SAN DIEGO -- Some local veterans believe the “don’t ask, don’t tell” law is a step closer to being repealed.

“It’s time,” Stewart Bornhoft, a 1969 West Point graduate. “Long well past time.”

Bornhoft commanded a combat engineering battalion in Vietnam before returning stateside and retiring as a colonel in the army. He said “don’t ask, don’t tell” is not about gays serving in the military.

“Gays have been serving in the military since the revolutionary war,” he said. “There are over 66-thousand of them currently in the military.”

While she served in the Navy, Lisa Kove said her secret was out but it did not matter.

“Everybody understood, nobody cared,” she said. “They didn’t care then and that was in 1982 that I left the military. What they cared about was the job that I did.”

She said she did not have a problem until she left the military.

“Once I became a civilian, I had to go into the closet deep working for the Department of Defense,” said Kove.

While some members of Congress continue to try to overturn “don’t ask, don’t tell,” the military continues to study the impact of repealing the law, which some such as Rep. Duncan Hunter believe will be detrimental.

“If you overturn ‘don't ask, don't tell’ it's going to rip that fabric of cohesiveness that we have in the military right now,” said Hunter, a former Iraq War veteran, in an interview in February.

Bornhoft believes just the opposite will happen.

“Those who have been fired for not doing anything wrong, for just being who they are, many of them will join back up,” he said.

Jenny Hopfstein, whose career in the Navy ended when she came out, said she would do just that.

“I want to get back into the military because I'm an American too and I want to serve,” she said.

A vote on the repeal could take place as early as Thursday, but if it passed, it would not go into effect until the Pentagon study finishes in December.