SOUTH ROYALTON, Vt. — When military recruiters begin arriving this month for the first time in more than a decade at Vermont Law School, it will have a special meaning for Alex Manning.
Manning, a lesbian, graduated from the law school in 2006, 17 years after she was discharged from the Army for a “failure to adapt to military standards.”
She was serving as a private at Fort Lewis, Wash., when she went to a farewell dinner for a friend who was being discharged for being a lesbian, and then out with a group to a gay bar. The investigation started soon after.
“It had the flavor of a witch hunt,” she said, adding that she soon followed her friend in being expelled from the service. In the days before the Clinton administration created “don’t ask, don’t tell,” she said, the policy was, “We asked. You lied. You’re out of here.”
Manning, now 42, went on to a career in law enforcement, working as a drug detective for the Georgia Bureau of Investigations in her native state, as well as other agencies.
Last week, she traveled north from Atlanta, where she practices family and criminal law, to attend a ceremony at Vermont Law marking the end of the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy and the end of a ban on military recruiters by the small, unaffiliated law school.
The ban wasn’t a 1970s-style protest against U.S. military involvements, school officials said.
