In a handwritten letter to himself, dated December 13, 1990, Specialist Alan Rogers, a twenty-three-year-old African-American chaplain’s assistant, grappled with the issue of fear as he prepared for his first combat tour. Aboard Flight 104 from Germany to Saudi Arabia, as part of Operation Desert Shield, he wrote, “It seems like only yesterday that we were initially alerted that our unit would be deploying to the Persian Gulf to support the multinational force buildup already operating in the Middle East theater. Yet, in the midst of all the preparations and briefings, frenzied activity and excitement, there exists a general feeling of numbness. This really isn’t happening . . . this world crisis is not going to affect me. . . .” Rogers was an unusually soft-spoken and cerebral enlistee—he’d been voted “most intellectual” in his high-school class—and he found himself replaying the lyrics to Diana Ross’s “Theme from Mahogany” in his head (“Do you know where you’re going to?”).
Rogers went on to a distinguished military career. After earning two Kuwait Liberation medals with the 8th Battalion, 43rd Air Defense Artillery, which provided Patriot-missile support against Saddam Hussein’s Soviet-made Scuds, he returned home and, on an R.O.T.C. scholarship at the University of Florida, earned his bachelor’s degree, in religion. Then he accepted a commission as an intelligence officer. While stationed in Arizona, as an aide-de-camp at Fort Huachuca, he received a master’s degree in organizational management from the University of Phoenix, and later, after serving two tours in South Korea, and returning to the Middle East in 2002 for the initial phase of Operation Iraqi Freedom, he pursued a second master’s, in policy management, at Georgetown. The Georgetown stint was part of an élite Defense Department internship program offered to twenty captains across the services, and it included an assignment to the Pentagon—in Rogers’s case, as a special assistant to the Deputy Secretary of Defense, Gordon England. After the internship, he worked at the Pentagon as the lead biometrics officer in Army Intelligence—“the stuff that you see on ‘C.S.I.: Miami,’ ” as one of his friends put it, referring to the use of advanced fingerprinting techniques and retinal scans, which are particularly useful in counter-insurgency warfare, and in tracking the sources of improvised explosive devices, the primary killer of U.S. troops. Biometrics was a notorious mess, but Rogers excelled in the role, owing in large part to his facility for reconciling the technological demands of civilian contractors with the Army bureaucracy. “Every biometrics staff in the Pentagon and beyond—every single one, and I’m not joking here—contacted me and asked if they could borrow Major Rogers to help them work out their biometrics problems,” his supervisor later recalled. “Every meeting—fights, pandemonium—heads would turn to Alan.”
The measure of a soldier can fairly be said to consist of his ability to maintain the respect of his peers and his subordinates while earning it anew from his superiors. Rogers rarely talked about himself, which helped contribute to a widespread sense among his troops that he was there “solely for them,” as one Pentagon colleague said recently, but he was also fearless when it came to briefing two- and three-star generals. “If the sun was coming up and Alan said, ‘You know, it’s still kind of dark outside,’ people would say, ‘Yeah, maybe it is kind of dark outside,’ ” the colleague recalled. Rogers was deeply attracted to the symbolism of the Army, frequently leading civilian friends on tours of the Pentagon and of Arlington National Cemetery, and after he began his third tour in Iraq, last December, he took note of the weather in Baghdad, which wasn’t so different from Florida’s, and declared, “This is an ideal time to be here.” Major Rogers was by then approaching twenty years’ service, and was on track to be eligible for promotion to lieutenant colonel. He believed in the nobility of the mission.
In Baghdad, Rogers was assigned to the 1st Division National Police Transition Team, which involved embedding with Iraqi military units in an effort to train them for eventual self-sufficiency. He was part of an eleven-man unit known as Team Stiletto, working closely with several Iraqis who were nicknamed Steve, Mike, Leo, Kiwi, and Dave. “It is an understatement to say this is a significant paradigm shift for our conventional army,” he wrote in an e-mail to friends, after arriving at Forward Operating Base Shield, on the site of the former Olympic Training Center. “Throw into the mix the deadly I.E.D.’s that continue to produce casualties daily, rampant corruption and mixed allegiances, a Shia/Sunni divide that threatens all of our progress, coupled with a myriad of other elements, and it makes for the very complex battlespace which is Iraq today.”
At the end of January, Rogers spent the better part of a Saturday night checking back in with home, by e-mail and using a “morale phone” that he shared with a couple of other soldiers. He had a two-week leave coming up, so that he could stand as the best man in his friend Shay Hill’s wedding, in Jacksonville, and he called Hill, who was heading out to a rugby game and couldn’t talk. He was able to reach another friend, Kelly O’Connor, an Army recruiter stationed in St. Augustine; they talked about the relevance of his pre-deployment training at Fort Riley, in Kansas (so far, so good), and about the upcoming bachelor party they were planning for Hill, in Orlando. Rogers had no siblings, and had lost both his parents to illness in 2000. He thought of Hill and O’Connor as surrogate brothers. By the time Hill returned Rogers’s call, it was four in the morning in Iraq, and he could tell that he had woken Rogers up, so he kept the conversation brief. The next night, while helping his fiancée, Theresa, sort through the effects of her grandmother, who had recently died, Hill got a call from one of his neighbors in Jacksonville, who said that there were two men in uniform standing outside his door.
Several hours after the inadvertent wakeup call, it turned out, Rogers was sitting in the right rear seat of an armored Humvee, in East Baghdad, on a routine morning patrol, as it passed a guardrail concealing an I.E.D. The force of the explosion blew straight through the vehicle, knocking an Iraqi interpreter, in the left seat, into the street. The interpreter and an American gunner who was standing beside Rogers in the Humvee were injured. Rogers died instantly. He was forty.
Deputy Secretary England attended a memorial service at the Pentagon, where Thomas Gandy, a director of counterintelligence and human intelligence, hailed Rogers as “simply the most talented officer I ever had the opportunity to serve with,” and described his selflessness in taking wounded veterans at Walter Reed hospital to a Super Bowl party on a nearby base. “There was something special about Alan Rogers,” Lieutenant General John F. Kimmons, the deputy chief of staff for Army Intelligence, said. “He was more than he seemed.”
An obituary in the Gainesville Sun mentioned that Rogers was divorced and a Baptist minister—news, in both cases, to many of his friends at the Washington, D.C., chapter of American Veterans for Equal Rights (AVER), formerly known as Gay, Lesbian, and Bisexual Veterans of America. The minister claim was accurate—Rogers’s troops on Team Stiletto called him the Preacher, on account of his frequent sermonlike pep talks—and before his burial at Arlington National Cemetery, in March, a “homegoing service” was held for his casket at the Ebenezer Baptist Church, in Starke, Florida, where he was ordained, in 1995. (Governor Charlie Crist ordered the flags at the statehouse flown at half-mast for the occasion.) The mention of a divorce was not accurate; it may have been a story some acquaintances passed on to explain why Rogers did not have a wife or a girlfriend. “We made a statement that he was married to the Army,” one longtime friend told me.
Defense Department policy acts as a deep closet, even in death. From the Second World War until the Clinton Presidency, homosexuality in the armed services was banned outright; declaring oneself gay was a common draft-dodging maneuver during the Vietnam years. When Bill Clinton took office, in 1993, he vowed to end the ban, but, facing strong opposition from the four-star community, he settled on a compromise: “Don’t ask, don’t tell,” which attempted to draw a distinction between homosexuality (not forbidden in theory) and homosexual conduct (grounds for immediate discharge). The effectiveness of the distinction has been a source of debate ever since.
Shortly after Rogers moved to Washington, in 2004, he joined AVER, and served as the local chapter’s membership coördinator and treasurer, participating in “pride” festivals in Baltimore and Washington and organizing rafting and movie trips; among the latter was a trip to see “Gunner Palace,” a documentary about the experiences of soldiers in Iraq. In March of 2005, an AVER member named Tom posted to the organization’s Yahoo discussion group an Army Times op-ed titled “Gays in the Military: It’s a Question of Liberty.” “Thanks for sharing this,” Rogers posted, in response. “It’s nice to see active-duty field-grade officers making a strong case for the repeal of D.A.D.T. and publishing it in the Army Times. Curious to read some of the backlash the subsequent issues will no doubt contain.” (A retired officer, Lieutenant Colonel James E. Schmidt, wrote, “The Bible clearly states that homosexuality is a sin. Leaders must have respect from those they lead. I do not think many soldiers will respect or follow a leader who promotes sin.”) As word of Rogers’s death spread in the gay community, some began to wonder if he might not qualify as the first known gay casualty of the Iraq war. Opponents of the military’s policy, noting his impeccable résumé, and his work with the Deputy Secretary of Defense, saw in Rogers a transformative figure and began soliciting media coverage.
About a dozen gay active-duty personnel, including one senior officer, attended Rogers’s formal burial at Arlington, and joined in a memorial celebration later that evening at a local bed-and-breakfast that was attended by reporters from the Washington Post and from N.P.R.’s “Morning Edition.” The Post’s unusually detailed obituary ran the following week, under the headline “ARMY OFFICER REMEMBERED AS HERO: FRIENDS, FELLOW SOLDIERS MOURN LOSS OF ‘EXCEPTIONAL’ MAN.” It cited his Purple Heart and his two bronze stars, discussed the Persian rug that Rogers’s team in Baghdad had pitched in to buy for Shay Hill as a wedding gift, and quoted Mark Nadel, Rogers’s thesis adviser at Georgetown, saying that he recalled thinking, “This is a guy I’m going to hear from in ten years, and he’s going to be a general.” It did not mention that the subject of the thesis was the effect of “Don’t ask, don’t tell” on United States military recruiting and retention rates. The N.P.R. segment was pegged to news of the four-thousand-casualty mark having been crossed five years after the invasion, with Rogers’s story standing in as a kind of Everyman soldier’s. “You should know that about two hundred people came to the burial, soldiers and civilians alike,” the host, Steve Inskeep, said. “Major Rogers had no wife or child to take away the flag that draped his coffin, so soldiers folded that flag and gave it to his cousin, Cathy Long.”
The coverage pleased Long, who is fifty-nine, and who became close to Rogers after the death of both his parents, assuming an almost motherly role. Others, particularly those who had tipped off the Post and N.P.R., were frustrated by what was omitted. Weren’t the skill and the secrecy with which Rogers had compartmentalized the varied and seemingly incompatible aspects of his accomplished life a notable part of his “exceptional” story? Outing him was left to the Washington Blade, a gay weekly, which ran the headline “MEDIA, MILITARY KEPT SOLDIER IN CLOSET AFTER DEATH: FRIENDS SAY GAY MAN KILLED IN IRAQ WOULD WANT THE TRUTH TO BE KNOWN.” The blogger Andrew Sullivan linked to the Blade account and encouraged readers to complain to the Post. “I can see why outing someone who is alive and closeted is unethical,” he wrote. “Inning someone who is dead and was out is a function of utterly misplaced sensitivity, rooted in well-intentioned but incontrovertible homophobia.”
At the end of March, a patent agent in the Washington, D.C., area named Rob Pilaud decided to create a Wikipedia page for Rogers. Pilaud was a peripheral friend of Rogers—he wasn’t aware of the death until he received an e-mail invitation to the bed-and-breakfast gathering, seven weeks afterward—but he felt connected to the cause through his father (a retired enlisted man) and his domestic partner (a former military interpreter).
Two days after the Wikipedia entry appeared, an anonymous editor removed nearly all the biographical information, including references to Rogers’s involvement with AVER. The new entry read, simply, “Alan G. Rogers was a United States Army Major that died in Iraq in late January 2008. Alan was an ordained pastor.” The anonymous editor also added a comment on the Wiki Talk page which suggested that he or she had an even more personal connection to the subject: “Alan’s life was not about his sexual orientation but rather about the body of work he performed ministering to others and helping the defense of the country. Quit trying to press an agenda that Alan wouldn’t have wanted made public just to suit your own ends.”
Pilaud decided to track the tamperer’s I.P. address, and what he found lent credence to a growing conspiracy theory among his friends. The address associated with the computer on which the edits were made was assigned to “Army Information Systems Command-Pentagon.” A subsequent search appeared to connect the computer to the department run by Lieutenant General John F. Kimmons, the deputy chief of staff for Army Intelligence, who had not only praised Rogers at the Pentagon memorial service (“I rated Alan in the top five per cent of all M.I. majors I had seen in thirty-four years of service”) but had also presented the American flag to Cathy Long at the burial. A brief Wiki edit war ensued. Pilaud expanded on his initial entry, referring to Rogers as a “civil rights activist.” He uploaded a photograph of Rogers holding hands with another man on the beach at a same-sex wedding ceremony. He added that “the subsequent coverage of his death in the national media sparked a debate as to what information should and should not be included in the biography of a gay military person killed in action.”
Pilaud told me a few weeks later, “There’s this sort of dark side of me that thinks they shoved him off to Iraq to get rid of him.” He wondered if a further military coverup might not be to blame for the fact that Georgetown had proved unable to furnish a copy of Rogers’s master’s thesis.
The coverup, such as it was, was not the result of any coördinated government campaign but a freelance effort enabled by the good intentions of colleagues and friends whose own experiences with Rogers made it hard to conceive of him as a dissident of any kind. Lieutenant Colonel Mike Hardy worked in the cubicle across from Rogers at the Pentagon, and spoke movingly at the memorial service, comparing Rogers’s mentoring of his troops to the sacrifices of the apostle Paul. He and Rogers were the only African-Americans in the office with Army backgrounds. “Alan was a few years behind me, but I would have rated him above me in leadership and intelligence,” Hardy said recently. Hardy was assigned the role of casualty assistance officer, overseeing the execution of Rogers’s will, and evidently took this to include the protection of Rogers’s legacy from people who seemed too ready to introduce politics into the grieving process. After the bed-and-breakfast gathering, where he was struck by the composition of the mourners, Hardy sent an e-mail to Donna St. George, the Post reporter, expressing vague concern, on behalf of Rogers’s family, about the tone of her forthcoming piece. Deborah Howell, the Post’s ombudsman, did not mention Hardy or the letter in her follow-up account, “PUBLIC DEATH, PRIVATE LIFE,” but she explained that the paper’s decision not to disclose Rogers’s sexuality had been an “agonizing” one, which was ultimately made by the paper’s executive editor, Len Downie, who preferred to exercise caution in the absence of any proof of the soldier’s own wishes. (Howell concluded that the paper had erred: “There was enough evidence—particularly of Rogers’s feelings about ‘Don’t ask, don’t tell’—to warrant quoting his friends and adding that dimension to the story of his life.”)
“To a person—I really mean every person in the office was completely surprised,” Hardy told me, referring to Rogers’s private life. Hardy’s officemates knew Rogers as an easygoing college-football enthusiast and a capable volleyball player—their team captain, last June, at the annual office picnic. “ ‘The first openly gay soldier to die in Iraq,’ ” Hardy said, recalling Pilaud’s Wikipedia entry. “We’re, like, ‘Hold it. If it’s a surprise to all of us, that can’t count as the first openly gay soldier to die in Iraq.’ And we just felt there was an agenda that wasn’t Alan’s.” Hardy said that he did not know who had made the Wikipedia edits, but he mentioned a recent article in USA Today in which a soldier’s mother expressed some unease about the specificity of the instructions her son had given her in the event of his death—which friends should speak on his behalf, what songs to play at his funeral. “Nowhere—and I read the will—did Alan leave any piece of paper that said that,” Hardy told me. “He did not make any moves to be remembered as a gay soldier. Nowhere in those phone calls home did he say, ‘Let everyone know that I died a proud gay officer.’ ” Of course, being a proud gay officer is tantamount, under the current military policy, to being a retired gay officer with no pension.
Hardy’s appeal to the wishes and concerns of the family may have been weakened by the fact that the closest living relatives of the deceased were only cousins, but he found additional moral support from Rogers’s longtime friend Shay Hill, whom Rogers had designated his executor and sole benefactor. Hill lodged a complaint with the Washington Blade arguing that Rogers’s sexuality had “no more relevance than the color of his skin,” and, after joking with Hardy about the biographical editing, even considered pursuing defamation charges against Wikipedia on behalf of the Rogers estate. “It’s really minimizing him,” Hill told me. “Granted, we remember the bad and the good, but typically we remember the good. I’m not saying being gay is bad or good, just saying he would rather be remembered for a lot more than that.”
After Rogers’s death, it emerged that there were a number of people who considered him to be their closest friend, and who felt that they were in a position to discern how he would have wished to be remembered. Their differing notions may have said more about the richness of Rogers’s friendships than about his beliefs. Nearly everyone, in recalling Rogers, talked about his great strength as a listener—his habit of drawing people out and making them feel as though their best selves had been understood. Only in retrospect did they realize that he never revealed much of himself.
The wrangling over Rogers’s private life threatened to obscure a remarkable American biography. He was born in New York City in 1967; the man his mother had married was in prison and denied paternity, so she, a Roman Catholic of Trinidadian descent, put him up for adoption. He lived at the Foundling Hospital, an orphanage on Sixth Avenue, until he was three, when he moved into the Mitchel Houses, in the South Bronx, with his new parents, George and Genevieve Rogers. George worked in a garment factory; Genevieve stayed home to take care of Alan, who was never told that he was adopted. When Alan was in the fourth grade, he and his mother moved to Hampton, Florida, an hour southwest of Jacksonville, to take care of Genevieve’s mother, who was ailing. (George continued working at the factory, and joined them after he retired.) Hampton has a population of about four hundred, and the new living circumstances could hardly have been more different from the South Bronx.
The Rogerses were devout Southern Baptists, and in Hampton Alan mostly kept to himself and his Bible, occasionally picking buckets of pecans from a giant tree in the back yard. He was the only boy to carry a briefcase to school in the eighth grade, and in high school he joined the debate team. In every picture from his school days, his shirts appear pressed and tucked. “He reminded me of Urkel growing up—you know, the nerdy Urkel,” Gordon Smith, a former classmate, who is now the police chief in the neighboring town of Starke, said recently. “But he got along with everybody. Nothing bothered him. He just read his Bible. He was one of those few people you meet in life where nobody has nothing bad to say. It was just hard for me to picture him going into the military. I’ll be honest with you: I’d have never dreamed it in my life that he’d be a military man. I believed he’d be a preacher. ’Cause he never was a tough, macho kind of guy.”
At the time of Rogers’s enlistment, in 1987, he had never been to the Atlantic Ocean, despite the fact that he lived no farther than seventy miles from the coast. It is not difficult to imagine that, amid such a sheltered environment, and given his family’s limited financial means, the Army seemed an easy way out—all the more so when he was assigned to Giebelstadt Army Airfield, in Germany. While in Germany, friends recalled, Rogers struggled to reconcile his emerging sexuality with his faith, and found sanctuary in a house owned by an American pharmaceutical executive named Marty McNeil, who was married (his wife worked for Stars and Stripes) and also had a male lover. McNeil’s house was a popular retreat for gay service members in Germany at the time, but McNeil was also a practicing Roman Catholic, and he often spoke with Rogers about his admiration of the Jesuits. Rogers joined the Giebelstadt Gospel Church and became an associate pastor. “Alan really cared deeply about what people felt about him—people’s respect for him,” McNeil told me. “He went to a lot of effort to maintain that respect. He certainly impressed the hell out of my father, an ex-marine.” McNeil said that he and his father had “one of those ‘Don’t ask, don’t tell’ relationships,” but that his father continued to ask about Rogers ten years after Rogers had left the country.
Broadly speaking, Rogers’s friends could be divided into two camps, one associated with Florida and the other with Washington. “Shay was never really a part of Alan’s gay life,” Tami Sadowski, a close friend from Washington, said in April, at a gathering at her house, where several people expressed reservations about Hill’s handling of the estate, and shared recollections of Rogers as a lover of good food and fashion, who enjoyed taking long vacations in the Greek Isles. In 2004, Sadowski attended an Army ball as Rogers’s date, and last year she asked Rogers to stand beside her as a “man of honor” at her marriage to Matt Wagenhofer. “I think we were all a little surprised to find out that Shay was the sole beneficiary of the will,” she said, and added that she had started an Alan G. Rogers Memorial Scholarship Fund, to which Hill had not yet contributed anything. As Rogers’s beneficiary, Hill was entitled to the military life-insurance policy of four hundred thousand dollars.
Hill, an affable environmental scientist with a slight drawl and a ruddy complexion, met Rogers in 1992, while selling boiled peanuts at the side of the road outside Gainesville to pay for his education at a local community college. Rogers, who had recently returned from Germany and had enrolled at the University of Florida, didn’t particularly like boiled peanuts, but he decided to stop one day after noticing that Hill seemed always to be waving at him when he drove by. The waves were nothing more than a simple salesman’s trick. “I almost didn’t have the heart to say, ‘I’m actually waving to everybody,’ ” Hill told me. But Rogers took the opportunity to invite Hill to a party, and Hill, in turn, invited Rogers to join in his regular games of Risk. Before long, they became roommates—Rogers had told Hill that he was gay—in what Hill calls the “international house of people,” which included “a guy from Mexico, a black lady from England, and a white guy from South Africa.”
Hill met his future wife, Theresa Bennett, at the Riverside Avenue Christian Church, in Jacksonville, in 2005. She was a commercial banker and came from a prominent Florida family—her grandfather Charles Bennett was the longest-serving congressman in the state’s history, and the man responsible for placing the phrase “In God We Trust” on the nation’s currency. She objected to homosexuality on religious grounds and likened it to drug addiction, so Hill spoke cautiously about Rogers before introducing her to him. He took her to Washington for Rogers’s graduation from Georgetown, in 2005, and they arranged to stay at his town house. “There was an ironing board, there was a whole vase of fresh flowers near my bed, all clean linens, everything organized in the bathroom,” she recalled. “You could eat off the floor.” The discovery was unsettling at first—“I’m, like, ‘Shay has an African-American gay best friend. This is interesting’ ”—but she came to regard Rogers as her favorite of Shay’s friends, and the most respectful and supportive of their relationship. This may have been Rogers’s singular gift: an extraordinary ability to read the anxieties of others, and to offer a suitable version of himself to fit the situation. “He realized that you don’t change the system by alienating those who are against you,” Shay told me. “You change the system by trying to convince those who are against you.”
When I first met the Hills, a couple of months had passed since their wedding, and their house was overrun with boxes containing the personal effects of Major Alan G. Rogers, which had recently been delivered by the Army, as well as dozens of testimonials and condolences from dignitaries and acquaintances as varied as Senator Sam Brownback, of Kansas, and “Steve,” of Team Stiletto. (“Sir . . . would be honored if you would accept this Babylonian Lion. He wanted to do one last thing for the man he called his friend, Alan.”) Hill had been looking forward to the shipment as an opportunity to peer into the soul of a close but intensely private friend. “Think about if you died tomorrow,” he said. “What would somebody remember you by? That, to me, is the neatest thing about receiving all these items.”
Rogers did not appear to have kept a regular diary, however, and the writings that Hill had unearthed were for the most part spiritually reflective, not personally introspective. (“Rev. Rogers’s life philosophy is summed up in these two sentences: ‘If you meet me and forget me, you have lost NOTHING. When you meet Jesus and forget Him, you have lost EVERYTHING!’ ”) Rogers’s collection of books was extensive, but notable more for its breadth (from the complete “Left Behind” series to Samantha Power’s “A Problem from Hell”) than for its exploration of any particular themes or ideas. A bright-orange life preserver served as a reminder that Rogers, for all his travels, had never learned to swim.
Hill pointed to a bongo drum—a gift from the men of the Bravo Company human-intelligence unit out of Yongsan, South Korea. “Here’s something cool,” he said. The skin of the drum had been marked up to resemble an interrogation form, and its joking tone suggested that some of Rogers’s troops would have been neither shocked nor offended by Pilaud’s Wikipedia entry: “Alan Rogers, a.k.a. Preacherman, Captain Velveeta . . . Source is very cocky and sure to talk about his knowledge of men’s fashion. Do not talk about the inappropriateness of his tuxedo.” A list of the subject’s “documents” included “one book, titled ‘Searching for My Perfect Bride,’ unsuccessfully well used . . . one V.I.P. membership to all the clubs on Texas Street . . . one copy, ‘It’s Raining Men’ CD.”
Hill referred to his inheritance as “blood money,” and after a few days of living with Rogers’s effects he seemed to regard each unopened box as a kind of rebuke—a reminder of guilt. “The biggest burden has been not to wither his worldly goods away—to do something with them, aside from taking care of myself or my family,” he said. “It’s a higher responsibility.” It was also slow going. He had had to get up early on the morning after learning of Rogers’s death, and drive to Tallahassee to dig wells at the site of a proposed gas station. The wedding followed not long afterward, and then came an abbreviated honeymoon in Napa Valley. These were not ideal circumstances for grieving, or the most salutary conditions for beginning a happy marriage. Hill still had a dime that he found on the street during his bachelor party, in February; it had oxidized in such a way that President Roosevelt’s face appeared black. It was dated 1967, the year of Rogers’s birth, and Hill had noticed, while looking up at the stars that night, that Mars—the Roman god of war—was shining directly overhead. Hill’s first fiduciary act as the executor of the Rogers estate was to sign for his dead best friend’s credit-card bill when checking out of the rooms that Rogers had reserved for the occasion.
“You wonder, like, why he picked me,” Hill said at one point. “I wonder that sometimes. A lot of people were his friends.” He recounted the story of the deaths of Rogers’s parents, which occurred in swift succession in 2000, when Rogers was stationed in Korea. George Rogers had had a heart attack while driving to visit Genevieve, who was suffering from kidney failure. She died less than two weeks later. In the interim period, Rogers was going through some family paperwork, and discovered that he’d been adopted. “She wasn’t feeling well enough for him to approach her,” Hill said. “So here he is, a grown man, had just buried his father, and he found out he was adopted. And I’m there as a friend to experience that. I don’t know how I would have reacted if it were me. But then he did the eulogy at his mom’s funeral. It was just amazing how he had the wherewithal.”
Kelly O’Connor, the Army recruiter from St. Augustine, first met Rogers at a Kmart in Arizona, where O’Connor was working part time to pay for community college. One day, while stocking shelves, he noticed a customer wearing a Florida Gators T-shirt, and made a taunting comment; the Florida-Florida State football game was coming up, and O’Connor was a Seminoles fan. Rogers was the Gators partisan, and he invited O’Connor to a party to watch the game. The two men later ended up serving overlapping combat tours—O’Connor was a construction engineer who helped build base camps—at the start of Operation Iraqi Freedom. Upon returning to the United States, O’Connor volunteered for recruiting duty. “Anybody who was interested in military intelligence, I used to be able to call Alan,” he told me. “It was just another of the things he did—he could talk to applicants about all the different careers that Intel had. He would make time in his schedule to call them back.” O’Connor now runs the recruiting station in St. Augustine, and he was, like many of Rogers’s friends, curious about Rogers’s thesis.
The thesis did not turn up among Rogers’s personal effects, although Theresa Hill showed me a white binder on the kitchen floor, labelled “Capstone Project Research,” that left little doubt about the strength of Rogers’s convictions on the matter. The binder included a printout of an e-mail from Rogers to his friend Jason Cianciotto (an AVER member at whose same-sex wedding Rogers had offered a prayer), explaining that his adviser was urging him to work on concealing his biases, and to focus more on analysis than on advocacy. (The adviser, Mark Nadel, explained that because the project was a capstone paper and not, technically, a thesis, there was no protocol for keeping a copy on file.) The research followed the history of attitudes toward gay servicemen in the military both before and since the introduction of the current policy, and included the story of Private First Class Barry Winchell, who was beaten to death in 1999 by a fellow-soldier at Fort Campbell, in Kentucky, because of suspicions that he was gay. Survey results have shown a steady increase in tolerance over time, with generals typically lagging behind enlisted men. A Zogby poll, in 2006, of people who had served in Iraq and Afghanistan showed that nearly half believed at least one member in their own unit to be gay, and, among those who felt certain that they had served alongside a gay colleague, about two-thirds did not think troop morale had been affected. Two weeks ago, the Washington Post released the results of a poll indicating that seventy-five per cent of Americans now favor repealing “Don’t ask, don’t tell,” up from forty-four per cent fifteen years ago. Fifty per cent of veterans agreed.
While working in biometrics, after completing the thesis, Rogers had his first extended exposure to civilian contractors, and realized that not only did they make twice as much money for doing similar work, in many cases, as that of active-duty officers; they had their private lives to themselves. Shortly after accepting his third tour of duty in Iraq, last year, Rogers began telling friends that he planned to retire from the Army when he reached the twenty-year mark, which would have coincided with his stateside return. He was beginning to worry that he would never get a chance to settle down and enjoy a long-term relationship. One of the people he called on the night before his death was his friend Tami Sadowski, who works as a real-estate broker in Maryland. They had made arrangements to go house hunting in the D.C. area during his two-week leave.
“He followed every rule he believed in,” a close friend and colleague who got to know Rogers well while they were both living in Atlanta, near the headquarters of the Third U.S. Army, in 2003, told me. “He believed in the Army. It was so important to him. This is probably the perfect case study of somebody who was gay and accepted the Army’s values—and how it doesn’t work at the end of the day. If he hadn’t died in Iraq, the Army would have lost him.”
A couple of weeks after Memorial Day, Hampton held a political rally at its City Park, a sandy square a few hundred yards from the one-story house where Rogers and his parents had lived. Hampton’s mayor, Jim Mitzel, refers to the town as “Mayberry, U.S.A.” The rally featured short speeches by candidates running for the local school board, county commissioner, sheriff, and even for Congress, and was intended to raise money for a Hampton Veterans Memorial, which would be dedicated in the honor of Major Rogers, Hampton’s first and only casualty of the War on Terror. Rude Roy the BBQ Boy, a burly Vietnam veteran with a gray ponytail, was selling pulled-pork sandwiches and burgers, and donating twenty per cent of his proceeds to the effort; and the Mayor’s wife, Jennifer, occasionally passed around a jar and minded a folding table at which contributors could inspect potential designs for the memorial statue. (Five thousand dollars would buy a helmet sitting atop a standing machine gun, and twice that much added a pair of boots.) On a pole to the right of the town bandstand, Mayor Mitzel had affixed a poster board mounted with a couple of local newspaper stories about Rogers. “SOLDIER: TOOK CARE OF HIS AGING PARENTS AS THEY GREW WEAK” read one headline, above an article that repeated the divorce canard.
Gordon Smith, the Starke police chief and Rogers’s old classmate, was there, running for the office of sheriff, with a large contingent of supporters giving out free ice cream. (“There’s nobody more red, white, and blue than Gordon Smith,” he said. “Nobody loves the Lord above more than I do.”) During pauses between speeches, a man wearing an American-flag bandanna sang karaoke to the music of Eric Clapton and Creed. The other candidates included a member of the National Guard who had been called to drill duty, and who therefore asked the Hampton police chief to read a statement on his behalf, and a man, Charles Van Zant, who said that his call to public service had come last year when his son, a member of the local school board, began his second Iraq deployment, and Governor Crist asked Dad to fill in. Van Zant, who was running for the State House, said that he had sought higher counsel in devising his platform. “I asked the Lord, ‘Is there something else that you’d like for me to do?’ ” Van Zant said. “And he showed me two things. One, he showed me plainly that he wanted me to get in the fight against abortion politically. . . . Secondly, we’ve got an amendment coming up on our constitution that you need to vote yes for. It’s amendment No. 2. It has to do with the definition of marriage as one man, one woman.” Except for this digression, the day’s honoree might have felt entirely at home.
Shay Hill and his wife spent the morning holding a yard sale to unload some of Rogers’s less personal belongings—furniture, clothes, books—and they arrived late. After two weekends, they’d sold five hundred and forty-four dollars’ worth, or just enough to clear a path through the living room. Instead of donating to Tami Sadowski’s scholarship fund in Washington, they planned to give the cash to an organization in Jacksonville called Community Connections, for homeless women and children. Hill’s pickup truck was loaded with paintings and some other selected items of Rogers’s—a family Bible, a Buffalo Soldier figurine—that he intended to give to Cathy Long and her husband, Jerry.
The Longs, the only black people in the park, were easily recognizable as representatives of the Rogers family. Cathy is the grand-niece of George Rogers, Alan’s adoptive father. She and Jerry were living in the Bronx, where Jerry worked as a New York City cop, when Alan was adopted. They had a son who was about the same age, and had joined George and Genevieve and Alan for their first Thanksgiving dinner. In 1990, the Longs moved to Ocala, about an hour south of Hampton, which is where I’d first met them, a few weeks before the rally.
Cathy works the night shift at a hospital, as a nurse, so she had suggested that we have an early dinner, at four o’clock, in a Piccadilly Cafeteria on State Road 40. She and Jerry seemed to be on familiar terms with much of the staff and the clientele. Hill had warned me that the Longs didn’t approve of homosexuality, and Cathy seemed uncomfortable talking about it. “As far as the family is concerned, we really did not become privy, I guess you could say, to ‘the information’ until Alan had passed,” she said. “Just because he felt that all people should be treated the same—and I’m sure that that was the extent of his involvement, not that he was trying to parade any particular life style, or whatever. He just loved people. He was a people person.”
Jerry, a Vietnam veteran, said grace before we ate. Cathy mentioned the phone call she’d received from Rogers the day before his death; they were in Georgia at the time, looking at investment properties, and Rogers was worried about the possibility of their leaving Ocala, which he’d come to see as an extension of his home base. In retrospect, Cathy felt that the way he’d said “I love you,” at the close of the conversation, seemed like a final goodbye. She hadn’t yet been able to delete his number from her phone, and she said that, in the days after the guardrail explosion, she’d received more than fifty calls from servicemen and women, many of them in Iraq. “One of the generals, I had to console him,” she said. “He tried to express his condolences, but I was concerned with what was going on with him, because he was still there.” She and Jerry couldn’t agree on whether their Verizon bill for that month had exceeded three hundred or eight hundred dollars.
They recalled the last time they’d seen Rogers, about a year ago, and how eager he had been to take them to the Jacksonville Landing, a waterfront tourist plaza with restaurants and shops. When they arrived, the Landing was closed, because of a terrorist threat, so they met at a Japanese restaurant instead, and Shay Hill showed up carrying a five-foot python in a pillowcase—Rogers’s pet, as it turned out, which had been left in Hill’s care. “I joked with Alan for the longest time,” Cathy told me. “I said, ‘You know, Alan, I finally saw a side of you that I didn’t know was there.’ I never took him to be a snake owner.” The python’s name is Alexis, and it currently lives in a tank in the Hills’ bedroom.
In late June, Shay Hill received a CD from the Army, the contents of which drastically altered his perspective on the preceding five months. It contained the unclassified files from Rogers’s laptop in Iraq, among them a “letter of intent,” to accompany his will.
Rogers had told Hill that the letter of intent would be included in a box of clothes for the wedding that he was shipping to Jacksonville before departing for Iraq. He’d mentioned it primarily to suggest that Hill not open the box when it arrived. Hill recalled this exchange on the night that the two Army representatives came to his door with the news of Rogers’s death. He told Kelly O’Connor, who had raced over from St. Augustine, and they opened the box together. But there was no letter. Evidently, Rogers did not finish writing it until he had arrived in Baghdad, in December.
“Well, if you’re reading this, you’ve got a lot of work to do,” Rogers wrote, and then explained in some detail the various ways in which he had clearly considered the question of his legacy. He wished his funds to be disbursed not only to other friends and family but to a variety of organizations: the N.A.A.C.P., AVER, and the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network, which publishes a gay soldier’s survival guide. The letter also mentioned a godson, living in California, for whom Rogers wanted to set up a trust; Hill hadn’t known of any godchildren, and he didn’t recognize the names of the child’s parents. “I’m not even sure if they know Alan is dead,” he said, marvelling at the number of secrets his friend had kept.
Hill realized that none of the people mentioned in the letter knew of its existence, and that, legally speaking, he was still the sole beneficiary. Who was to say that Rogers hadn’t intended to revise the letter further? He hadn’t printed it and signed it, after all. Shay and Theresa had recently made an offer on a new home, and they’d been planning to use much of the life-insurance money for the down payment. “I did make some purchases I wouldn’t have made,” Shay said, with a mixture of remorse and aggravation. “This has completely thrown our lives into a whirlwind. My house has been saturated with physical stuff.”
But his conscience soon overpowered his frustration, and after consulting a minister he even began to relieve himself of the guilt associated with all the remaining household clutter. “Little did I know that he wasn’t blessing me as much as I thought he was,” Hill said. “I mean, I was blessed to be his best friend. Maybe that’s the whole life lesson.”
He read aloud some more from Rogers’s letter: “Growing up in New York, and then moving to the small town of Hampton, I never imagined that I would see much beyond the city limits of Bradford County. My parents gave me so much love and hope that there was a better life out there, and by God’s grace I found it. The U.S. Army has provided me such a wonderful opportunity to realize my dreams to go to college and see parts of the world that I had only read about in schoolbooks. I’ve been to countries that many only dream about. Walked the streets of Europe: Paris, Greece, Spain, Germany, England, Italy, Czech Republic. I’ve seen Asia, South America, and, of course, the Middle East. . . . As you know I’ve been raised in the Church and have always had a love, reverence, and fascination for God. I am blessed to be saved by His grace, and so I know that I am going up yonder to be with my Lord. Please tell those who remain not to grieve too much but to have a big party and celebrate. . . . My only regret is that I have never found that special one to grow old with and watch the sunset with.” ♦
