Fishwrapper - Bush’s ‘Summer Patriot’ Reserve Duty

Oh Camil, tell me how do you feel? / You fought for your country / for God and for war, / now your heart tells you that can’t be real.

-- Graham Nash, “Oh! Camil (Winter Soldier),” 1974

There’s a murderer sitting on Georgia’s death row who in a rather eloquent way demonstrates that George Bush is a liar, not that the matter is much in dispute.

This prisoner was, prior to his incarceration, an officer in the Army Reserve. Jail didn’t deter his military career. While killing time awaiting execution, he was promoted from lieutenant to captain. He got credit for his Reserve service, and he received an honorable discharge. All while sitting in a cell.

His lawyers at the Georgia Resource Center, which represents indigent condemned prisoners, asked me not to use his name. They fear retaliation from the state’s Republican administration.

But the con’s example exposes as more mendacity the Bushies’ “proof” — mainly some barely legible pay stubs — that their man didn’t desert the Air National Guard. Their evidence is so marinated in spin and deception, it has done nothing but justifiably deepen Americans’ suspicion about Bush.

Guard and Reserve records are notoriously sloppy. If a killer can get credit for Reserve service while in jail, a privileged and insouciant playboy can certainly be a no-show at drills and still collect pay. (That would, of course, put Bush among one of the Republicans’ favorite hate targets, welfare cheats, who suck up tax dollars based on fraudulent claims.)

Beyond that, it’s been clear for years (not that most of the mainstream press was anxious to report it) that Bush used his family’s influence to dodge going to Vietnam. This wasn’t a principled dissent against the war. I respect those who protested against the war, many of whom obeyed their conscience and refused to serve. I honor those who did don a uniform, and then, in the highest tradition of patriotism, courageously took a stand against that illegal, immoral and fraudulent conflict.

Bush? Nope, no conscience and no principles. He epitomized the “Summer Patriot” — those, who as Tom Paine pointed out, weren’t to be found when the going got tough. Bush has said he supported the war. He was just too busying partying to go to Vietnam. For him, it was just fine that the poor, blacks and Chicanos died in the rice paddies. He had beer bashes to attend.

Sort of like today in Iraq. Only one member of Congress has a child in the armed forces. No sons or daughters of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz or the rest of the neo-conservative cabal are in uniform and risking their lives in Bush’s quagmire. Ditto with the scions of the execs running Halliburton, Bechtel and other war profiteers.

So you tell me your story from beginning to end / all the blood and the guts and the gore / will you tell all the people / ‘bout the people you killed, / not for God, but for country and war?

-- “Oh! Camil”

In recent days, the Republican Party and its barking attack dogs on Fox News and talk radio have been in a panic trying to beat back accusations that in the early 1970s, the then party-hearty Bush went AWOL from his Texas Air National Guard commitment.

By comparison, Bush’s likely opponent, Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry, won a Silver Star and three Purple Hearts in Vietnam (see story, page 31). And one of Kerry’s frequent campaign sidekicks is Georgia’s ex-senator, Max Cleland, also a decorated hero and a triple amputee from a grenade blast in Vietnam.

The Bush camp, which for years has refused to fully disclose his military records (obviously for good reasons), was cornered and began disgorging documents that purportedly attested Bush had attended Reserve drills.

As Bush said in his recent, pathetic appearance on “Meet the Press,” he must have attended drills, “otherwise I wouldn’t have been honorably discharged.”

Not quite.

Bush trained as a fighter pilot, but intentionally grounded himself by missing a flight physical — removing any possibility that he would face a dangerous assignment. Almost no one remembers Bush showing up for duty in Alabama, where he moved from Texas in 1972 to work on a political campaign. The only guardsman who claims he did see Bush at Alabama drills recalls him there at times before he had transferred to the state. Oops.

Pay stubs show he did not drill for six months between April and October 1972. He did not have permission to skip Reserve duty; thus, he was AWOL. (Military lawyers I’ve talked to say few reservists were thrown in the brig for missing meetings — but a common penalty was to send them to active duty. Not if your daddy was a congressman, it seems.)

Other stubs show Bush was paid for 25 days in late 1972 and early 1973 — but they don’t show where. A number of ex-reservists — including Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen — have volunteered that they had skipped Reserve drills and still were paid.

To deflect attention from Bush’s “service” (keep in mind that his Texas unit was what veterans call a “champagne squadron,” a haven from the draft for rich boys from powerful families), the GOP/Heritage Foundation/ talk-show axis began a smear campaign this month against Kerry and Cleland.

The awful, awful Ann Coulter poison-penned a column claiming Cleland “did not give his limbs for his country” because the grenade that crippled him wasn’t hurled by the enemy. Indeed, it was a tragic accident. By that logic, Coulter would spit on the coffins of soldiers killed in Iraq by other-than-enemy-fire. And, of course, the truth is that just days before his maiming, Cleland braved enemy bullets to save his comrades — and was awarded a Silver Star.

Neal Boortz last week began echoing the Karl Rove talking points, claiming Kerry was “coward.” The reason? Military policy allowed soldiers to go home upon winning their third Purple Heart, a medal granted for battlefield injuries. Kerry did just that after four months in Vietnam. Cowardice? Hardly. That was an honorable decision, and even more honorable was his Silver Star.

My name is Scott Camil. I was a sergeant attached to Charley 1/1. My testimony involves burning of villages with civilians in them, the cutting off of ears, cutting off of heads, torturing of prisoners, calling in of artillery on villages for games, corpsmen killing wounded prisoners, napalm dropped on villages, women being raped, women and children being massacred, gas used on people, animals slaughtered ...

-- My friend, Scott Camil, testimony at the Winter Soldier Hearings, 1971In 1968, I got out of the Navy and, hugging my honorable discharge, returned to the University of Florida. My military career was hardly heroic. With my training, I’d glumly anticipated duty as a radioman on a swift boat, such as Kerry skippered. Luck of the draw, however, and I never got closer to Vietnam than Reykjavik, Iceland. My most “important” job was running a football pool for officers.

Still, a security clearance made me privy to intelligence coming from Vietnam, and I learned the war was a lie, from its trumped-up justifications to the bogus body counts. The question that repeatedly beset me was: If what we’re doing is right, then why can’t we tell the truth?

Back at college, I became a campus, then state and eventually a national organizer of the antiwar movement. It was during a period when in ever-larger throngs, veterans and active duty military joined the protests — and because of the movement a war that killed more than 3 million Vietnamese and 50,000 Americans was ended.

At the U of Florida, I met Scott Camil, an ex-Marine with two Purple Hearts, who led the Vietnam Veterans Against the War. The government trumped up charges against the group, claiming they planned terrorist actions at the 1972 GOP convention in Miami Beach. A conservative judge and an all-American jury — realizing that the only people advocating violence were government spies — acquitted the “Gainesville 8.”

Government agents then concocted drug charges against Camil. While one agent held Camil during a bust, another shot the veteran in the back. Camil lived, barely, and beat those charges. He should have been awarded another Purple Heart. Years later, through a Freedom of Information search, he turned up a government document in which Nixon’s thugs had ordered that Camil be “neutralized.”

In 1971, I witnessed Camil’s and Kerry’s testimonies at the Winter Soldier Hearings (a play on Paine’s “Summer Patriot” admonition) in Detroit. Camil’s admission of the atrocities he witnessed moved Graham Nash (of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young) to write the song “Oh! Camil (Winter Soldier).”

I think of Bush refusing to attend funerals of soldiers killed in Iraq, and I recall Kerry’s testimony: “Where are the leaders of our country? ... These are commanders who have deserted their troops, and there is no more serious crime in the law of war.”

I called Camil, a supporter of Dennis Kucinich, the other day, and he commented: “How can anyone compare Bush and Kerry? Kerry is a hero who had the guts to speak the truth. Bush was in hiding, waiting for his father’s friends to make him rich. It took a lot of courage for John Kerry to admit that what we did in Vietnam was wrong. And what we need in the White House is a man who knows right from wrong. That isn’t Bush.”

Senior Editor John Sugg — who comments, 30 years ago, all of today’s hawks were singing “The Draft-Dodger Rag” — can be reached at 404-614-1241 or at john.sugg@creativeloafing.com.