Community Corner
Recalling Fort Holabird and the Army Before 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell'
The author, a Fort Holabird alum, writes about arriving at the historic Dundalk base as a draftee out of college. This is the third of three short vignettes this week by the former New York Daily News and Washington Star newspaperman.
Roy Hudson was a gentle giant, a tall slender Army I met at at Fort Holabird in Dundalk 50 years ago.
It had been rumored that he had been a good athlete at a New Jersey high school before he joined the Army. But Roy never talked much about himself.
And it was only after we left Holabird, long-since re-located to the Arizona desert, that I discovered the reason for Roy’s reticence.
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We shipped out on a troopship to Germany, and took a train to Stuttgart where we were assigned to the 66th Counterintelligence Corps headquarters in what was once said to be a compound where the famed German Desert Fox, Gen. Erwin Rommel, trained.
Roy and I would have lunch. He talked about returning home, after his tour, to Asbury Park and maybe going into law school.
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One time, a bunch of us took a trip to Munich in a battered Mercedes we had bought for $150, only to have it break down before we got there. But Roy was pretty much of an enigma during that trip and most of the time.
And then on a a brisk Saturday morning when we were standing outside waiting to carry out cleanup assignments, a soldier assigned to the attic of our barracks ran out babbling, “Roy’s up there. Roy’s up there.”
He found Roy hanging from a rafter. He had kicked a couple of trunks out from under him. Since we were a secret intelligence organization the details of what happened were not revealed.
Roy was gay. “Homosexual” was the word we used them. The story was that he had gone downtown and sought to have a gay contract only to be arrested by the German police.
This was long before the “don’t ask, don’t tell” law recently repealed by Congress. If you were gay in the 1950s you were drummed out of the service, mostly likely with a dishonorable or medical discharge. Being gay was considered either a sin or a disease or both.
The Army officials figured the revelation could be especially injurious if a soldier worked in intelligence. He could be blackmailed into revealing national security secrets. But that was then.
Now, several states have passed laws allowing gay marriages. Maryland came close, and almost certainly will in the near future. That is not going to help Roy Hudson, is it?
