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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Avatar for car_al
iVillage Member
Registered: 03-25-2003
Thu, 02-19-2004 - 4:42am
FYI – Lt. Kerry served aboard a destroyer for a year (which is why he actually knows something about a destroyer - not just a prop for a photo-op) and requested the assignment to be captain of a Swift Boat and from the article:



“He famously beached his boat, jumped off and shot a Viet Cong before he could aim his grenade launcher. Kerry's JFK act was a little off-putting at first. "I thought, J.. C.., Audie Murphy just walked onboard," Jim Wasser, Kerry's No. 2 on Swift Boat PCF-94, recalled to NEWSWEEK. But his crew trusted him. "I don't think he was overly risky," says Mike Madeiros, the rear gunner aboard PCF-94. "He never was 'Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead'." There was some grumbling among Kerry's fellow officers that he was medal hungry. Kerry received three Purple Hearts for minor shrapnel wounds that others might shake off, though no one doubted that he had bravely faced enemy fire. Anyone wounded three times could ask to be transferred home, and Kerry did after FOUR months of combat duty.”

IMO the reason Kerry has asked his staff not to comment on Bush’s guard service is because he has always said that he didn’t fault anyone for not choosing combat duty. Whether they left the country or served in the guard. He respected their choice.

As far as his anti-war activities, he did influence many people who had been supporting that war to take another look, which is what exercising free speech is all about. Why is this disgraceful?

You are making a mistake to think that those of us, who remember that time quite well, don’t remember how powerful his speech against the war was - he had great credibility. The credibility factor should also keep the Bush campaign away from this issue. After all Pres. Bush supported the Vietnam War, he just didn’t want to actually fight in it.

C

iVillage Member
Registered: 03-26-2003
Thu, 02-19-2004 - 9:30am
Well it is an accurate portrait of what he stood for then, and to a degree stil does.

I personally dont have a problem with the fact that Kerry spoke out against the war when he returned, as it was his right. My problem came with the fact that he basically lied to Congress by using imposters as eye witnesses for his accounts of the war crimes our troops committed during the Vietnam War?

This is going to haunt him much more than his protests will.

iVillage Member
Registered: 03-18-2000
Thu, 02-19-2004 - 10:49am

>"he basically lied to Congress by using imposters as eye witnesses for his accounts of the war crimes our troops committed during the Vietnam War?"<


Do you have a link to this imposter issue?

 


Photobucket&nbs

iVillage Member
Registered: 04-16-2003
Thu, 02-19-2004 - 10:56am
<>

I don't understand this either. How are things suppose to change if expressing objection to policy is "disgraceful". We certainly have changed our idea of what it takes to be an American in the last three years. This is what is disgraceful.

Avatar for stacy257
iVillage Member
Registered: 05-06-2003
Fri, 02-20-2004 - 1:02pm
Bush will lose in 2004.
iVillage Member
Registered: 12-11-2003
Fri, 02-20-2004 - 2:09pm
That's wishful thinking...but not possible! :) Go BUSH!!!
iVillage Member
Registered: 03-18-2000
Fri, 02-20-2004 - 3:11pm

Welcome

 


Photobucket&nbs

iVillage Member
Registered: 03-26-2003
Fri, 02-20-2004 - 4:56pm
We will have to wait and see.

If Kerry is the nominee, we see that he debates as well as Al Gore (which is horrible), and Edwards tore him apart in Wisconsin, with Sharpton and Dean beating up on him in other debates. The man is as stiff as a corpse, and doesnt seem like he can think too swiftly on his feet (but then again it doesnt appear that GWB can either...lol), but at least Bush has some vitality when he speaks, and doesnt look like he is right off the set from "Night of the Living Dead".

I have watched Kerry speak, and to me he is just too dull.

iVillage Member
Registered: 03-26-2003
Fri, 02-20-2004 - 4:57pm
Unless Kerry can figure out how to carry the South, he is in for an extremely difficult time. Heck, Al Gore was from the South and still lost (even with a supposedly strong economy to back him up).
iVillage Member
Registered: 03-26-2003
Fri, 02-20-2004 - 4:59pm
I dont know why my response did not post yesterday, but I said that my facts were wrong, and the imposter story comes from his Winter Soldier Investigations.

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