Just one more from the tarpit. A reader in Houston urges me to correct my
statement of yesterday: “We all know what happened when time came for
George W. Bush to make his Vietnam decisions. His family, like 90 percent of
well-connected elite families in America at that time, made a few phone
calls & got him a stateside billet. This option was not open to most
Americans.”
Not so, says my reader: “The assertion that Dubya signed up for the Texas
Air National Guard to avoid serving in Vietnam … [is] simply untrue. It’s
untrue for the very simple — objectively factual, easily verifiable
— reason that the
TANG unit young Bush signed up for was indeed in hot combat in Southeast
Asia’s skies at the very moment he signed up for it, and Bush or anyone else
joining that unit would reasonably have expected that its pilots would still
be in hot combat over Southeast Asia as long as the war continued!
“As it turned out, that TANG unit was no longer in combat by the time Bush
was trained to fly its planes. And so Bush didn’t get shot at by his
country’s enemies. Rather, his unit intercepted and shadowed Russian
aircraft (flying out of Cuba) that were routinely probing American airspace
in the Gulf. World War III didn’t break out, and no, Bush wasn’t shot at by
the Russians, and no, he can’t now claim to have the combat experience that
Kerry can claim. Yes, he’d be a more appealing candidate today if he could
claim combat experience. He can’t, and he’s never tried to. But the
explanation for that is not what you’ve claimed — that is, that Bush used
his connections to join a part of the armed forces which was guaranteed not
to see combat.”
“(Ironically, exactly the opposite thing happened to Senator Kerry. Joining
the Navy, as he did, was unlikely to put him into hot combat, and indeed he
saw none on the ship on which he served most of his time abroad. When he
volunteered to join the Swift Boats, they weren’t seeing hot combat either.
It was only a change in their mission, after he’d volunteered for them, that
resulted in his country’s enemies shooting at him. And after four months
and three bandaide wounds with the Swift Boats, he promptly got his ticket
punched, collected his medals and his 8mm films of his dramatic
re-enactments of his combat experiences, and headed back to a stateside post
as an admiral’s aid, and thence to an early discharge so he could run for
Congress. The medals eventually went over a Capitol fence in a war protest;
the 8mm footage will be onscreen at tonight’s Democratic National
Convention.)”
I hope this is correct. I can *absolutely guarantee*, though, from years of
experience in this business, that within half an hour of this being posted I
shall get some equally indignant, equally long, and equally self-assured
e-mail from someone arguing an entirely different version of events. Since
no-one is going to pay me to dig to the bottom of this, which would take
weeks — if it actually has a bottom, which after 35 years is by no means
certain — I present my reader’s account as offered (though edited without
prejudice), declare myself respectfully agnostic, and CLOSE THE SUBJECT.