Other misrepresentations GW Bush has made about his service.

[girl gone mad]

1. While running for governor, George W. Bush portrayed himself to voters as a great fighter pilot. Asked how he managed to get a spot in the Air National Guard, Bush said, "They could sense I was going to be one of the great pilots of all time."

He failed to mention that his permission to fly was eventually revoked by the military or that he had been suspended, assigned to a disciplinary unit and not allowed to fly military assignments again.

(The quote comes from the 1988 Houston Chronicle article by R. G. Ratliffe)

2. In his autobiography, A Charge to Keep, Bush claims he volunteered for a program that would have rotated him to Vietnam to relieve active duty pilots, but says he was told he had not logged enough hours to participate. There is no evidence to support his assertion. However instead of attempting to make up his hours, Bush stopped reporting for duty and left town to work on a friend's political campaign.

Despite Bush's biographical bravado, in 1998 he told a reporter for The Fort Worth Star-Telegram, "I don’t want to play like I was somebody out there marching when I wasn’t. It was either Canada or the service and I was headed into the service."

3. Bush makes another unsupported claim in his autobiography when he says "I continued flying with my unit for the next several years." In reality, he was suspended from flight duty in August of 1972 and did not log any flight hours in the last two years of his service. There is no evidence that he ever showed up for duty in the final two years of his six year commitment.

4. Because of Walt Starr's efforts, we're now learning that Bush was photographed wearing a medal he does not appear to have earned.

What other Bush service record embellishments and exaggerations have been uncovered? I think we should compile comlpete, concise list and forward it to the media.

[Heath.Hunnicutt]

1. Specifics regarding his claim of volunteering for Vietnam?

It will be the weekend before I can get a copy of A Charge to Keep in order to look up the quote you reference in your post. Could you provide more details? When did he claim he volunteered?

That is, he claimed he volunteered for service at what time?

It is amazing how much active duty he was paid for in May 1973, and I think it is very interesting that this is a time period for which I am unable to determine his commanding officer or duty.

[girl gone mad]

2. It appears around page 34 of the book.

"Several of my fellow pilots had participated in a program known as 'Palace Alert,' which rotated Guard pilots into Vietnam to relieve active- duty pilots. A friend and fellow pilot, Fred Bradley, and I were interested in participating and we talked to Col. Jerry Killian about it. He told us the program was being phased out, that a few more pilots would go, but that Fred and I had not logged enough flight hours to participate."

I took the above from this article, which also delves a little bit into the more frustrating asspect of this Bush anecdote, and that is the way Bish allows his surrogates to equate it to actually requesting to go to Vietnam (the way Kerry and others did).

Bush himself also commits exaggeration by not mentioning that pilots in the program were more often sent to Europe and the Far East.

[girl gone mad]

3. Oops..

you asked about the specific dates.

Not sure if this helps, but I just found this in an article by Josh Marshall from February:

The program, in the words of The Washington Post, “dispatched qualified F-102 pilots in the Guard to Europe and the Far East, occasionally to Vietnam, on three- to six-month assignments.”

Bradley told Babbin that he and Bush were told they weren’t experienced enough and that was the end of it.

So did this really happen? It’s a little hard to figure that after the president and his family pulled so many strings to keep him out of Vietnam he’d go and sign up to get in the first chance he got. And of course there’s no evidence for this in the president’s service records.

The president himself floated the Palace Alert story in the past, too. But one reason he stopped may be because of what the Post discovered in 1999.

The program was shut down just one week after the president got out of flight school — making it a suspiciously ineffective way to end up actually going to Vietnam.


http://www.hillnews.com/marshall/022604.aspx

[Heath.Hunnicutt]

4. Thanks! I will look up Palace Alert when I get home

For some reason, I have a lot of documentation about F-102 history at home. I have been collecting it for days now. :)

I will look into the Palace Alert deployment. My understanding so far was the the F-102 had been phased out of S. Vietnam well before Bush was ever in the guard. According to my memory, 12 of the 1130 or so F-102s had been deployed to S. Vietnam...

I will post more later.

I would love to work this timeline/date into my web sites' calendar if it applies. :)

He also mentions a few people by name, which should help put the story on the timeline.

[Heath.Hunnicutt]

8. F-102s in Vietnam, or: Another thing that doesn't make sense

I've only owned Wayne Mutza's Convair F-102: Delta Dagger for two days, but it's been a compelling read. Here's my summary of his data covering deployments of F-102 aircraft to the Pacific Air Force Command (PACAF):

(I should add that he has an appendix that accounts for all of the F-102's (except 56-1442), by serial number. So this is almost definitely a close-to complete list.)

F-102 Units Deployed to Pacific Air Force

TAIL  FIS   FIW                                    LAST DATE
CODE  UNIT  COMMAND PACAF BASE                 VIETNAM   PACAF
PE     64th 405th   Clark AB, Pacific Islands  15Nov69   15Dec69
NV     82nd  51st   Naha AB, Okinawa           25Sep68      1971
PK    509th 405th   Clark AB, Pacific Islands    May70   24Jul70
       16th  51st   Naha AB, Okinawa                        1964

Errors are my fault, as this is not a quote but a re-summation of the data and text. The program was clearly winding down at the time Bush was learning to fly the F-102.

I am not sure these deployments were called "Palace Alert", by the way. These are the deployments of F-102 aircraft to Southeast Asia, however.

---

I was just wondering which aircraft served both in any of these units and also a Texas Air National Guard (TEXANG) unit. This might help track down the people who communicated with and met G*W around that time. I came up with:

Aircraft first assigned to PACAF, then TXANG

SERIAL   TYPE    PREVIOUS   OTHER INTERVENING
NUMBER           UNIT       UNIT ASSIGNMENTS
55-4049  TF-102   64th FIS  318 FIS, 325 CAMS, 460 FIS
56-1067  F-102A   82nd FIS  --
56-1078  "        82nd FIS  --
56-1198  "        82nd FIS  326 FIS, 4780 ADW
56-1209  "        82nd FIS  326 FIS, 4780 ADW
56-1218  "       509th FIS  HI ANG
56-1340  "        64th FIS  325 CAMS, 4756 ADW, ADWC, PA ANG
56-1361  "        64th FIS  326 FIS, 4780 ADW
56-2370  TF-102   64th FIS  4756 ADW, ADWC

Aircraft first assigned to PACAF from TXANG

SERIAL   TYPE    
NUMBER           UNIT ASSIGNMENTS STARTING IN TEXAS
56-1491  F-102A  TX ANG -> 4780 ADW -> 82nd FIS -> Scrapped at NAHA, 1971

Looking at these records, there were three (3) F-102's that came from the Pacific to Texas without passing through an intervening FIS or ANG. To me, this implies that the pilots of those three may have been characters in the story who brought news of Vietnam. I don't have enough detail to know which of the 2 TXANG FIS these jets went to. Bush was in the 111th. I believe the other Texas Squadron was the 182nd. The TF-102A, being a trainer and a two-seater, might have brought a seasoned instructor home from the War.

At least one F-102 left Texas Air National Guard for the 82nd in PACAF. It probably left long before G*B had his training completed.

---

Someone who is really interested in digging this stuff up is invited to check out my post on another thread, requesting local volunteers in Washington D.C., Montgomery or Birmingham, Alabama, and Houston, Texas.

[Bernardo de La Paz]

7. Bush signed form saying he didn't want to serve overseas (Vietnam)

Bush signed a form saying he didn't want to serve overseas (Vietnam). A pic of it was posted here recently.

[grasswire]

5. in his campaign literature...

...when he was running for Congress, he stated that he served in the USAF, not the TANG.

[girl gone mad]

6. You're right.

Thanks for the tip. I found the following from an article (the Nation) by David Corn.

Putting aside the controversy over Bush's Air National Guard service (or dereliction of duty), there was another instance when Bush clearly did not speak truthfully about his military record. In 1978, Bush, while running for Congress in West Texas, produced campaign literature that claimed he had served in the US Air Force. According to a 1999 Associated Press report, Bush's congressional campaign ran a pullout ad in the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal that declared he had served "in the US Air Force and the Texas Air National Guard where he piloted the F-102 aircraft."

I'd love to find a copy of that ad. Maybe I can try phoning a library in Lubbock tomorrow, unless anyone has seen it on the web.

[grasswire]

9. I've seen it...

...during the 2000 campaign. It exists somewhere.

[grasswire]

10. maybe Corn has it.

His email address is [e-mail].

[Bandit]

11. I think technically that was correct. the Air Force did the training

I think for a short while he was an Airman attached to the Air Force.

[girl gone mad]

13. David Corn refutes that defense..

in one of the articles I linked to above. He contacted the AF and they told him it never would have been correct for Bush to claim he had served in the AF. He would have been considered a guardsman at all times.

I'm paraphrasing, but Corn made a convincing argument.

[arbusto_baboso]

12. You'll be interested in this site, then....

www.phonyfighterpilot.com

A vet in my area has written this, and one of the findings is that Bush's false claims of flight status were actually listed on US State Department websites!

Check it out.