Frank Boettcher wrote:
Doug, as one who was there I'll offer some additional information
regarding this subject.


Frank, I appreciate & respect your views. I am old enough to remember
the "temper of the times" pretty well. The newscasts are still vivid
in my mind, in fact! Some stuff like the moonwalks, LBJ's signature
'Mah fellow Ah-murricans...' the footage of B-52 raids, and the
growing consensus that the war in Vietnam wasn't really worth it.

Within six months or so, I am the same age as both Bush and Clinton.
I was subject to those same decisions regarding what to do about the
draft similar to each of those individuals. Falling behind in my class
because of lack of money and the neccessity to work, and losing my
deferrment, I chose to join the Marine Corp Reserves, rather than be
drafted. I thought that, if deployed, it would be better to go with
people I know who would be pretrained. If not deployed, I could
continue with my education and life in general.


A good choice IMHO. Not sure what I would have done myself, my family
has a strong tradition of military service and I was not a great
student. With a spiralling recession & talk of reviving the draft, I
enlisted in the Navy in 1978.

Bush joined the Guard much later than I. At the time that the
alledged AWOL took place the military was in a mode of trying to dump
excess personnel.

Well, all his records have been lost, so nobody really knows, do they?
The funny thing is that most vets I know have copies of many of their
important military records, like evals and of course the DD-214. That
a prominent person like George Bush Jr. had his records "lost" and
none have ever surfaced really smells funny to me.


Clinton, OTOH just dodged the draft.

No more so than anybody else on a student deferment.

... Used influence to temporarily
avoid serving

I've never understood this. What influence did he have? He was a great
student but he was a nobody from a broken home and a poor family.

..so he could go to England on a Rhodes scholarship with
a promise he would serve on return. He broke that promise.

Possibly so. It wouldn't be the first, most likely, and it wouldn't be
the last. However, since bashing the Clintons has become the nation's
largest industry, and much of the bashing is utter fabrication to my
certain knowledge, I am rather reluctant to condemn Clinton for many
of the things that are flung at him, like this "draft dodger" stuff.
There are plenty of things that we definitely know he did that we can
condemn him for.


I think I have more respect for those that went to Canada to avoid the
draft and a war that was ill conceived and poorly executed, than for
Clinton.

How about the conscientious objectors who went to Vietnam and followed
their units around unarmed? That takes real guts IMHO.

DSK