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The story of "Lieutenant Bush skipped Guard Duty" collapsed under the weight of the evidence of the fraudulence of the supporting "documents

No it didn't. Quite the contrary...but proof that would stand up in court never surfaced.
My experience and reading tell me that whether or not clever young men serve in the armed forces and/or fight in combat is a matter of choice. That's even more true when the men are from rich and powerful families.

Viet Nam was a very unpopular war. All sorts of clever young men avoided service and combat. So when people tell me that young George obtained entry to a well-known rich-man's safe-haven

The specifics of history matter. Viet Nam became a very unpopular war after the Tet Offensive. It didn't really happen overnight and - though I've seen on FR a posting which purports to document that John Kerry was ambivalent about Viet Nam while he was still in college - it wasn't well started on that road (at least in the popular press) until after Tet.
That matters to me in the sense that since Kerry is a year older than Bush, they made their decisions on the military at different stages of that evolution. Had Kerry been a year younger than Bush, and thus had Kerry like Clinton been in college when the ~~antiwar protests~~ draft riots were in full swing, Kerry's choice might have been to go to law school instead of signing up for the Navy and ending up in Viet Nam. In such case Kerry very well might have availed himself of choices which would have kept him out of harm's way.
But in fact the time Bush entered TANG was a time when antiwar sentiment was further developed than it was when Kerry entered the Navy. Bush did not, and has at no time claimed any different, sign up for an active combat arm which would have been sure to have gotten him to Viet Nam.
But he did join an inactive combat arm. Training as a fighter pilot isn't the way to guarantee you won't be activated and sent into battle. In fact the training to get you up to flying status isn't just a Weekend Warrior thing - you have to go into effectively active status for a significant time in order to train enough to attain flight status. Training to be a fighter pilot is expensive and time-consuming, and when Bush joined TANG he could not have known that the military would not decide that it needed to activate him after he was trained. And there is such a thing as an "operational accident" to consider the possibility of before you sign on for fighter pilot duty, even as a reserve.
Bush became an operational reserve fighter pilot, and maintained flight status until US involvement in Viet Nam was wound down. At that point the USAF pulled a boatload of fighter pilots back home and deactivated them. Many of them loved to fly and joined the Air National Guard. And suddenly the paucity of ANG fighter pilots turned to a glut. Instead of being an asset to the Guard, Lt Bush was competition for limited flight hours among all those combat veterans.
So if you were the commander of Bush's TANG fighter wing, would you at that point exercise yourself to make sure that Lt. Bush maintained flight status? Or would you not in fact prefer that he leave flight status and do something else? If you were in Lt. Bush's shoes in that circumstance, might you not in fact choose to do something else, and feel free to commit to an out-of-state political campaign?