November 15, 2003

Idiot

Slate's Jacob Weisberg says President Bush "never served in the real military, only in the Texas Air National Guard." Darren Kaplan notes that members of the same unit that Bush served with were deployed to Iraq, so it would seem that Weisberg is wrong. As I've noted in posts before, the day Bush joined the Texas Air National Guard to learn to fly fighter jets, pilots from the Texas Air National Guard were flying combat missions in Vietnam.

As I wrote back on May 7, in the first of a series of posts debunking the Left's "Bush was AWOL" charge:

Incidentally, Bush flew with the 111th Fighter-Interceptor Squadron, which was attached to the 147th Fighter Wing, based in Houston, Texas. While Bush's unit never got called to Vietnam, the 147th was. From 1968 through 1970, pilots from the 147th participated in operation "Palace Alert" and served in Southeast Asia during the height of the Vietnam War. The 147th came off runway alert on Jan. 1, 1970 to start a new mission of training all F-102 pilots in the United States for the Air National Guard.

Bush enlisted as an Airman Basic in the 147th Fighter-Interceptor Group at Ellington Air Force Base, Houston, on May 28, 1968 - at a time when the 147th was actively participating in combat in Vietnam. However, one can not train overnight to be a pilot. Bush completed basic flight training and then, from December 1969 through June 27, 1970, he was training full-time at Ellington to be an F-102 pilot.

Bush volunteered to serve in a unit at the very moment it was seeing combat in Vietnam, and only a restructuring of the unit's mission before he completed his flight training made it unlikely he would fly in combat.