Ah, the U.S. Marine Corps, vaunted and fabled for putting boots on the ground in one war for empire after another, serving their commanders in chief with faithfulness and valor. As the song of their own exploits blusters, "From the Halls of Montezuma/To the shores of Tripoli," the Marines fight our country's battles and to keep our honor clean.

Gee, with a fight song boasting its reputation for honorable warriors, an old peacenik like myself wouldn't expect the first Marine general to lead the Joint Chiefs of Staff to start trash talking his own fighting men and women. But General Peter "Open Mouth Insert Combat Boot" Pace tore into his troops this week and the mud is still flying.

Let's review. General Pace, in comments to the Chicago Tribune on March 12, declared, "As an individual, I would not want (acceptance of gay behavior) to be our policy, just like I would not want it to be our policy that if we were to find out that so-and-so was sleeping with somebody else's wife, that we would just look the other way, which we do not. We prosecute that kind of immoral behavior."

Where to begin with this mess? General Pace serves as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the U.S. Armed Forces. His job is to advise the president and all the president's men (oh yeah, and Condi, too) on all matters military. So, the general's limp acknowledgement that he oughtn't have discussed his personal views about homos in uniform falls on fallow ground. General Pace's personal views undergird official policy, despite his delicate sidestepping of the big old cowpie he laid in his own nest.

General Pace keeps laying the crud by comparing "gay behavior" with marital infidelity. Oh, we're homosexuals so we must all be liars, cheaters and stealers of the human hearts of our loved ones? Guess ole Pistol Pete musta been shootin' from his lip at those straight military two-timers and missed the Queer 101 class wherein the many slanderous stereotypes of queerfolk were fully truthenized.

Oh dang! Turns out that the general doesn't limit his trashing of LGB servicemembers to them that cheats on their spouses. It's any of us who don the colors and put our bodies in the line of fire.

So before he eats more shoe leather, General Pace should meet former Marine Staff Sgt. Eric Alva. Eric got his leg blown off in Iraq, just after putting his boots on the ground in the invasion of a sovereign nation that posed no discernible and verifiable threat to the United States. But Sgt. Alva, like every one of Peter's good Marines, marched in step with his buddies into war and came home not able to walk at all. Eric Alva, the first soldier to be seriously injured in Iraq, was treated to a hero's welcome. Even President Bush and Mrs. Bush visited him at his bedside, where he was recovering from the amputation of his leg. After Eric retired from the U.S. Marine Corps, he came out as a gay man and now campaigns for the repeal of Don't Ask Don't Tell, the law that requires Alva and 65,000 other lesbian, gay and bisexual service members to conceal their sexual identities while putting themselves in harm's way.

Peter Pace would do well to reacquaint himself with the motto of the U.S. Marine Corps: Semper Fidelis. Translation: always faithful. Pace isn't, but Eric Alva is. Faithful to his country, faithful to his buddies in battle, faithful to his Constitution, and faithful to his brothers and sisters who still wear the colors in silence.

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