From Colin Powell's autobiography, My American Journey, p. 148
According to the Washington Post, a bronze bust of young lieutenant G.W. Bush was unveiled Thursday, Feb. 9th by the National Guard Association of the United States at the National Guard Memorial Building in Washington D.C. He is, the article said, probably its most famous alumnus.
Perhaps it should have said the most infamous.
" I was not prepared to shoot my eardrum out with a shotgun in order to get a deferment. Nor was I willing to go to Canada. So I chose to better myself by learning how to fly airplanes."
What a travesty!! What an insult to all the Guardsmen risking their lives in Afghanistan and Iraq today! A statue of any one of them would be more honest.
George Bush (with a little help from Daddy's friends) joined the Texas Air National Guard to escape having to go to Vietnam. Guardsmen today cannot escape the war their commander-in-chief lied them into by enlisting in the Guard rather than in the regular military as the lucky could at the time G.W. enlisted. And, thanks to "stop loss" many of them are having to risk their lives in more than one tour of duty in what General McPeak calls Bush's "vanity war."
Would Bush have been so quick to go to war if he actually knew anything about combat? Many soldiers, parents, and veterans (including some generals like General Zinni who knew combat and who thought this war would be a tragic mistake) would like to know.
Lt. Colonel Jerry Killian was the head of the 147th fighter interceptor squadron to which Bush was assigned in Houston in 1970. According to Mary Mapes and others, in April 1972 Bush walked away from the Guard. Killian tried to get him back, ordered him to take a physical, worked with him to try to get him to show up for alternative guard duty, and then was pressured by his superiors to fill in paperwork that would get Bush off the hook for having been gone for a year and a half.
G.W. Bush served his country neither honorably nor well. His fellow guardsmen in both Texas and Alabama offered rewards for anyone who remembered seeing Bush show up for duty during long stretches of his service.
It would seem that nearly all of his fellow Guardsmen would remember serving with a congressman's son. Especially one as cocky and as much of a partier as G.W. always was. But, Bush apologists would have us believe that men who served honorably in the Guard - even some who are Republicans and voted for Bush -- are all liars, and the proven liar (about nearly everything), G.W. Bush, is telling the truth.
In fact, Bush says very little about his service.
Ben Barnes, who admits that he interceded to get young Bush into the champagne unit of the Texas Air National Guard has since expressed regret over that intervention, and guilt about the young men who may have died in Vietnam because of his intervention on behalf of men from prestigious families.
It has been suggested that Bush's military records were scrubbed (and words are blacked out in Bush's records) some, possibly, to cover up arrests that should have kept him out of the Guard. But, Bush did what he always does in such circumstances; Promoted the person most likely to know the truth about such allegations.
In 2002, he promoted Lt. General Daniel James III, head of the Texas Air National Guard at the time of the alleged scrubbing, to head the national Air National Guard. http://www.buzzflash.com/analysis/2002/05/28_scrubbed.html
Mary Mapes, the longtime CBS producer fired over the 60 Minutes segment on Bush's military records and the allegations that he received preferential treatment to get into the TANG has written a book "Truth and Duty: The Press, The President, and The Privilege of Power" about the 60 Minutes debacle, and was interviewed on Democracy Now, on Feb. 9th and 10th 2006. http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/02/10/1434202
She believes the documents she used on that now infamous "60 Minutes" segment are authentic. She says they have never been proven not to be. She believes her firing was political.
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