In this episode, Women of Washington hosts Aileen Black and Gigi Schumm interview Brig. Gen. Tammy Smith, Deputy Chief of Staff for the Army Reserve.

Smith described how she almost resigned over the Army’s “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” policy and what changed her mind. “The Army had a policy, and it later became a law, that you could not be in the military if you were gay or lesbian,” she said. “And I had, through my entire career, hidden my true identity. And I did that because I wanted to serve.”

“It got harder and harder to justify serving and hiding what was the most important thing in my life, which was [my wife],” she said. “I couldn’t share her the way my peers could share their spouses and their family. Things were changing in America, and as I saw that conversation going on, and that conversation didn’t include me, it was just too hard to go on serving.”

However, as the Army’s view changed, so did Smith’s. “When [Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Michael] Mullen was asked to testify before the Senate Armed Services Committee on Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, when he testified, he said that he personally found it hard to understand how we as an institution could ask members of our military to sacrifice their integrity in order to serve.”

“When I heard that, I cried,” Smith said. “It was the first time that a senior leader in uniform had said that my service was as honorable as anyone else’s, that my serving was as good as anybody else. When I heard him say that, he gave me hope. All my discouragement went away, and he gave me hope that Don’t Ask Don’t Tell would be repealed.”

Smith also spoke about being one of the early women to join the ROTC. “At the time that I joined ROTC, I just thought that anybody could get a scholarship,” she said. “I had no idea when I got my scholarship in 1982 that we had just ended the separate Women’s Army Corps in 1978. I was unaware about the women who had run the gauntlet and been the first graduates [of West Point] in 1980. I didn’t have a contextual awareness of that.”

“As I look back, I realize that those brave women really broke through some barriers that made it possible for me to serve for the past 30 years,” she said. “And I think that especially now, the military is a great place for women who want to choose this as their career.”

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