Bush and Military Service

iVillage Member
Registered: 04-16-2003
Bush and Military Service
134
Tue, 02-10-2004 - 12:53pm
By Richard Cohen

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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iVillage Member
Registered: 03-31-2003
Sun, 02-15-2004 - 5:28pm
<> Ooh! What's Bush hiding?

I was just objecting to the mood in the thread that only Democratic politicians are guilty of cheating on their wives.

iVillage Member
Registered: 03-18-2000
Sun, 02-15-2004 - 5:30pm

Glad Larry David can hold his head up proudly now.

 


Photobucket&nbs

iVillage Member
Registered: 03-31-2003
Sun, 02-15-2004 - 5:52pm
You've forgotten two things: first, it was President George H.W. Bush who began the process to normalize relations with Vietnam in 1991. The article you posted makes it sound like John Kerrry snowed the Senate into the idea to so he could profit on real estate deals. And second, Kerry worked side by side with Republican Senator John McCain on the POW & MIA issue.

http://www.heretaunga.school.nz/dept/history/VIETNAM/chronolo.HTM

Avatar for car_al
iVillage Member
Registered: 03-25-2003
Mon, 02-16-2004 - 1:49pm
Yes, the marriage exemption for the DRAFT, before it was eliminated, was a real marriage promoter at that time.

C

iVillage Member
Registered: 03-26-2003
Tue, 02-17-2004 - 10:32am
>> I was just objecting to the mood in the thread that only Democratic politicians are guilty of cheating on their wives.

Nah, they are only guilty of getting caught at the wrong time.... LOL

iVillage Member
Registered: 07-25-2003
Tue, 02-17-2004 - 11:54am
He obviously wasn't a pilot. They spent their first 2 years of their 6 year commitment in full time service (the same amount of time as a tour of duty in Vietnam).

Back then, it was so difficult to find young men who would/could make that committment that there was no waiting list for anyone who signed up to be a pilot, and the documents that were released last weekent show that, contrary to leftist cant, Bush didn't receive any special favors to get in.

Additionally, people who wanted to avoid being sent to Vietnam, didn't sign up to be a pilot because there was a high probability that they would would be sent to Vietnam. They also didn't join a unit that was at the time in combat in Vietnam or request to be sent there (as a fellow pilot has verified Bush did) afer training when the unit had been sent back home. They also, as a rule, didn't specifically ask to fly one of the most difficult and complicated planes in the AF or one of the most dangerous which had a high casualty rate just in training.

Renee

Avatar for car_al
iVillage Member
Registered: 03-25-2003
Wed, 02-18-2004 - 1:27pm
It was always said that old men sent young men to war, but the difference in the past was that the old men almost always had personal combat experience. Now we have men with no personal combat experience sending men & women into battle. I find it telling that those with the most hawkish stance were never in combat – not even in the proximity of actual warfare.

As far as Pres. Bush wanting to see actual combat, I think he clearly did not.

“I was not prepared to shoot my eardrum out with a shotgun in order to get a deferment. Nor was I willing to go to Canada," Bush explained to The Dallas Morning News back in 1990. "So I chose to better myself by learning how to fly airplanes."

As Bush was heading back to Texas to, as New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd once wickedly wrote, "help defend Texas from Oklahoma," Kerry was going into the Mekong Delta.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4271520/

If I were advising the Bush campaign, I would tell them to not play up his "military service" - it's a lose/lose situation.

C

iVillage Member
Registered: 03-18-2000
Wed, 02-18-2004 - 1:42pm

Bush seems to have had a couple of nicknames, maybe more.............


Quote from your article.........


>"Bush had a quality prized by Andover boys of that era: sarcastic humor. Everyone had a nickname at Andover; Bush's was "Lip"."<


Quote from Time mag..........


>"George W. Bush has long had a habit of giving people nicknames—and perhaps that's because he picked up a few along the way himself. Like the one he earned in 1972, when he left his home in Houston to work on the long-shot Senate campaign of Winton M. (Red) Blount in Alabama. Bush, then 26, would often turn up at campaign headquarters in Montgomery around lunchtime, recount his late-night exploits and brag about his political connections, according to a Blount campaign worker. All that made him slow to win over the Alabama crowd, who began to complain that Bush was letting things slide. C. Murphy Archibald, a nephew of Blount's who worked on the campaign that fall, told TIME that Bush "was good at schmoozing the county chairs, but there wasn't a lot of follow-up." Archibald, now a trial attorney in North Carolina, remembers that a group of older Alabama socialites, who were volunteering their time, gave Bush a nickname because they thought he "looked good on the outside but was full of hot air." They called him the Texas Soufflé."<


http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1101040223-590683-2,00.html


 


Photobucket&nbs

iVillage Member
Registered: 07-25-2003
Wed, 02-18-2004 - 10:07pm
<>

If that's the case, why is Bush still talking proudly about his service and Kerry is telling the Dems to drop the subject?

Could he be worried that the American public are going to weigh his 2 months in Vietnam against his disgraceful & damaging anti-war activities when he got home?



Renee

iVillage Member
Registered: 03-18-2000
Wed, 02-18-2004 - 11:23pm

How the Bush team will try to paint Kerry........


>"•He's a hypocrite on the Vietnam War. "Hypocrisy is a character issue that we ought to be concerned about," Gillespie said Sunday on NBC's Meet the Press. The charge is a crucial element of Bush's plan to rebut criticism of his own National Guard service during the Vietnam War. Bush wants to label Kerry, a combat veteran who later opposed the war, a hypocrite. Their case: During a 1971 protest at the U.S. Capitol, Kerry tossed onto the steps his combat ribbons and other veterans' medals, but he kept his own medals. For years, Kerry did not correct the impression that he had discarded his medals in protest.


"Doing something that phony on such a poignant issue of conscience is viscerally unsettling," Matalin says. "What does the capacity to be so calculating say about him?"


Behind the strategy are concerns in Bush's camp about the potential damage of controversy over Bush's service in the Texas Air National Guard during the Vietnam War. Although he was honorably discharged, there are questions about how diligent Bush was during his Guard service.


Reality check: This issue is about more than who did what 30 years ago. Kerry hopes his military record will help him counter doubts about his readiness to be commander in chief. Bush aides wish the media would focus on Kerry's past conduct, not on Bush's.


By 1990, 71% of Americans considered the Vietnam War a mistake. That suggests Kerry's opposition after serving may not be a pivotal issue. But questions about both men's conduct are more about character and credibility, qualities that matter in presidential campaigns.


If he wants to make an issue of Bush's military record, Kerry may be hindered by a remark he made in 1992 amid charges that Bill Clinton had dodged the draft. "We do not need to divide America over who served and how," Kerry said. "<


Quote from...........


http://www.usatoday.com/news/politicselections/nation/president/2004-02-16-bush-paint-kerry_x.htm

cl-Libraone~

 


Photobucket&nbs

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