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Try as readers may to find the tale of Cheney's Vietnam service or, to be more precise, his meticulous avoidance of service, they just won't find that In My Time offers much in the way of revelation about Cheney's times.
Cheney has always positioned himself as an arch militarist. But when he had a chance to get on the front lines, he instead got deferments. A lot of them
Richard Bruce Cheney was "of age" for service during the Vietnam conflict. Faced with the chance to engage on the battlefield or the home front, however, he dodged out -- not for moral reasons but selfish ones. Pulitzer Prize-winning author David Maraniss, who interviewed Cheney for his book They Marched Into Sunlight, says the vice president just couldn't be bothered. "I think he's emblematic of a certain type. He wasn't against the war, just didn't want anything to do with it," explains Maraniss. "He wanted to get on with his life and not let the world get in the way."
Unfortunately, the world had a tendency to get in the way of young men who, like Cheney, were of draft age when the US troop presence in Vietnam began to rise in the mid-1960s. As a result, there was one sense in which Cheney mirrored the actions, if not the politics, of his fellow students. Dick Cheney was definitely opposed to the draft, at least as far as it affected him. Indeed, unlike George W. Bush, who performed some sort of service -- ill-defined and unrecorded as it may have been -- in the Texas Air National Guard, Cheney reacted to the prospect of wearing his country's uniform like a man with a deadly allergy to olive drab.
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