Eric Alva's new battle: the gay marine staff sergeant lost a leg fighting one enemy. Now he's taking on another--the U.S. military's antigay policy.

ON THE NIGHT OF MARCH 20, 2003, Lois Alva tossed fitfully in her sleep at home in San Antonio. In a dream, she saw her son Eric speeding across a vast expanse of sun-whitened desert in a Jeep.

"In the dream," she recalls, "his leg was sticking out the window of a vehicle." Lois woke with a start, profoundly chilled by the surreal image, particularly on this night. After months of bellicose chest-pounding from the White House about weapons of mass destruction, terrorism, and Iraqi freedom, the invasion of Baghdad was under way, and Eric's Marine battalion was part of the first wave.

The next day Staff Sgt. Eric Alva would step on a land mine that would shatter his right arm, rip his leg from his body, and make him the first casualty of the Iraq War.

Welcome to Texas," says 36-year-old Eric Alva in the faintest drawl as I approach him in the San Antonio International Airport. He's fit, tan, and dressed in cargo shorts and a T-shirt. And within seconds he's in motion, enthusiastically taking my bags from my hands and wrangling my luggage into his car with as much dexterity as any man on two legs.

"Hey, Alva!" shouts the parking lot attendant through the glass partition. "I saw you on TV again. Keep up the good work, man. We're all proud of you." Blushing furiously, Alva graciously thanks the woman, then aims his beige Nissan Pathfinder into traffic, heading for the house he shares with his partner, Darrell Parsons.

Behind the wheel, Alva drives like a marine. He squints fiercely into the late-afternoon sunlight, his jaw set in a firm line. He may be retired, but military bearing is his default condition. "I grew up here and people know me," he says modestly in response to a question about the attendant. The consummate team player, Alva is always reluctant to be seen as more heroic than any other marine.

But Alva isn't like every other marine. In 2003, with the invasion still fresh in the minds of more optimistic Americans, the newly wounded marine was a symbol of everything noble and patriotic about the U.S. military. He was awarded the Purple Heart by Gen. William Nyland, the former assistant commandant of the Marine Corps. He was photographed with the president and first lady as well as Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sheryl Crow. Donald Rumsfeld dropped by his hospital room for a photo op. The picture shows the former secretary of Defense towering over the frail, stone-faced marine and grinning like a great white shark.

Four years later, Alva once again distinguished himself by coming out on Good Morning America and speaking against the military's ruinous "don't ask, don't tell" policy.

Since then, Alva has testified before Congress in support of the Military Readiness Enhancement Act, a bill that would effectively end the ban on gays and lesbians in the armed forces. He has crisscrossed the country as a speaker and activist. He has also appeared on CNN to challenge Gen. Peter Pace's assertion in the Chicago Tribune that "homosexual acts" and "gay behavior" are "immoral" and that the military "should not condone immoral acts."

Alva told CNN's Paula Zahn that he took those remarks personally. "I have served my country honorably for 13 years, and [I'm] highly decorated," he said. "And I've paid a huge sacrifice."

The first Marine Corps recruiter to meet 19-year-old Eric Alva laughed in his face when he went to join up in the spring of 1990.

"I really looked like I was 10 years old," he admits, laughing. Alva is 5 foot 1 and, at the time, weighed roughly 90 pounds. "They said I didn't even come near to what a person needs to weigh just to join the military, let alone the Marine Corps."

We're sitting in the sunny kitchen of the new house he shares with Parsons. Family photos scattered across surfaces and along walls are testament to the couple's strong family roots and military upbringing. Both men's fathers (and, in Alva's case, his grandfather too) were in the military.

"I think I picked [the Marine Corps] because I wanted to toughen up," he says. "I wanted the best. And somewhere in the back of my mind, I wanted it to make me a tougher man. I wasn't thinking about whether or not I was going to live my life as a gay man. I was thinking that the Marines would make me the man I was supposed to be." So he lifted weights and drank protein shakes and, that June, raised his right arm and swore to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.

One of the most noxious arguments against gays in the military seeks to plant in the American consciousness an image of predatory gay soldiers licking their lips at the sight of muscled backs and taut rear ends of coltish recruits at boot camp. Pure fantasy, says Alva. "Boot camp was never about thinking, Oh, he looks cute across the room," Alva says, laughing. "It was about being screamed at all day long by drill instructors and having maybe 90 seconds to eat. The showers were about getting in and out pretty quick, because you still had things to do before you went to bed at night."

After Alva graduated from boot camp--as one of five marines in his class awarded meritorious promotion for outstanding performance--he began to identify more solidly with his orientation. Working in supply acquisitions at California's Twentynine Palms Marine Corps Air-Ground Combat Center, Alva also identified serious homoerotic undercurrents even from straight marines.

"They'd compare me with their wives and girlfriends back home," he says. "You know, "You remind me of my wife. Too bad you're not my wife.' Some would spend time with me, some would want to drink with me." Still, being a good marine was an all-encompassing goal. "I was always careful not to cross that line," he says. "I always held myself to a certain standard and told myself, Let it go, let it go."

Yet there were love affairs. In 1993, Alva began a clandestine 15-month romance with another marine. They had to make sure they weren't seen together, both because of the gay ban and because Alva outranked his boyfriend--fraternization with lower ranks is forbidden. "Darrell is my first true love," he says. "But [the marine] was my first true relationship. So, yes, I would say I was in love with him."

The relationship ended when Alva left for a post in Okinawa, Japan. By then an E-4 corporal, Alva threw himself into his career even more, sublimating his loneliness and desire for male companionship with a punishing physical regimen that left him gloriously fit and utterly exhausted. "On Friday and Saturday nights, when most people were going out, I was running the base perimeter, doing five miles at a time," he recalls. "I gained in age, rank, and maturity." In every way imaginable, Alva was a marine's marine.

"I sort of lived in fear of my dad," says Alva on the way to Our Lady of the Lake Catholic University in San Antonio, where he's scheduled to address a crowd of students and allies observing Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network's annual Day of Silence. The elder Alva served in Vietnam in 1967 and '68. When he returned home, he had vivid memories of war, he'd lost many friends, and like many veterans dealing with life after war, he drank. Their home was occasionally violent. When Alva was 10 years old his mother left his father, taking Eric and his two sisters with her. His parents have since reconciled.

"War is an ugly thing," says Alva. "[Servicemen] leave one way and come back another way." It's as true for Alva as his father, but in the young marine's case, it's the wound you can see that shapes his present course.

On the night of March 20, 2003, Eric Alva tried to sleep as tracer fire lit up the winter sky over Iraq. "Thousands of feet above us we could see the illumination of the missiles going over," he recalls. "I knew that wherever those bombs were landing, people were getting killed. We were bombing a country." On American television screens it looked like a fireworks display. But from the battalion's position on the Iraq-Kuwait border, it looked like the beginning of a war from which they might not come home.

The next day a convoy of thousands of vehicles entered Iraq. Around noon they stopped for lunch, and Alva walked around to the passenger side of his vehicle to eat. He took a step and his world suddenly shattered in an explosion of light, heat, dirt, and pain. The blast threw him 10 feet from his Jeep. Alva clutched his right arm in pain, oblivious that he was holding a broken limb; he looked down and saw that half of his index finger was gone. Covered in blood and screaming in agony, Alva watched as medics stripped him naked and cut the laces off his left boot to remove it. "What's wrong with my right leg?" he asked the chaplain. "Nothing, you're fine," was the response.

Above him the sky had grown strangely overcast, and Alva was suddenly fatigued. "I was starting to die," he remembers. "I was praying to God not to let me die because I knew my mom couldn't handle it. And then I said, 'Please say goodbye to my family. Please tell them I'm sorry. I didn't mean for this to happen.'"

All around the sound of explosions became deafening, as Alva's unit realized with horror that it had parked in the middle of a minefield for its first lunch break of the war.

"I woke up in recovery and I was so drugged. The first thing I did was look down, and my leg was gone. I remember just crying and thinking, It's OK. They'll put it back on. They probably have it somewhere, like a broken leg. They'll fix it."

Alva underwent two hours of surgery at Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany. His lungs collapsed under anesthesia, so he was intubated and hooked up to a respirator. Fearing cardiac arrest, his doctors would administer only minimal pain medication, so Alva remained excruciatingly conscious after the operation. When the pain became too much to bear, he tried to kill himself.

"I tried to hold my breath, to asphyxiate myself or choke," he recalls. It marked the first and only time in his military career--his life, really--that Alva felt he couldn't go on. "Of course, it didn't work," he says, laughing softly. "Every time I tried to stop breathing the stupid machines would go off. So I just prayed for God to take me instead. He didn't."

Nine days later Alva was airlifted to the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Md., where he underwent a second surgery, amputating his right leg further above the knee to better accommodate a prosthesis. His family, who hadn't been allowed to visit him in Germany (the U.S. military cited massive protests against the war as the reason), was there. "I knew I had to be strong," Lois recalls, but she says she was shocked at her son's appearance. "He looked very small. He'd always been sort of muscular. I barely recognized him."

As he learned to walk again, Alva had an epiphany: He had effectively buried his sexuality in the service of his country. Over the years he had told several marine friends that he was gay, and they'd protected his secret. When others speculated as to why he wasn't married, they'd answer, "He's married to the Marine Corps." The one marine who betrayed his confidence was ostracized by the rest until he understood that Alva's sexuality was off-limits. But now, having lost his leg, his military career, and prior barriers, Alva began to question.

"I knew I wasn't going to be in the military anymore, and that was difficult," he explains. "At the same time, I thought, Now maybe I can live happy, find someone to love, and be myself. I wondered who was going to love me, being so disfigured and deformed. But I realized that at least I could live life as an openly gay man and try to help other people.

"And no," he adds, jaw firm, "I never blamed the Marine Corps. Once a marine, always a marine."

In 2004, Alva met his partner, Darrell Parsons, on the Internet. The grandson of a Pentecostal minister, Parsons says he grew up mired in internalized homophobia. Although he and Alva are both registered Democrats, Parsons worked in 1987 and '88 as a paid staffer on the presidential campaign of the senior George Bush.

Before he met Alva, Parsons had never told a soul he's gay. "It was a freeing moment for me to be able to talk to another human being about who I really am, and what I had done with my life so far, and how it was sad because I hadn't been able to be myself," Parsons says.

"He was my friend before love," Parsons says of Alva. "I always thought if I could have the perfect mate in life, it would be someone who is also my best friend. Eric is my best friend."

It was Parsons who initially pointed Alva in the direction of the Human Rights Campaign, for whom Alva currently serves as spokesman for its campaign to end "don't ask, don't tell." "Here is someone who lost a leg for his country," says Parsons. "Here is someone who did more for his country than most of those politicians will ever do. But they're going to pass constitutional amendments to discriminate against gay people, to tell them they're second-class citizens and they don't deserve equality?"

One night in 2006, Parsons told Alva he found it sad that he didn't have the same rights as other citizens despite the fact that he'd spent his whole life defending them. "It just hit him suddenly," remembers Parsons. "And that's when he contacted the HRC."

It was also when Alva realized that his life as a warrior wasn't over. He could still defend those who couldn't defend themselves. But this time the war would be waged upon podiums, in the media, and in schools--anywhere people are willing to listen to the stories of men and women who fight and die for a country that doesn't recognize their worth.

The crowd at Our Lady of the Lake Catholic University is on its feet as Alva takes the stage. A full spectrum of social and sexual orientations is represented, but at this moment they all identify singularly with the retired marine on the podium. He launches into a speech he has given many times before, but the words sound no less spontaneous and impassioned today.

"Silence gives consent," says Alva, his voice projecting across the outdoor arena even without a microphone. "If we don't speak, they win. On the battlefield they put our fingers behind the trigger, but when we come home we don't have the same rights as the rest of America," he continues. "I'm speaking for all of us now. I'm standing on two strong legs, and I will be heard."

Rowe is a writer living in Toronto. His collection of essays Other Men's Sons will be published this summer.

Eric Alva photographed exclusively for The Advocate by Phoebe Rourke-Ghabriel in Houston

ABOUT THIS SPECIAL REPORT

Ever since a Zogby International poll in December revealed that 73% of American service members are comfortable serving with openly gay colleagues, "don't ask don't tell" has been under attack like never before. In January former Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman John Shalikashvili published a New York Times op-ed calling for repeal of the 14-year-old policy prohibiting out soldiers, saying the military is now ready to accept gay personnel without risk to "morale" or "unit cohesion," the perceived threats of yore. In March, Joint Chiefs chairman Peter Pace may have inadvertently done more for the call to repeal when he called homosexuality "immoral," looking foolish and out of touch in the process

In light of these developments, The Advocate thought it time to reexamine "don't ask, don't tell," When a decorated gay service member such as cover subject Eric Alva--or any of the estimated 65.000 gay and lesbian soldiers now serving in the U.S. military--loses a leg fighting for his country doesn't that prove the ban is shameful? That's the question we asked Pentagon spokesperson Cynth a Smith. Her response? The usual boilerplate statement handed out to the media, citing the Department of Defense's duty to follow federal law--except this time with a promising new sentence: that gays and lesbians "have the opportunity to continue to serve their nation and national security by putting their abilities to use by way of civilian employment with other federal agencies, the Department of Defense or in the private sector, such as with a government contractor."

It's the first time the Pentagon has explicitly acknowledged "that lesbian and gay Americans are qualified and capable of making important contributions to our national security," says Servicemembers Legal Defense Network spokesperson Steve Rails. "And, I believe, it is a sure sign that support for 'don't ask, don't tell' within the Pentagon is weakening, if it has not indeed already disappeared completely." It's about time.