General Zinni on Sixty Minutes

Bush was AWOL for eight months.


Prove it.

"Yeah, the mainstream media have really kept a lid on this one. We wouldn't
know anything about Bush going AWOL if it hadn't been for that obscure
underground newspaper the Boston Globe, which broke the story nationally in May
2000. But you're right that coverage has been pretty thin. A few months after
the 2000 election, former Bill Clinton adviser Paul Begala said he'd done a
Nexis search and found 13,641 stories about Clinton's alleged draft dodging
versus 49 about George W. Bush's military record. Why the disparity? We'll get
to that.

First the basics: Yes, it's true, Bush didn't report to his guard unit for an
extended period--17 months, by one account. It wasn't considered that serious
an offense at the time, and if circumstances were different now I'd be inclined
to write it off as youthful irresponsibility. However, given the
none-too-subtle suggestion by the Bush administration that opponents of our
Iraqi excursion lack martial valor, I have to say: You guys should talk.

Here's the story as generally agreed upon: In January 1968, with the Vietnam
war in full swing, Bush was due to graduate from Yale. Knowing he'd soon be
eligible for the draft, he took an air force officers' test hoping to secure a
billet with the Texas Air National Guard, which would allow him to do his
military service at home. Bush didn't do particularly well on the test--on the
pilot aptitude section, he scored in the 25th percentile, the lowest possible
passing grade. But Bush's father, George H.W., was then a U.S. congressman from
Houston, and strings were pulled. The younger Bush vaulted to the head of a
long waiting list--a year and a half long, by some estimates--and in May of '68
he was inducted into the guard.

By all accounts Bush was an excellent pilot, but apparently his enthusiasm
cooled. In 1972, four years into his six-year guard commitment, he was asked to
work for the campaign of Bush family friend Winton Blount, who was running for
the U.S. Senate in Alabama. In May Bush requested a transfer to an Alabama Air
National Guard unit with no planes and minimal duties. Bush's immediate
superiors approved the transfer, but higher-ups said no. The matter was delayed
for months. In August Bush missed his annual flight physical and was grounded.
(Some have speculated that he was worried about failing a drug test--the
Pentagon had instituted random screening in April.) In September he was ordered
to report to a different unit of the Alabama guard, the 187th Tactical
Reconnaissance Group in Montgomery. Bush says he did so, but his nominal
superiors say they never saw the guy, there's no documentation he ever showed
up, and not one of the six or seven hundred soldiers then in the unit has
stepped forward to corroborate Bush's story.

After the November election Bush returned to Texas, but apparently didn't
notify his old Texas guard unit for quite a while, if ever. The Boston Globe
initially reported that he started putting in some serious duty time in May,
June, and July of 1973 to make up for what he'd missed. But according to a
piece in the New Republic, there's no evidence Bush did even that. Whatever the
case, even though his superiors knew he'd blown off his duties, they never
disciplined him. (No one's ever been shot at dawn for missing a weekend guard
drill, but policy at the time was to put shirkers on active duty.) Indeed, when
Bush decided to go to business school at Harvard in the fall of 1973, he
requested and got an honorable discharge--eight months before his service was
scheduled to end.

Bush's enemies say all this proves he was a cowardly deserter. Nonsense. He was
a pampered rich kid who took advantage. Why wasn't he called on it in a serious
way during the 2000 election? Probably because Democrats figured they'd get
Clinton's draft-dodging thing thrown back at them. Not that it matters. If
history judges Bush harshly--and it probably will--it won't be for screwing up
as a young smart aleck, but for getting us into this damn fool war.

--CECIL ADAMS

http://www.straightdope.com/columns/030411.html