What was Junior willing to do to dodge Vietnam?
<font color=green>Bush himself said that he enlisted in the National Guard to avoid Vietnam. He told one reporter, ``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.''</font>
miami.com
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George W. Bush entered Yale in 1964 and graduated in 1968. On May 27, 1968,
Bush was 12 days away from losing his student draft deferment. The Texas
Air National Guard had a huge waiting list, a year and a half. Yet Bush was
admitted the same day he applied, regardless of any waiting list. His unit,
the 147th, was infamous as a nesting place for politically connected and
celebrity draft avoiders. Democratic Sen. Lloyd Bentsen's son was in the
unit, as was Republican Sen. John Tower's. So were at least seven members
of the Dallas Cowboys.
Upon completing basic training, Bush was given a "direct appointment"
without having to go through Officer Candidate School. This special
procedure also got Bush into flight school. He scored 25 percent on a pilot
aptitude test, the absolute lowest acceptable grade. He was assigned to fly
the F-102 Delta Dagger, a plane already being phased out. In fact, the Air
Force had ordered all overseas F-102 units shut down as of June 30, 1970,
just three months after Bush finished his training. Since training is so
airplane specific, Bush was guaranteed from the beginning to be safe from
combat. He even used his training on the obsolete plane to justify his
early discharge, almost a year before his scheduled discharge.
In May 1972, Bush stopped attending Guard duty. In August 1972, he was
suspended from flight duty for failing to take his physical. He won his
release from service in September 1973, nine months early, for graduate
school. There is much, much more about his Guard duty, none of it
complementary.
Bush himself calls 1968 to 1973 his "wandering years," .</font>
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