BETRAYED BY THE VA Thomas Alan Bowman Sr. asked his country for help. He got silence. Sign the demand →
Dear Doug Collins

Margaret Witt: The Poster Nurse, the Outing, and the Standard That Bears Her Name

Margaret Witt did everything the Air Force asked, and the Air Force said so, in writing, for years: superb evaluations, a chest of medals, selection as the literal face of Air Force nursing — the flight nurse on the recruitment flyer. In 2004, a man who was not in her chain of command, not in her unit, and not in the military at all sent an email to the Air Force Chief of Staff about her private life, and the institution that had put her on its posters began throwing her out under "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" — not for anything she did on duty, in uniform, or on base, but for who she was at home, some 250 miles from it. She was, by the account the Ninth Circuit recorded, less than a year short of the twenty years of service that would have earned her a full retirement pension. Witt fought for seven years, and her fight changed the law's terms for everyone behind her: the government would have to prove, person by person, that a discharge was necessary. When it finally had to try, in September 2010, it could not. This page is the record.

The service and the promise

Margaret Witt graduated from Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma in 1986 with a degree in nursing and was commissioned a second lieutenant in the Air Force in 1987, according to the ACLU of Washington, which later represented her, and to the federal courts that heard her case. VA’s profile of her service records eight years on active duty as a flight nurse and operating room nurse, including service in 1991 as an operating room nurse during Operation Desert Storm at the Wiesbaden Regional Medical Center in Germany. She was promoted to first lieutenant in 1989, to captain in 1991, and to major in 1999 — the dates are set out in the district court’s 2010 memorandum opinion in her case — and she logged nearly 2,000 flight hours.

In 1993 — the same year Congress enacted the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” statute, 10 U.S.C. § 654 — the Air Force selected her as the face of its Nurse Corps recruitment flyer, the “poster child,” in the ACLU’s phrase, for the campaign urging nurses to join. In 1995 she transferred from active duty to the Air Force Reserve and was assigned, as a flight nurse, to the aeromedical evacuation squadron at McChord Air Force Base near Tacoma — designated the 40th Aeromedical Evacuation Squadron when she joined it, later the 446th, as the trial court described it. The court’s findings fix her active participation in the 446th Aeromedical Evacuation Squadron from December 1995 to November 2004. The squadron’s mission, the court wrote, is to convert cargo aircraft into flying intensive care units and transport wounded and injured personnel throughout the military’s medical system, on worldwide deployment at any time.

Her record in that squadron was not adequate; it was, in the words used across the official and court records, exemplary. The trial court’s opinion lists her decorations: the Meritorious Service Medal, the Air Medal, the Aerial Achievement Medal, the Air Force Commendation Medal, and numerous other awards, with annual officer performance reports that were “routinely high.” She was selected as the squadron’s Chief of Standards and Evaluation — the officer responsible for evaluating the other flight nurses — based, the court found, on her knowledge of the regulations and her leadership skills; her fellow flight nurses acknowledged her “superior job skills, a calm demeanor under pressure and the ability to coalesce her subordinates into an effective, proficient team.” The ACLU’s case record adds that she served in Oman during Operation Enduring Freedom and received an Air Medal whose citation, endorsed by President Bush, noted that she had delivered “outstanding medical care” to injured service members and that her “outstanding aerial accomplishments … reflect great credit upon herself and the United States Air Force”; that in 2003 she received another medal for saving the life of a Department of Defense employee who had collapsed aboard a government-chartered flight from Bahrain; and that in 2003 she was named her squadron’s Officer of the Quarter. VA also records a deployment for Operation Southern Watch.

The promise, for an officer like Witt, has a specific shape. The Air Force recruited with her face. It evaluated her, decorated her, promoted her, and entrusted her with judging the proficiency of every other flight nurse in one of its best evacuation squadrons. In return, the institution’s side of the bargain was that her career would be decided by that record — and not by her private life at home in Spokane, which she had never once disclosed to anyone in uniform. The record shows what the institution did instead: it took the word of an outsider’s email over eighteen years of its own evaluations. The ACLU of Washington’s final account of her case describes an 18-year career; some of its releases during the litigation said nineteen. The dated spine is not in dispute: commissioned in 1987, suspended in 2004, discharged effective October 1, 2007.

What happened

Witt never told. The Ninth Circuit’s opinion states it plainly: while serving in the Air Force, she never told any member of the military that she was homosexual, and she never engaged in homosexual acts on base. From 1997 to 2003 she was in a committed relationship with a civilian woman, and starting in October 2003 she was in a relationship with Laurie McChesney, who was then married to Pat McChesney; the couple shared a home in Spokane, roughly 250 miles from McChord. In June 2004, according to the district court’s findings of fact, Pat McChesney sent an email to the Air Force Chief of Staff stating that Witt had engaged in a romantic relationship with his then-wife. That email — a third party’s disclosure about a private, off-duty, off-base life — was the “tell” the policy required. Witt herself had said nothing to anyone.

The machinery moved on the email, not on her record. In July 2004 an Air Force major, Adam Torem, contacted her to say he had been assigned to investigate an allegation that she was homosexual; she declined to make a statement, and declined as well to speak with an Air Force chaplain who contacted her about her homosexuality. On November 9, 2004, she received the memorandum that ended her working career: formal separation proceedings were being initiated on account of her homosexuality, and pending their resolution she could engage in no “pay or point” activity — she could not be paid as a reservist, could not earn points toward promotion, and could not earn points toward retirement. The Ninth Circuit’s opinion records what that timing cost her: when she received the memorandum, she was less than one year short of twenty years of service, at which time she would have earned a right to a full Air Force retirement pension. The same opinion notes the suspension’s other consequence: it seriously harmed her chances of promotion to colonel.

Sixteen months later, on March 6, 2006, a second memorandum notified her that a discharge action was being initiated on account of her homosexuality. The ACLU of Washington took her case. On April 12, 2006, she filed suit in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington, arguing that “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” violated her substantive and procedural due process rights and her right to equal protection. On July 26, 2006, District Judge Ronald B. Leighton dismissed the case, applying the deferential rational-basis review that prior precedent had used. Her discharge board finally sat on September 28 and 29, 2006 and recommended that she be discharged under the policy. On July 12, 2007, the Secretary of the Air Force’s designee directed that she receive an honorable discharge, effective October 1, 2007; her discharge certificate, the trial court later found, contained no stigmatizing language or coding. The characterization was honorable. The career was over anyway, the retirement she had nearly reached was gone, and the reason was a statute under which the government had never been asked to show that her service had harmed anything at all.

That was the question her appeal put to the Ninth Circuit, and on May 21, 2008, the court answered it in the decision that made her name a legal standard: Witt v. Department of the Air Force, 527 F.3d 806 (9th Cir. 2008).

What the institution did afterward

The Ninth Circuit’s holding deserves to be stated exactly, because it is the hinge of the whole case. Reading the Supreme Court’s decision in Lawrence v. Texas (2003), the court held that the old rational-basis review of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” no longer stood: Lawrence had applied “something more than traditional rational basis review,” and so would the Ninth Circuit. The test it announced — the as-applied, heightened-scrutiny test now known as the “Witt standard” — has three parts. When the government attempts to intrude upon the personal and private lives of homosexuals in a manner that implicates the rights identified in Lawrence, the government must (1) advance an important governmental interest, (2) show that the intrusion significantly furthers that interest, and (3) show that the intrusion is necessary to further it — in other words, that a less intrusive means would be unlikely to achieve substantially the government’s interest. And the analysis is as-applied, not facial: the trial court on remand was directed to determine “not whether [the policy] has some hypothetical, post hoc rationalization in general, but whether a justification exists for the application of the policy as applied to Major Witt.” Generalized assertions about gay service members in the abstract would no longer be enough; the Air Force would have to prove that discharging this nurse hurt this unit — or that keeping her would. The court affirmed the dismissal of her equal protection claim and held her procedural due process claim not yet ripe. The Obama administration let the deadline to seek Supreme Court review pass in 2009, leaving Witt standing as binding law in the Ninth Circuit and sending the case back to Judge Leighton for the trial the standard required. At her confirmation hearings that era, Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan discussed the significance of the Witt standard, as the ACLU of Washington noted at the time.

The trial ran in Tacoma from September 13 to September 21, 2010 — six days of testimony, in the ACLU’s count. What the government had to prove, under its own theory of the statute, was that Witt’s presence damaged unit morale, good order, discipline, and cohesion. What the evidence showed, the court found, was the opposite. Members and former members of the 446th testified, in the court’s summary, “persuasively that serving with Margaret Witt and other known or suspected gay and lesbian service members did not adversely affect unit morale and cohesion. To the contrary, it was Major Witt’s suspension and ultimate discharge that caused a loss of morale throughout the squadron.” The court’s memorandum opinion is blunt about the record it was left with: “There is no evidence that wounded troops care about the sexual orientation of the flight nurse or medical technician tending to their wounds.” And about the plaintiff: “The evidence before the Court is that Major Margaret Witt was an exemplary officer. She was an effective leader, a caring mentor, a skilled clinician, and an integral member of an effective team. Her loss within the squadron resulted in a diminution of the unit’s ability to carry out its mission. Good flight nurses are hard to find.”

On September 24, 2010, Judge Leighton issued his findings of fact, conclusions of law, and a fifteen-page memorandum opinion (739 F. Supp. 2d 1308). The findings hold that no credible evidence indicated that Witt’s sexual orientation had ever had a negative effect on the morale, order, discipline, or cohesion of the 446th, or that her reinstatement would harm the 446th or any other Air Force unit. The conclusion of law follows directly: “Because it was not necessary to discharge Major Margaret Witt in order to prevent a negative impact on unit cohesion, morale, order or discipline, her discharge violated her substantive due process rights.” The judgment ordered her restored “to her position as a Flight Nurse with the 446th AES as soon as is practicable.” One part of her case she lost, and this page keeps it on the record: the court dismissed her procedural due process claim — she had received notice and a full discharge board hearing, and an honorable discharge carries no stigma of the kind that triggers the doctrine. Her victory was substantive, not procedural: the Constitution did not merely require the Air Force to process her fairly on its way to discharging her; on the facts proved, it forbade the discharge itself. “I want to serve my country,” Witt said that day. “Wounded people never asked me about my sexual orientation. They were just glad to see me.”

The institution’s response to losing was split, and both halves are documented. On November 23, 2010, the government appealed the ruling to the Ninth Circuit — but it did not ask for a stay of the reinstatement order, which meant that, as the ACLU put it, Witt would become the first openly gay person to serve in the military by court order under “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” She prepared to return, telling reporters she hoped to rejoin her reserve unit as early as her regular December drill weekend, and soon to be known “just as a flight nurse, instead of a lesbian flight nurse.” But the Air Force did not put her back on duty; as KNKX Public Radio reported when the case ended, the military did not restore her to her unit while the appeal and the negotiations ran. Meanwhile the political branch finished what her litigation had started. She was in the audience in Washington on December 22, 2010, when President Obama signed the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell Repeal Act of 2010, Public Law 111-321. On May 10, 2011, the final settlement of her lawsuit was announced: the government would drop its appeal, the unlawful discharge would be removed from her military service record, and she would retire — as a major, with full benefits. VA’s account states the choice plainly: she chose to accept full retirement benefits instead of returning to the Air Force. “For the past seven years, I have been fighting for my rights and the rights of other lesbians and gays in the military,” she said at the settlement. “I wish I could have spent that time serving with my peers.” The repeal she had attended the signing of was certified by the President, the Secretary of Defense, and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs on July 22, 2011, and took effect sixty days later, on September 20, 2011. The statute under which she had been discharged ceased to exist four months after her settlement.

For the thousands discharged in her era, the institution’s amends came later and more slowly. By the Defense Department’s own accounting, some 13,500 service members were administratively separated under “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” and close to 2,000 of them received less-than-honorable characterizations that barred VA health care, home loans, and education benefits. For more than a decade after repeal, correction was individual: each veteran had to learn that a discharge review existed and apply. Only in September 2023 did the department announce it would review cases proactively, without an application, and on October 15, 2024, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin announced the completed results: the review boards had directed relief in 96.8 percent of the 851 cases proactively reviewed — some 823 veterans upgraded — bringing, by the department’s figure, about 96 percent of all those separated under the policy to an honorable characterization. The review covered the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” era; veterans discharged before 1994, under the outright ban that preceded the statute, were left to the old individual process.

Where it stands now

For Margaret Witt personally, the fight is complete, and its terms are on paper: the May 2011 settlement retired her as a major with full benefits, ended the government’s appeal of the ruling in her favor, and removed the unlawful discharge from her service record. The standard her case created outlived the statute it tested. Witt was never taken to the Supreme Court; within the Ninth Circuit it remained the governing framework for as-applied challenges until repeal made the question moot, and it is still the case lawyers cite for the proposition that, after Lawrence, the government must justify an intrusion into private life with evidence about the person in front of it — not with assertions about a class. She told her story in full in Tell: Love, Defiance, and the Military Trial at the Tipping Point for Gay Rights (2017, with Tim Connor, foreword by Colonel Margarethe Cammermeyer — whose own discharge fight a generation earlier had been carried by the same ACLU of Washington cooperating attorney, James Lobsenz, who represented Witt). After the settlement she earned a doctor of physical therapy from Temple University in 2012, per VA, and worked as a rehabilitation coordinator at the VA hospital in Spokane. VA’s current profile places her in Portland, Oregon, living with her wife and working as the supervisor of rehabilitation services at the Portland VA Medical Center.

What the settlement could not give back is also part of the record, and she has never pretended otherwise: the seven years from the November 2004 suspension memorandum to the May 2011 settlement were years she did not fly, did not serve with the 446th, and did not advance. The Ninth Circuit noted in 2008 that the suspension had cost her pay, promotion points, and retirement points and had seriously harmed her chances of promotion to colonel. She retired at the rank she had held since 1999. The institution eventually conceded, in a courtroom and then in a settlement, that her discharge had been unnecessary and unconstitutional and that her record should not carry it. It has never had a mechanism for returning the career itself.

Systemically, as of October 2026, the accounting is the one the 2024 review left. The “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” population has been substantially — not completely — made whole on paper: about 96 percent now hold honorable characterizations, by the Defense Department’s own figure, most because individuals applied over the years and some 823 because the department finally went and found them in 2023–24. The pre-1994 ban-era population has had no equivalent proactive review and must still apply individually, and the narrative reasons and separation codes that once flagged a service member’s file for homosexuality are not, on the public record, uniformly corrected even where the characterization has been upgraded. The policy that produced Witt’s discharge is gone; the paperwork it left in other veterans’ files is still being cleaned up one application at a time — the precise burden her case established the government, not the service member, should have had to carry all along.

The ledger

The accounting, in three lines — what the record shows has been done, what it shows has not, and what is still being sought.

What has been done

What has not been done

What is being sought

The record, on video

Witt’s own case was argued in courtrooms and decided on paper, and the cameras arrived at the end of the policy rather than at her trial. Two films frame that ending, both from the White House’s own record: a service member who had fought the same machinery a generation earlier, reflecting a year after repeal, and the President who signed the repeal, marking the first Pride Month after it took effect.

A year after repeal. Retired Navy Commander Zoe Dunning — who had herself beaten a discharge case in the 1990s and then spent eighteen years campaigning for repeal — reflects for the White House a year after "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" ended: the repeal Witt's lawsuit helped force, in the voice of another generation's fight. (The White House.)

The signing hand, a year on. President Obama's Pride Month video message of June 2012 — the first after repeal took effect — recounting the change as one ordinary people and unsung heroes demanded, the frame in which Witt's seven-year case sits in the official record. (The White House.)

Sources

Part of Betrayed, Not Forgotten — this site's accounting for the service members and veterans their own institutions failed. Videos are embedded from their publishers; nothing here is re-hosted.