Tracking the National Guard Career of the Fatuous Flyboy from New Haven
By JEFFREY ST. CLAIR
The early winter of 1968 was a season of acute anxiety for the young George W.
Bush. As his academic career at Yale sputtered to an inglorious denouement, the
war in Vietnam was hurtling forward at full-bore with the onset of the Tet
Offensive. In those perilous months, there were 350,000 US troops in Vietnam,
dying at a rate of more than 350 a week. From Bush's perch in New Haven, elite
hamlet of his birth, the draft loomed, casting a chill shadow over his future.
Bush faced limited options. Unlike his warden-to-be ***** Cheney, this randy bon
vivant wasn't prepared to anchor himself down in early wedlock, which would
have entitled him to a marriage deferment. There were too many oats yet to be
sown. How many seeds in how many fields? Tough to say precisely, but in the
ripe phrase of one of Bush's drinking buddies from the 1970s: "he bedded nearly
every bimbo in West Texas, married or not."
Alas, the remedial scholar's grades at Yale, already puffed-up beyond all merit
courtesy of his legacy admission, proved to be so paltry that the escape hatch
of graduate school was out of the question, too.
Only one sure sanctuary remained: the National Guard.
In January of 1968, Bush sent enquiries to the National Guard. It seems Bush had
had an epiphany: he wante to be a pilot, just like his dad. Well, not exactly
like Pappy, who was shot down flying a fighter in World War II. Yes, Lil' Bush
wanted to fly fighter jets, but not in dicey combat situations. That,
naturally, would defeat the entire purpose of joining the Guard.
In 1989, Bush explained the coarse calculus behind his decision to a reporter
from the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal, "I'm saying to myself, 'What do I want to
do?' I think, I don't want to be an infantry guy as a pilot in Vietnam. What I
do decide to want to do [sic] is learn to fly."
The National Guard commanders responded warmly to Bush's initial probings, but
noted, somewhat ominously for the fratboy flier, that before his application
could be accepted he had to submit to a battery of physical and mental tests.
Damn, Bush must have shivered, more exams and no helpful tutors from the
egghead division of Skull and Bones to guide him through the intellectual
shoals!
At the time Bush applied to the National Guard, there were 100,000 other young
men in line before him, stalled on a crowded waiting list hoping their number
would be called before they were sucked up by the draft and dropped onto the
killing fields of the Mekong Delta. In Texas alone, there were 500 applicants
frantically vying for only four open slots for fighter pilot-training in the
Air National Guard.
At first blush, Bush didn't seem to have much of a shot at landing one of those
choice positions. First, he flunked his medical test. Then he flunked his
dental exam. And finally, as Ian Williams reveals in Deserter, his merciless
indictment of Bush's disappearing act in the National Guard, he scores a
rock-bottom 25 percent on his pilot aptitude examination. That's one out of
four correct answers, a ratio that is not even a credible mark in
cluster-bombing class. To put this achievement in perspective, the average
score of applicants taking the pilot aptitude test was 77 percent, a whopping
fifty-two percentage points higher than the proud product of the Yale ancestral
admissions program. More than 95 percent of the testers scored higher than
Bush, the Ivy Leaguer.
Aptitude for piloting a fighter jet notwithstanding, on May 27, 1968, just nervy
twelve days before the expiration of his student deferment, Bush the Younger
was accepted into the Texas Air National Guard. On his application form under
the heading "Background Qualifications," Bush declares in a refreshing spurt of
honesty "None."
Today the pipsqueak commander-in-chief has exploited the Guard and Army Reserve
as a form of covert conscription to beef up troop numbers in Iraq and
Afghanistan. But in those days National Guard squadrons were generally not
being sent off to the frontlines in Vietnam. But just to be sure, Bush checked
the box on his enlistment form saying he was unwilling to do time overseas.
That box was a comfy failsafe that is no longer available to young people
seduced into signing up as weekend warriors in Bush's National Guard.
Flush with excitement at his triumphal entry into the Air National Guard, Bush
averred to one-and-all that he had caught the flight bug. He duly submitted to
the Guard brass a "Statement of Intent," pledging that he had "applied for
pilot training with the goal of making flying a lifetime pursuit and I believe
that I can best accomplish this to my own satisfaction as a member of the Air
National Guard as long as possible."
This seems like boilerplate stuff. But it is a crucial document in at least one
respect. Getting the dunderheaded Bush air-ready was going to take a lot of
training and the Guard wanted to get a guarantee that it would get a minimal
return on its investment-if not a special line-item in the appropriations bill,
at least commitment from Bush that he would stick around as a pilot for the
duration of his commitment, if not beyond. Ian Williams estimates that the
Guard spent more than a million dollars training Bush how to fly. Bush was
warned that any prolonged absence from the Guard would result in him being
ordered to "active duty" for a period of two years.
What the commanders of the Guard may not have known at the time was that in
Bush's mind it was either the Guard or Canada. In 1994, the gunshy Bush, who
tortured animals as teen-ager, fessed up to the Houston Chronicle that being
sent to Vietnam was simply not an option for him: "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 choose to better myself by learning how to fly airplanesI
don't want to play like I was somebody out there marching when I wasn't. It was
either Canada or the service. Somebody said the Guard was looking for pilots.
All I know is, there weren't that many people trying to be pilots."
As we now know, there were more than 500 people looking to be pilots in Texas
alone, nearly all of them more qualified for the slots than Bush.
So how did this miraculous induction come about? Bush has long denied he got any
favored treatment, which would seem unmanly. But there's now little doubt that
the draft evader benefited from at least three pairs of helping hands: Sid
Adger, a Texas oilman and Bush family crony, Ben Barnes, then Speaker of the
House in Texas, and Gen. James Rose, former commander of the Texas Air National
Guard.
The truth began to trickle out in 1999, when Barnes, then a top lobbyist and
political fixer in Austin, became a witness in a lawsuit by Laurence Littwin.
Littwin was suing the State of Texas for firing him as lottery directory, which
he claimed was politically motivated. The Littwin lawsuit is a complex and
confusing affair that provides a glimpse at the baseline of corruption
pullulating through the Texas political system.
In sum, Littwin claimed that he was forced to hire a company called GTech to run
the Texas lottery in order to suppress the real story of how Bush won entry
into the Guard-namely that Ben Barnes had pulled strings with Gen. Rose. In the
1990s, Barnes worked a lobbyist for GTech. Indeed, GTech had paid Barnes $23
million for his expert services.
In his deposition, Barnes denied blackmailing Littwin into giving GTech the
lucrative contract. But he confessed, with the haughty sense of accomplishment
that only an apex politico can impart, that he had indeed opened the backdoor
for Bush into the Air National Guard. Barnes said that he responded to a
distress beacon from Bush intimate Sid Adger, a now dead Texas oil tycoon, and
prevailed on Gen. Rose to adopt the young Bush as a member of the Guard's
flying elite, which then included the war aversive sons of Gov. John Connelly
and Sen. Lloyd Bentsen. It helped that Barnes's chief of staff, Nick Kralj,
also served as a top aide-de-camp to the general. Mission accomplished.
But the handouts didn't stop there. Bush didn't want to remain a lowly private
or corporal in those drab uniforms. He saw himself as officer material. Yet, he
had no desire to subject himself to the mental and physical rigors of Officer
Candidate School. In his mind, he was a birthright officer. And so it came to
be. After a mere six weeks of training, Bush was promoted to the rank 2nd
Lieutenant. He didn't even have his pilot's license.
In the wake of this astounding achievement, Bush felt it was time for a
breather. He abandoned his training with the Guard for two months, hightailing
it to the beaches and bars of Florida, where he claimed to have occasionally
lent the services of his agile political mind to the senatorial campaign of
rightwing, neo-segregationist congressman Ed Gurney, a favorite of Richard
Nixon. Gurney won, but his victory was short lived. Gurney was later indicted
by a federal grand jury on charges of political corruption, bribery and
perjury. He walked away a free man courtesy of a hung jury.
* * *
After the election, Bush headed for Moody Air Base in Georgia to complete his
pilot training with the 3559th Student Squadron. Around Thanksgiving, Bush was
once again whisked away from the monotony of life as a
fighter-pilot-in-training, this time courtesy of Richard Nixon. The president
sent a plane to Moody Air Base to pick up the young Bush so that the newly
brevetted lieutenant could escort Nixon's fabulously neurotic (and what progeny
of Nixon's wouldn't at least be neurotic?) daughter Tricia out on a date.
Sparks didn't fly. The young officer made clumsy advances, which Tricia deftly
deflected. She later described Bush as "testy."
And so the days and weeks of Bush's service to the country, as
commander-in-chief likes to put it, during the war in Vietnam rolled on. His
instructors at the Moody Air Base assigned Bush the task of learning how to fly
the F-102, an obsolete fighter soon destined for the scrap heap.
Finally, on June 23, 1971 Bush graduated from combat flight training school. Now
he was ready to defend the airspace of Texas from hostile incursions from
Mexico, Belize or the Virgin Islands.
Except that George the Younger apparently had formed other plans. Without
informing the Guard commanders who had saved him going to Vietnam, Bush quietly
applied for admission to study law at the University of Texas. For one of the
few times in his life, Bush didn't get immediate gratification.
The flying fratboy's application to the University of Texas law school was
ungraciously declined, despite the pleas of his father, who had just lost a
fierce senatorial campaign against Lloyd Bentsen. Whatever its faults,
apparently the University of Texas isn't prone to handing out legacy admissions
to New Haven-born whelps of the political elite. Even in Texas, you have to
draw the line somewhere.
Sulking at this unfamiliar rebuke, Bush slunk off to Ellington Air Base near
Houston to join the 111th Fighter Squadron. By most accounts, his drinking,
already problematic, began to intensify. By other accounts, it was during this
time in Ellington that Bush began to refamiliarize himself with his narcotic of
choice at Yale...cocaine. In his college days, Bush not only snorted, he dealt.
Among the haut monde at Yale, he was known as one of the top purveyors of primo
Colombian powder in New Haven, dispensing the crystal snow from ounce bags.
Now we come to the crucial lost years of 1971 and 1973. Shortly after Bush
arrived at Ellington, his political ambitions begin to percolate to the
surface. He tells the Houston Post that he is considering a run for the Texas
state senate. His testing of the waters doesn't excite much interest and
nothing comes of it.
So he continues flying, mainly on weekends, over the course of the next year.
And he continues getting inebriated. On a trip back to Washington, DC at
Christmastime, Bush treats his younger brother to a night cruising the bars of
Georgetown. In the early hours of the morning, a *****-faced Bush crashes his
car into a row of garbage cans in front of the family house. Roused from his
slumbers by the racket outside, his father confronts him in the driveway about
driving around drunk. Bush the Younger threatens to pummel his father with his
fists, but Marvin, also drunk, intervenes and Bush is sent packing back to
Texas.
In April of 1972, two important events coincide. The Air Force mandates drug
testing for all pilots during medical exams and Bush takes what will turn out
to be his last flight as a pilot for the Air National Guard.
Less than a month later, Bush flees his Texas Guard base for Alabama, where he
signs up to work on the congressional campaign of Winton "Red" Blount, a friend
of Bush's father and Nixon's postmaster general. He didn't inform his superiors
at Ellington that he had left Texas until two weeks later, when he requested a
transfer to the 9921st Air Reserve Squadron, a postal unit with no fighter
jets. Initially, the transfer is granted.
No one recalls seeing Bush report for duty and there is no documentary record
supporting his service there, which, in any event, was to consist primarily of
reading flight manuals--an uninviting assignment for the quasi-literate airman.
On July 6, Bush is scheduled to take his required flight physical, which will
for the first time include a drug test. He fails to show up. Failure to take a
flight physical is grounds for immediate suspension of his pilot's license.
These days Bush claims that he simply blew off the physical because the Guard
was phasing out the F-102 and he didn't expect to be piloting any more flights.
This excuse is circumspect for two reasons. First, although the F-102 was on
its way out, the jet had not yet been mothballed and Bush still had the
opportunity to learn to fly the new generation of fighter jets. Indeed, there
was a fleet of them just down the highway at Dannelly Air Base in Alabama.
Moreover, the flight physical was a mandatory requirement of service. This was
not a matter of getting a permission slip to play intramural polo at Yale. For
most Guardsmen, failure to abide by such orders resulted severe consequences,
like being compelled to spend two-years in active duty, perhaps in Vietnam.
On July 31, Bush's transfer to the Montgomery postal unit was overturned by the
DC office, which deemed him "ineligible for reassignment to the Air Reserve
Squadron. He is ordered to return to Ellington. But Bush doesn't pay any
attention. Instead, he retreated to Miami with his father for the 1972
Republican National Convention, the last hurrah of Nixon.
Two weeks later Bush returns to Alabama, where he files a new transfer request,
this time to the 187th TAC Recon Group in Mobile. The transfer is approved on
September 5, 1972. The following day the Air Force officially revokes his
flight privileges for "failure to accomplish annual medical examination."
Bush wasn't alone in losing his wings. The other pilot suspended alongside Bush
was none other than his close friend, James M. Bath. Yes, that James Bath, who
would in just a few short years become the financial factotum for the Bin Laden
family in Texas. In the 1980s, it was Bath, backed by the Bin Laden fortune,
who bailed Bush out of the financial ruin he had made of Arbusto Drilling and
Harken Energy. Old friends down there are not forgotten.
The de-winged pilot was ordered to report for duty to Lt. Col. William
Turnipseed, commander of the 187th Recon Group. The Colonel says he never meet
Bush and there is no record that junior ever showed up at the base. "Had he
reported in, I would have had some recall, and I do not," said Col. Turnipseed.
"I had been in Texas, done my flight training there. If we had had a first
lieutenant from Texas, I would have remembered."
On September 29, Bush was sent a letter commanding him to appear before the
Flying Evaluation Board to explain why he had refused to take the medical exam.
Bush never responded. At this point, Bush was not only AWOL, but in breach of
two direct orders.
Meanwhile, back in Montgomery, Bush had apparently gone AWOL from the Blount
campaign as well. He spent his nights carousing in the bars of Montgomery. He
would arrive hung-over at the campaign office in the afternoon, prop his
cowboy-booted feet on the desk and recount his night of debauchery. The women
workers at the campaign headquarters called Bush the "Texas soufflé." Full of
himself and stuffed with hot air, the blue-haired ladies for Blount snickered.
Blount lost the election, but remained tight with the Bush clan. His company,
Blount International, continues to benefit from it close association with the
Bushes and their wars. In 1991, Blount International got a multimillion-dollar
contract to reconstruct bombed out Kuwait City. Later, it won one of the
largest private contracts ever awarded by the Saudi Royal family. Now, Blount's
firm is working as a subcontractor for Halliburton in Iraq.
In the fall of 1972, things began to look grim for the fatuous flyboy from New
Haven. The National Guard was on his tail, demanding an explanation for why he
had jilted them after they had saved him from Vietnam and had invested a
million dollars in teaching him how to fly fighters.
Thanks to the investigations of the intrepid Larry Flynt, we now know that it
was in this window of months that Bush apparently got a Houston woman pregnant
and gallantly paid for her to have an abortion. It was also in this period that
Bush, according to his biographer J.H. Hatfield, was arrested for possession of
cocaine. Instead of landing in prison, the judge presiding over the case bent
to the pleadings of Bush's father, then US ambassador to the UN, and ordered
the young derelict to perform six month's worth of community service at PULL, a
center for black youths in urban Houston.
Williams' book Deserter lends circumstantial credence to Hatfield's account and
raises even new questions. According to Bush's autobiography (ghostwritten by
his political au pair, Karen Hughes), A Charge to Keep, he met former Houston
Oiler tight end John White in December of 1972. White, Bush claims, asked him
to come work full-time at his Houston youth center, called Project-PULL. Bush,
who until this charmed moment had never exhibited the slightest charitable
instinct, agreed. He started work at PULL in January of 1973.
Now keep in mind that Bush supposedly already had a job, working for the
National Guard. Yet over the next six months there's not one confirmed Bush
sighting by his Guard commanders. In the ornithology of the Air National Guard,
Bush is the rarest and stealthiest of birds, passing through Guard air space
like a ghostly passenger pigeon. Indeed, when his superiors tried to fill out
an annual evaluation of Bush's service they are unable to complete the form,
writing on May 2, 1973: "Lt. Bush has not been observed at this unit during the
period of the report."
A month later, National Guard HQ in Washington sent Texas Guard commanders an
official query about Bush. The DC brass instructed the Texas crew to prepare a
Form 77a on Bush "so this officer can be rated in the position he held." The
Texas Guard, then run by Bush family cronies who now saw themselves implicated
in the transgressions of the absconder fratboy, balks at the order. Indeed,
they delay filing a response until November 12, 1973, by which time Bush has
been honorably discharged from the Guard. Even then the response from the Texas
HQ is coy, though ripe with nefarious possibilities: "Not rated for the period
1 May 1972 through 30 April 73. Report for this period unavailable for
administrative reasons."
So it seemed that the bureaucratic vise beginning to squeeze young George. Then
mysteriously Bush is recorded as having performed 36 days of duty between May
and July of 1973. Bush doesn't recall precisely what he did. There are no pay
records to confirm his service. No one in the Guard witnessed him on the base.
Indeed, Bush couldn't have done the Guard service because by his own admission
he was working full-time for John White at PULL-if he'd gone AWOL from that job
he might have very well landed in jail. It now seems likely that the entry of
those 36 days of service was post-dated by someone in the Texas office not only
to protect Bush, but also to shield his retinue of enablers in the high command
of the Texas Air National Guard.
In September Bush completed his tour of duty at PULL, applied to grad school,
and despite being AWOL from the National Guard from May of 1972 through October
of 1973, is granted an honorable discharge.
That fall Bush evacuated to Cambridge, making a soft landing at Harvard Business
School, another reliable safehouse for the brattish scions of the ruling class.
Fellow students at Harvard remember Bush prancing into lecture halls wearing
his uniform. Even then, he had a taste for military cross-dressing, though no
one in the Massachusetts National Guard ever recalls the tyro-in-a-jumpsuit
showing up for duty at the base--although he did drop by once to have his
choppers cleaned gratis by the Guard's dentist.
Whenever Bush plays dress-up, as he does at nearly every photo-op on a military
site from the USS Lincoln to torture seminar rooms at Ft. Bragg, he comes off
as the missing member of the Village People, which mayy explains his enduring
appeal to the latent types manning the controls of the Christian right these
days.
In the mid-1990s, as Bush began to plot his run for the White House, the
governor and his handlers (Dan Bartlett, Karen Hughes and Karl Rove) realized
that Bush's missing years in the Guard might prove problematic. After all,
during the 1992 presidential campaign, Bush's father assaulted Clinton for his
deft manipulation of Col. Eugene Holmes, the commander of Arkansas's ROTC, to
sidestep the draft.
Bush's dilemma was trickier and more unseemly than Clinton's. In order to escape
service in Vietnam, he had exploited his family's political connections to
secure a choice spot in the Texas Air National Guard, despite failing his pilot
aptitude test. Though a blatant act of patronage, Bush was promoted to officer
status before he earned his pilot's license and without going to officer
training school. He refused to take his mandatory flight physical and also
refused to show up for a mandatory evaluation. He went AWOL for a year and a
half and then requested and received an early discharge. All this after
promising to "serve as long as possible" and to devote himself to a lifetime of
high flying...flying planes, that is.
In the offices of the Texas Air Guard there were records documenting Bush's
dubious career and exposing the holes in his extravagent version of his
military service to the country. The most potentially damning of those
documents (Bush's pay records) are now missing. Where did they go?
One intriguing explanation comes from Lt. Col. Bill Burkett, a top aide to Maj.
Gen. Daniel James, III, then commander of the Texas Air National Guard. In
1997, Burkett claims he was just outside the open door of Maj. Gen. James's
office when the general received a conference call from Joe Allbaugh, Bush's
chief of staff, and Dan Bartlett, Bush's communications director. The
conversation played out over James's speakerphone, where Burkett claims he
overheard Bush's men order James to cleanse Bush's military files. Burkett said
he recalled Allbaugh's saying: "We certainly don't want anything that is
embarrassing in there."
A few days later, Burkett says that he saw Brig. Gen. John Scribner dispose of
Bush's pay and performance records in a 15-gallon metal waste can inside the
Texas Air National Guard Musuem. "The files had been gone through over the
years," Scribner quipped to Burkett, pointing to the garbage can. "Not as much
in here as I thought." Apparently, this was a mop-up operation to make sure
that nothing had been missed in previous search-and-destroy raids on Bush's
files.
Burkett went public with his recollections in the spring of 2004 during the
mini-tempest in the corporate press over Bush's military record sparked by
Michael Moore's assertion that the president was a "deserter." The president's
praetorian guard went into action, smearing Burkett as a disgruntled malcontent
with an ax to grind against Maj. Gen. James, who Bush had elevated to the head
of the Air National Guard for the entire country. Although the Burkett story
quickly faded, phone records and other documents back up the circumstances of
his claims. And Burkett himself hasn't backed down despite the assaults on his
character from Bush's political mercenaries. "If President Bush is going to be
the first president in over one hundred years that puts himself in a uniform
and uses taxpayer's money for a photo opportunity to land on a flight deck and
say hooray," Burkett told reporters. "He's put it on the table and we deserve
to know." But the press bus had long since pulled away, never to return to the
scene of the crime.
Given this vaporous record of service during Vietnam, it takes a perverse kind
of hubris for Bush to assail the military careers of a POW (John McCain), a
bona fide killing machine (John Kerry) and a triple amputee (Max Cleland). It's
the trademark of a pampered bully.
* * *
The moment George Bush refused to go spill blood in Vietnam may have been the
moral Everest of his life. But he has long since buried that singular act of
conscience beneath a stench-heap of warped psychological projection and ethical
hypocrisy. The president remains a stunted brat and a coward at the core,
dodging rules he forces others to abide by with unforgiving strictness.
Festooned in a flight jacket he never deserved, Bush has ordered National Guard
troops into a bloody desert war he and his chickenhawk cronies launched under
fabricated pretexts. Then in order to hand out tax breaks to the super-rich and
billion-dollar contracts to favored arms makers, Bush scrimped on the funding
of his precious war itself: too few troops, under-armed, over-worked, operating
with no occupation plan and no exit strategy.
In their quest to transfer every possible federal dollar to their fatcat base,
the Bush regime even went so far as to try to slash combat pay and separation
allowances and increase co-payments for the treatment of those maimed in
battle. Although he opted out of the Guard early, Bush has now implemented
(perhaps illegally) "stop-losses" orders, a kind press-ganging by Oval Office
fiat that keeps National Guard and Reserve troops in Iraq far beyond their
contracted tour of duty. In essence, they are war slaves.
When the Iraqi resistance surfaced with a vengeance after Bush made his
premature declaration of victory, the faux-warrior taunted them by sneering,
"Bring it on." They did. And more than 700 American soldiers have perished
since the delivery of that infamous sideline chant, tossed off as if the
president were still a flighty cheerleader at Andover. To top it off, while
Bush still refuses to attend funeral ceremonies for slain soldiers, he wasted
no time in trying to slash death benefits for military families. And on and on
it goes.
Explain his actions? Not then, not now, not ever.
Just as he stiffed the Flight Evaluation Board in 1972, Bush now refuses to
offer an explanation for his illegal and unjust war that has killed and maimed
tens of thousands. "I'm the commander--see, I don't need to explain," Bush
brayed in his best Mafia capo syntax to Bob Woodward. "I do not need to explain
why I say things. That's the interesting thing about being the president. Maybe
somebody needs to explain to me why they say something, but I don't feel I owe
anybody an explanation." That's the distilled essence of George W. Bush from
his very own mouth: a bellicose and imperious buffoon who has never once been
held to account for the mayhem he leaves in his wake.
So yet again Bush has succeeded in doing the impossible: he has sullied the once
heroic term "draft evader."
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