Thank you for your well researched historical answer. Great job!

Could you please share you sources? I'd like to read more about this.

Sources... hmm... O presume you mean about the issue of "seeing the elephant"?

The problem is, not matter how much and how thorough and how well the training is done, nobody knows how individuals will perform when they actually experience combat. The ones who can't handle it are actually a hazard in the battle field, but those who can are the ones who become your important, effective warriors.

The ones who can't handle it tend to get Post Traumatic Stress Disorder - aka PTSD - and that's something that can haunt a person for the rest of their life, so if you put someone not fit for combat into battle, then not only are they a hazard on the battlefield, but you've now created someone who's not going to be as functional as a member of society, and therefore you've done your society as disservice as well.

Consequently, that's one of the holy grails of recruiters... is to figure out how to tell at recruitment time is someone has the neurological makeup to be a good soldier, and it's just a fact that if somehow the neuropsychologiests were to discover that with the right training, gays made better solders, then in a second the recruiters would be zeroing in on those guys to get them signed up, with not one nanosecond of thought over whether or not it was popper of gays to be in the military.

The only thing that matters in war is to win, and the only thing you want is soldiers who can win battles.

The source was my neuropsych prof in university.

Yes, you know, sources places where I can verify your facts and learn more:
The studies on sexual orientation as a function of career,
The Canadian Navy murders,
The Alexander the Great allegation,

So your only source is what you remember from classroom lectures of a university professor? I'm disappointed as I would truly like to verify and research your answer. Oh well, My loss I guess.

S: "Yes, you know, sources places where I can verify your facts and learn more:"

R: Well, that's easy enough... just open your favorite search engine and enter the keywords.

S: "The studies on sexual orientation as a function of career,"

R: It was told to me by a drinking buddy who does career studies at one of the local universities. He knows I'm in IT, and he mentioned his study, and asked if I'd noticed the trend, and I shrugged and said something like, "Yeah, I'm not surpised... I've sorta noticed that a lot of the guys don't date women", and then he got a mischevious grin on his face and said, "Guess what number two is?". I said, "what?", and he said, "Military". We both had a laugh, and went on to talk about something else. That was about two years ago, so there's a good chance that it's been published by now, which means a simple search should find it.

S: "The Canadian Navy murders,"

R: They weren't classified as murders at the time... it was war, and there was still that gap in the mid-Atlantic where the German U-boats were able to move undetected by aerial reconiasance, so navy discipline was extreme at the time... and it was tied to the concept of being alert and always ready for action. This was told to me by a retired Naval officer I met in Ottawa during a trip there, when he and I got into a conversation over differences of methods of discipline between the US vs Canada/England/Austrailia/New-Zealand. He didn't say it was a policy, rather that it had been known to happen with those who had left their posts during the crossings the U-Boat zone, and who hadn't listened to their warnings.

Mostly, the point he wanted to make didn't really have anything to do with sexuality... it had to do with what we were really talking about, which was differences in the way that discipline was maintained, and really the point he wanted to make was that in England/Canada/Australia/New-Zealand they've never told their troops that they're supposed to love ther jobs, whereas in the US there seemed to be a tendancy to tell troops that they're supposed to be getting a real thrill out of being soldiers and sailers.

S: "The Alexander the Great allegation,"

R: That's not an "allegation". Alexander in no way tried to mask his bisexuality, nor did anyone else at the time.

S: "So your only source is what you remember from classroom lectures of a university professor? I'm disappointed as I would truly like to verify and research your answer. Oh well, My loss I guess."

R: Okay, look, I know that most of the guys I went to school with tended to forget what they'd learned two weeks after they'd written their final, but why's it a problem if I didn't? I went to school because I wanted to learn, and I didn't cram for exams, which is what causes people to forget what they were taught... I just listened and learned. That prof was standing up there teaching, and I learned it. Is it somehow less legitimate if it comes out of the mouth a professor teaching the stuff to a class than if... if what?

I've noticed a tendancy in Mahalo, and that's that if I just and answer a question because I happen to know the answer, people get upset, and seem to want to see lists of URL links.

To me, the reason for being here is to take a break from my normal duties, and just use it like a sort of Jeoprody, where it's entertaining to see if people are asking questions I happen to know the answer to, in which case it's usefull as mental excercice to keep the memory circuits alive, but it's almost like what's really expected here is for people who don't know the answer to jump onto search engines and find links to other people's comments about the question, such that the goal of Mahalo is to sift for people who are simply efficient search engine researchers.

Is that what it's for?

I'm sorry if that's sounding frustrated, but it's a pattern I'm seeing a lot on Mahalo. People want me to share my sources, so I do, and they get upset that it came out of memory, as if what was supposed to be happening is that I'm supposed to be reading a question that's interesting but which I not supposed to know the answer for, such that it's expected for me to go digging around the net with search engines, and then post links.

Is that the real objective of Mahalo... to produce a level of interwoven links, as a kind of human AI-supplemented search engine, as opposed to what would be called an Expert-System application in computer science?

If so, then someone should just say so. I thought it was a place to excercise memory and excercise the process of pulling bits and pieces of memory together to make new solutions. No?

I apologize if I'm missing something, but I don't know what to say when someone says, "Tell me your sources", and so I do, and they say, "Wrong kind." My professors, whom I paid to teach me, are now to be classified as invalid sources of information and learning?!?

What am I missing here?