I, unlike your god, am not running to be the "war president." I also managed to show up every month even during the three years I was in law school and even missed a week of school to attend required training at one point. Unlike Dubya, I didn't consider service to my country as too much of a burden on my graduate school studies and, despite the "burden" of National Guard duty, I still managed to graduate in the top 1/3 of my class. Neither did I have "other priorities" like your demi-god Cheney.
I have never disparaged the service of anyone who served regardless of where the military happened to send them as long as they did their service honorably - not even Dan Quayle. My father was on active duty during the Korean War and never got sent to Korea. Same thing with one of my uncles. My mother's father joined during WWI and, because of certain skills he had, never left the continental United States. The military has never asked me whether I wanted a particular assignment and, if they decide to send me to Iraq, they won't ask me at that time either. They give me an order and I am obligated to carry it out to the best of my abilities.
In my current assignment I work with the family members of deployed soldiers helping them to resolve things such as pay problems, emergency leave, etc. I occasionally get phone calls late at night from a spouse of a deployed service member who has a problem and doesn't know where to turn. I have drafted bunches of legal documents for those family members and dispensed I have no idea how many hours of legal advice to them. (And no, I don't charge for it). Again though, no one asked me if I wanted this job. I was told to do it and I will continue to do it until someone tells me to do something else.
I would also add that the National Guard and Army Reserve today are significantly different than the National Guard and Army Reserve of the 1960's. I joined in 1986 and there were still a lot of folks in units that could remember showing up every month and doing basically nothing. At the two week annual training, they would have the "middle weekend" free to do whatever they wanted. Believe it or not, in many units, they allowed male soldiers to have hair of any length as long as they stuffed it inside a wig that looked like a regulation haircut. Almost no National Guard units served in Vietnam.
Today, we publish Yearly Training Guidance and Monthly Training Schedules and are expected to adhere to them. There ain't no "days off" at annual training. You show up at the armory on Saturday, drive to the training site, draw equipment on Saturday evening, and move to the field on Sunday. You stay there and train 18-20 hours a day until the next Wednesday when you come in from the field. You spend Thursday and Friday cleaning and maintaining equipment and on Saturday, you drive back to the armory. Something like 40% of the troops now in Iraq are reserve component soldiers so we don't have 19 month waiting lists of folks hoping to avoid a draft.
Dubya used political influence to skip a 19 month waiting list to join the Texas National Guard. He score the absolute bare minimum (25th percentile) on the flight exam yet somehow managed to get into flight school where others who scored higher than him didn't. He made sure to check the box "do not volunteer for overseas service" on one of the forms. (Not something they ask you today - at least I've sure as hell never seen a form with a box like that). He skipped a scheduled flight physical and was removed from flight status (the reasons for skipping this requirement have never been explained). For several months in Alabama, there simply are no records of him ever showing up for drill. When he started graduate school, rather than transferring to a new unit, he begged for an "early out" because National Guard duty would have been too difficult to couple with graduate school.
What's amazing about this is that his father is a man of enormous honor and integrity. I actually voted for Bush I over Clinton even though I disagreed with many of his policies because I trusted him. Furthermore, I thought Clinton's avoidance of military service was about as sleazy as Dick Cheney's. Unfortunately, it appears that honor and integrity are not genetic.
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But that video did make me a little dizzy.
