Records show pledges unmet

September 8, 2004

This article was reported by the Globe Spotlight Team -- reporters
Stephen Kurkjian, Francie Latour, Sacha Pfeiffer, and Michael
Rezendes, and editor Walter V. Robinson. It was written by Robinson.

In February, when the White House made public hundreds of pages of
President Bush's military records, White House officials repeatedly
insisted that the records prove that Bush fulfilled his military
commitment in the Texas Air National Guard during the Vietnam War.

But Bush fell well short of meeting his military obligation, a Globe
reexamination of the records shows: Twice during his Guard service --
first when he joined in May 1968, and again before he transferred out
of his unit in mid-1973 to attend Harvard Business School -- Bush
signed documents pledging to meet training commitments or face a
punitive call-up to active duty.

He didn't meet the commitments, or face the punishment, the records
show. The 1973 document has been overlooked in news media accounts.
The 1968 document has received scant notice.

On July 30, 1973, shortly before he moved from Houston to Cambridge,
Bush signed a document that declared, ''It is my responsibility to
locate and be assigned to another Reserve forces unit or mobilization
augmentation position. If I fail to do so, I am subject to involuntary
order to active duty for up to 24 months. . . " Under Guard
regulations, Bush had 60 days to locate a new unit.

But Bush never signed up with a Boston-area unit. In 1999, Bush
spokesman Dan Bartlett told the Washington Post that Bush finished his
six-year commitment at a Boston area Air Force Reserve unit after he
left Houston. Not so, Bartlett now concedes. ''I must have misspoke,"
Bartlett, who is now the White House communications director, said in
a recent interview.

And early in his Guard service, on May 27, 1968, Bush signed a
''statement of understanding" pledging to achieve ''satisfactory
participation" that included attendance at 24 days of annual weekend
duty -- usually involving two weekend days each month -- and 15 days
of annual active duty. ''I understand that I may be ordered to active
duty for a period not to exceed 24 months for unsatisfactory
participation," the statement reads.

Yet Bush, a fighter-interceptor pilot, performed no service for one
six-month period in 1972 and for another period of almost three months
in 1973, the records show.

The reexamination of Bush's records by the Globe, along with
interviews with military specialists who have reviewed regulations
from that era, show that Bush's attendance at required training drills
was so irregular that his superiors could have disciplined him or
ordered him to active duty in 1972, 1973, or 1974. But they did
neither. In fact, Bush's unit certified in late 1973 that his service
had been ''satisfactory" -- just four months after Bush's commanding
officer wrote that Bush had not been seen at his unit for the previous
12 months.

Bartlett, in a statement to the Globe last night, sidestepped
questions about Bush's record. In the statement, Bartlett asserted
again that Bush would not have been honorably discharged if he had not
''met all his requirements." In a follow-up e-mail, Bartlett declared:
''And if he hadn't met his requirements you point to, they would have
called him up for active duty for up to two years."

That assertion by the White House spokesman infuriates retired Army
Colonel Gerald A. Lechliter, one of a number of retired military
officers who have studied Bush's records and old National Guard
regulations, and reached different conclusions.

''He broke his contract with the United States government -- without
any adverse consequences. And the Texas Air National Guard was
complicit in allowing this to happen," Lechliter said in an interview
yesterday. ''He was a pilot. It cost the government a million dollars
to train him to fly. So he should have been held to an even higher
standard."

Even retired Lieutenant Colonel Albert C. Lloyd Jr., a former Texas
Air National Guard personnel chief who vouched for Bush at the White
House's request in February, agreed that Bush walked away from his
obligation to join a reserve unit in the Boston area when he moved to
Cambridge in September 1973. By not joining a unit in Massachusetts,
Lloyd said in an interview last month, Bush ''took a chance that he
could be called up for active duty. But the war was winding down, and
he probably knew that the Air Force was not enforcing the penalty."

But Lloyd said that singling out Bush for criticism is unfair. ''There
were hundreds of guys like him who did the same thing," he said.

Lawrence J. Korb, an assistant secretary of defense for manpower and
reserve affairs in the Reagan administration, said after studying many
of the documents that it is clear to him that Bush ''gamed the
system." And he agreed with Lloyd that Bush was not alone in doing so.
''If I cheat on my income tax and don't get caught, I'm still cheating
on my income tax," Korb said.

After his own review, Korb said Bush could have been ordered to active
duty for missing more than 10 percent of his required drills in any
given year. Bush, according to the records, fell shy of that
obligation in two successive fiscal years.

Korb said Bush also made a commitment to complete his six-year
obligation when he moved to Cambridge, a transfer the Guard often
allowed to accommodate Guardsmen who had to move elsewhere. ''He had a
responsibility to find a unit in Boston and attend drills," said Korb,
who is now affiliated with a liberal Washington think tank. ''I see no
evidence or indication in the documents that he was given permission
to forgo training before the end of his obligation. If he signed that
document, he should have fulfilled his obligation."

The documents Bush signed only add to evidence that the future
president -- then the son of Houston's congressman -- received
favorable treatment when he joined the Guard after graduating from
Yale in 1968. Ben Barnes, who was speaker of the Texas House of
Representatives in 1968, said in a deposition in 2000 that he placed a
call to get young Bush a coveted slot in the Guard at the request of a
Bush family friend.

Bush was given an automatic commission as a second lieutenant, and
dispatched to flight school in Georgia for 13 months. In June 1970,
after five additional months of specialized training in F-102
fighter-interceptor, Bush began what should have been a four-year
assignment with the 111th Fighter-Interceptor Squadron.

In May 1972, Bush was given permission to move to Alabama temporarily
to work on a US Senate campaign, with the provision that he do
equivalent training with a unit in Montgomery. But Bush's service
records do not show him logging any service in Alabama until October
of that year.

And even that service is in doubt. Since the Globe first reported
Bush's spotty attendance record in May 2000, no one has come forward
with any credible recollection of having witnessed Bush performing
guard service in Alabama or after he returned to Houston in 1973.
While Bush was in Alabama, he was removed from flight status for
failing to take his annual flight physical in July 1972. On May 1,
1973, Bush's superior officers wrote that they could not complete his
annual performance review because he had not been observed at the
Houston base during the prior 12 months.

Although the records of Bush's service in 1973 are contradictory, some
of them suggest that he did a flurry of drills in 1973 in Houston -- a
weekend in April and then 38 days of training crammed into May, June,
and July. But Lechliter, the retired colonel, concluded after
reviewing National Guard regulations that Bush should not have
received credit -- or pay -- for many of those days either. The
regulations, Lechliter and others said, required that any scheduled
drills that Bush missed be made up either within 15 days before or 30
days after the date of the drill.

Lechliter said the records push him to conclude that Bush had little
interest in fulfilling his obligation, and his superiors preferred to
look the other way. Others agree. ''It appears that no one wanted to
hold him accountable," said retired Major General Paul A. Weaver Jr.,
who retired in 2002 as the Pentagon's director of the Air National
Guard."

http://www.boston.com/news/politics/...duty_at_guard/

Bush is as dishonorable as he is unfit to command.

Walt