Bush and Military Service
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| Tue, 02-10-2004 - 12:53pm |
Tuesday, February 10, 2004; Page A23
During the Vietnam War, I was what filmmaker Michael Moore would call a "deserter." Along with President Bush and countless other young men, I joined the National Guard, did my six months of active duty (basic training, etc.) and then returned to my home unit, where I eventually dropped from sight. In the end, just like President Bush, I got an honorable discharge. But unlike President Bush, I have just told the truth about my service. He hasn't.
At least I don't think so. Nothing about Bush during that period -- not his drinking, not his partying -- suggests that he was a consistently conscientious member of the Texas or Alabama Air National Guard. As it happens, there are no records to show that Bush reported for duty during the summer and fall of 1972. Nonetheless, Bush insists he was where he was supposed to be -- "Otherwise I wouldn't have been honorably discharged," Bush told Tim Russert. Please, sir, don't make me laugh.
It is sort of amazing that every four or eight years, Vietnam -- that long-ago war -- rears up from seemingly nowhere and comes to figure in the national political debate. In 1988 Dan Quayle had to answer for his National Guard service. In 1992 Bill Clinton had to grapple with the question of how he avoided the Vietnam-era draft. Now George Bush, who faced this question the last time out, has to face it again. The reason is that this time he is likely to compete against a genuine war hero. John Kerry did not duck the war.
But George Bush did. He did so by joining the National Guard. Bush now wants to drape the Vietnam-era Guard with the bloodied flag of today's Iraq-serving Guard -- "I wouldn't denigrate service to the Guard," Bush warned during his interview with Russert -- but the fact remained that back then the Guard was where you went if you did not want to fight. That was the case with me. I opposed the war in Vietnam and had no desire to fight it. Bush, on the other hand, says he supported the war -- as long, it seems, as someone else fought it.
It hardly matters what Bush did or did not do back in 1972. He is not the man now he was then -- that by his own admission. In the same way, it did not matter that Clinton ducked the draft, because, really, just about everyone I knew at the time was doing something similar. All that really matters is how one accounts for what one did. Do you tell the truth (which Clinton did not)? Or do you do what I think Bush has been doing, which is making his National Guard service into something it was not? In his case, it was a rich kid's way around the draft.
In my case, it was something similar -- although (darn!) I was not rich. I was, though, lucky enough to get into a National Guard unit in the nick of time, about a day before I was drafted. I did my basic and advanced training (combat engineer) and returned to my unit. I was supposed to attend weekly drills and summer camp, but I found them inconvenient. I "moved" to California and then "moved" back to New York, establishing a confusing paper trail that led, really, nowhere. For two years or so, I played a perfectly legal form of hooky. To show you what a mess the Guard was at the time, I even got paid for all the meetings I missed.
In the end, I wound up in the Army Reserve. I was assigned to units for which I had no training -- tank repairman, for instance. In some units, we sat around with nothing to do and in one we took turns delivering antiwar lectures. The National Guard and the Reserves were something of a joke. Everyone knew it. Books have been written about it. Maybe things changed dramatically by 1972, two years after I got my discharge, but I kind of doubt it.
I have no shame about my service, but I know it for what it was -- hardly the Charge of the Light Brigade. When Bush attempts to drape the flag of today's Guard over the one he was in so long ago, when he warns his critics to remember that "there are a lot of really fine people who have served in the National Guard and who are serving in the National Guard today in Iraq," then he is doing now what he was doing then: hiding behind the ones who were really doing the fighting. It's about time he grew up.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A27178-2004Feb9.html

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http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/11/politics/11BUSH.html
Bush Web Site Pulls Clips After NBC Complains (February 11, 2004)
Bush's National Guard Pay Records Are Released
By ELISABETH BUMILLER
Published: February 11, 2004
WASHINGTON, Feb. 10 — The White House released 18 months of President Bush's National Guard payroll records on Tuesday showing what administration officials asserted was proof that Mr. Bush had fully completed his service in the Guard during the Vietnam War.
But the records, which the White House obtained from blurry 30-year-old microfiche files in Colorado, show only the specific days in 1972 and 1973, 82 in all, that Mr. Bush was paid for his service.
Although Scott McClellan, the White Houses press secretary, the said the documents "clearly show that the president fulfilled his duties," he would not say, under repeated questioning at a contentious White House briefing that the records definitively prove that Mr. Bush reported for duty on those dates.
"These documents show the days on which he was paid," Mr. McClellan said. "That's what they show." The president, he said, "does recall showing up and performing his duties."
Mr. McClellan could not say why some of Mr. Bush's commanding officers did not recall his turning up on the dates he was paid, but he suggested they might have forgotten. "We're talking about 30 years ago," Mr. McClellan said.
The White House released the records under intense election-year pressure from the Democrats, who have accused a president who sent men and women into battle in Iraq and Afghanistan of shirking his own military duty during the Vietnam War. Terry McAuliffe, the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, has called Mr. Bush "AWOL" from the National Guard. John Kerry, a decorated Vietnam War veteran who is leading in the Democratic primaries, has repeatedly called on the president to answer questions about his record.
The White House has appeared to be caught off balance by the aggressiveness of the Democrats, who have put Mr. Bush in the rare defensive position of having to respond. Tim Russert of NBC kept the issue alive into this week, when he asked Mr. Bush in an interview on "Meet the Press" on Sunday if he would release all his military records. Mr. Bush, who was honorably discharged, replied almost offhandedly that he would.
"Yeah, if we still have them," Mr. Bush said.
Then the president added: "And I'm just telling you, I did my duty, and it's politics, you know, to kind of ascribe all kinds of motives to me. But I have been through it before. I'm used to it."
By Monday night, White House officials said they had obtained the payroll records, which they said they had not previously known were available, from the Air Reserve Personnel Center in Denver.
After the release of the records on Tuesday, Mr. Kerry then said he had no comment. "It's not my record that's at issue, and I don't have any questions about it," he told reporters between campaign stops in Tennessee and Virginia.
The records show that Mr. Bush did not report for service from mid-April to late October, 1972, a period when he was working as the campaign manager for Winton Blount, a Republican Senate candidate in Alabama and a friend of his father.
Mr. Bush never served in Vietnam. His service in the Guard has previously erupted as a political issue in his two campaigns for governor of Texas and his 2000 presidential campaign. Then, as now, the period in contention is May 1972 to May 1973, and where, when and how often Mr. Bush reported for duty during that time. What is indisputable is that for part of that year, from May 1972 through November 1972, Mr. Bush lived in Alabama to work on Blount's campaign. He received permission to train with an Alabama unit of the Guard while there, and has always said he reported for duty.
But one of Mr. Bush's commanding officers, Lt. Col. William Turnipseed, has said that while he is not sure, he does not remember Mr. Bush reporting for duty. The Alabama Guard, meanwhile, has no record of Mr. Bush's service in the state.
The payroll records released by the White House appear to shed some new, but not definitive, light on Mr. Bush's Alabama service. They show that he was paid for two dates in October 1972 and four days in November 1972. But they do not specifically say that he reported for duty in Alabama.
On Tuesday, Alabama Guard officials said that while they have no records of Mr. Bush reporting for duty, they would also not necessarily have those records. Officials at the time, they said, would have sent Mr. Bush's duty reports on to Texas.
In the winter of 1973, Mr. Bush was back in Texas, where his payroll records show that he was paid for six days in January, no days in February or March, two days in April, 14 days in May and five days in June
Mr. Bush then served 19 days in July before going to Harvard Business School that fall. Although he still had about six months left in his six-year service, Mr. Bush told Mr. Russert that he "worked it out with the military."
Mr. Bush's spokesmen have always said that he made up the many training dates he missed, and that he would not have been honorably discharged unless he had done so. To support that claim on Tuesday, the White House made public some documents that it also released in response to inquiries in 2000; they show that Mr. Bush had accumulated his required retirement points, based on his service, in 1972 and 1973.
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Mr. Bush acquired 56 service points in each year, the documents showed; the minimum requirement is 50 points.
The documents were reviewed, the White House said, by Albert C. Lloyd, a retired lieutenant colonel in the Guard who assisted the Bush campaign in releasing Mr. Bush's records in 2000. The documents on Tuesday included Lt. Col. Lloyd's declaration that Mr. Bush "completed his military obligation in a satisfactory manner."
Guard officials said on Tuesday that is possible to have as many missed dates as Mr. Bush did and still make them up, as long as a member talks over the absences with his or her commander. Guard members also say that it was possible to be paid in 1972 and 1973 without actually turning up for the service dates because of relaxed record keeping at the time.
Back in 1972, the Alabama National Guard had about 19,500 members, with fewer than 3,000 of those members serving in the Alabama Air National Guard. The 187th Tactical Reconnaissance Group, the air unit Mr. Bush was expected to report to in September 1972, but did not at the time, is based at Dannelly Air National Guard Base in Montgomery.
According to those same reports, it was rare, though not unheard of, for Alabama guard members to be disciplined for failing to show up for training. In 1972, for example, 43 Alabama guard members were disciplined for "continuous absence from drills," the records state. The records, however, do not identify those disciplined.
On "Meet the Press," Mr. Bush said emphatically that he had shown up for service in Alabama.
"There may be no evidence, but I did report," he said. "Otherwise, I wouldn't have been honorably discharged. In other words, you don't just say `I did something' without there being verification. Military doesn't work that way. I got an honorable discharge, and I did show up in Alabama."
Mr. McClellan said again on Tuesday, as he has since the Democrats first leveled the charges, that calling Mr. Bush "AWOL" — or a "deserter" as the director Michael Moore did with Wesley K. Clark at his side — was an "outrageous, baseless accusation." Mr. Bush's opponents, Mr. McClellan said, are "clearly more interested in twisting the facts to seek partisan political advantage in the context of an election year."
David A. Barstow contributed reporting for this article.
HENRY HYDE, THE MAN WHO WILL SIT IN JUDGMENT ON PRESIDENT CLINTON, CONFIRMS THAT HE CARRIED ON A SECRET AFFAIR
http://www.salon.com/news/1998/09/cov_16newsb.html
Now Livingston's Past Becomes an Issue
ost.com/wp-srv/politics/special/clinton/stories/livingston121898.htm
I think they were miffed because the "proof" turned out to be meaningless.
From today's (2/11/04) NY Times editorial page:
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/11/opinion/11WED1.html
The President's Guard Service
If President Bush thought that his release of selected payroll and service records would quell the growing controversy over whether he ducked some of his required service in the Air National Guard three decades ago, he is clearly mistaken. The payroll records released yesterday document that he performed no guard duties at all for more than half a year in 1972 and raise questions about how he could be credited with at least 14 days of duty during subsequent periods when his superior officers in two units said they had not seen him.
Investigative reporting by The Boston Globe, our sibling newspaper, revealed in 2000 that Mr. Bush had reported for duty and flown regularly in his first four Texas Guard years but dropped off the Guard's radar screen when he went to Alabama to work on a senatorial campaign. The payroll records show that he was paid for many days of duty in the first four months of 1972, when he was in Texas, but then went more than six months without being paid, virtually the entire time he was working on the Senate campaign in Alabama. That presumably means he never reported for duty during that period.
Mr. Bush was credited with 14 days of service at unspecified locations between Oct. 28, 1972, and the end of April 1973. The commanding officer of the Alabama unit to which Mr. Bush was supposed to report long ago said that he had never seen him appear for duty, and Mr. Bush's superiors at the Texas unit to which he returned wrote in May 1973 that they could not write an annual evaluation of him because he had not been seen there during that year. Those statements are so jarringly at odds with the payroll data that they demand further elaboration. A Guard memo prepared for the White House by a former Guard official says Mr. Bush earned enough points to fulfill his duty but leaves it unclear whether he got special treatment.
The issue is not whether Mr. Bush, like many sons of the elite in his generation, sought refuge in the Guard to avoid combat in Vietnam. The public knew about that during the 2000 campaign. Whether Mr. Bush actually performed his Guard service to the full is a different matter. It bears on presidential character because the president has continually rejected claims that there was anything amiss about his Guard performance during the Alabama period. Mr. Bush himself also made the issue of military service fair game by posturing as a swashbuckling pilot when welcoming a carrier home from Iraq. Now, the president needs to make a fuller explanation of how he spent his last two years in the Guard.
Everyone has a bias and is shows in writing. For me this is just another piece of information in how to view an article. It's all spin!!!
SO!!! Obviously you have a different opinion, I'll accept that but it doesn't invalidate the views expressed.
Even the Boston Globe which was the source of the original story is now satisfied.
Renee
Throw as I say, not as I do: On that same day he led members of VVAW in a protest during which they threw their medals and ribbons over a fence in front of the U.S. Capitol.
Kerry later admitted the medals he threw were not his. To this day they hang on the wall of his office.
I am in the military and I think what we are doing in Iraq is the right thing to do. And I don't say that because I am some mindless military warmonger (its amazing how many people think the only reason I support the war just because I am in the military and obviously I can't think for myself) but because I believe the people in that country are far better off with Sadaam Hussein gone, and we are safer as a nation with him gone.
Having said that, I don't dispute anyones right to protest but if you really believe in something then you don't do it halfway. Don't pretend to throw your medals away, really throw them away. If the experience disgusted him that much, those medals shouldn't be hanging on display in a box for all to see. Apparently he was somewhat proud of what he did in Vietnam because those medals he "threw away" are on still display in his office.
<> With Bush's recent track of misleading the American people the Republicans aren't any position to quibble about truth right now.
<> Au contraire! Republicans are the most guilty of waving their arms around and (genteel shutter) shouting. Quote from Time magazine "Sunday, Nov. 26, 2000
Marjorie Strayer insisted she was just a Virginian on vacation in Miami. She had come to the downtown Stephen P. Clark Government Center to watch the Dade County vote recount — something to do before the trip to the Seaquarium. But Strayer, it turns out, is a top aide to New Mexico's Republican congresswoman, Heather Wilson, and was one of hundreds of paid GOP crusaders who descended on South Florida last Wednesday to protest the state's recounts. "The system is unfair, inaccurate, fraught with human error!" Strayer cried. In a Winnebago outside, GOP operatives orchestrated the ranks up to the 19th floor, hoping to halt the tally of the largest potential lode of Gore votes. Republicans, not usually known for takin' it to the streets, got what they wanted. Just two hours after a near riot outside the counting room, the Miami-Dade canvassing board voted to shut down the count. Yet the way the Republicans went after it, by intimidating the three-member board or by providing the excuse it was looking for, gave Americans the first TV view of strong-arm tactics in what was supposed to be a showcase of democracy in action. If Jesse Jackson can do it, the Republicans argued, so can we. But the GOP's march turned into a mob. The screaming, the pounding on doors and the alleged physical assaults on Democrats suddenly made a bemused public queasy. "I'm all for anyone's right to protest," says Miami-Dade Democratic chairman Joe Geller, who had to have a police escort. "These were Brownshirt tactics." It was the Dade vote counters, however, who provoked the Republican machine. Seemingly oblivious to GOP anger over the Florida Supreme Court ruling to allow manual recounts, the canvassing board tried an end run around the court's Sunday deadline by deciding to recount only some 11,000 of Dade's 654,000 ballots. Those disputed ballots, most of which did not register presidential votes in the machines, were thought to favor Gore. Worse, the board moved into a smaller room that cut off public observation. "They denied our legal rights," says Paul Crespo, an ex-Marine and coordinator of a group called Young Professionals for Bush. "We cried foul." In fact, the Republicans, who justifiably delight in throwing 1960s chants back at Democrats, began shouting, "The whole world is watching!"
What the world watched was a GOP melee. When Geller walked out of the room with a sample ballot, the crowd accused him of stealing a real one and responded as if he had just nabbed a baby for its organs. Geller says he was pushed by two dozen protesters screaming, "I'm gonna take you down!" Luis Rosero, a Democratic observer, claims he was punched and kicked. Republicans dispute the charges, but video cameras caught scenes of activism that had morphed into menace. The organizers in the RV outside, who GOP protesters have told TIME were led by hardball Washington strategist Roger Stone, had phone banks churning out calls to Miami Republicans, urging them to storm downtown". Freepers make plans online to go out and wave their arms around aand shout rude slogans all the time to demonstrate against one Democrat or another.
All politicians have some sort of scandal to hide....if you want to compare ghosts, I would hate to visit Kerry's graveyard.
C
My War
By LARRY DAVID
LOS ANGELES
I couldn't be happier that President Bush has stood up for having served in the National Guard, because I can finally put an end to all those who questioned my motives for enlisting in the Army Reserve at the height of the Vietnam War. I can't tell you how many people thought I had signed up just to avoid going to Vietnam. Nothing could be further from the truth. If anything, I was itching to go over there. I was just out of college and, let's face it, you can't buy that kind of adventure. More important, I wanted to do my part in saving that tiny country from the scourge of Communism. We had to draw the line somewhere, and if not me, then who?
But I also knew that our country was being torn asunder by opposition to the war. Who would be here to defend the homeland against civil unrest? Or what if some national emergency should arise? We needed well-trained men on the ready to deal with any situation. It began to dawn on me that perhaps my country needed me more at home than overseas. Sure, being a reservist wasn't as glamorous, but I was the one who had to look at myself in the mirror.
Even though the National Guard and Army Reserve see combat today, it rankles me that people assume it was some kind of waltz in the park back then. If only. Once a month, for an entire weekend — I'm talking eight hours Saturday and Sunday — we would meet in a dank, cold airplane hangar. The temperature in that hangar would sometimes get down to 40 degrees, and very often I had to put on long underwear, which was so restrictive I suffered from an acute vascular disorder for days afterward. Our captain was a strict disciplinarian who wouldn't think twice about not letting us wear sneakers or breaking up a poker game if he was in ill humor. Once, they took us into the woods and dropped us off with nothing but compasses and our wits. One wrong move and I could've wound up on Queens Boulevard. Fortunately, I had the presence of mind to find my way out of there and back to the hangar. Some of my buddies did not fare as well and had to call their parents to come and get them.
Then in the summer we would go away to camp for two weeks. It felt more like three. I wondered if I'd ever see my parakeet again. We slept on cots and ate in the International House of Pancakes. I learned the first night that IHOP's not the place to order fish. When the two weeks were up, I came home a changed man. I would often burst into tears for no apparent reason and suffered recurring nightmares about drowning in blueberry syrup. If I hadn't been so strapped for cash, I would've sought the aid of a psychiatrist.
In those days, reserve duty lasted for six years, which, I might add, was three times as long as service in the regular army, although to be perfectly honest, I was unable to fulfill my entire obligation because I was taking acting classes and they said I could skip my last year. I'll always be eternally grateful to the Pentagon for allowing me to pursue my dreams.
Still, after all this time, whenever I've mentioned my service in the Reserve during Vietnam, it's been met with sneers and derision. But now, thanks to President Bush, I can stand up proudly alongside him and all the other guys who guarded the home front. Finally, we no longer have to be embarrassed about our contribution during those very trying years.
Larry David, who served in the Army Reserve in the 1970's, appears in the HBO series "Curb Your Enthusiasm."
http://nytimes.com/2004/02/15/opinion/15DAVI.html
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