Back in the spring of 1964 it was fairly evident that we were going to war. While our new President Lyndon Baines Johnson had yet to launch his bombing campaign against North Vietnam (that would came about in late summer, as a response to a vicious North Vietnamese attack on the U.S. navy in international waters ― an attack that, by the way, never happened), draft boards were already ramping up their efforts to bring young men into the army. I was about to graduate from college, not at the rock bottom of my class but not comfortably near the top, either, and I was worried. What was to be done to avoid going and getting myself killed in a war for which I had no taste? (I had an Esperanto-speaking pen pal in Hanoi and so had gone to the effort of looking up something of the background of the situation in Viet-nam, a place that most Americans of the time ― and even today ― couldn't find on a map. Anybody who had read Bernard Fall's books, for instance, knew that America was about to get herself into a quagmire, without any reasonable justification for doing so.)
There were, of course, various options that various people took over the years. Mine was to enlist in the U.S. Air Force and go to Officer Training School. This would not keep me out of Viet-nam, but it would pretty much ensure that I (who would never be a pilot because of my eyesight) would likely be out of harm's way even if I were in country. I'm not particularly proud of this ― more courageous, in my opinion, was the cousin, son of an army lieutenant-colonel, who skipped off to Canada for the duration to avoid having to serve in that stupid and immoral little war, which ultimately claimed ― as we often hear ― sixty thousand American lives and ― as we almost never hear ― more than two million southeast Asian lives.
Others took different routes. In our nicely stratified society, those with connections could arrange for themselves deferments, extending them or renewing them for year after year until the war ended and they could stop worrying about it. This was the route that two of our greatest current hawks, Vice-President Cheney and Attorney General Ashworth, embarked on, with great success.
President George W. Bush made a decision somewhat similar to my own; he decided to enlist in a relatively safe branch of the service, the Texas Air National Guard. Quantitatively, his branch was even safer than mine, but qualitatively the decisions appear to have been about the same.
Senator John Kerry, for whatever reasons, decided to enlist in the navy and actually request duty in Viet-nam. This may have been a foolish decision; it was, in my humble opinion, a more honorable one than those of Bush or Harlow, and infinitely more honorable than those of Cheney or Ashcroft, who, with a little moral training, might develop to a level at which they are qualified to lick Kerry's boots, or some more appropriate, if pungent, part of his anatomy.
Now two questions have arisen:
(1) Did Bush skip out on part of that relatively unimportant duty for which he had volunteered?
(2) Did Kerry deserve the various medals (purple hearts, a bronze star, a silver star) that he won in Viet-nam?
As far as Bush is concerned, I think we can ignore the question. Even if he did go absent without leave for a few months, presumably to do work that he considered more important, nobody at the time seems to have considered this of any great consequence. From what I remember of the Texas ANG (gained from briefing some of its pilots in the weather station at Webb AFB a couple of years before young George Bush joined up), its primary raison d'être was to lend its planes to fly right-wing politicians around the state on political campaigns. Frankly, again in my humble opinion, if every pilot in the whole organization had gone AWOL for three months just to go fishing on the Nueces River, I would have considered that a valuable contribution to the well-being of the average citizen of Texas.
So let those of us on the left agree to let George Bush's purported AWOL period be left out of the political campaign. Those of us who simply can't get over it can write the man to congratulate him on his excellent behavior.
A better question, and one that hasn't yet been answered (because, at this late date, the documentation to answer it may simply not exist) is: how did George ever get into the Texas ANG, anyway, especially as an officer and pilot trainee? Somehow he managed to get jumped over the heads of a waiting list 500 long. Who contributed to this? What's the possibility that one of those names on the Viet-nam Memorial in Washington was a wannabe Texan pilot who was edged out by George and ended up stepping on a punjee stake as a grunt in 'Nam?
As far as Kerry's earning his medals is concerned, eyewitness accounts indicate that he did, indeed, earn at least his bronze star and his silver star. (1) The eyewitnesses in question include Kerry's own crew, Special Forces operative Jim Rassmann who worked with Kerry and whose life was putatively saved by him, and fellow swift boat commander William B. Rood, who was working with Kerry in the action that earned him his silver star (and Rood a bronze star).
Bush kept himself out of harm's way, but the question naturally arises: if Bush had been in Kerry's position, would he also have earned the sort of honors that Kerry did?
Despite Al Franken's rather vitriolic sketch of a swift boat whose crew consisted of Bush and other current right-wing hawks (you can find this in Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them, but I don't recommend it; that section is about three orders of magnitude below the rest of the book in quality, and has more the quality of a vicious sneer than a belly laugh), I suspect that swift boat commander Bush would, in some ways, have done as well as Kerry. As far as the rescue of Rassmann is concerned, I have to work really hard to imagine Bush ordering his boat turned around to go back for the missing Special Forces man ― but, once the boat was turned around, I have no difficulty imagining George Bush, in the heat, throwing himself across the rail, with enemy bullets whizzing all around him, to give a hand in helping Rassmann back to safety. Most of us, I like to believe, have the stuff of heroes in us, and while the President doesn't get much opportunity to demonstrate this ― thanks to the Secret Service ― I have no reason to suppose that this capacity is lacking in George Bush.
The silver star is a different manner. According to Rood, it was awarded not for any particular act of heroism but for an innovation proposed by Kerry and adopted by his fellow commanders Rood and Droz that made swift boat operations more effective against Viet Cong ambushes. George Bush does not strike me as ever having been a particularly innovative sort of fellow. I find no difficulty in imagining him bravely leading his fellow swift boat commanders past an enemy ambush in the tried-and-true tactics he had been taught ― and getting the usual results from this action, which were none.
So ultimately I can see a George Bush, standing in John Kerry's shoes, wearing with pride Kerry's purple hearts (after all, anybody can get himself wounded) and his bronze star, but with a conspicuous absence where Kerry's silver star should be ...
(1) The various arguments about Kerry's purple hearts remain inconclusive. One argument is that the wounds Kerry received for one purple heart were (accidentally) self-inflicted. Aside from the fact that at that time the military did award purple hearts for wounds accidentally self-inflicted during action, the citation for the purple heart in question doesn't mention those particular wounds, but others suffered by Kerry while rescuing Jim Rassmann on the same day. I'm reminded of a report, published in Playboy during the period in question, of a serviceman who was granted a purple heart for suffering a severe bite inflicted on a particularly sensitive portion of his anatomy by a lady later determined to be a Viet Cong agent. This despite the fact that the "action" in question was not of the sort usually recognized by the army as military in nature ...