questions back at the base. “Who was that guy that answered your phone? What was he doing in your house when you weren’t there?”

“Talk about isolation!” Benecke says. “The relationship has to take place in a vacuum.”

The isolation intensifies when the soldier leaves for weeks at a time for field training and climaxes during months of deployment in a combat zone overseas. Brett recalls the emotional scenes as the men in his unit left their wives for an unknown destination in the Persian Gulf War.

“I had these grown men crying!” he said. “They never envisioned themselves ever going to war.” While heterosexual wives and husbands have spouses’ clubs to support them, gay partners are on their own. Members of Brett’s platoon faced several Scud missile attacks during their months in the desert, and the panic back home sometimes rose to hysterical proportions. His buddies’ wives were looked after with care packages, visits from the family support group and occasional videoconferences with the soldiers in the field. He wonders how a boyfriend of his would have handled it all alone.

“It’s the worry,” Benecke says. “Every military spouse worries, and the worry [for gays] is exaggerated because they can’t be plugged into the support channels that exist for straight people. Nor are they usually listed on any of the official forms that the military would use to contact the next of kin.” Peacekeeping deployments vary widely in the danger they pose, but six months away from home can strain a relationship regardless of any physical threat. During Brett’s deployments, soldiers were given free “morale calls” to lift spirits during the mission, but also to maintain shaky marriages for the long haul. The calls were made on Army lines, which can be monitored, so he couldn’t have risked calling a boyfriend, he says. And public phones weren’t available in several of the war zones in which he has been deployed. Military e-mail is often available, but it’s also open to Army surveillance.

“The access is limited and conducted in public,” Benecke says. “Everyone knows that you’re not married, so who the heck are you calling [to say 'I love you']?”

A particularly depressing moment for gays in a serious relationship tends to be the arrival home after deployment or training. “All the wives are out there screaming, ‘Oh, honey!’ and the kids are running up to them as they get off the planes or the buses,” Brett says. “And you’re like, ‘Well, I have to see mine at home.’” It may seem like a minor matter to a civilian, but gay service members bring it up repeatedly and emotionally. “It’s a big deal when you’ve been away for a long time, or you’ve been to war and come back,” Brett says. “No one’s here to welcome me!”

But if the loneliness and deception are particularly acute when these gay officers are overseas, it’s with them stateside, too. After all, they spend most of their time with straight service members, and even as they’ve begun to find happiness in the gay social networks they’ve developed and to seek boyfriends, they can’t afford to undermine their straight fronts. Brett, Drake and Alex balance their gay and straight worlds differently — Brett has become an isolationist, Drake’s a juggler, Alex is somewhere in between — but all three are having a hard time feeling comfortable with the emotional trade-offs of their choices.

Drake wasn’t at Hide & Seek the night I first watched the straight kids pour in. He was out with his buddies from the post. He’s constantly juggling the two groups — maintaining two separate social worlds, like a bigamist with one wife resigned to the arrangement. It’s gays one night, military buds the next, some nights ducking out early from the straight night at the pool hall to hit last call at Hide & Seek.

Brett doesn’t have any buddies at Fort Carson. He tried juggling for three years in Italy, but couldn’t stand the constant lying or the threats of exposure every time a buddy asked a routine question about what he’d been up to. With no buddies, there are fewer questions. So he gave up juggling when he transferred to Fort Carson and implemented isolationism, the second strategy popular among gays in the military. He made a conscious decision before his arrival to distance himself from his work mates and spurn any potential friendships.

Alex represents a somewhat murky middle ground between the other two strategies. He began a switch to isolationism a year ago, after having already developed several close relationships at Peterson Air Force Base. He loosened those ties by convincing his work friends that he found Colorado Springs stifling, and shifted all his free time to Denver, routinely spending three to five nights a week up there.

But the constant questions of his juggling strategy still dog him — “What you been up to? What did you do this weekend?” — requiring an elaborate fictional life. “I have to be careful,” Alex says. “I have to be guarded when I come back from a weekend and start talking about where I’ve been or what I’ve done.”

He has spent enough time in Denver’s straight clubs to swap them with the gay bars; dates and tricks are converted to feminine counterparts. “I try to keep it as close to the truth as possible, because if I have to retell the story, I’m not going to stumble over things,” he says. “If some guy has a broad chest, she’s got a rack. A guy named Clay becomes Claire. Everything else pretty much stays the same.”

Eventually Alex came to miss bonding with his straight buddies outside of work, so he reverted to a mild juggling strategy this spring. “You can’t be an isolationist everywhere you go,” he says. “It’s stifling, oppressive; you’ve completely compartmentalized yourself.” He’s also trying to prepare for a very different situation at his next assignment. He’s moving on at the end of April and doesn’t foresee the same freedom he has enjoyed for the past two years.

Drake faces the most constant questions, as he’s fully engaged with his work buddies, splitting his social life nearly 50-50 between the two worlds. But he thought he was safe in Denver, until a disturbing incident the last weekend of February, just a few days after our combative lunch interview in Brett’s kitchen.

A tough-looking guy accosted him on the dance floor at the popular gay dance club Tracks 2000. “Who the fuck are you?” the guy yelled. “I know you, and I know you’re in the Army, too!” That was the end of his career, Drake figured; there’d be no Career Field Designation form to worry about in his future. He recognized the face but couldn’t place it until the guy cracked up.

Drake was only mildly relieved to recognize Jason, his best friend from their lieutenant days in the mid-’90s, giving him a hard time. “It scared the shit out of me,” he says. “Things that involve morality — or someone’s perception of morality — you just don’t know until it’s tested.” Jason had left the Army and had come to Tracks with his girlfriend; Drake was dancing with a date. “And the dude had a hand on the back of my neck.” “Are you here for this?” Jason asked.

“And I’m thinking, ‘Oh, my God! He knows! He knows!’” Drake says. “Well, I guess so,” he answered. “You caught me.”

Same with them, Jason said: great music, great dancing. And then he stepped back a foot — literally and figuratively — and took another look at the situation. “No fucking way!” he yelled. “Are you guys … partners?” And then he was laughing again, hugging Drake. “Don’t worry, don’t worry,” Jason said. And then he took another step back. “You have got to get out of the Army!” he said. “And make yourself happy!”

Brett occasionally betrays misgivings about the all-gay, all-the-time social world he has constructed for himself, but he’s not about to return to juggling. He has doubts about how long a hefty gay social calendar can be successfully juggled. SLDN’s Benecke concurs. “Straight friends are not stupid,” she says. “A concerned straight friend is going to notice that the gay service member is cutting them off at a certain point, and will want to know why. The safer path is to be an isolationist, obviously — but that has its costs as well.”

Like command. Combat command requires total immersion in the lives of your soldiers, Brett says. “You have to spend every waking minute [with your unit]. You’re a mentor, you’re a leader; you’ve got to spend your time with the troops and their families. You give up your life to be a [combat] commander. I really believe that.”

Juggling would be difficult if Brett became a combat commander, but isolationism is of course out of the question. He’d be unlikely to ever receive another combat command if he aroused suspicion by pursuing a full- or even half-gay life.

Drake and Alex have plenty of time to tinker with their strategies. Majors never command, so they’ve each got five to eight years of staff time before they make battalion commander. Unfortunately, Brett’s Career Field Designation form was due by the end of May. He had to decide whether he could beat all the odds and stomach a return to juggling — with a much heavier emphasis on the straight side than the three are enduring now. But if he chose the combat arms and failed to make colonel — whether because of suspicion or confirmation of his gay identity — he’d be forced into early retirement.

But a self-imposed exile to the support services could accommodate a decent amount of juggling, maybe even a mild form of isolationism. “I’m not taking my dental staff into war and having them say, ‘Fight!’” Brett says, imagining a hypothetical operational support role. “I am the commander of the 24th Dental Group! You’re in charge of accountants, or intelligence agents who sit behind a desk and gather intelligence. That [combat] cohesiveness doesn’t exist in those administrative jobs,” he says, so being gay wouldn’t detract so much from his leadership.

Perhaps more important, suspicion of his being gay might not disqualify him from attaining the positions necessary for advancement. “With fighting troops, you’re supposed to exude masculinity and machismo and all that,” he says. “To know that you’re a homo will detract from that. I think that’s one of the fears of the higher-ups. Support commanders are not the ‘Follow me!’ kind of guys. They can get away with [appearing gay] because they’re administrative commanders.”

He could get away with it, but what’s the point? He dreamed of sweeping through the Philippines like Gen. Douglas MacArthur, not bustling around a New Jersey accounting office with a stack of insurance forms.

Alex will never face a Career Field Designation form. The Marines are a specialized service more heavily organized around the infantry. But he has a more immediate dilemma ahead. Alex relocated during the last week of April to a short, temporary assignment. Then he’s off to a duty station, the absolute reverse of the freedom he has enjoyed here: tight quarters, tiny community, with everyone knowing everyone else’s business. “Any [homosexual] contact with anyone is unthinkable,” he says.

So how does he plan to behave, how does he expect to cope? He echoes the themes Brett and Drake keep repeating about their futures: “I don’t know. I don’t live in a hypothetical world, so I don’t know what I’ll do. It’s irrelevant now. Military training says we don’t worry about what we can’t change.”

Drake happily seconds that sentiment. After years of feeling terrified of exposure, he faced one of the worst possible scenarios at Tracks this February, but the would-be disaster proved a turning point in his personal development.

Jason was so supportive that Drake has come out to one straight friend after another since February. “I’ve got six straight friends that routinely go to hockey matches and baseball games and stuff and I’m like their …” He pauses, searches for a way to describe it. “I’m like their queer buddy.”

Since that incident, Drake has spent nearly every weekend with Jason and his girlfriend, and has developed a whole new sense of identity. “They’re the first straight friends that I’ve ever been out to,” he says. “Being with them and being honest with myself has really helped me come to terms with who I am and accept the fact that maybe I am capable of being in love and maybe I’m just adult enough to make it work. It’s a goal. I never had a goal before that involved my love life.”

In April, these friends inspired him to pursue a dormant long-distance romance that had sizzled briefly after a trip to the West Coast last Fourth of July. He has made several trips back this spring, fallen head over heels and lined up his next duty station for the man’s hometown. “It’s the first time it’s ever happened to me,” he says. “And it’s really funny too, because it’s all I think about. It’s pathetic.”

Just before Memorial Day, Drake casually mentions in a final round of follow-up interviews that he has gradually let go of the general’s-star dream. “I would love to make general, but I will never be married and there have only been two nonmarried modern generals,” he says. “I don’t think general is a possibility, but I do think I’ll be a colonel.” He says it so nonchalantly, it’s hard to believe he’s the same blustery guy on the verge of belting me for suggesting the danger over lunch at Brett’s last February.

He lets out a good belly laugh at being reminded of how heated our discussion grew. “I think being acknowledged and accepted has given me pause,” he says. It “has kind of mellowed me out a little bit, to become more accepting of myself and less of a ‘Fuck them all, I’ve got to prove something.’ I will have proved something to myself every time I get promoted and every time I get to a point where I didn’t think I was going to be.”

He has even begun to let go of the idea of “the profession of arms,” though he says that’s strictly based on a profound attraction to a new specialty he began experimenting with last year, not because of his private life. “I could be sort of leaning toward this specialty, but my heart is still in the combat arms,” he says. He says he has “a lot of soul-searching to do” before his own Career Field Designation form is issued.

Suddenly, the man dead certain of every significant goal appears lightheartedly open to serendipity. “I remember when we first started talking, [I was saying,] ‘Hell no! I may be at a crossroads, but by God, my turn indicator is on and I know where I’m going!’ Now I’ve sort of got my hazards on. I could go either way. I have no idea,” Drake says. And he seems absolutely content with the unknown. “Who knows, they may somehow change the gay thing and I’ll be the Army’s first gay general,” he laughs. “I have time on my side right now.”

But in all his reassessments, one position remains absolute. He dismisses Jason’s advice to leave the Army out of hand. “I can’t imagine another way of life,” he says. “It gives me a total sense of purpose. It is why I am.”

Brett can easily imagine civilian life. The military’s esprit de corps is important, but it’s hardly his priority. It’s the profession, not the organization, he’s dying to hold onto. And it’s still possible — all he has to do is marry a mail-order bride, steal away for anonymous sex when she can’t satisfy him and kiss off all the friends who understand his predicament.

The choice is clear: He can let go of any chance at a soul mate, a life partner, or else let go of his lifelong dream. And he doesn’t have Drake’s luxury of another year or two of soul-searching. May 31 was the form-completion deadline, and in the end he made his decision a few weeks early.

“What happened was, I was sitting around one lazy Saturday afternoon, and the stupid CD-ROM was sitting on my desk staring at me,” he said. “I’m like, ‘Fuck, I’ve got to do this! I might as well knock it out.’” He popped in the CD, logged onto the secure Web site and froze up at the keyboard. “I sat there, stared at it for a while, and then I finally started filling it out,” he says. “When it came to actually sending it off — to this is my final answer — at that point, I was like, ‘God, I hope I am doing the right thing. And I hope I’m going to be happy with the decision that I’ve made.’ And that was it.”

He didn’t call his dad or his mentor, Col. Hagen; he didn’t tell Drake or Alex or anyone else. He went to the gym and pumped up his arms. “Just normal business,” he says. Monday morning, he walked into the office and told his commander. That was the first time he actually said it out loud. “Anytime you’re thinking about something, but you don’t finally put it on paper, or something where it can be read by everybody and understood by everybody, that’s when it really hits you,” Brett says. “It’s sort of like coming out, when you vocalize it, and you say, ‘I am gay.’ It’s like that big final step.”

We went clubbing in Denver the next Friday night, started with a leisurely chat over dinner, and he was his usual bubbly self. He didn’t mention it until the next afternoon, when I happened to ask him about it over coffee. How did he finally make the decision? I asked.

The sham-marriage possibility was the first to go. “I sort of eliminated that option because it boils down to being honest,” he says. “I don’t think I could do that. It would be different if I did it before I knew [I was gay], and then you discover it, but it’s a totally different story, knowing.” And after months of agony, the final debate took only seconds. “My realistic side totally took over,” he says. “I came to this very clear realization, like, Who am I kidding? I cannot pursue that [combat] side. It is not realistic.”

Brett will never be MacArthur, but at least he can remain in the Army for the time being. “My profession is changing,” he says. “The ‘want’ part of me was really gunning for [combat].” Instead, he sees himself transitioning from soldier to bureaucrat. “That’s a big change.” He called Col. Hagen a few days later to tell him about his decision and tried to convince his mentor that he was just playing it safe. “Is it worth it to risk the next 10 years trying to pursue [the combat] goal and have nothing to show for it?” he asked. “I have good opportunities to still have a successful career on the support side.” That analysis did play a role in his decision, but it certainly wasn’t the decisive factor.

Col. Hagen just couldn’t make it all add up. “He goes, ‘Well, that makes sense,’” Brett says. “‘But I just don’t understand why you would want to do that. If you’re going to make the Army your career, wouldn’t you want to give yourself the best opportunities of being a general?’ And I go, ‘Yeah,’ and I’m thinking, ‘I’ll never be married. I’m not going to get married just for the sake of my career.’ You need to. You’ve got to have a spouse.”

I ask him the painful question. “So you gave up your profession as a soldier to be gay?”

His head drops. “I guess. I guess you could look at it that way.” He trails off, then perks up with a laugh. “But I’m still a soldier, because I’m still defending my country, I’m still in a uniform.”

He laughs some more, then grows more reflective. “I still think it’s honorable. But [it was] not my original intent. It was my original intent to be a soldier, to stay a soldier, but, hey, something changed in my life.” And he notes that this can happen to people who aren’t gay, too. “It may be that, hey, you have a family, and you’re more devoted to your family so you want to get out of that [combat] role, or you’re going to get out of the military, period.

“Lots of things. People go through changes in their lives. As they mature, value systems change. At one point your military career was everything, but now you realize it’s your family. And for me, now, it’s like, yeah, at one point, the military was everything, but now I’m a little concerned about my life and my personal well-being and my personal happiness. And that’s more important to me than being a general. And that’s the bottom line.”

The Denver Post recently dubbed it the “Vatican of Evangelical Christianity.” After Colorado’s infamous anti-gay Amendment 2 campaign was mobilized from here in 1992, gay activists labeled the area Ground Zero.

Thursday Night Club kicked off in a small restaurant in February, moved up to Zio’s in March, and the visible location immediately troubled the soldiers in the group. It’s a pretty butch crowd for a gay dinner party, but the civilians occasionally break into high-queen eruptions, provoking minor shudders in the rigid major seated next to me. Weeks later he will confide it took several shots of whiskey to draw him out into public that first time. But his appearance didn’t provoke a court martial or an investigation, and he’s been a regular ever since.

New men just kept coming out on Thursday nights, and by late March it was growing impossible to escape the curious looks. After weeks of good-natured gawking, an earnest old lady finally leaned over from the next table and asked what brought all these men together.

“Such variety!” she cooed — black, white, military, civilian and, most strikingly, ages ranging from early 20s to late 50s. One of the soldiers described them as “an eclectic mix of old queens to young military guys.”

“I’m so curious what drew you all together,” the old woman continued. “What one thing could you possibly all have in common?”

They chuckled about it briefly, then someone yelled “Promise Keepers!” referring to the conservative Christian men’s group headquartered 70 miles north, near Denver. The table exploded in laughter, but they never did give her a legitimate answer. Nobody pressed them any further, not that night anyway.

The next week they moved to Amanda’s Fonda, an offbeat Mexican restaurant favored by students, grungers and bohemians.

Army captain Brett worries about getting caught, but lately he’s more focused on the price of hiding. “I kind of regret that I missed my youth in the gay world,” he says. All those boyfriends he never had — they slipped right by while he was consumed holding up the straight front.

He doesn’t have to put up much of an act. Tonight the strapping 6-foot Filipino towers over the table, reaches out to greet late arrivals with arms like Sylvester Stallone. His deep, hearty laugh booms over the conversation. The soldiers are easy to pick out even without the buzz cut; their military bearing gives them away, the swagger as they approach the table.

Brett always pictured himself married by now. The Army encourages its officers to settle down early, and he never expected to get out of his 20s single. Most of the captains at Fort Carson are busy raising families, some are already onto their second marriage. Brett just turned 36, and he’s never even been in love.

He looks around the table at his two best friends in Colorado, staff officers like himself, just a few years behind him. Drake is a big, brash Army captain, with a quick wit and a sharp tongue. Captain Alex is a quiet Marine, thoughtful and analytical, clearly the intellectual of the group. He carries himself like a Marine, agile and fit, but not tall or beefy like the other two. Yet for all their differences, Brett is single, Drake is single, Alex is single — between the three of them, they can count exactly one serious boyfriend in their lives.

But then they haven’t really been at it that much of their lives. Like most of the gay officers they know, they didn’t come out to themselves until their late 20s, heavily invested in their military careers before they grasped their need to violate the Uniform Code of Military Justice.

Long before they dreamed of dating men, they dreamed of leading them into battle. The profession of arms. Over and over the phrase was drilled into their hearts at the academies, at Officer Candidate School and ROTC. They repeated it back with the reverence of a Trappist monk uttering his vow of silence. The earliest and noblest vocation, the same sacred calling that drew Alexander, Charlemagne and Caesar. Pope John Paul II traces his line back 2,000 years to St. Peter; Brett, Drake and Alex were taught to gaze back several thousand further, past the Hyksos, past Hammurabi.

It’s difficult for civilians to grasp the gravity of a discharge to the true believer — for any infraction, not just being gay. “It’s an identity,” Alex says. His attraction to men, that’s just one characteristic among hundreds. “Being a Marine is a fucking lifestyle!”

Most of his life, the Profession meant everything to Brett. It’s still the most important thing, but he wonders how wise it was to make it the only thing.

Now he wants a boyfriend. Eventually he’d like a husband, though all three captains are squeamish with the term, with the concept of gay marriage. They each want a “life partner.” But Brett faced a bitter choice as he prepared to advance to major this spring. The pivotal career decision would pit his dream of a soul mate directly against the profession of arms.

It was never supposed to be a conflict. They were supposed to get married, the earlier the better. “The Army still has the concept of the command team,” Drake says, and acquiring a first lady was more or less a job requirement — advisable by captain, essential by lieutenant colonel.

“Don’t ask, don’t tell” made the news regularly during the four months I spent with the captains; but it was obvious almost immediately that they had little trouble maintaining the letter of the policy. Nobody was asking, and they certainly weren’t telling. And as officers, they were largely immune to harassment.

The dirty little secret of the policy is that it never offered more than half a solution to the challenge of integrating gay men and women into the military. It attempts to accommodate enlisted gays — but ignores the central problem faced by officers.

Before the change in 1993, the chief complaints in the gay enlisted ranks were discharge and harassment. In theory, the compromise was simple: You can be as gay as you please if you just keep your mouth shut; in return, we won’t beat you up or kick you out. Fair enough if you can tolerate the closet (and if they ever figure out how to make that no-harassment promise a reality).

But the officer corps faced a different problem: not so much direct discharge, and especially not harassment, but an impenetrable glass ceiling. While presumed homosexuals are frequently tolerated in the lower ranks, even moderate suspicion will stop a rising officer’s career dead in its tracks. And officers operate under an “up or out” system: For them, stagnation equals retirement. It amounts to a subtler form of delayed discharge — after more than a dozen years invested in a hopeless career — which the policy entirely ignores.

There is one well-known defense against the glass-ceiling ejection, but it requires a staggering sacrifice. While a national debate rages on over “don’t ask, don’t tell, don’t pursue,” Brett, Drake and Alex quietly face an unwritten but parallel policy widely understood within their community: Don’t ask, don’t tell, don’t fall in love.

It’s hard to grasp the intensity of the paranoia gay officers feel about exposure without actually experiencing it. Most of Brett’s buddies ran for cover the moment they discovered a journalist among them at Hide & Seek, Colorado Springs’ only gay bar.

For weeks I had failed to coax a single active gay service member to talk, despite the best efforts of intermediaries like the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network (SLDN), the major advocacy group for their cause. “It’s just too risky for them,” says executive director Michelle Benecke. So the first Friday in February, I drove down to approach them in person.

Like most small-town gay clubs, Hide & Seek tries to accommodate a diverse and sometimes antagonistic clientele. It has adopted a separation strategy, walling off bars and dance floors for cowboys and lesbians, a narrow alcove for pool players and a deserted basement for leathermen. The niche quarters surround a center mainstream room, dominated by a small, tacky stage lined with footlights, and projecting a wide catwalk well into the cramped audience.

The main dance floor alongside it stands idle most of the night Fridays and Saturdays, while the same small band of local drag queens performs the same tired routines. Once or twice a month, the monotony is interrupted by a male strip troupe shuttled in from Denver. No one in town seems very happy with the arrangement, but it’s the only arrangement they’ve got.

The GIs were as easy to pick out at Hide & Seek as they would be weeks later at Thursday Night Club: same high-and-tight buzz cut, same military bearing. They were laid-back, warm and inviting, until someone asked what I did for a living.

When I said journalist, most of the pack bolted, but Brett stood his ground to interrogate, a couple of buddies on either side. Who are you working for? What do you want from us? What did Jack tell you? They weren’t even buying the journalist line; suddenly I was an interloper, smuggling out classified information.

You’re an informer, aren’t you? Who sent you? Jack, what did you tell him?!

“No, I swear, I’m gay!” I yelled. I patted myself down as though I’d find some kind of gay ID card, when suddenly I realized I sort of had one. I whipped out my membership card from a gay dance club in Denver. “Look, my Bent card! With my name on it. Here, check out my driver’s license.”

That calmed them down, but Brett remained wary until I joined them on the dance floor a few hours later.

I spent the next four months as a participant-observer inside Brett’s social circle, which includes several closeted gay officers and a healthy network of civilians — but very few women or enlisted men, and not a single straight GI. I became a regular at their barbecues and dinner parties, hung out at coffee shops, hiked into the mountains, slept on their couches and enjoyed dozens of rich, satisfying conversations.

Brett spent much of the period grappling with the pivotal decision of his career — “Of my life, really” — to flout the odds and pursue the profession of arms, or accept an administrative position within the Army, but outside the profession.

Brett was born in a wealthy Manila, Philippines, suburb, and dreamed of growing up to be another Gen. Douglas MacArthur. His father fanned his aspirations, regaling him with tales of the crusty old general vowing to return in 1942, and recovering the capital in three glorious weeks of battle three years later.

When Brett was 9, the family emigrated to Seattle, but retained much of its native culture. Brett was the oldest son, and to this day his father looks to him to establish the family name and produce an heir. He led a platoon through the Gulf War, proved himself under fire and later commanded a combat company in Italy.

The Gulf War gave him a quick taste of the life he dreamed of. His platoon was whisked to the Middle East on a clandestine mission: No time for training, no briefings on how to react to a Scud missile attack. They rode all night in a darkened plane, stepped out onto the tarmac unsure what continent they were deploying into. The Scud-warning alarms blasted and they scattered on the airfield. “I just remember all these people running for cover and I was thinking, where are you running? There’s no cover, there’s nothing to protect you here,” Brett said. “We were on a tarmac on an airfield — if they hit us, we’re goners. I was trying to keep them from panicking, and keep the unit together.” He held the unit together through several attacks over the next few months, donning gas masks and protective suits for anticipated chemical warheads.

But early this March, the Army sent him a CD-ROM offering another path entirely. The “Career Field Designation” form arrives once a career, just before promotion to major. After a decade of specialization, officers are given a one-time chance to select a new branch, a true fork in the road. Combat officers like Brett must finally choose between continuing in combat, or taking an operational support role that’s really quite different from “the profession of arms.”

A common civilian misconception is that most of the Army mobilizes for the battlefield in the event of war. In reality, only a fraction of the force will ever engage in combat, principally soldiers in the infantry, armor and artillery branches. The vast majority of the service focuses on feeding, supplying, transporting and otherwise supporting the combat troops. Warfare requires a parallel society, complete with lawyers, accountants, cooks and mechanics. Those branches make up the bulk of the Army, but carry little of the prestige. Most of the generals and nearly all the powerful commanders are drawn from the three “combat arms.” The problem for the professional soldier lies in the dearth of coveted combat command slots.

For an ambitious officer who dreams of leading hordes across continents, conquering evil empires, vanquishing the next Napoleon or Hitler, the Career Field Designation form is a no-brainer: He’s going to continue on his path, aiming toward battlefield general. If he wasn’t gay, Brett said, his form would have been completed in seconds.

Instead it tore him apart for months, beginning even before he received it. “Because I’m thinking about everything here,” he said. “I’m thinking about who I am, what I want to be, what I want to do, how is this going to affect my career? Everything [is] kind of converging. Ugh. This is awful!”

Col. Hagen, the Brigade Commander at Brett’s previous assignment in Italy, and a mentor ever since, was baffled at his hesitation. “My mentor was saying, ‘Why would you want to pursue operational support?’” he says. “‘You’re limiting yourself. You’ve got the capability to be a commander, why would you even consider going support?’ And I’m thinking, ‘Because I’m gay! They’ll never allow me to be a general.’”

He received the designation form in March and put it away until May.

The bachelor whispers are the first problem to surface. No matter how straight Brett walks and talks, his happily married peers can’t help noticing the infrequency of a woman on his arm.

They kid him about it frequently. “The other day CNN was broadcasting Pride,” he says, referring to the gay Millennium March on Washington in April. “And some of the guys were like, ‘Hey Brett, man, Pride!’” “Yeah, I was there!” he says he shot back.

He’ll typically disarm them with cracks like, “You know me: I like boys,” or “I’ve been trying to get you to go out with me, Hank.”

It’s the only way to deal with it, agrees Alex, the bookish Marine captain. “Someone will make a joke about being gay or some kind of deviant behavior, and I’m like: ‘Hey, that doesn’t count! Everybody does that in college.’”

The banter actually reduces the danger, they say. If they were ever confronted publicly, they would be well-practiced in defusing the issue; and a persistent accuser who refused to play along would find himself out of step with convention.

So far, none of the captains has had to face a direct accusation, but they’re sobered by the possibility. Drake is characteristically brash and animated: “No one would ever approach it like, ‘Hey, are you fucking this guy?’” he says.

It’s hard to picture anyone confronting the big, blustery Army captain so boldly. But he softens as he describes his deceptions, contemplates what might really be running through their heads. He scrounges up a date whenever he can for official functions, shows up stag perhaps 50 percent of the time. It’s a better showing than his buddies Brett and Alex, but is it good enough to keep the straight guys fooled? “Certainly the lesser of two evils is to have your peers know about it and no one say anything, than to have them confront me with it and force my hand,’” he says.

Brett and Alex echo the same deep sense of foreboding. Alex is reflective, as always, but he seems strangely unprepared for the eventual encounter. “I don’t know how I’d handle it if someone ever did ask me,” he says. “I’d want to plead the Fifth, but I wouldn’t know how to delicately do it.” Considering their elaborate subterfuges — which Alex refers to as his “counter-surveillance techniques” — it’s surprising to hear they wouldn’t simply deny it. They seem to despise the deception almost as much as they fear the exposure — and they hope to draw the line at outright denial.

“That’s the worst part of it, the sneaking and hiding,” Drake says. “I chose this life because of the honor, the integrity and the ethics of people I’d be working with. Yes, we really do believe this shit. It’s not just something you make up for recruiting. It’s really a matter of life or death for us. The unfortunate reality was I didn’t realize what was going on with me sexually at the time.”

But Drake and Alex shock me with their own ambivalence about the right of gay men and women to serve openly in the military. “Until you see man-to-man couples walking down the street hand in hand in Colorado Springs, it’s not going to happen in the Army,” Drake says. “I don’t think you can separate the moral from the gross.”

While Brett finds “don’t ask, don’t tell” ridiculous, Alex comes down somewhere in the middle — toward Drake’s side of the middle. “I wish we could get everybody not to be homophobic, but that’s not the reality,” he says. “It’s better left undisclosed.”

But he’s frustrated by some of the policy’s implementation — particularly the arbitrariness of activities deemed to be “telling” — and disgusted by continuing investigations. “The witch hunts are ridiculous,” he says.

Yet they all agree that lying and deception about their sexuality are profoundly disturbing because the essence of their role as officers is to lead by example. “My conflict is, it’s hard to be who I am,” Brett says. “As a leader, as a commander, you have to enforce the rules. Any rule” — including the underlying rules in the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ) outlawing just about every form of gay sex. Brett realizes he’s breaking the law each time he slides into bed with a man, regardless of Congress’ 1993 law exempting him from prosecution for his crimes so long as he keeps his mouth shut.

The same UCMJ provision includes seldom-enforced language banning oral sex between a husband and wife, a double standard that frustrates Brett terribly but does nothing to diminish his own ethical dilemma.

“It’s hard to be standing in front of people and acting like I am not [gay], and at the same time, having to enforce the rule” he says. “You have to set the standards, and that’s a big conflict for me … If you can’t stand in front of your people, and act as that person, then you’re a fricking hypocrite.”

Drake actually faced the hypocrisy of enforcing that rule as a company commander in North Carolina. He discovered a gay porn magazine in a soldier’s locker during a barracks inspection. In reality, possession of the magazine isn’t even grounds for an investigation, but Drake thought it might be, and immediately consulted his first sergeant. That’s when he learned that the soldier had just discussed his sexuality with the first sergeant, believing he had been outed by a peer. The fear proved false, but his statement put him in clear violation of the policy.

“I wanted to ignore it,” Drake says. “I was conflicted on two points: One, I wanted to follow the rules, and two, I wanted to do what was best for my unit. He’s a hell of a good soldier, and his soldiers would kill for him.”

He finally decided to ignore the incident, with his first sergeant’s blessing, and the soldier is still in the force. He says his own status and his sympathies for the soldier’s plight were never even a consideration. “I totally divorce myself from it as soon as I put my uniform on,” he says. “I know that’s hard for people to understand.”

But did it jar him with a sobering reminder of his own shaky position?

“As a gay man, it doesn’t bother me, because I understand that every decision I make has certain repercussions,” he says. “I’m comfortable being a gay service member, knowing I’m protected by the policy. It protects me from anyone walking up and asking if I’m gay. If anything, it gave me greater respect for the policy. The onus relies squarely on the commander. I chose what was best for my unit.” He does, however, regret that the Uniform Code of Military Justice still makes sodomy a crime.

He also regrets that homosexuality provokes a corollary problem: No officer’s wife to advance his career. Straight female officers also complain about the first lady requirement, but the role can be played by a willing officer’s husband — it just has to be played by someone.

“Officers are expected to participate in unit-sponsored social events, to which they are expected to bring dates and wives and husbands,” says SLDN’s Benecke. “And participation in that social milieu can be as important to promotion as an officer’s competence.”

The first lady tends to perform practical functions, like hosting social events and supervising the family support group, which can play a major role in unit morale. But her key role is played behind the scenes, working the highly influential spouses’ grapevine.

“They socialize, politicize — some of them are very political in trying to help the husband’s career,” Brett says. The conventional wisdom holds that an officer can coast to major on performance alone, but by colonel it’s highly political.

Even if the spouse is a poor first lady, it’s crucial to present the picture of a “Command Team,” he says. “It’s an image they’re trying to portray. They expect battalion commanders to be married.”

“It’s not denying, that’s not what it requires at all,” Benecke says. “Basically, this policy requires people to establish affirmatively a heterosexual image. And if they do not put forward that image, they will come under suspicion, and will find themselves running into a glass ceiling.” Bottom line, it’s get a wife or give up general, Brett concludes. Probably give up even colonel. “You need to,” he says. “You’ve got to have a spouse, a Command Team.”

Brett has temporally defused the marriage problem by playing the cultural card. He wants to please his father by accepting an arranged Filipino marriage, but he’s never quite had the stomach to go through with it. Every year or two, Dad flies in a candidate from Manila to grace his arm for a formal military ball, and for years Brett made a legitimate effort to court them. Several years ago he struck up an engagement. He had every intention of marrying her, but pulled out at the last minute. His sincere struggle — played out semi-publicly — has provided the perfect alibi for bachelorhood. And nothing straightens up a gay risumi quite like an engagement — Brett figures it alone bought him at least a couple years.

But he’s had quite a few years already.

Drake and Alex have no comparable alibis. But Alex may have the best out of all: He might still happily marry a woman one day. “I go back and forth,” he says. “Sometimes I think I’ll end up with a guy. Eventually I will make a choice.” He never acted on his gay urges until 1997, and it’s been mostly men since then, but he still feels attracted to women. He scoffs at the notion he’s just going through a bisexual phase, but some of his friends believe it’s only a matter of time until he settles down with men for good.

Bookish Alex feels an extra sense of isolation, stationed at Peterson Air Force Base, hundreds of miles from the nearest Marine base. He’s also quiet and reserved among strangers. He barely spoke at Brett’s barbecue where we first met, but days later he invited me into his home for an interview. The Dallas Wind Symphony swept through his tastefully understated apartment, wafting serenely through Gustav Holst’s “Moorside Suite.”

The next week he hosted a dinner party of a dozen close friends — all gay, a mix of military men and civilians — at his apartment just outside the base, and Brett invited me along. The discussion crackled with dissension on gay issues, especially marriage, gay culture and the separatism within “the community.”

Drake and Alex are frankly hostile toward liberal gay activists, and take a dim view of the isolationism of gay ghettoes. Brett isn’t exactly waving a rainbow flag, but tends to sympathize with those leading the gay-rights charge. Alex and Drake have only been out to themselves a few years, and some of the guests believe they’re still in a transitional phase, a view they clearly resent. Their frustration peaks at what they see as the homogeneity of accepted “gay culture,” which Alex calls “part of the Wal-Martization of America.”

While they enjoy the company of gay friends a great deal, Drake and Alex feel little affinity for the swishier elements of urban gay culture — particularly in contrast to the aggressive masculinity of the military life they enthusiastically embrace. Their discomfort is probably exaggerated by their sense that they’re one false move away from hurtling straight from military culture to the exclusive company of gays.

They look around the living room at the most frustrating symptom of their quandary: They’re discussing it exclusively with other gay men, a requirement imposed by the culture they embrace, which constantly threatens to eject them.

As the group sits around the fireplace debating gay life and gay politics — and it’s a diverse group despite being all-gay — it’s clear that while many of the debaters have significantly greater gay experience, Alex proves better read than anyone on one gay issue after another. He quotes liberally and effectively from an eclectic collection that spills out of bookcases stacked from living room to bedroom. Kerouac and Camus look down on Bill Buckley and Bill Bennett; Kierkegaard and Nietzsche nestle snugly around Dennis Miller.

But he has to scramble to the rear of the apartment to retrieve a passage from Michelangelo Signorile’s “Life Outside.” The gay collection is hidden away in a storage closet, piled in among combat gear, field guides and a stack of manuals on Marine Corps doctrine.

Drake only faced his sexuality two years ago, but he bears no illusions about turning back. He has no hope of an arranged marriage or falling in love with a woman. He’s contemptuous of gays who have resorted to the sham-marriage option. “I could never stand in front of God and everybody and take that oath,” he sneers.

That’s unfortunate, because of the three captains, he’s the one dead set on making general. He struts like a field marshal already: big, bright, and aggressive, with a trenchant wit he’s not shy about wielding. He’s completed two stellar combat commands, intuitively grasps the politics and plays it with the best of them. Nobody doubts his ability to earn the general’s star — except perhaps the gay officers who share his secret.

Drake meets Brett for lunch frequently, and happens to call one morning while I’m visiting, around the end of February. We’ve hit it off socially at Brett’s barbecue and Alex’s dinner party, so he agrees to a lunch interview, with Brett sitting in. Drake suggests a restaurant downtown, Brett rolls his eyes. Drake is extremely intelligent, but mildly reckless in Brett’s view: The interview will be conducted in private, he insists.

Brett and I run out to the Safeway on the corner for lunch meat and fruit. Most of the Carson GIs take advantage of the lower prices at the commissary and the PX, but Brett lives downtown, miles from post, and he’s eager to avoid off-duty contact anyway. One less chance for casual encounters with his peers, who might strike up a conversation, get to know him outside of work, suggest he join them for a couple of beers or a game of pool.

Drake elaborates on his opposition to open gay service while Brett fixes the sandwiches. “It’s too indoctrinated in our Judeo-Christian tradition,” he says. “People will always think they’re better than you.”

The reality, he says, is that most of the troops would be comfortable with most of their gay peers if they knew who they were. The military generally attracts “butch guys” regardless of their sexuality, he says. Yet he’s pessimistic about overcoming the ingrained images of gays in the service. “The stereotype is nothing but group showers and boots in the air,” he says.

He describes his future so passionately, so vividly, that it’s hard to believe he doesn’t see the contradiction. One moment he’s describing his rapid ascent toward general, minutes later a completely opposing picture of “wedded” bliss.

He acknowledges he’ll have to sacrifice much of his gay life to continue advancing up the chain of command. “I’ve chosen to put my personal life aside,” he says. “I’ve purposely sort of squelched my private life because of a sense of higher purpose.”

Yet soon, he’s bristling at the thought of sacrificing the life partner he’s still intent on finding. “I don’t want to die an old, sad fag without a mate,” he insists. “The kind you always see in the coffee shop knitting and talking to himself. I don’t want to be that guy.”

Brett calls us to the table for lunch. He’s whipped up a savory pasta salad to accompany his stuffed baguettes, carved the pineapple into steeple-shaped strips easily separated from the rind into bite-sized triangles, and laid it out sumptuously on a banana-peel platter. “Brett, this is spectacular!” Drake says. “I thought you were just making sandwiches.” Sooner or later, a gay gene had to turn up somewhere in the group; Martha Stewart, I wouldn’t have expected.

Brett ladles out generous portions of chunky clam chowder, and I force the issue of Drake’s contradiction. Drake seems to suggest he will attain his two goals sequentially, but the math is incompatible. When do you picture yourself hooked up with a lifetime partner? By 40, for sure. If it hasn’t happened by 40, chances are it never will, he says. And what’s the age generals pin on that first star? Late 40s. So, if you sacrifice until general, you’ve sacrificed for forever?

He’s not happy. He looks about ready to vomit, or possibly slug me. But Drake’s a sharp guy: He knew the visions were irreconcilable, and acknowledges it with only a minor hesitation. He may be forced to abandon his profession somewhere down the road, he says, but suddenly offers a very different reason.

“I would give up my career rather than bring shame upon the organization that’s been so good to me,” he says.

Shame? He seems a bit surprised by his own statement. “Shame in the sense that the media frenzy would be embarrassing,” he says.

We talk for several hours, but it only takes a moment before he’s speaking candidly about the obstacles ahead. “I think captains can get away with having a roommate, but majors can’t,” he says. “If you have a roommate anywhere in your 30s, you’re [gay]. I have to admit I always suspect that.”

The truth is, Drake’s just playing it by ear, hoping for some kind of miracle. He’s nearly 15 years from general; the world could change dramatically in that time. Maybe. “I don’t anticipate doing anything about it for a while,” he says.

Brett listens attentively through most of the interview, interjecting a thought only occasionally. He contemplates his own options aloud after Drake returns to work. Brett’s got a much easier out. He really does want to please his father — he might have married a stranger regardless of his sexuality.

That fiancie several years ago — did he love her?

“It was somebody I thought I could fall in love with,” he says. “She probably felt the same way. I didn’t think that was totally unrealistic. To marry somebody who your …” He breaks off. It’s clear from earlier conversations that he was about to invoke his father’s wishes, but he shies away from acknowledging it in certain moods. “… who comes from a good family,” he continues. “A good education, all that stuff. I could grow to love her. That’s sort of my cultural upbringing.”

And she was also his last chance of straightening out, he admits. He had only recently begun experimenting with men, terrified he might not be able to stop. She might have put an end to it, and in the end that’s why he called it off. The gravity of the wedding vows forced him to face the truth, and then there was no going back to women. If he married now, it would be a complete sham: to please his father, to produce an heir and to save his career.

The appeal is tantalizing, he admits, but the gravity of the deception appalling. He had thought he sabotaged the marriage option two years ago, by coming out to his father. But he could only bring himself to acknowledge “gay-leaning,” and the partial disclosure just provided Dad additional incentive to step up the pressure.

By the time the Career Field Designation form arrives in March, Brett is split 50-50 on giving in to a mail-order bride.

Wednesday: Brett makes his decision.

The bulk of the report is built around a detailed timeline beginning at 11:10 a.m., nine minutes before the first shot was fired. The introduction states: “This report explains how the crime was planned and committed.” However, the planning is largely relegated to portions of a seven-page section titled “Glimpses of Klebold and Harris.” Some related material appears in “Trench Coat Mafia and Associates,” another six pages out of the several hundred in the report.

“The crime started over a year before April 20th, and yet the official report basically pretends that that had no basis on anything, and has no reason to be included in there,” Rohrbough said. “That, in itself, shows the police department clearly withholding information from the public.”

Fifteen families filed lawsuits against the sheriff last month, and many of
them charge that the massacre could have been prevented. The suits contend
that Randy and Judy Brown repeatedly warned authorities about Eric Harris’s
Web site, and death threats against their son, Brooks.
The report devotes just three paragraphs to the controversial events.

“On March 18, 1998, the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office took a ‘suspicious incident’ report from Randy Brown, stating that his son, Brooks, had received death threats from Harris. These threats were reported to have been contained in Harris’ Web pages. On his Web pages, Harris also allegedly wrote about making and detonating pipe bombs and using them against people. Brown requested that he and his family remain anonymous in making the report for fear of retribution, particularly to his son.

“The information was reviewed by sheriff’s investigators; however, Harris’ Web site could not be accessed nor could reports of pipe bomb detonations be substantiated. Because of Brown’s request to remain anonymous, Klebold and Harris were not contacted. Further investigation was initiated but no additional information was developed.

“Because of the routine nature of the report and investigation, the former Jefferson County sheriff, Ronald Beckham, was not informed of the report at the time. The district attorney, subsequent to April 20, was provided with information from Harris’ Web pages. After reviewing the report, the DA offered the opinion that, based upon the information in the report to law enforcement, there would have been insufficient basis to legally support a request to obtain search or arrest warrants.”

No explanation is given as to why the site could not be accessed. The lawsuits contend that the Browns provided printouts of the site and followed up with authorities several times. One of the suits also contends that a search warrant was actually issued at one point, and a friend of Wayne Harris within the department squelched it.

Rohrbough says the treatment of this issue in the report is scandalous. “How could this be accurate when they never even interviewed the Browns?” The Browns made the same charge Monday afternoon, again calling on investigators to interview them to get the rest of the story they say they are eager to provide.

Rohrbough was similarly disgusted by the dearth of quotes used to outline the mind-set of Harris and Klebold. He said the limited number of quotes presented a narrow and often misleading portrait of the killers, tailored specifically to support the police’s position. In particular, he cites the one of the few passages included from Harris’ diary, written in 1998: “It’s my fault! Not my parents, not my brothers, not my friends, not my favorite bands, not computer games, not the media, it’s mine.”

That quote gives a very misleading picture of Harris, said Rohrbough. “If you’re really trying to understand what’s going through the mind, then you see the videos and they’re making it pretty obvious they hate their brother, they hate their parents — ‘You should have never put us in daycare!’ So what [sheriff's officials] have done is put in the stuff they felt worked best. Of course you can’t blame the police. If you can’t blame the parents [for not seeing the danger], you can’t blame the police.”

Most of the contents of both killers’ diaries and the rest of the information on them should be released, he said. “There’s probably things that shouldn’t be released, but the judge seems to be showing pretty good thoughtfulness to that.”

He predicted that most or all of the material would eventually surface anyway, and releasing it all at once was greatly preferable to watching it dribble out as it has over the past year. “By withholding information that they had from the families, they caused a tremendous amount of additional suffering,” he said. “They are going to continue to leak information as they have.”

He also scoffed at the report’s contention that his son was killed by either Harris or Klebold rather than a law enforcement officer, as claimed in his lawsuit. “Even though the sheriff’s department says what I’m saying can’t be true, and they can prove it wrong, the reality is, if they could have, they would have done it on the front page of the newspaper.”

The central focus of the package is a
minute-by-minute timeline describing the
events of April 20, 1999, in great
detail. It dramatically collapses the
amount of time the massacre took to
unfold, claiming gunmen Eric Harris and
Dylan Klebold only spent seven and a
half minutes in the library, killing 10
and wounding 12. “They carried more than
enough ammunition to kill all 56 people
in the library,” it says, adding that
the 34 victims were killed or injured in
the first 16 minutes of the attack.
After the killing rampage, there were 33
minutes in which nobody was shot until
the gunmen killed themselves.

The report provides the most
comprehensive profiles yet of the
killers, offering newly disclosed
passages from a variety of sources,
including
school essays, journals kept by both
killers and interviews with the killers’
parents. While some information was
known about Harris because of his
Web site, and href="/news/feature/1999/09/23/journal/"
>passages from his journal published
by Salon, one of the biggest surprises
in the report is writings from
Klebold. Klebold’s newly revealed
journal depicts him as depressed,
outcast, paranoid and suicidal. “I swear
– like I’m an outcast, and everyone is
conspiring
against me,” he wrote in 1997. He
mentions suicide repeatedly and in
November 1997 describes getting a gun
and going on a killing spree.

His tone changed only briefly in
1997, during a period where he describes
his “first love.” “It appeared that this
was an unrequited love,” the report
says. “Throughout his journal, Klebold
named several girls he ‘loves’ but he
did not indicate that he ever actually
spoke to any of them. He even went so
far as to write letters to one girl but
it appears he never sent them
because they remained in his journal.”

Harris’ journal doesn’t begin until the
spring of 1998. The report
describes it as expressing Harris’
hatred of mankind and love of his own
anger, though it omits the journal’s
opening line, which sets its tone: “I
hate the
fucking world.”

“There were also many common themes
throughout their writings. Harris and
Klebold both wrote of not fitting in,
not being accepted and their lack of
self-esteem. They reflected on natural
selection, self-awareness and their
feelings of superiority. They plotted
against all those persons who they
found offensive — jocks, girls that
said no, other outcasts or anybody they
thought did not accept them. Most of
those teens were unaware that they had
ever offended Harris or Klebold.”

Klebold’s journal provides evidence
confirming what investigators have been
saying for months: that Harris and
Klebold were both involved in the
planning of the attack. Shortly after
the shooting, media reports focused on
Harris as the mastermind, casting
Klebold as a somewhat reluctant
follower. The report also states that a
“hit list,” generally attributed to
Harris, was created by both killers, and
puts the final
figure of people whom they listed as
disliking for various reasons at 67. It
does not reveal the names, though in
September, lead investigator Kate Battan told
Salon News that the list included some
unusual names, including Tiger Woods.

Investigators had repeatedly said that
no one on the lists was killed or
injured, but the parents of Rachel Scott
strongly protested in December
that comments on the videotapes clearly
identified their daughter. The
report concedes that one person on the
list was “injured,” but that the person was a
male. “There is no evidence that he was
specifically
targeted,” the report says.

Investigators could not pinpoint exactly
when Harris and Klebold began
conspiring to commit the massacre, but
the earliest evidence of mutual
understanding occurred a year before the
attack.

In April 1998, Klebold made four entries
in Harris’ yearbook. One referred
to “the holy April morning of NBK
[Natural Born Killers].” Another
includes
the lines “killing enemies, blowing up
stuff, killing cops!! My wrath for
January’s incident will be godlike. Not
to mention our revenge in the
commons.” The reports says investigators
believe the January incident
referred to their arrest for breaking
into a vehicle on Jan. 30, 1998.
The main bombs were set to go off in the
commons. The report says that those
bombs could have killed all 488 people
in the cafeteria. It also concludes that
the casualties were a fraction of the
number
intended chiefly because Harris and
Klebold were poor bomb makers.

Harris made similar entries in Klebold’s
1998 yearbook: “God I can’t wait
till they die. I can taste the blood now
- NBK” [Natural Born Killer] …
You know what I hate? … MANKIND!!!!
… kill everything … kill everything.”
He also drew a gunman standing amid a
sea of dead bodies with a caption:
“The only reason your [sic] still alive
is because someone has decided to
let you live.”

Investigators also retrieved eight pages
Klebold apparently wrote and drew
just a day before the attack, discovered
in his notebook along with his
math homework. “About 26.5 hours from
now the judgment will begin,” one
passage began. “Difficult but not
impossible, necessary, nervewracking and
fun.
What fun is life without a little death?
It’s interesting, when i’m in
my human form, knowing i’m going to die.
Everything has a touch of
triviality to it.”

The report also seems to downplay the
significance of the Trench Coat Mafia,
another focal point of many of the
stories just after the shooting. It
states: “Although the investigation
identified Harris and Klebold as being
‘members’ of the TCM, it appears that
the Trench Coat Mafia was a loose,
social affiliation of former and current
Columbine High School students with no
formal organizational structure,
leadership or purpose such as that
typically found in traditional juvenile
street gangs. Contrary to reports
following the Columbine shootings, there
is no evidence of affiliated Trench Coat
Mafia groups nationwide.”

Previously, investigators had minimized
the pair’s role in the group,
characterizing them as “fringe members.”
In an exclusive interview with
Salon in September, Battan repeatedly
scoffed at the notion of any significant
association: “They were outcasts in
that!” she said.

Some families were left unsatisfied and
angry after the report’s release,
accusing the sheriff’s office of
continuing to withhold crucial
information. Brian Rohrbough, whose son
Dan was killed in the attack,
characterized the report as full of lies
and contradictions in an interview on
the local CBS affiliate. “They want to
show it to be much more confusing than
it was,” he said. “And they want to
build in a lot of excuses.”

“Certainly they’re not going to tell the
truth,” said Judy Brown at an
impromptu press conference when the
report was distributed. “People are
going to be so outraged when they hear
the truth.” The Browns alerted
officials to Harris’ death threats and
Web site months before the attack,
and play a key role in several of the
families’ lawsuits. They have begun
the process for a recall of Sheriff
John Stone. Brown’s son escaped unharmed from
the school the day of the assault.

“If you’re preparing for a lawsuit, one
of the most major lawsuits in the
United States, and you have all the
information, do you think you’re going
to give everything out?” Brown’s husband,
Randy, added. “I think you’re going to
release the best version of this that’s
going to do best for your lawsuit.”

The report reiterated several statements
repeated frequently by
investigators: It ruled out a third
gunman or conspirator, said Harris and
Klebold hoped to kill hundreds and
concluded that a failed bomb outside the
school was
intended to divert police longer. “The
failure of the cafeteria bombs to
detonate and the arrival of responding
officers apparently caused the gunmen
to reevaluate their planned attack,
since they had never listed the school
library as a destination point,” it
said.

It explained the third-gunman confusion
as coming both from Harris’ removing
his trench coat quickly and the sighting
of a “shooter” on the roof who
turned out to be an air-conditioning
repairman.

Sheriff’s officials refused to comment
on the report, citing the pending
litigation brought by several families.
Copies of the report will be available
to the public, beginning Tuesday, for
$12 plus tax and shipping. They can be
ordered by phone at (720) 317-1131, fax
at (720) 449-7553 or e-mail at
Columbine@wcox.com.