The Foreign Minister has challenged my assertion that National Guard Service was a way to avoid Vietnam.

FM: ‚ÄövÑv Speaking of George, I really get irritated when people mention Draft dodging by folks joining the National Guard.‚ÄövÑvp

The purpose of my post was not to bash our President. My concern was with the hypocrisy of partisanship ‚ÄövÑv¨ why would the same people who damned Clinton for student deferments give their man a pass on the Guard — Or damn Clinton for smoking dope while ignoring Bush‚ÄövÑvÂ¥s chemical history. Or damn Clinton for lying about Monica and yet be unconcerned about Nigerian uranium. Shoot, the list goes on and on.

I don‚ÄövÑv¥t think Greg was rising directly to the defense of George; if I understand it correctly, he was simply disputing my assumption that the Guard was a haven for war-dodgers.

I had always bought the argument that serving in the Guard was a popular way to avoid dying in a rice paddy on the other side of the world, but I take the FM‚ÄövÑv¥s arguments about the military very seriously. His knowledge of military history is pretty darn scary ‚ÄövÑv¨ I remember his indignation as we watched an Indiana Jones movie: ‚ÄövÑv That‚ÄövÑv¥s inaccurate! The RPG the German is carrying wasn‚ÄövÑv¥t developed until 1942!‚ÄövÑvp So I began to second-guess myself.

METHODOLOGY

In the event that I was mistaken, I asked my colleagues born in the late 1940s about their recollections, did a bit of googling, and applied a bit of logic to the numbers cited by the Foreign Minister. After this research, I think I have solidified my understanding of the Guard as a way to avoid Vietnam, but stand ready to evaluate additional information.

BRIEF ASIDE (Or, alternatively: Smallholder just can‚ÄövÑv¥t help himself)

But since the original post was about the partisan hypocrisy surrounding the condemnation of Clinton‚ÄövÑv¥s student deferment and giving Bush a pass on his student deferment and Guard Service, I do want to start with a link to an article that hits that point better than I did:

http://www.salon.com/news/col/cona/1999/07/13/conason/print.html

Selected quote from the article above:

Those are questions that nearly every American male born in the 1940s or ’50s has had to answer at some point, but they retain the greatest moral force for those who seek public office — particularly for those few who seek to become the nation’s commander in chief. Like many of the personal issues that have come to dominate debate in this era of tabloid journalism — from youthful drug “experimentation” to marital infidelity — the examination of Vietnam-era draft dodging is all too often an occasion for sanctimony, lying and hypocrisy.

The case of George W. Bush appears to be no exception. According to the exhaustively researched investigation published on July 4 by the Los Angeles Times, young Bush was jumped over a long waiting list of applicants to the Texas Air National Guard in 1968. Bush was about to graduate from Yale and lose his student deferment, and he obviously had no overwhelming urge to fight in the bloody jungle that his father — then a Republican congressman ‚ÄövÑv¨ would later blast Bill Clinton for avoiding.

One interesting trivia tidbit I found while doing research was that while Lloyd Bentson was blasting Danny Quayle‚ÄövÑv¥s Indiana Guard Service, he forgot to mention that he had used his political pull in Texas to get little Lloyd Jr. into the Texas Air Guard. Amusingly enough, LB III served in the same unit as our current president and was promoted to First Lieutenant on the very same day ‚ÄövÑv¨ election day between their two fathers. Small world, huh?

If any of you are readers of ‚ÄövÑv Lying in Ponds‚ÄövÑvp — http://www.lyinginponds.com — you know that one of the pieces of data used in assessing the partisanship of columnists is their willingness to apply standards that they use to criticize the other side to their own party. Look! Look! Smallholder is nonpartisan! He lambastes Bentson and Bush for the same sin!

But if, if I may, let us return to the matter at hand:

Was the National Guard used to avoid service in Vietnam?

SUPPORTING POINT I: PERSONAL RECOLLECTIONS OF THE VIETNAM GENERATION

I asked four members of my department (I teach history in a public high school) about their recollections. All four immediately responded that the Guard was a way to avoid service.

Jack told me that he was lucky in that he finished his active duty hitch in the army just thirty days before the Gulf of Tonkin resolution. He continued to serve in the National Guard, but was immune from a call-up. He remembers with pride that he coached an awesome basketball team for the guard ‚ÄövÑv¨ several athletes joined the guard as a way of immunizing themselves against the draft. In fact, Jack is still all warm and tingly about the game he played against Army Guard member Oscar Robinson, a hall-of-fame Basketball star.

Joe just laughed when I asked him the question. He had looked into the Guard himself ‚ÄövÑv¨ his draft number was 87 at a time when the first 100 were guaranteed to be drafted. But the waiting list was too long. Joe lucked out in that the war wound down and they didn‚ÄövÑv¥t make it to his number that year. He also pointed me toward CCR‚ÄövÑv¥s ‚ÄövÑv Fortunate Son,‚ÄövÑvp which criticizes the way that the war was really a poor man‚ÄövÑv¥s fight.

Weblink:
http://www.elyrics4u.com/f/fortunate_son_creedence_clearwater_revival.htm

Some folks are born to wave the flag,
Ooh, they’re red, white and blue.
And when the band plays “Hail to the chief”,
Ooh, they point the cannon at you, Lord,
It ain’t me, it ain’t me, I ain’t no senator’s son, son.
It ain’t me, it ain’t me; I ain’t no fortunate one, no,
Yeah!

Henry, who was in the sandwich generation between Korea and Vietnam and thus was in no danger himself, answered that, at least in the Shenandoah Valley, the saying was that the smart kids went to college, the rich kids went to the guard, and the poor dumb kids went to Vietnam.

Tim, whose athletic ability kept the student deferments flowing until marriage and fatherhood, agreed that the Guard was a good way out for those folks who couldn‚ÄövÑv¥t stay in school.

100% of the folks agreed that the Guard was a way out. I will grant you that a polling sample this small is unreliable. Would the other MWO bloggers ask their family members, friends, and co-workers and report back?

SUPPORTING POINT II: THE GLORIES OF THE GOOGLE

Quick Google survey:
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The first article talks about today‚ÄövÑv¥s Guard and makes an explicit comparison to the Vietnam-era guard. According to the author, the use of the Guard to avoid combat has become a losing strategy because of the changing makeup of the armed forces.

http://www.globalsecurity.org/org/news/2003/030414-arng01.htm

Salient quotes:

Although National Guardsmen were not commonly called overseas during the Vietnam War, University professors and military analysts say the National Guard can no longer be considered a safe haven in the conflict with Iraq.

“I don’t think anybody who has half a brain thinks of the National Guard as a place to hide out,” University history professor John Lynn said. “But it may be more than they ever anticipated.”

And a bit latter on:

According to University history professor Mark Leff, the National Guard being called to service creates a different mentality in the United States.

“There is a major difference in terms of the people going or the people being concerned that they might go,” Leff said. “Now there is a different sense of commitment because people are no longer joining the National Guard in order to avoid the draft.”

The following article traces the changes in the force structure that makes a Guard call-up much more likely in 2004 than in 1965.

http://www.govexec.com/dailyfed/0203/021803db.htm

Selected quote:

There is no question that as currently constructed, Total Force has placed an increasing burden on Reserve forces over the past decade, as the U.S. military has confronted a steady stream of small wars and peacekeeping missions. In the four decades of the Cold War, Guard and Reserve forces faced only two presidential activations‚ÄövÑvÆfor the Berlin Airlift in 1948-49 and for a very limited call-up during the Vietnam War. Since 1990, in contrast, the Reserves have been activated at least six times, participating in major military missions in the Persian Gulf War, the southern and northern no-fly zones over
Iraq, Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, and now, once again, Iraq. It is not unusual to find reservists who have been called up four or even five times in the past decade.

This article is a good primer for the Total Force concept. As a former officer in the Reserves, I have to tell you that I think the Total Force concept is a bad idea and that I agree with Rumsfeld‚ÄövÑv¥s push to move essential duties back into the active arm of the military. Perhaps my disdain for the readiness of the Reserves would be a good future blog post‚ÄövѬ

Finally, here is a Washington post article that traces Bush‚ÄövÑv¥s use of connections AND talks about how the Guard could be used to avoid Vietnam.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/campaigns/wh2000/stories/bush072899.htm

Four months before enlisting, Bush reported at Westover Air Force Base in Massachusetts to take the Air Force Officers Qualification Test. While scoring 25 percent for pilot aptitude ‚ÄövÑv¨ “about as low as you could get and be accepted,” according to Martin ‚ÄövÑv¨ and 50 percent for navigator aptitude in his initial testing, he scored 95 percent on questions designed to reflect “officer quality,” compared with a current-day average of 88 percent.

Only pilots with extensive flying time ‚ÄövÑv¨ at the outset, 1,000 hours were required ‚ÄövÑv¨ were sent overseas under the voluntary program. The Air Force, moreover, was retiring the aging F-102s and had ordered all overseas F-102 units closed down as of June 30, 1970.

SUPPORTING POINT III: NUMBER CRUNCHING

The Foreign Minister cited the following statistics:

In WW2 300,034 Guardsmen reported for active duty

My point is that joining the NG is no safe bet to avoid going to war. In Vietnam, it was mostly Air Guard units deployed and GW was a Pilot. Your chances of being sent to war are infinitely greater being in the Guard than being in Canada or England.

My first quibble with these numbers is that mobilization is not necessarily the same thing as going to Vietnam. Many of the units currently mobilized for the ‚ÄövÑv war‚ÄövÑvp in Iraq are not serving overseas. My old unit was called up to active duty and is running training exercises in New Jersey. While I don‚ÄövÑv¥t minimize the disruptive impact on my old colleagues‚ÄövÑv¥ lives and families and thank God that I have not been separated from my daughter, living in hotels in New Jersey is a far cry from getting sniped by a muhajadeen.

I would speculate (I don‚ÄövÑv¥t know and stand ready to be corrected) that many of the 10,000 or so Guardsmen called up for Vietnam never went overseas, instead freeing up better trained active duty folks to go overseas.

I also would call the reader‚ÄövÑvÂ¥s attention to the ‚ÄövÑv 10,000‚ÄövÑvp mobilized. Vietnam was a long war. Even if we limit the timeline to between post-Tonkin and our withdrawal, you are averaging about a thousand men per year over a decade — this at a time when the draftee army was in for over half a million personnel. If you assume that half (I‚ÄövÑvÂ¥d think is was more) of the activated Guardsmen never left the continental U.S., we are talking about 500 guys per year ‚ÄövÑv¨ less than a tenth of a percentage point of the troops ‚ÄövÑv in-country.‚ÄövÑvp

Furthermore, as the articles I found by googling indicate, going to Vietnam was something for which Guardsmen VOLUNTEERED (George checked ‚ÄövÑv Do not volunteer‚ÄövÑvp).

The Foreign Minister makes specific mention of the danger of pilots, but if the Washington Post is correct, Bush couldn‚ÄövÑv¥t have had he wanted to ‚ÄövÑv¨ there was a minimum number of flight hours required before you could volunteer ‚ÄövÑv¨ probably to limit pilot volunteers to former active-duty folks with real experience.

CONCLUSION

If membership in the guard carried the same risk of Vietnam service as being drafted, one wonders why Guard units had waiting lists while the same population that produced eager Guard volunteers earnestly endeavored to avoid the draft by any means necessary. My favorites are the hall of fame quarterback Joe Namath who was 4-F due to ‚ÄövÑv knee problems‚ÄövÑvp and Woodie Guthrie‚ÄövÑv¥s unique solution (http://www.arlo.net/lyrics/alices.shtml).

The Foreign Minister is certainly right that Guard members had a greater chance of getting sent to Vietnam than draft dodgers who ran to Canada, but only because an infinitesimal chance is infinitely greater than a zero chance.