Kevin Craig wrote in message ...


But the subject at hand is Air National Guard, which *did* serve in
Vietnam.

It is true that both NG and ANG forces were deployed in Vietnam.
Most remained in the US. Enlisting in the NG was not a sure bet
to avoid serving in Vietnam, but those who did enlist in the NG
or ANG were much less likely to end up in Vietnam than were those
who were drafted.



Bush spent more time on active duty than Kerry, and also volunteered
for an active rotation over Vietnam. (He was rejected because they were
only accepting pilots with 1,000+ hours for F-102 missions.)

False to Fact. Bush volunteered for the Palace Alert program which
was flying F-102s overseas but was not flying F102s in Vietnam. The
F102 was withdrawn from service in Vietnam before Bush volunteered.
The F102 was a missiles-only interceptor, it had no guns and was not
designed to carry bombs. It was designed for the sole mission of
intercepting bombers. As such it was sub-optimal for the sorties
being flown in Vietnam where the enemy had no bombers.

You are correct that he was rejected from the program because he had
insufficient experience, but even if accepted, he would not have
flown in Vietnam.

Also, one presumes that Bush knew of the minimum stick-time requirement
befor he volunteered. According to personal corespondence from one
veteran aviator it was commonplace for guys to volunteer for service
where they knew they would not be accepted because it looked good
in their records.

All of which is fine with me. IMHO none of that reflects poorly
on Bush as a young man The misinformation about 'volunteering for
Vietnam' does reflect poorly on his campaign but one presumes that
Bush does not take an active role in campaign issues.


Bush met the drill and time requirements every single year he was in
the Air National Guard, including the so-called "missing" year.

It is a trying exercise to atempt to follow the chronology. But
the worse I have seen is that during that 'missing year' he got
behind on drills and made them up later, which was evidently not
unusual.

By
1972, the Air Guard was surfeit with pilots with no planes to fly. As
you said, the F-102 was obsolete and being phased out. The active war
in Vietnam was rapidly drawing down. It would be foolish to retrain an
Air Guard pilot when there was a surplus of trained F-4 pilots coming
off of active duty.

True enough although his Texas ANG group continued to fly the F102
until 1974. I see no reason to suppose that he stopped flying for
any reason other than the one he stated--to do political work out-
of-state. I'm also sure that wasn't particularly unusual.

--

FF