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: 03-18-2000
Sun, 02-22-2004 - 1:10pm

Link to interview on Meet the Press.


Nader is running for Pres.


http://messageboards.ivillage.com/n/mb/message.asp?webtag=iv-elinthenews&msg=6106.8&ctx=0


I only wish he were electable. I Wish

 


Photobucket&nbs

iVillage Member
Registered: 03-26-2003
Sun, 02-22-2004 - 10:46pm
Too many people have fallen for the "link" between the 9/11 attacks and our attack on Iraq. Sometimes we want to lash out and feel that something can be achieved in terms of retribution and that's what Bush was seeking to tap into. As you note, it's just causing further carnage.

Gettingahandle

Ignorance is Nature's most abundant fuel for decision making.

Avatar for car_al
iVillage Member
Registered: 03-25-2003
Mon, 02-23-2004 - 4:31am
“Whether before 9/11 or since, more Americans visit Maya Lin's memorial in Washington each year than they do the White House, the Washington Monument and the Jefferson memorial combined; no wonder it's the only aesthetic standard against which the ground zero memorial is measured.”

Those of you, who do not recognize all the references in the following article, will never understand how much that war impacted on the lives of all of us, who remember everything about it. Also, we are already in or moving into the group that most consistently turns out to vote. If this becomes a campaign issue, we will pay attention and it will influence our votes. IMO this will not be a plus for the present administration.

C

February 22, 2004

FRANK RICH

You Can't Skip Vietnam Twice

When George W. Bush's handlers had him dress up as the 1986 Tom Cruise of "Top Gun" to dance a victory jig on an aircraft carrier, they didn't stop to think that he might soon face an opponent who could be type-cast more persuasively in his own Tom Cruise role. John F. Kerry was in real life a comrade of Ron Kovic, whom Mr. Cruise played to great acclaim in the 1989 "Born on the Fourth of July." Mr. Kerry, like the movie's hero, was a decorated Vietnam soldier who became a star activist for Vietnam Veterans Against the War upon returning home.

In a pivotal scene in the film, delegates at the 1972 Republican National Convention in Miami Beach eject Kovic and his fellow protesting vets from the hall, call him a traitor and spit on him. If that incident has a certain angry passion, it may be because the director was Oliver Stone. Like both Mr. Bush and Mr. Kerry, Mr. Stone was a son of privilege who attended Yale in the mid-1960's. Like Mr. Kerry but unlike Mr. Bush, he went on to combat in Vietnam, won a bronze star and then turned against America's most disastrous foreign war.

But just where was Mr. Bush during that convention fracas dramatized in "Born on the Fourth of July"? We still don't know. The summer of '72 is midway through the missing months in the president's résumé — a time when, in the still undocumented White House account, the young Mr. Bush was supposedly completing his National Guard service while campaigning for a senatorial hopeful in Alabama. Whatever the future president was up to, it is not inconceivable that he accompanied his candidate to Miami Beach, where he watched from afar as Mr. Kovic and his fellow veterans were dispersed in a paroxysm of tear gas and rage.

Cut to 2004. We want to believe that the wounds of Vietnam have long since been anesthetized by the panacea we call closure. Most Americans can probably no longer identify Nguyen Van Thieu or the Tet Offensive. Communism and the domino theory alike have been relegated to history's junk heap. And yet: even as the actual war fades in memory, Vietnam still looms as a festering culture war, a permanent fixture of the national collective unconscious, always on tap for fresh hostilities.

Whether before 9/11 or since, more Americans visit Maya Lin's memorial in Washington each year than they do the White House, the Washington Monument and the Jefferson memorial combined; no wonder it's the only aesthetic standard against which the ground zero memorial is measured. This year no fewer than two Oscar-nominated documentaries, "The Fog of War" and "The Weather Underground," take us back to Vietnam in all its anguish. And now, of all unlikely developments, Jane Fonda has been roped into a comeback. A movie star who hasn't been seen in a Hollywood feature in almost 15 years and who is best known to younger Americans as Ted Turner's ex-wife has been drafted into a political attack on Mr. Kerry: he appears as a blurred extra sitting several rows behind her in a photo of an antiwar protest held two years before her famous, self-immolating trip to Hanoi. This is guilt by association so loony that even the perpetrators of the Hollywood blacklist might have found it a stretch.

Mr. Kerry and his fellow members of Vietnam Veterans Against the War are now being attacked by Republicans as vociferously as Mr. Kovic's band of brothers were at the party's '72 convention. The head of a group called Vietnam Veterans Against John Kerry, which helped disseminate the Fonda picture, portrays him as a radical, a traitor and, worst of all, "hippielike." The Weekly Standard characterizes the antiwar Vietnam veterans of that time as "hairy men, many with `Easy Rider' mustaches."

There's a method to this archaic culture-war language. It's meant to complement the ubiquitous Vietnam-era photo of a decidedly clean-shaven, unhippielike Mr. Bush at the moment he is joining the Texas Air National Guard. The tableau shows Mr. Bush's beaming father, then a congressman, as he prepares to pin second lieutenant's bars to his son's uniform. But there's something wrong with this picture. It all too potently raises the unanswered question of just how the young Mr. Bush got into the guard, in those days a safe haven from combat duty, ahead of 100,000 others then on the national waiting list. At the time, 250 Americans a week were dying in Vietnam.

Those in Washington who view Vietnam only through a political lens say none of this should matter today. As President Bush and his surrogates point out repeatedly, his service record is old news and died as a campaign issue in both his '94 governor's race and in 2000, when he faced two Vietnam vets, John McCain and Al Gore. Others note how Bill Clinton, a notorious draft avoider, vanquished both a Vietnam vet (Bob Kerrey) and two World War II heroes in the '92 and '96 elections. End of story, end of culture war.

"I don't think the Democrats really want to rerun Vietnam," is how one Republican consultant's wishful thinking put it on "Nightline," just as the story of the president's guard service ignited once again.

But we're not in '92, '96 or 2000 anymore. American troops are once again fighting a war of choice — and this time the National Guard is seeing combat, lethally so. Mr. Bush's Tom Cruise pose of May, so fetishized among his partisans that an ad in National Review hawks a bronze replica at $1,995 a pop, makes an unexpectedly striking visual contrast with Mr. Kerry's Tom Cruise role of 30-some years earlier. In the Kerry Vietnam flashback we hear his most famous line as a protester, "How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?" While few Americans believe that it was a mistake to overthrow Saddam Hussein, the question hangs in the air anyway in 2004. It hangs over those American soldiers who have died since his overthrow, who have died since the triumphal Bush "Top Gun" remake declared "mission accomplished."

In this cultural battlefield, Mr. Kerry is a unique figure as a presidential candidate. Unlike Mr. Bush, Mr. Gore or Mr. McCain, he is the first in either party to have been both a leader in combat in Vietnam and a leader in the antiwar movement; he represents both the establishment that fueled our misadventure in Southeast Asia and the counterculture that changed America, for better and for worse, in revolt against it. To his critics he's hypocritical, but to many others he may be prototypical. It took years of body bags and falsely optimistic White House predictions for an American majority to turn against the war. Once the country did change its mind, however, it stayed changed. To argue now that antiwar protesters were traitors, especially those who took bullets for their country in the Mekong Delta and saved their buddies' lives, could be a tough sell.

"He can't run on a war record when his true record is an antiwar record," said Steve Buyer, a Republican congressman, on CNN. Perhaps other Kerry opponents are realizing that he can. This may explain why they quickly tried to change the subject from Vietnam once it impaled the president. Instead of defending Mr. Bush's military service, The Drudge Report rushed to brand Mr. Kerry with another trait associated with 60's antiwar counterculture: sexual hedonism. But even before it was exposed as false, the "intern" rumor got no traction, despite ample airing by Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh. We're not in the frivolous peacetime Clinton 90's anymore, and if the well-documented exploits of Arnold Schwarzenegger could not outrage a public sated by the Starr Report, it's hard to imagine what politician's sexual transgression would.

Maybe that other "hippielike" activity, drug use, will be the next up to bat. But in Douglas Brinkley's best-selling chronicle of Mr. Kerry's Vietnam years, "Tour of Duty," this candidate not only admits to smoking pot upon return from the war but also adds that he "certainly enjoyed it." I have yet to hear anyone so much as remark upon this revelation.

If Mr. Kerry is anomalous as a presidential candidate of the Vietnam generation, so in his way is Mr. Bush. By all reports neither a true hawk nor a dove at Yale, the president was AWOL from the culture wars back then even if he wasn't AWOL from guard duty. Though Mr. Kerry was in a pick-up rock band, the president, by his own account, didn't even listen to the Beatles once they entered what he called their "weird, psychedelic period."

To be as unhip and apolitical as Mr. Bush was in that most politicized of times is certainly no sin. But it leaves him at a disadvantage as he finds himself thrust back into Vietnam all these years later. He doesn't seem to know the potential dangers of the jungle in which he may have to do battle as a "war president" in this election year.

In response to Tim Russert two Sundays ago, Mr. Bush said that the only troubling lesson he had learned from Vietnam was that "we had politicians making military decisions." Given that his secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, has made military decisions about Iraq much as Robert McNamara did in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, it's not clear how well he learned that lesson. But in any event, the real problem for Mr. Bush is that he seems tone-deaf to the other echoes of Vietnam in our home-front culture as the postwar war drags on: polls that show that half the country now thinks the Iraq war was "not worth fighting," the return of a "credibility gap" about the war's progress and origins, the fogginess of the exit strategy, the class differences between many of those who return from the war in coffins and those who sent them there.

"The issue is settled" has been the White House press secretary's mantra when badgered about the president's military service. You have to wonder if the issue would have come up at all had Mr. Bush not set the stage for Iraq-Vietnam parallels by wearing the fly boy uniform of his own disputed guard duty while prematurely declaring victory last spring. But that's the way it always is with Vietnam. To paraphrase a totemic line that Francis Coppola wrote for "Godfather III" but that would be even more appropriate to "Apocalypse Now": just when we think we are out, it pulls us back in.



http://nytimes.com/2004/02/22/arts/22RICH.html

iVillage Member
Registered: 03-18-2000
Mon, 02-23-2004 - 8:46am

Just shows how down & dirty this race is going to be.


Thanks to Metrochick's post on the Politics Today board.


Republicans Circulate Phony Pictures.


http://messageboards.ivillage.com/n/mb/message.asp?webtag=iv-elpoliticsto&msg=2652.1&ctx=0


Here's the link to the article..................


http://www.newsday.com/ny-kerry0215,0,1445946,print.story?coll=ny-top-headlines

cl-Libraone~

 


Photobucket&nbs

iVillage Member
Registered: 03-26-2003
Mon, 02-23-2004 - 10:29am
>> Why bring up Clinton deserting

He didnt desert, he went to England to avoid the draft, but who cares. John Kerry didnt care back in 1992 when he stated that it did not matter who served or how, but suddenly, it does? Can you say HYPOCRITE?

>> John Kerry went to Vietnam and served. Kerry is a decorated veteran

Yes, and this nation owes a debt of gratitude for his service, but he disgraced many Vietnam Veterans with the way he conducted himself upon his return. I am not speaking of his opposition of the war, but the way he used imposters during his Winter Soldier Investigation to confirm his stories of attrocities that were committed during the war.

>> Those documents that The Shrub released raised more questions.

You mean his entire military record? If it raised more questions, then why was the Boston Globe convinced that there was no longer a story to follow, and they were the paper that started the story in the first place. Wrong again.

>> The Shrub moved to Alabama without the permission of the Guard

Wrong yet again. He asked for, and received a transfer to a unit in Alabama. You really should research your facts if you are going to debate.

>> The Shrub didn't show up for a physical, which mean he couldn't fly

Wow....you are just taking guesses here....If you are referring to Alabama, he transfered there to be on a grond support unit, as the plane he flew was being removed from service, and since he only had about a year left in the guard, it was not time efficient to train him on a new plane.

>> President Clinton is a former president!

What is your point here? So are Ronald Reagan, Jimmy Carter, Gerald Ford, George HW Bush (and these are the ones that are still living).....what does that have to do with anything?????

>> Where are those WMD, the kept talking about before his illegal and immoral war?

Wrong again.....boy this is a habit with you.. It isn't illegal as Congress (including John Kerry) voted him the authority to use military force, and all the members of congress had the same access to George Tenet, and most of the intelligence that the President had. Dick Gephardt admitted this to Tim Russert and to Bill O'Reilly in interviews done with them.

With regards to the WMD's, where was the human intelligence that the CIA relies on to gather information? Oh that is right, Bill Clinton, John Deutch and Robert Torricelli made sure that the CIA could no longer be as effective an intelligence agency due to the cuts in funding and the "Torricelli Principle."

iVillage Member
Registered: 04-16-2003
Mon, 02-23-2004 - 11:04am
<>

I was one of those people, and this may be the reason I didn't fall for Bush's rhetoric--I checked the facts and didn't see the case. I didn't understand what the American people inhaled that made them so gullible to inferences. Knowing that the National Guard was an "out" for those afraid to go to Vietnam, I didn't like the fact that GWB was "proud of his service" how could this be true?

To me investigating why he attacked Iraq, focusing on Bush's disasterous record on the environment and economy, and taking a close look at foreign policy (how has he in three years turned the world against us?) are more important that his service record.

iVillage Member
Registered: 04-16-2003
Mon, 02-23-2004 - 11:08am
Libraone, is the Kerry/Fonda picture a phony? Pictures aren't proof any more!
iVillage Member
Registered: 12-11-2003
Mon, 02-23-2004 - 11:56am
I'm sure he will go back to Texas for good...but I believe that will happen after he is elected president once again in November. :)
iVillage Member
Registered: 03-18-2000
Mon, 02-23-2004 - 12:09pm
Yes it's a phoney!
cl-Libraone~

 


Photobucket&nbs

iVillage Member
Registered: 03-18-2000
Mon, 02-23-2004 - 12:11pm

>"elected president once again in November"<


Say it wont be so.............Prayer

 


Photobucket&nbs

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