September 27, 2010--Do Ask, Do Tell: A Life In the Shadows

On the same day that the Senate voted not to repeal don't-ask-don't-tell which means that homosexual soldiers have to continue not to tell if they want to continue serving their country (every Republican voted against it), on the same morning that someone sitting next to me at the diner, a military veteran who told me he is a libertarian but wouldn't want one of "them" next to him in a foxhole, a nearly full-page obituary appeared in The New York Times for Eileen Nearne, who died recently in Torquay, England at the age of 89.

She earned this final tribute because, during the Second World War, along with 38 other bilingual English women, she parachuted behind enemy lines in order to help French partisans mobilize against their Nazi occupiers.

This is only the beginning of a remarkable story about combat and heroism by an until-now largely forgotten woman.

Read the entire obit linked below and then ask if you, or John McCain or any of his craven colleagues might not like to have Miss Nearne next to them in a foxhole.

Then ask about the others who they would exclude from service, men and women who are fighting for us, including for Republicans, right now and in too many cases giving up their lives and limbs, because the same arguments made about not allowing women such as Eileen Nearne to serve in combat--that they are too soft, too subject to torture if captured, and would be sexual distractions--are still being raised now about our gay troops.

Eileen Nearne, who went by the name Didi, volunteered to be sent into occupied France and once there made her way to Paris where she clandestinely operated a radio to coordinate weapons drops to Resistance fighters and serve as a link between the French and the allies who were planning to cross the English Channel and invade France on D-Day in June 1944.

After a series or narrow escapes she was captured by the Gestapo and send to the Revensbruck concentration camp where she was repeatedly tortured in order to get her to give up the names of her associates. Though she was stripped naked, beaten, sexually assaulted, and plunged repeatedly into ice cold water until she blacked out from lack of oxygen, she did not break and continued to refuse to give away any of her comrades or reveal any secrets.

At the time she was 26.

From Ravensbruck, still uncooperative, she was shipped from death camp to death camp, finally arriving at the Markleberg camp in eastern Germany in December 1944. To survive, she worked on a road-repair gang 12 hours a day until she and two other women managed to escape. They were finally rescued by American troops who thought she was a Nazi collaborator and held her captive in a detention center until her superiors in London vouched for her.

After the war, by her own choice, she faded into anonymity. It wasn't until 1993 that she returned to Ravensbruck for a visit. She told an interviewer that hers was "a life in the shadows, but I was suited for it. I could be hard and secret. I could be lonely. I could be independent. . . I liked the work."