All politicians are douche bags! They all avoid the military, Clinton, Bush, Cheney, Rumsfleld. The only two recent presidents that were in the military was Bush SR. (pilot), and Carter (nuclear sub commander).
So the National Guard isn't "military," and all those Guard units in Iraq can just come home whenever they want? Wow, who knew . . .
Maybe you should go up to some of the
125th Fighter Wing guys at Jacksonville or Homestead and tell them they're not really military pilots.
Being an ANG pilot was no guaranteed way to avoid being sent to Vietnam: "Four tactical fighter squadrons--the 120th (Colorado), 174th (Iowa), 188th (New Mexico), and 136th (New York)--deployed to Vietnam. And although not an Air National Guard unit, the National Guard can claim credit for a fifth squadron, the 3755th: 85% of this tactical fighter squadron's personnel were Air Guard volunteers from New Jersey and the District of Columbia.* The combat record of these five squadrons was summed up by the Air Force Commander in Vietnam, testifying before the Senate Committee:
'I had . . . five F-100 Air National Guard squadrons . . . Those were the five best F-100 squadrons in the field. The aircrews were a little older, but they were more experienced, and the maintenance people were also more experienced than the regular units. They had done the same work on the weapon system for years, and they had stability that a regular unit doesn't have.'" BTW, the article containing the above information (
The Air Guard in Vietnam) gives an incorrect date. ANG units began flying support missions into the RVN in 1962. (133rd Airlift Wing based at Minneapolis-St. Louis International Airport, and subordinate squadrons from Schenectady, N.Y, and Manchester, N.H.) *The squadron named as the "3755th" was actually the
355th Tactical Fighter Squadron, which was assigned to the 37th TFW, and later the 31st TFW, where it was manned by ANG personnel from New York and New Mexico.
[FONT=arial,helvetica]From
F-102 in Vietnam: "The Air National Guard has often been ridiculed as a safe place for military duty during the Vietnam War. However, pilots from the 147th Fighter Interceptor Group, as it was called at the time, were actually conducting combat missions in Vietnam when Bush enlisted. Air Force F-102 squadrons had been stationed in Thailand since 1961 and South Vietnam since March 1962. It was during this time that the Kennedy administration began building up a large US military presence in the region as a deterrent against North Vietnamese invasion."[/FONT] When Bush Jr. was a
pilot, they also patrolled the Gulf Coast against incursions from Soviet aircraft based in Cuba. But since the U.S. was never actually attacked from there, that wasn't "real military duty" either, right?