Quote:
Originally Posted by shintao";p="
Quote:
Originally Posted by MRMAGQQ";p="
Don't worry. If Bush had been called to active duty, he would have been over there with the rest of the cannon fodder, if he wished to stay in the service.
|
[color=blue]Bush "honorably" chose the height of the Tet Offensive to engage in aggressive maneuvers - using his family influence to get into the Texas Air National Guard specifically to avoid being drafted to go to Vietnam. |
The Tet offensive occurred at the end of January, 1968, and Bush joined the Texas ANG around four months afterward. It seems that you conveniently omitted the part of my post where I made the point about military pilots resigning their commissions near the end of the Vietnam war, owing to the general disillusionment, not wanting to get their rear-ends shot off in a war we weren't going to win, and apparenly weren't supposed to win. Bush's attendance record was impeccable up until around that time. If he skipped some training periods, starting around 1972, I see that as reflecting the general mood about Vietnam among the military, and I can't say that I blame any of them. Even as early as 1970, during my fifth and final deployment aboard the USS Coral Sea, stories were going around that many "Search & Destroy" missions were really nothing more than "Ordnance Disposal" missions, where pilots just flew around in a safe area for awhile, dumped their weapons and came home. Even then, the general mood about Vietnam was going sour. I believe that all this nitpicking about Bush's military record is just a bunch of partisan crapola. Obviously, Bush didn't have any more respect for the way the Johnson/McNamara team were running the war than any of the aforementioned people.