Bush Acts Against Critics on Guard Records and 9/11
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/14/politics/14BUSH.html?pagewanted=2 "The White House also more definitively explained than it has in the past why Mr. Bush skipped a 1972 National Guard medical exam, which has been a source of enormous speculation from Mr. Bush's critics, who have suggested he did so because drug testing was introduced around that time.
The records show that Mr. Bush was suspended from flying beginning Aug. 1, 1972 because he failed to take the exam. His last flight exam was on May 15, 1971.
Mr. Bartlett said Mr. Bush missed the exam because he felt there was no reason to take it. Mr. Bush, he said, had begun his training in 1968 with the Air National Guard in Texas, where he flew a fighter jet, the F-102. When he moved to Alabama in 1972 to work in the Senate campaign of a friend of his father, Mr. Bush transferred to an Alabama unit of the Guard that did not fly the same plane. Because there was no way Mr. Bush could fly planes in Alabama, Mr. Bartlett said, he did not bother to report for the medical exam. "
Whenever you discuss this issue with someone else, make sure to ask how often individuals in the service get to decide which orders to follow and which are not needed?