A new study by the Defense Manpower Data Center has found the military discharged 770 people last year because they were gay under the Pentagon’s ’don’t ask, don’t tell policy’. The majority of the discharged were enlisted personnel. This comes at a time that the military is issuing stop orders to prevent thousands of soldiers from retiring or returning home from Iraq. Hundreds of the discharged were specialists including 88 linguists, seven of whom spoke Arabic 39 specialists who worked on nuclear, chemical and biological warfare were dismissed as were 90 nuclear power engineers.