Posted on 07/30/2004 2:49:23 PM PDT by swilhelm73
RE: KERRY, GWB, VIETNAM [John Derbyshire] 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. Posted at 07:51 AM
It is a common misconception that the Air National Guard was a safe place for military duty during the Vietnam War. In actuality, pilots from the 147th Fighter Interceptor Group, as it was called at the time, were actually conducting combat missions in Vietnam at the very time Bush enlisted. In fact, F-102 squadrons had been stationed in South Vietnam since March 1962. It was during this time that the Kennedy administration began building up a large US military presence in the nation as a deterrent against North Vietnamese invasion.
F-102 squadrons continued to be stationed in South Vietnam and Thailand throughout most of the Vietnam War. The planes were typically used for fighter defense patrols and as escorts for B-52 bomber raids. While the F-102 had few opportunities to engage in its primary role of fighter combat, the aircraft was used in the close air support role starting in 1965. Armed with rocket pods, Delta Daggers would make attacks on Viet Cong encampments in an attempt to harass enemy soldiers. Some missions were even conducted using the aircraft's heat-seeking air-to-air missiles to lock onto enemy campfires at night. Though these missions were never considered to be serious attacks on enemy activity, F-102 pilots did often report secondary explosions coming from their targets.
These missions were also dangerous, given the risks inherent to low-level attacks against armed ground troops. A total of 15 F-102 fighters were lost over Vietnam. Three were shot down by anti-aircraft or small arms fire, one was lost in air-to-air combat with a MiG-21, four were destroyed on the ground during Viet Cong attacks, and the remainder were lost in training accidents.
Even in peacetime conditions, F-102 pilots risked their lives on every flight. ...
Hey Tonk, ping to this thread and follow the link in my reply #2.
I have always wondered why John Kerry didn't enlist in the Army or the Marine Corps if he was looking for a firefight.
And Bush did volunteer to be sent to Vietnam as fighter pilot! He was not accepted as they had already the needed pilots.
OK, the fellow says it's easily verifiable. So, John verifty it (or debunk it) and do us all a favor.
He didn't have the flight hours required for the program at the time he "volunteered" to go.
Distribute this link to everybody who wonders
about President Bush
and his service during Vietnam.
http://www.aerospaceweb.org/question/history/q0185.shtml
ALONG with this
DD 214 shows 17 Feb 72 terminal date of Reserve Obligation for John Kerry
http://www.johnkerry.com/pdf/jkmilservice/DD214.pdf
Kerry's anti war activities were doing this period!
What is Senator John Kerry's relationship to VVAW?
http://www.vvaw.org/faq/#4
Since Vietnam Veterans Against the War's inception in 1967, tens of thousands of vets, GIs and supporters have participated in and supported the actions of VVAW. One of those members in the early 1970s was John Kerry. Kerry was appointed to the VVAW Executive Committee to assist in preparing Dewey Canyon III, VVAW's limited incursion into the land of Congress in 1971 (Nicosia, 98-99). Kerry made his greatest contribution to the anti-war movement and to VVAW in his speech to the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations on April 23, 1971 (Brinkley, 371-373: Hunt, 109-110; Nicosia, 136-138; Wells, 495).
Content of the speech is found at:
http://lists.village.virginia.edu/sixties/HTML_docs/Resources/Primary/Manifestos/VVAW_Kerry_Senate.html.
By 1972, John Kerry had moved on from VVAW (Brinkley, 406: Hunt, 127-128; Nicosia, 211).
He was not one of the original founding members of VVAW in 1967.
Didn't President Bush transfer to a squadron in Alabama that did not have any aircraft he was qualified to fly, so he spent the rest of his enlistment reading manuals?
Ping. (Ping means I'm sending a thread to you for you to see.)
Good stuff for my project.
Actually, I think Bush DID volunteer for Vietnam duty, but by then the troops were coming home.
Bump!
I knew plenty of young men who joined the National Guard during the Vietnam war who were not from rich or influential backgrounds. As a matter of fact, back then, I don't think I knew anybody from a rich or influential background. LOL Did they join to get out of going to Vietnam? I honestly don't know. I know many of them stayed in the Guard for probably 20 years.
He wasn't? I think I read somewhere that he claimed he was. Did he really claim that? How do we know it isn't true? When did he end his active duty time and begin his reserve time?
If you take GWB's 600 flight hours and consider 4 flight hours to be a day (don't forget all the time spend in pre-flight and post-flight not included in the 600), that comes up to 5 months which is one more month than Kerry spent in his Swift Boat.
The first American jet fighters to be deployed to Vietnam were F-102s of the 509th Fighter Interceptor Squadron. When Lt. Bush signed up for fighters and joined the 111th FIS, he stood ready to deploy to Vietnam, as did every other Air National Guard pilot. In fact, he tried to volunteer for Vietnam.
Of the four pilots I spoke to who flew with Bush in the Texas days, Fred Bradley knew him best. They had met before going off to the year-long ordeal of pilot school, and entered the 111th at about the same time. Both were junior lieutenants without a lot of flying experience. But the inexperience didn't prevent Bush — along with Bradley — from going to their squadron leaders to see if they could get into a program called "Palace Alert." "There were four of us lieutenants at the time, and we were all fairly close. Two of them had more flight time than the president and me, said Bradley." All four volunteered for Vietnam (Bradley doesn't remember whether he and Bush actually signed paperwork, but he specifically remembers both Bush and himself trying to get into the Palace Alert Vietnam program.) Bush and Bradley were turned away, and the two more senior pilots went to Vietnam.
I wasn't comparing our President to Kerry, I just don't understand why he would request a transfer to a base that did not have any aircraft he was qualified to fly. Seems to be a waste of time.
The F-102 was being phased out. There were no bases to transfer to where he could keep flying the 102. GWB was looking to his post-service career and when an opportunity to work on a Congressional campaign for someone in Alabama came up, he requested the transfer. For a young lieutenant with relatively low flight hours, there just weren't pilot slots available that didn't go to pilots with more seniority or that weren't regular Air Force.
Not to be a cynic, but is there any evidence the F-102 was actually phased out of the base where our President served in Texas while he was there?
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