Dan Choi - Made to be Broken 

 

 

It's hard to believe, about a year and a half ago, I was in Iraq, an area called the Triangle of Death, or in Arabic, the Muthallath al-Mawt. Sounds a little more deathlike in Arabic. But I was in my Humvee, real dusty, real sweltering heat, and I heard the mosque and the minaret called a prayer. llahumma Salli ‘ala Muhammadin wa ‘ala aali Muhammadin wal fraju ala an adu. And my gunner tapped me on the shoulder. He said, “Lieutenant Choi, that sounds a little bit different.” “Can you translate that? What are they saying?” He said, “It did sound a little bit different.” Ala an adu, well ansar waledo muktadha mukthada, ya ala, ya Muhammad ya ali, ya Mahdi.

 

That was a Shia political rally. See, knowing some of the language of what's going on certainly helped out. And so, although, I was just an infantry officer, I had a degree in Arabic from West Point. And sometimes it certainly helped in Iraq. But we realized that our job was actually pretty simple. We went to war, we patrolled around, we found out where the terrorists were, we killed them, we did other things. It was pretty simple. 

 

We rebuilt their water infrastructure, we rebuilt their hospitals, we rebuilt their electricity. Very simple stuff. And then we did some reconciliation with the tribal leaders and we installed the democracy in a war-torn country. So, all very simple stuff, [audience laughter] and all the more simple when you don't know the language. So sometimes I did feel a little bit useful in the Muthallath al-Mawt. 

 

But I came back from Iraq and I was 27 years old and I seen people in my family and my friends for the first time in two years, some of them. And I had something missing in my heart. See, at 27 years old, I still didn't have the experience of love. I never had a girlfriend until I met in New York City a wonderful woman, named Martha. And I could not stop talking about Martha. Martha this, Martha that. I would go into work and it was like, “Lieutenant, you are so happy all the time, something's wrong with you,” but I couldn't stop talking about my girlfriend. 

 

And I had all these questions because I had never had a love relationship. And I said, what does it mean when your girlfriend gives you flowers? Red roses or white roses or chocolates? And what is this teddy bear that she gave me for my birthday? It wasn't just any teddy bear. It was an infantry. I was like, what is this? It's a bright red teddy bear with hearts all over it. How am I supposed to explain this to my soldiers? But they, I needed them to explain to me, see, because this love thing was a whole different battlefield. Something I did not have a manual for. And they all wanted to meet this Martha. They said, “You talk so much about her. We have to meet her.” And my sister said, “You keep saying she's really hot, but I want to know. I want to meet her. Is she really that hot?” And there was a big problem. See, this woman Martha, actually didn't exist. There was no woman named Martha. I didn't have a girlfriend. I had a boyfriend. His name is Matthew.

 

And under don't ask, don't tell, in the military, I wasn't allowed to talk about my love. I had to lie about my love. And it was okay, for a decade, I lived under it. I was never going to come out of the closet. I have a dad who's a Southern Baptist minister. I have a mom, she's a baby nurse at the maternity ward in the hospital, translated. She wants a lot of grandchildren, [audience laughter] and she wants a lot of Korean grandchildren. [audience laughter] So for me, I was comfortable. I was hiding, it was okay until I fell in love. And I didn't want to lie about it anymore, because finally I understood what the movies were talking about, what the poems were talking about, what the love songs and the romance, what that was all about, I finally understood it, why should I lie about that? And I started telling. 

 

I told my parents, I told my friends. I joined the Gay Men's Chorus. [audience laughter] And I would look, and in the rehearsal, I would be reading this music, and I would look up, and it just seemed like any kind of straight chorus. And I'd be like, “Oh, my God, all these 200 people are really gay. You are all gay.” [audience laughter] This was my new community. This was like my new unit, except we didn't have to lie about who we were. So, I continued to tell. 

 

And I met another group of people that I probably should have met a whole long time ago. Other veterans, combat veterans who were also gay. And I met a group of West Point Graduates just like me, who were gay. And we got together, we talked about our love stories, and we said, “Why should we lie about something that's so important to us?” We learned at West Point the very first day, the honor code, so simple. You will not lie, and you won't tolerate those who lie, but you have this don't ask, don't tell code that says, “Your boyfriend can't exist. Don't talk about it. You must lie.” 

 

Well, we looked at it and said, well, actually, when I started telling, when I even told my mom or my dad, or so say Rachel Maddow on MSNBC, [audience laughter] or Anderson Cooper, that was illegal. That was a violation. And people said, “You broke the law.” I said, “Yeah, but I stuck true to the West Point honor code.” And you know what? Before we learned at West Point that very day a decade ago, before we learned how to salute, before we learned how to stand attention, before we learned how to march in step, before we learned how to take orders, before we learned how to execute orders to the best of our ability, and sometimes when we didn't do that to the best of our ability, we got pushups. And before we even got a single pushup, we learned the honor code. It says “You will not lie.” It's that simple. 

 

And so, we continued to tell. We told on radio, we told on TV. My parents didn't have a problem with that until I talked to the Korean Christian conservative radios and they swore that the gay agenda was just getting me to be part of this. I think Pat Robertson himself might have called him up and said, “We know he's not gay, but he's just doing all this to piss you off.” Well, my dad got in and he said, “We know you're not gay. This is just a phase.” And he said, “This is a bigger shame. A bigger shame. You have no shame. This is a bigger sin. Number one sin,” I said, “Wait a minute, Dad, I sat through your sermons. I went to your church. I remember you preached the biggest sin is not to accept Jesus Christ as your lord and savior. And the greatest command was to love your neighbor as yourself. And I remembered other commandments like honor your father and your mother. And I want to honor you because you could talk about saving face and you can talk about shame and not having any honor, but I'm telling you the truth. And any relationship of love can't be based off a deception or what face do you save when you have no integrity? So, I will follow that honor code,” and I kept telling. 

 

The army eventually caught up to me and said, “You violated something” and sent me a little present in the mail and just said really simply, really coldly that “This is to inform you that because of your homosexual admission, we consider that moral and professional dereliction. Moral dereliction for telling the truth, professional dereliction for refusing to lie.” Well, the letter gave me some choices. It said, “You can resign and you'll probably get your honorable discharge. You'll get all your benefits,” and being 50% disabled from the Iraq war, I'm going to need some of those.

 

I could just leave, but I learned a lesson at West Point the very first day. If you are a soldier, and there's a fight to be fought, you stand up. And so, we started collecting up these letters. About 300,000 of them came in. And some of these letters were fiercer than the letter that I got from the Army. They said, “You need to keep Dan Choi because he speaks Arabic. He graduated from West Point. He is an infantry officer. He's ready to go back. He's our leader, people that I served with.” And it said, “Don't waste my taxpayer money getting rid of this guy. We are not homophobic. Don't insult us by saying that.”

 

And one of the messages that I got that I'll remember forever was one of the doctors that I met in Iraq. We rebuilt his hospital. And he said, “I saw you on YouTube. I think you were doing a CNN, we do watch YouTube. And he said, “Brother, if they strip you of your benefits, your country, who sent you to my country and all the sacrifices that you made, if they will not treat you, if they won't take you into a veteran's hospital because you have an other than honorable discharge, you come to my hospital any day in South Baghdad, any day, and I will treat you because I know you're gay, but you are still my brother. You are still my friend, and I want to honor your sacrifice, and it would be my duty to pay you back.” 

 

And he also said, “I saw you speaking at some of those rallies. I love this poem that you said [speaks Arabic] You are free, you are free before the noonday sun, and you are free before the moon, and you're free before the stars. And you're free when there's no sun, when there's no moon, and when there isn't a single star in the sky. But you are a slave. You are a slave to the one you love because you love him. And you are a slave to the one you love because he loves you back.” I know a little bit about protecting freedoms and what it means to be free. Even on my West Point ring, it says, “We are the protectors of the free.” I know war and now I know love. And of all the things that war can cost, and it can be really costly. I know in my heart that of all those things, love is certainly worth it. Love is worth it.