I’ve been reading a lot over the last week about the Bush AWOL story and have started to write about it several times, but find that there’s just too much to it. All of the posts quickly become interminable.
There’s one specific point that I’ve been meaning to explore and then discovered that Salon’s Eric Boehlert did it for me — whether Bush stopped showing up for his National Guard duty because he was worried about a drug test.
After being trained as a pilot, Bush stopped flying in April 1972 — two years after finishing flight school and two years before his commitment to the National Guard was over. Bush transferred to an Alabama Air Guard unit, so he could volunteer for a Republican Senate campaign, but there’s no evidence he ever showed up.
William Turnipseed, the retired general who commanded the Alabama unit at the time, said, “Had [Bush] reported in, I would have had some recall, and I do not. I had been in Texas, done my flight training there. If we had had a first lieutenant from Texas, I would have remembered.”
A few months after transferring, in August 1972, Bush was suspended from flight status for failing to take his annual flight physical. Boehlert explores the various reasons why Bush may have decided to walk away from his Guard responsibilities and wonders whether Bush dropped out to avoid being tested for drugs, which could have been a part of the physical exam.
In fact, Boehlert notes that the military instituted the Medical Service Drug Abuse Testing Program the same year Bush stopped reporting to the Guard. The policy required “a systematic drug abuse testing program of all military personnel on active duty, effective 1 July 1972.”
While the policy applied to personnel on “active duty,” and as a Guardsman, Bush wasn’t, it nevertheless prompted the National Guard to create a random drug-testing program, in which Bush may have been required to participate, had he shown up.
And considering that questions surfaced, albeit briefly, in the 2000 campaign about whether or not Bush had a drug problem in his youth, it’s not unreasonable to wonder if there was a connection. After all, there had to be some reason Bush chose not to fulfill his responsibilities.
As Boehlert explained:
During the 2000 campaign, when Bush’s spokesman was asked about the possibility of Bush facing a drug test back in 1972, the spokesman told the Times of London that Bush “was not aware of any [military] changes that required a drug test.” Still, at the time when Bush, perhaps for the first time in his life, faced the prospect of a random drug test, his military records show he virtually disappeared, failing for at least one year to report for Guard duty. White House officials insist that if Bush missed any weekend Guard drills in 1972, he made up for them during the summer of 1973. If this is true, he would have been vulnerable to random drug tests during his makeup days. But again, Bush’s own discharge papers fail to conclusively back up his claim that he performed Guard service in 1973.
[…]
During the early stages of his 2000 campaign for president, Bush was dogged by questions of whether he ever used cocaine or any other illegal substance when he was younger. Bush refused to fully answer the question, but in 1999 he did issue a blanket denial insisting he had not used any illegal drugs during the previous 25 years, or since 1974. Bush refused to specify what “mistakes” he had made before 1974.
Perhaps realizing that explanation pointed reporters toward possible drug use during his time as a guardsman, Bush insisted he hadn’t taken any drugs while serving in the Texas Air National Guard, between 1968 and 1974. “I never would have done anything to jeopardize myself. I got airborne and I got on the ground very successfully,” he told reporters on Aug. 19, 1999. But today we know that for his last 18 months in the Guard, from April 72 to late ’73, Bush didn’t have to get airborne, because he simply quit flying. Moreover, if Bush in fact took no drugs at all after 1968, that would mean his drug use, if any, stopped at age 22 — an unusual age to swear off recreational substances for someone with the partying reputation Bush had at that time.
Unanswered questions continue to swirl around Bush’s Guard service in part because he refuses to release the full contents of his military records.