The Real Military Record of George W. Bush: Not Heroic, but Not AWOL, Either-The Original Story

George Magazine Archives ^ | 10-10-00 | By Peter Keating and Karthik Thyagarajan

[kabar]

Not a good tactic - attacking Kerry's record when it's so much better than Bush's.

Disagree. Kerry is making his war record the centerpiece of his campaign. He never misses an opportunity to bring it up on the campaign trail. He is doing it for several reasons: contrast his service with GWB; demonstrate that the Dems can handle national security issues; and attract veteran and independent support.

Bush shouldn't cede this issue to Kerry. Kerry's war record does deserve closer scrutiny. He only served 4 months in Vietnam and requested to leave a scant 4 days after receiving his third superficial wound. Who wrote him up for his Silver and Bronze stars? Will he make the citations public? Did he committ atrocities while serving in Vietnam, as he has admitted? Moreover, his actions when he returned should also be examined.

http://66.102.7.104/search?q=cache:vWPtWJXn-wYJ:www.usvetdsp.com/jf_kerry.htm%2B&hl=en&ie=UTF-8

[BushCountry]

Like many of the junior U.S. Navy officers who applied for Swift-boat duty, John Kerry had assumed that he would be assigned mostly to relatively safe coastal patrols off South Vietnam.

Kerry's first night on Mekong Delta river patrol found PCF-44, his first Swift boat, supporting a provincial reconnaissance unit (PRU), one of more than 200 such eighteen-man squads in a CIA-funded program aimed at destroying the Vietcong through assassination, kidnapping, and sabotage carried out by Vietnamese mercenaries.

Paid four times what privates in the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) received, plus hefty bounties per kill or captured prisoner or weapon,

PRU members in many cases were hardened South Vietnamese criminals given a choice between life imprisonment and joining up; in others they were North Vietnamese and Vietcong defectors recruited for their willingness to do anything for a price.

After the PRU had disappeared into the dense mangrove trees lining the bank, Kerry beached his boat on the mud, just a few hundred yards downstream from where the unit had landed. "There we sat silently, waiting to help if called upon," he wrote later in his war notes. "Hours passed slowly by. Then, late at night, a red flare shot into the sky from the PRU's position. It meant 'Emergency Extraction'—get the PRU's out as fast as possible." Two patrol boat river craft (PBRs) that were anchored close by also sprang into action. Before Kerry and his crew could get their Swift off the mud, "the PBRs had disappeared up a small estuary." The skipper of one was on the radio shouting to headquarters, "Emergency Extraction requested—moving in now—Emergency Extraction requested."

The Swift boat's young lieutenant had scant idea what he and his men were supposed to do. "The disorganization was incredible," Kerry wrote in his war notes. "We had never worked with the PBR's before. The Operation Order given to us that morning contained no contingencies for Swift boats." Kerry's Swift came under fire, but the crew couldn't tell from where. In the rush to get out of there, the boat ran aground. Finally the PBRs reappeared. Kerry's account of that night's events continued.

They had a sampan in tow and were moving very slowly, confident that the shooting was over for the evening. [Boatswain's Mate Stephen W.] Hatch nursed the Swift alongside the PBR. I jumped aboard to talk with the Chief Petty Officer in charge. "What happened?" "The PRU's were patrolling through the area when they came on a hut with two people in it. Man and a woman. PRU's went in and found the woman writing a letter to her VC boyfriend. So they took 'em into custody. As they were comin back they spotted a sampan with four people in it. They took 'em under fire and that's it." It seemed like an every day occurrence to him. "Were the people killed?" I ventured timidly. "Hell yes. PRU's don't miss when they shoot." "But the people in the sampan didn't fire or anything?" Just shooting them seemed incredible.

The Vietcong were not easily frightened—and not easily recognized. The battlefield was everywhere in Vietnam, and the enemy was sometimes a barefoot child carrying a bomb in a satchel. As a result, for the most part the rule on a Swift boat was "better safe than sorry." Every Asian was seen as a potential sniper. If a noise came from the thick mangrove brush on a riverbank, it was deemed wiser to spray the area with machine-gun fire than to make a closer investigation. And if in doing so one accidentally killed a civilian, it was better to keep it to oneself.

One of the most horrific moments of Kerry's tour in Vietnam occurred one day toward the end of winter, when the second Swift boat he commanded, PCF-94, and another Swift were patrolling the Cua Lon River in the southwestern delta region. The night was pitch-black, neither Swift's search or boarding lights were working properly, and both boats kept getting stuck on the bottom of a shallow channel. "Many minutes of silent patrolling had gone by when one of the men yelled sampan off the port bow," Kerry wrote in his war notes.

Everybody froze and we slowed the engines quickly. But the sampan was already by us and wasn't stopping. It was past curfew and nothing was allowed on the river. I told the after gunner to fire a few warning shots and in the confusion all the guns opened up. We moved in on the sampan and taking one of the battle lanterns off the bulkhead shone it on the silhouette of the craft that was now dead in the water.

Technically, the two Swifts had done nothing wrong. The sampan, operating past curfew, was undeniably in a free-fire zone. What's more, there had been several incidents of people in sampans trying to get close enough to U.S. Navy vessels to toss bombs into their pilothouses. But knowing they were following official Navy policy didn't make it any easier for the crews to deal with what they saw next. "The light revealed a woman standing in the stern of the sampan with a child of perhaps two years or less in her arms," Kerry wrote.

Neither [was] harmed. We asked her where the men from the stern were as one of the gunners was sure that he had seen someone moving back there. She gesticulated wildly and I could see traces of blood on the engine mounting. It was obvious that they had been blown overboard. Then someone said that there was a body up front and we moved in closer to see the limbs of a small child limp on the sacks of rice. She had already covered it and when one of the men asked me if I wanted it uncovered I said no realizing that the face would stay with me for the rest of my life and that it was better not to know whether there was a smile or a grimace or whether it was a girl or a boy.

Almost every American who served in Vietnam witnessed or heard about innocents' getting killed. The civilian casualties would haunt the consciences of many veterans, including John Kerry. It was impossible to rectify or rationalize a mistake that resulted in such a death. "The child was still dead," Kerry wrote of the accident on the Cua Lon River, "and we had done it."

"Good Hunting? Good Christ"

The longer he was in the Mekong Delta river system, the more Kerry's war notes reflected a distrust of his direct superiors. He also grew more and more uncomfortable with the tacit assumption that an American life was worth so much more than a Vietnamese life. Although he never saw the slightest evidence of bigotry, hatred, or cruelty of any kind in any of the men he served with on a Swift boat, or in any of his fellow Swift skippers, Kerry was troubled by the callous attitude he perceived coming from the top U.S. brass. Worse, it seemed to be trickling down into the enlisted ranks among men eager for promotions. He wrote in his war notes,

The popular view was that somehow "gooks" just didn't have very much personality—they were ignorant "slopeheads," just peasants with no feelings and no hopes. I don't think this was true among most of the officers and this made me wonder how much of it was feigned among the enlisted so that they would look good in the eyes of their more chauvinistic comrades.

The Chief talked on. "Doesn't matter. They shouldn'a been there. Besides, one of the PRU's says they had guns but that the sampan tipped over and the guns were lost in the water."

Then, Kerry wrote, he looked over at the young woman they had detained, "who was squatting in the rear of the PBR." She was defiant. She sat very calmly, watching the movements of the men who had just blown four of her countrymen to bits. She glared at me. I wondered about her boyfriend who was fighting us somewhere else. The PBR crew said that the men in the sampan got what they had coming to them but I felt a certain sense of guilt, shame, sorrow, remorse—something inexplicable about the way they were shot and about the predicament of the girl. I wanted to touch her and tell her that it was going to be all right but I didn't really know that it would be. Besides, she wouldn't have accepted my gesture with anything but scorn. I looked away and did nothing at all which was really all I could do. I hated all of us for the situation which stripped people of their self respect.

Kerry returned to his boat, and as it moved out to the Soi Rap River, he looked back and saw the PRU mercenaries talking animatedly, no doubt discussing the lucrative killing they had just done. One of them mimicked the expression and the position that one of the dead had assumed at the instant he had become one of the dead. It had been easy. No shot had been fired at them. Besides, the dead didn't matter at all. They were now just four more casualties of war. The United States would now

[holdonnow]

November 3, 2000, Friday, Late Edition - Final


SECTION: Section A; Page 27; Column 5; National Desk

LENGTH: 539 words

HEADLINE: THE 2000 CAMPAIGN: MILITARY SERVICE;
Bush's Guard Attendance Is Questioned and Defended

BYLINE: By JO THOMAS

BODY:
Two Democratic senators today called on Gov. George W. Bush to release his full military record to resolve doubts raised by a newspaper about whether he reported for required drills when he was in the Air National Guard in 1972 and 1973.

But a review of records by The New York Times indicated that some of those concerns may be unfounded. Documents reviewed by The Times showed that Mr. Bush served in at least 9 of the 17 months in question.

Dan Bartlett, a Bush spokesman, said that Mr. Bush had fulfilled his military obligations "or he would not have been honorably discharged."

The senators, Daniel K. Inouye of Hawaii and Bob Kerrey of Nebraska, both Medal of Honor winners, were responding, in a telephone conference with reporters, to an article in The Boston Globe on Tuesday.

The article, citing military records for Mr. Bush, raised questions about whether Mr. Bush performed any duty from April 1972 until September 1973, when he entered Harvard Business School.

A review by The Times showed that after a seven-month gap, he appeared for duty in late November 1972 at least through July 1973.

Mr. Bush was assigned to the 111th Fighter-Interceptor Squadron at Ellington Air Force Base near Houston, from November 1969, last flying there on April 16, 1972.

In a report dated May 26, 1972, his commander, Maj. William D. Harris Jr., said Mr. Bush had "recently accepted the position as campaign manager for a candidate for the United States Senate."

Mr. Bush went to work for Winton M. Blount a few days after Mr. Blount won the Republican primary in Alabama on May 2, 1972.

From that time until after the election that November, Mr. Bush did not appear for duty, even after being told to report for training with an Alabama unit in October and November.

Mr. Bartlett said Mr. Bush had been too busy with the campaign to report in those months but made up the time later.

On Sept. 5, 1972, Mr. Bush asked his Texas Air National Guard superiors for assignment to the 187th Tactical Recon Group in Montgomery "for the months of September, October and November."

Capt. Kenneth K. Lott, chief of the personnel branch of the 187th Tactical Recon Group, told the Texas commanders that training in September had already occurred but that more training was scheduled for Oct. 7 and 8 and Nov. 4 and 5. But Mr. Bartlett said Mr. Bush did not serve on those dates because he was involved in the Senate campaign, but he made up those dates later.

Colonel Turnipseed, who retired as a general, said in an interview that regulations allowed Guard members to miss duty as long as it was made up within the same quarter.

Mr. Bartlett pointed to a document in Mr. Bush's military records that showed credit for four days of duty ending Nov. 29 and for eight days ending Dec. 14, 1972, and, after he moved back to Houston, on dates in January, April and May.

The May dates correlated with orders sent to Mr. Bush at his Houston apartment on April 23, 1973, in which Sgt. Billy B. Lamar told Mr. Bush to report for active duty on May 1-3 and May 8-10.

Another document showed that Mr. Bush served at various times from May 29, 1973, through July 30, 1973, a period of time questioned by The Globe.

[holdonnow]

The New York Times

View Related Topics


July 22, 2000, Saturday, Late Edition - Final
Correction Appended

SECTION: Section A; Page 1; Column 1; National Desk

LENGTH: 3414 words

HEADLINE: THE 2000 CAMPAIGN: GOVERNOR BUSH'S JOURNEY;
After Yale, Bush Ambled Amiably Into His Future

SERIES: GEORGE BUSH'S JOURNEY: A Man Adrift

BYLINE: By JO THOMAS

DATELINE: HOUSTON

BODY:
George W. Bush left Yale University in the spring of 1968 with a diploma in hand but no plans for what to do with it.

So for five years, not unlike many young men his age, he drifted.

He lived in three states, had at least seven apartments and at least that many girlfriends, held three full-time jobs -- one in business, one in politics and one in public service -- and learned to fly fighter jets with the Air National Guard.

"There are some people who, the minute they get out of college, know exactly what they want to do," he said in a recent interview about what he calls his nomadic years. "I did not. And it didn't bother me. That's just the way it was."

These youthful years also contain the gray areas of his biography: periods of unemployment and a hiatus of at least six months in his National Guard obligations while he worked on a political campaign.

And this was a period in which Mr. Bush has seemed to acknowledge trying drugs, if only by not denying that he did. Although he has steadfastly refused to answer directly whether he used marijuana, cocaine or other illegal drugs, he said last August that he could have passed a 15-year F.B.I. background check when his father became president, apparently ruling out drug use since 1974, but not before.

Of those preceding years, he stood on an earlier answer: "When I was young and irresponsible, I was young and irresponsible."

But in dozens of interviews conducted over several months, friends, former girlfriends, neighbors and roommates said they did not recall seeing any signs of drug use.

Indeed, the interviews and an examination of National Guard records create a complicated and sometimes contradictory portrait of Mr. Bush at that time in his life.

Mr. Bush sometimes seemed to inhabit two distinctly different social worlds, on some nights joining poolside parties at the Chateau Dijon, an upscale apartment for young professionals, and on others attending formal dances sponsored by an elite club of 100 bachelors.

He spent more than a year learning to fly supersonic military jets, becoming, by most accounts, among the best in his squadron. Yet he gave up flying -- and for months on end failed to show up for alternative military duty as he had promised, instead working on the hopeless campaign of a political neophyte running against one of the most powerful men on Capitol Hill.

He counted among his friends people who today say they smoked marijuana back then, and acquaintances say they saw him at a popular nightclub where pot was sometimes smoked. (Mr. Bush says he does not recall going there.) Yet dozens of people who knew him well described him as a conservative who preferred to party with beer. These friends professed to be baffled by the questions of drug use that have cropped up in his presidential campaign.

He went for months without a steady job, and the jobs he held all came from associates of his father. And he seemed to inhabit a series of successively cheaper, less exclusive apartments in Houston, a city that was about to boom on oil money. Yet friends and acquaintances recalled Mr. Bush as a stable, outgoing, hardworking, unpretentious, idealistic young man who cherished his family and was simply trying to figure out how to make his own way in the world, something he would do a few years later as he started his own business and ran for Congress.

At Ease in a Brooks Brothers Suit


Just before leaving Yale, Mr. Bush was accepted into the Texas Air National Guard, thanks largely to the prominence of his family. It was a path that reduced the chance of his being sent to Vietnam. After a summer of basic training, he spent two years on active duty learning to fly, first in Georgia and later at Ellington Air Force Base, near Houston.

Susan Munson, who met him at a poolside rice-and-beans party she held in 1970 and dated him off and on for several years, recalled that he was very good at arguing.

"He was conservative, and he hung around with people who were more liberal," Ms. Munson said. "Most of George's friends were the type who would sit on the floor with torn jeans and T-shirts. They were people who were well-educated and interested in making the world better."

Another woman who dated Mr. Bush at the time remembered him as "very nice, very straight. There was a little tension between the two of us. I was 'little miss liberal.' He was more conventional than people I knew." The woman, a former beauty queen who is now a lawyer living outside Texas, asked that her name not be used.

"There was a lot of counterculture stuff going on," she said, but "I've been mystified by the rumors about drugs. He wasn't using drugs. I thought he was about the straightest person I knew. He was straight in a refreshing way. He had a very good sense of humor. He had an edge, an energy, charisma. He could be wild and go to a party and drink a lot, but he was a very conventional college guy. He could have been a college guy from the early 60's."

Robert H. Gow, a colleague of Mr. Bush's father, who hired young George W. in early 1971 to work at his agricultural and horticultural conglomerate, Stratford of Houston, remembered him as "a presentable, attractive young college student."

"I've heard all this about a wild youth, but I never saw it," he said. "He was wearing a Brooks Brothers suit. He showed up on time and worked well past five, as we all did." Mr. Bush was assigned to research small nurseries that Mr. Gow hoped to acquire, a job that occasionally took him to Central America. His new boss had been an executive at the elder Bush's Zapata Oil Company and a guest at the Bush home. He gave his young employee a friendly ear.

"George liked to talk," Mr. Gow said. "He was searching for what to do. He was constantly wanting to talk about what to do with his life."

Houston itself was poised for a boom. The 1970's would bring 200 corporations and a flood of newcomers that reached 6,000 a month. As Houston expanded to cover 450 square miles, anything but zoning and mass transit seemed possible.

"It was a big change from what I knew in New England," Mr. Gow recalled. "One time, possibly at the Bushes', I went to a dinner party where one man was talking about walking on the moon. Another transplanted hearts. Another was digging for gold in Guyana. George and I were talking about drilling for oil at the bottom of the ocean. My father thought everybody in Texas must be mad."

The Dorm Away From College


On the raw southwestern edge of Houston in the early 1970's, just after the glittering Galleria shopping complex opened, the Chateau Dijon apartments were the place to live if you were young, ambitious and well-to-do.

The complex on Beverly Hill Street included a mock French chateau and a web of 300 semitropical garden apartments connected by walkways and set among oak trees and swimming pools. One tenant rented an extra apartment for his wine collection. Another, an inventor, used his apartment as a lab.

George W. Bush called it home.

The developer built the Chateau Dijon to be beautiful and comfortable and hired Mildred Alexander, a formidable widow with high-society credentials, as the manager who could keep it that way.

"She knew everybody's family," recalled Robert Sakowitz, the department store heir. "If you made too much noise, she'd let you know. It was a bit like a dormitory; it had that kind of feeling."

John W. Link, who lived in the apartments after law school, said, "You could literally have a whole social life without going outside the Chateau Dijon. You would date different people, and there were groups inside of groups. The guys would have contests: this week, we'll date from only this side of the street."

"Houston was on the edge of the sexual revolution," Mr. Link recalled. "It got here, but it didn't quite get here. We were not L.A., not New York. We were all young, trying to make a living."

Former neighbors at the Chateau remembered the youthful Mr. Bush as a "regular guy" who did not try to capitalize on his family name. But the Bush name was hard to miss. In the fall of 1970, his father ran for the Senate against the father of another Chateau resident, Lloyd M. Bentsen III, a member of a powerful and wealthy Texas family. Mr. Bush worked in the campaign.

"We had Bush banners stretched across the street," remembered Louis Atlas, a neighbor. "We had banners on our cars. The girls wore Bush scarves."

In an interview, Mr. Bush smiled as he recalled his days at the Chateau Dijon. "I'm a person who makes friends easily," he said. "It didn't matter whether I'd grown up there and gone to the University of Texas. There were University of Texas people there and a lot of other people. My wife-to-be was living in the apartments, although I didn't know her. She was at the other end -- I was at the sedate end, of course. But we had fun. We had a lot of fun."

"All of us had jobs," he added. "It wasn't a bunch of people hanging around." He said he did not remember attending the banana daiquiri parties for which two of his friends were famous. "That was a little sophisticated for me," he said. "I might have been more willing to drink beer."

Some of the residents of the Chateau, including Mr. Bush, belonged to a social club that was a far cry from beer parties in someone's apartment. It was the Master's Club, an elite group of about 100 bachelors that held formal dances at local country clubs, allowing its members to keep a toehold in the comfortable, exclusive world in which most of them were raised.

Jim Woodson, the club's organizer and now a Houston real estate executive, got the idea for the name from the golf tournament. The club's parties, he said, offered "a controlled atmosphere. You knew who was dancing next to you."

Ms. Munson remembers the less formal side of the future presidential candidate, the side that cared little about his appearance, for example. "George would wear his father's suit coats when he'd throw them away," Ms. Munson said. "They were obviously his father's suit coats. George wasn't as tall."

"George was interested in people," Ms. Munson said. "He seemed to like to sit around and talk about serious things in a fun way. You didn't get that with most of the guys there. He knew he wanted to own a baseball team, and he wanted to do politics," she said. "He wasn't sure how he was going to get to those goals.'

A Frugal, Not Prodigal, Son


In late spring 1971, Mr. Bush moved from the Chateau Dijon to an unfurnished one-bedroom garage apartment at 2039 1/2 South Boulevard, an elegant neighborhood near Rice University. Donald Ensenat, an old friend, shared this apartment for the rest of that year.

Rosemary Thornton, whose widowed mother, Georgia Corbett, rented the main house at 2039 South Boulevard, said her mother, who was 75 then, liked to sit out on her patio and would banter with Mr. Bush, who "had to walk down her driveway to get to his place."

Mrs. Thornton also recalled her mother's saying: "He doesn't seem lonesome, but you never see him with groups or other people. He's always alone."

In the fall of 1971, after a year of work at Stratford, Mr. Bush quit and was unemployed for the next five or six months. In an interview he said he spent the time flying with the Air National Guard. He was 25.

His father had given up his seat in Congress and was living with his mother in the Waldorf Towers in New York, serving the Nixon administration as its United Nations ambassador.

But according to his parents, there was never any concern about what young George was doing with his life.

In a recent interview, former President George Bush and his wife, Barbara, were both asked whether they worried about their son's nomadic period and both dismissed the question.

"He wasn't aimless," Mrs. Bush said. "I don't know why they say that."

She added: "We never worried about it. That's sort of a fiction-ary thing."

Governor Bush echoed the thought. "I think they must have had pretty good confidence in their ability to raise children," he said, "plus they had other children to worry about, too. A teenager is a heck of a lot harder to raise than a guy who has just gotten out of college."

He added that he did not ask them for financial support. "I was supporting myself," he said. "I wasn't calling them saying, 'Hey, I'm out of money again,' or 'Help!' I was making a living."

"It's not that hard to get along financially if you don't have a lot of desires," he added, "and I wasn't spending a lot of money. I think my friends will tell you I'm a frugal person. I was not living it up big time."

Even though his parents profess to have had little concern at the time, one of his father's friends came forward in May 1972 to offer him a job. Jimmy Allison, a former newspaper publisher in Midland, Tex., who had served as a political adviser to the elder Bush, recruited Mr. Bush to go to Alabama to join the Senate campaign of Winton M. Blount, a Republican novice running against a powerful Democratic incumbent, John J. Sparkman.

In a recent interview, Mr. Bush described Mr. Allison, now dead, as "an older figure who served as a mentor in a way, a wonderful friend."

Mr. Blount, a millionaire contractor known throughout Alabama as Red, had served three years as President Nixon's postmaster general but had never run for elective office. After he announced his intention to run, a newspaper columnist remarked that Mr. Blount must have decided "it's as good a time as any to go over Niagara in a barrel."

Nee Bear, who dated Mr. Bush at the time, said she was struck by how hard Mr. Bush worked for Mr. Blount.

"He wanted to be a hands-on guy," remembered Ms. Bear, who first met Mr. Bush while working on the campaign. "He put bumper stickers on in the parking lot, and believe me, that is the pits. At that time in Alabama, people would spit on you if you were a Republican."

Kay Blount Miles, who worked in the office for her father's campaign, remembered Mr. Bush as "funny and fun to be around. He was good at keeping the office up. He worked as part of the team. I never felt he was somebody from the outside coming in."

But it was an uphill battle. Former Gov. George C. Wallace heaped scorn on Mr. Blount for living in a Montgomery mansion with, as Mr. Wallace exaggerated it, 26 bathrooms. Even President Nixon, a fellow Republican, did not help for fear of angering the powerful Senator Sparkman, even though he was a Democrat.

"President Nixon did not support me," Mr. Blount recalled. "Sparkman was a leading senator, and the president needed his support."

Mr. Bush, who monitored the polls, kept the bad news to himself. Not until Election Day did he warn Devere Mclennan, who worked for him and shared an apartment with him, what to expect. "George explained to me we weren't going to win," said Mr. Mclennan, who was expecting a victory.

In an interview 28 years later, Mr. Bush remembered the numbers. "We all teamed together and helped Red get about 36 percent of the vote," he said with a short laugh, "in spite of the fact that Nixon had gotten 72 percent of the vote. The ticket-splitting was phenomenal."

When Mr. Bush went to work on the campaign he was still obligated to serve in the National Guard, and accordingly he sought a transfer to Alabama. His original request, to serve with the 9921st Air Reserve Squadron in Montgomery, was rejected because the unit would not meet his military obligation. He requested another assignment in July, and the Texas Air National Guard recommended letting him serve with another Montgomery group, the 187th Tactical Recon Group, from September to November 1972.

On Sept. 15, 1972, the head of personnel for that unit wrote: "Lieutenant Bush should report to Lt. Col. William Turnipseed, DCO, to perform equivalent training."

Questions about Mr. Bush's military service arose in May when The Boston Globe quoted Mr. Turnipseed, who retired as a general, as saying Mr. Bush never appeared for duty.

In a recent interview, the general took a tiny step back, saying, "I don't think he did, but I wouldn't stake my life on it. I think I would have remembered him. The chances are 99 percent he didn't."

In an interview, Mr. Bush disagreed. "I was there. I know this guy was quoted as saying I wasn't, but I was there."

Emily Marks, who worked in the Blount campaign and dated Mr. Bush, said she recalls that he returned to Montgomery after the election to serve with the Air National Guard.

National Guard records provided by the Guard and by the Bush campaign indicate he did serve on Nov. 29, 1972, after the election. These records also show a gap in service from that time to the previous May. Mr. Bush says he made up for the lost time in subsequent months, and guard records show he received credit for having performed all the required service.

Young Man Without a Game Plan


Back in Houston, Mr. Bush went to live in a four-unit apartment building at 2910 Westheimer, a busy east-west artery. His downstairs neighbor, a florist, had a dog and refused to let the landlord spray pesticides, Ms. Munson recalled, and "the roaches were just terrible."

Ms. Bear agreed: "It was little and dumpy, and there were a lot of bugs. It wasn't a nice place. He drove a white Cutlass, dirty laundry, tennis shoes, and everything else in the back of his car -- just like a guy. No Gucci loafers or things like that."

Asked about other women in Mr. Bush's life at the time, Ms. Bear said: "Not that summer. Well, I don't know. I spent a good deal of time with him. Mr. Lothario I never got the idea that he was. Do you get the impression he's a big romantic? I don't. He never was wolfish. He was a decent guy. He would never be a kiss-and-tell guy. Never."

In January 1973, Mr. Bush went to work for a Houston youth program, Professional United Leadership League, or PULL, set up by John L. White, a former professional football player who knew Mr. Bush's father.

"John had a vision of matching off-season athletes with city kids in the Third Ward, and he wanted me to come work with him," Mr. Bush said. "It was 27 years ago, so I don't remember the exact incident where John and I met each other, but I went down, and it was a great experience.

"I was coming from the west side of town, and this was in the inner city. I saw a lot of tragedy, and I saw a lot of goodness. I saw people who really cared about kids. There are some success stories out of that program, and there are some horrible failures, including this one little boy whom he and I had a very close attachment to, named Jimmy Dean, who's dead, shot on the streets of Houston."

Ms. Bear recalled that Mr. Bush "was trying to get a lot of the baseball players from the Astros and professional athletes to come there and show kids there was a way out. He spent time and energy on those children. He wasn't a dilettante who comes in and says, 'This will look good on my resume.'

Ms. Bear remembered that he liked simple pleasures. She said she never went to a night club with him. "We went to the VFW dance hall in Navasota, Tex., where you saw little old ladies dancing with each other in their housedresses and listened to Bob Wills and the Texas Troubadours. He loved it."

It was during this time that Mr. Bush applied to Harvard Business School, a move for which he thanks Mr. White. "A friend of mine sent me the application, and I really didn't seem to be that interested," Mr. Bush said. "And his attitude was, 'Well, it's a great challenge, and you ought to try it.' "

"So I filled out the application. I don't remember all of it, but I got in, and I wasn't really that excited about going. I think if you look at my full life, I have never been a person---- I haven't had a game plan. I could put it in the perspective of this race: I've never said, 'Gosh, I'll do this in high school, and then this will lead to that, and I'll end up being president.' Or, 'I will go to Harvard Business School so I can be president.'

"The truth of the matter is, I don't know what I'm going to do next, and it doesn't bother me. I do know I'm going to be the president, at least I think I am. We're about to find out in about four months. But I don't know what's after that. I truly don't."

George Bush's Journey

This is the seventh in a series of articles about the lives of the presidential candidates. The next installment will look at George W. Bush's entry into politics.

[hchutch]

The chance that facts will stop the likes of John F. Kerry and Michael Moore from spreading these lies is less than the chance that People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals will serve veal parmesan at their next awards banquet.

[holdonnow]

Very true, but at least our people should be armed with some facts.

[hchutch]

No doubt about that.

If Kerry and Moore will lie about the President, what else are they lying about?

On the other hand, the President is known as the type of person who will do what he says he will do. There are much worse things than a President who keeps his word, IMHO.

[soozla]

Not to say they won't try, but I think all of us who believe in Bush as a leader should write it off for what it is and will be.....desperation, on their part. There's no substance or benefit to be made from making the comparison............it can be factually refuted at every turn - Bush has lead this nation through the worst attack on U.S. soil EVER and exhibited leadership, courage and commitment....and he continues to do so - "encumbent advantage" - as long as he gets out there in front of all their junk, it will appear to be just what it is - "crybabies", "posers" & BSers running for office who point fingers and can't back it up - they throw stuff out there for a 60 second sound byte and hope it sticks - people will get REAL tired of this REAL quick!!

[soozla]

"If Kerry and Moore will lie about the President, what else are they lying about?"

Oh, gee...hmmmmmmmmmm...let's see here.........

THE TRUTH ABOUT "BOWLING FOR COLUMBINE"

[steve8714]

As a former Army Reservist, I can attest that perfect attendance records among the enlisted were rare. Officers in the AR were given preferential treatment, even to having an association to lobby Congress, something enlisted could not do at the time. I got into my unit in 1971, and got right in. Although there was a waiting list of 100,000 nationally, none of my friends had any trouble getting into any unit on short notice.
More interesting to me was the ethnic breakdown of my unit...people who joined in the late '60's were mostly affluent Jewish guys in law or med school or pre med...1970-72 saw the Catholic boys from working and middle class white families...after 1972, recruits were 85% black.
I don't make anything big of this but always interesting.

[backhoe]

I greatly appreciate your retrieving and posting that information- thank you.

[Robert A Cook PE]

Later,

Only 3 months in Vietnam?

[warchild9]

With Kerry's kill record (including women and children), I'm surprised he never joined the ATF.

[MEG33]

This would be a good post to put a link to as there may be some who don't know.I can't do links,

[twigs]

I think Kerry's military record is probably good. And I take it that he wasn't drafted--he went on his own? We need to give credit where it is due. What he CAN be faulted on, legitimately, is his activity when he returned. He threw medals (he claimed were his own but later turned out to belong to someone else) over a wall in protest and spoke before a congressional committee against the War. Others here have found evidence that he was involved in Jane Fonda's protests, but I don't know the details. He also co-authored a book after he returned, The New Soldier, on which appeared a flag upside down. I don't want this type of soldier as commander-in-chief, even if he did serve admirably at the time. His protests and book appeared at a time when his fellow soldiers were still in harm's way in SE Asia.

[MEG33]

That cover on his book mocked the raising of the flag on Iwo Jima.What respect he gives to an historic moment,what a reverence for America's sacrifices on that island.

[twigs]

Thanks for the detail. This is not a man we want as president and commander-in-chief. I'm willing to overlook the alleged atrocities in which he may have been involved simply because I believe it's just too hard to evaluate and judge after this long a time. Plus, as horrible as these things are, when in combat conditions, things are not as clear as they seem to be later looking back in hindsight. Who knows? Maybe he got so bitter because he did these things. But his actions after his return is enough to evaluate his capability of being president. I hope that the American people can see him for who he apparently is.

[MEG33]

I just found out what that represented this week,too.

I accept that my disdain for Kerry for his anti war words and actions,and resulting pain to returning soldiers to say nothing of those in Viet Nam,will mean nothing to many voters,sigh.

[backhoe]

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1070679/posts
MSNBC's "Imus In The Morning," 2/3/04 (Excerpt from RNC Research w/Sen McCain interview) MUST READ
Republican National Committee ^ | Feb 3, 2004 | RNC Research
Clintons are behind the resurfacing and using their friends in the press to spread the allegations that are without fact.

Read this White House response to these spurious slanders:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1070679/posts?page=9#9

[Howlin]

It's official; you now have your OWN folder on my IE Favorites! :-)