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★阿修羅♪
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ブッシュとベトナム戦争の記憶。【SteveBellの漫画です。】
http://image.guardian.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2004/02/12/bell1.jpg
Vietnam remembered：
Gee pop−
If you knows of a better 'ole,
Go to it！
ベトナムの思い出：
ねえ、父ちゃん、もっといい話知ってるなら、それで行こうよ！
※一応訳しましたが、自信ないです。
※無造作に転がる銃と共に、ウィスキーの空き瓶も？
かつてブッシュはアル中。雰囲気が良く出てますね。
George's war
In the photographs he looks every bit the dashing fighter pilot but President Bush is struggling to convince America that he did his bit in the Vietnam war. Did daddy pull strings to get him a cozy billet? Did he actually show up for duty? And do the latest documents released by the White House prove anything at all? Suzanne Goldenberg and Oliver Burkeman investigate
Thursday February 12, 2004
The Guardian
On May 2 1973, Richard Nixon was still reeling from the Watergate scandal. American troops were on their way home from Vietnam. And outside Houston, in Texas, a 26-year-old named George Bush, a lieutenant in the National Guard, reported for drill duty as usual at Ellington air force base.
That, at any rate, is the impression given by military payroll records released by the Bush administration on Tuesday. Apparently, however, Lt Bush's superiors at Ellington didn't see it that way. In an annual evaluation of his performance - dated, coincidentally, the very same day, May 2 - they conceded that they couldn't actually evaluate his performance, because they hadn't seen him for months.
Which version is the truth? For days now, the president and his operatives have been fighting off accusations that he shirked his wartime duties, first finagling his way to a safe berth in Texas thanks to being the son of a congressman - and then barely bothering to turn up for drills at all. Thirty years after the end of America's most painful and divisive 20th-century war, the White House is engaged in a desperate struggle to slay the ghosts of the Vietnam era before they cost Bush the presidency. But the administration's release this week of those new records from Bush's stint in the national guard - the US equivalent of the territorial army - seems only to have given the controversy new life.
The events of three decades ago would normally not feature in an election year. In 2000, when the facts of Bush's lost year began to emerge, Democrats had no interest in revisiting Vietnam: they were well aware of their own vulnerabilities in Bill Clinton, the draft dodger. But America is at war again, and Bush is fond of reminding Americans that he is a wartime president. He has ordered troops into battle in Afghanistan and Iraq; he has posed for the cameras in a flightsuit atop an aircraft carrier.
At first, such stirring visuals served Bush well. But the White House never reckoned on John Kerry, the Democratic frontrunner, who was, previously, a Navy speedboat captain on the Mekong Delta. His candidacy came back from the dead after a tearful reunion with a former comrade who claimed he had saved his life, turning the flinty New Englander with the chestful of medals into a lovable hero. The Democratic party chairman, Terry McAuliffe, could barely contain his glee. Party operatives began a slow drip-feed of leaks, and so far, the White House seems unable to stop them.
Ii is hard to escape the suspicion that Bush got an easy ride through the guard. At the time he did his years in uniform, his father was a prominent Texas congressman, a fact not lost on his commanding officers, who seemed, in the latter years of his service, disinclined to demand regular attendance. "I'd have to have been an idiot not to know about [Bush's parentage]," says Lieutenant-Colonel Albert Lloyd Jr, a retired personnel officer whose signature is on documents released by the White House this week apparently confirming Bush's service. "Bush is sworn into the National Guard and there is his father, Congressman Bush, standing beside him. It was a good chance for unit publicity."
Reports during the 2000 elections claimed that Bush and his father pulled strings to get him to the top of the queue. That was vehemently denied by the officer who was instrumental in ushering Bush into the ranks of the guard. But Bush's senior officers must have been acutely conscious that they had a scion of America's political elite in their command.
"He did not use political influence. He did all the things required," insists Walter Staudt, a retired National Guard colonel who was Bush's commanding officer. The two men first met during the Christmas holiday of 1967, during Bush's senior year at Yale. A few months later, the young graduate applied for pilot training. "I interviewed all the kids, and if I thought they had promise, sent them through the chain," Staudt says. He retired soon after Bush's induction, and says that he can remember little of that episode now. But contemporaries from the National Guard remember being extremely conscious of the benefits that could accrue to the service from having the son of a congressman in its ranks - especially at a time when there was talk of closing the Ellington base.
However rosy the future president's situation, though, the second half of 1972 marked the beginning of a black hole in his life. It was a period marinated in alcohol, and apparently as hazy to Bush at the time as it would prove to reporters who later tried to reconstruct it. In December that year, according to many reports, he took his 16-year-old brother Marvin drinking, prompting an aggressive confrontation in which George Jr famously offered to fight his father "mano a mano". (In 1976, he was convicted of drunk driving.) There have long been rumours of drugs: the president has never admitted taking them, but his carefully worded denials have never encompassed the years before 1976. "When I was young and irresponsible," the candidate often recited during the 2000 campaign, "I was young and irresponsible." And when it came to his military service, according to National Guard records that are not clearly refuted by this week's White House releases, Bush simply fell off the radar.
During his first period in the guard at Ellington, from 1968 he put in more than three years of apparently exemplary service. "George Walker Bush is one member of the younger generation who doesn't get his kicks from pot or hashish or speed," chirped a retrospectively ironic national guard press release in 1970. "As far as kicks are concerned, Lt Bush gets his from the roaring afterburner of the F102" - the fighter planes Bush learned to fly at Ellington. He was by many accounts a good pilot, although F102s were already so obsolete that there was little chance of pilots trained to fly them being sent to Vietnam.
But in the spring of 1972 he requested permission to switch units to one in Alabama, so he could work, on his off days, on the senatorial campaign of a Bush family friend. The request was denied: the sleepy Alabama unit could hardly provide the young fighter pilot with "equivalent training", as required. The Boston Globe's groundbreaking investigation on the topic, published during the 2000 campaign, quoted the unit's commander as saying: "We met just one week night a month ... We had no airplanes. We had no pilots. We had no nothing."
Despite being denied permission to switch, however, Bush seems to have gone to Alabama anyway: from May 1972, the records show, his attendance at the Texas base started to become sketchy, then non-existent. He missed a routine medical examination, and was banned from flying.
He surfaced again in the autumn, making another request to join a different Alabama unit. This time, he was given permission to serve in Alabama - and that's certainly what, back in Texas, they thought he was doing. His superiors, charged with writing an annual appraisal of Lt Bush in May 1973, explained that he "has not been observed at this unit during the period of report" because he was doing equivalent service in Alabama.
Retired colonel Earl W Lively, the operations officer for the Texas air National Guard at the time, says Bush would have had an easy ride there. "Alabama didn't care. He wasn't contributing anything to that unit. He just had to show up there, so that's that. He performed what his commander required of him, and his commander gave him, in effect, a leave from his duty to go do his civilian occupation elsewhere."
But did he serve in Alabama at all? The state goes unmentioned on Bush's discharge papers, which chimes with the memory of William Turnipseed, the Alabama unit's commander. "Had he reported in, I would have had some recall, and I do not," Turnipseed told the Globe. "I had been in Texas, done my flight training there. If we had had a first lieutenant from Texas, I would have remembered."
Bush aides scrambled to rebut the charges, and in 2000 they came up - to the excitement of conspiracy theorists - with the now infamous "torn document". It appeared to bolster the administration's case that Bush had served, but had been ripped where it ought to have read "Bush, George W", leaving only a mysterious "W" floating untethered in white space. Records subsequently unearthed seem to suggest that the torn document is genuine - but it is a record of payroll points, not actual attendance. The same is true of the documents released this week. Nevertheless, Scott McClellan, the president's spokesman, waved the 13 pages aloft at a White House briefing on Tuesday and declared: "I think these documents show that he fulfilled his duties."
But Col Lively, the retired Texas operations officer, queries key parts of the White House presentation, suggesting that it may be largely meaningless. Some sections of the documents, for example, show Bush earning 15 points towards retirement payments. Lively, however, says 15 points were often awarded as "gratuitous points" - essentially, credits simply for having a pulse. The other point often repeated by the Bush administration - that the president had been given an honourable discharge, and therefore could not have stinted on his attendance - has been questioned by several experts in military law.
Even if the White House wins the argument about exactly what happened in Texas and Alabama in 1972 and 1973, it is not clear that the furore will evaporate. Some interpretations of the documents suggest that Bush realised the gravity of his situation and hurried to make up his minimum service requirements, ending his time in the military with his duties fulfilled. But that might not be sufficient, says Joshua Marshall, a Washington journalist who edits the influential weblog www.talkingpointsmemo.com and writes for the Washington Monthly. "The backdrop is that even the White House's story is not a good one," he says. It is widely agreed, he points out, "that the president was a son of a congressman who used his connections to get a cushy deal ... So the Democrats wouldn't take much of a hit even if the whole White House story was true. It's still a story of using your connections to get out of Vietnam."
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題名には必ず「阿修羅さんへ」と記述してください。
