They kid him about it frequently. "The other day CNN was broadcasting Pride," he says, referring to the gay Millennium March on Washington in April. "And some of the guys were like, 'Hey Brett, man, Pride!'" "Yeah, I was there!" he says he shot back.

He'll typically disarm them with cracks like, "You know me: I like boys," or "I've been trying to get you to go out with me, Hank."

It's the only way to deal with it, agrees Alex, the bookish Marine captain. "Someone will make a joke about being gay or some kind of deviant behavior, and I'm like: 'Hey, that doesn't count! Everybody does that in college.'"

The banter actually reduces the danger, they say. If they were ever confronted publicly, they would be well-practiced in defusing the issue; and a persistent accuser who refused to play along would find himself out of step with convention.

So far, none of the captains has had to face a direct accusation, but they're sobered by the possibility. Drake is characteristically brash and animated: "No one would ever approach it like, 'Hey, are you fucking this guy?'" he says.

It's hard to picture anyone confronting the big, blustery Army captain so boldly. But he softens as he describes his deceptions, contemplates what might really be running through their heads. He scrounges up a date whenever he can for official functions, shows up stag perhaps 50 percent of the time. It's a better showing than his buddies Brett and Alex, but is it good enough to keep the straight guys fooled? "Certainly the lesser of two evils is to have your peers know about it and no one say anything, than to have them confront me with it and force my hand,'" he says.

Brett and Alex echo the same deep sense of foreboding. Alex is reflective, as always, but he seems strangely unprepared for the eventual encounter. "I don't know how I'd handle it if someone ever did ask me," he says. "I'd want to plead the Fifth, but I wouldn't know how to delicately do it." Considering their elaborate subterfuges -- which Alex refers to as his "counter-surveillance techniques" -- it's surprising to hear they wouldn't simply deny it. They seem to despise the deception almost as much as they fear the exposure -- and they hope to draw the line at outright denial.

"That's the worst part of it, the sneaking and hiding," Drake says. "I chose this life because of the honor, the integrity and the ethics of people I'd be working with. Yes, we really do believe this shit. It's not just something you make up for recruiting. It's really a matter of life or death for us. The unfortunate reality was I didn't realize what was going on with me sexually at the time."

But Drake and Alex shock me with their own ambivalence about the right of gay men and women to serve openly in the military. "Until you see man-to-man couples walking down the street hand in hand in Colorado Springs, it's not going to happen in the Army," Drake says. "I don't think you can separate the moral from the gross."

While Brett finds "don't ask, don't tell" ridiculous, Alex comes down somewhere in the middle -- toward Drake's side of the middle. "I wish we could get everybody not to be homophobic, but that's not the reality," he says. "It's better left undisclosed."

But he's frustrated by some of the policy's implementation -- particularly the arbitrariness of activities deemed to be "telling" -- and disgusted by continuing investigations. "The witch hunts are ridiculous," he says.

Yet they all agree that lying and deception about their sexuality are profoundly disturbing because the essence of their role as officers is to lead by example. "My conflict is, it's hard to be who I am," Brett says. "As a leader, as a commander, you have to enforce the rules. Any rule" -- including the underlying rules in the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ) outlawing just about every form of gay sex. Brett realizes he's breaking the law each time he slides into bed with a man, regardless of Congress' 1993 law exempting him from prosecution for his crimes so long as he keeps his mouth shut.

The same UCMJ provision includes seldom-enforced language banning oral sex between a husband and wife, a double standard that frustrates Brett terribly but does nothing to diminish his own ethical dilemma.

"It's hard to be standing in front of people and acting like I am not [gay], and at the same time, having to enforce the rule" he says. "You have to set the standards, and that's a big conflict for me ... If you can't stand in front of your people, and act as that person, then you're a fricking hypocrite."

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