Interesting article in the Washington Post today entitled "For the Candidates, Vietnam Choices Linger."

A few paragraphs struck me:

Of the four men, only Kerry saw combat in Vietnam. George Q. Flynn, a retired professor who has studied Vietnam War-era conscription trends, said the majority of students avoided going to Vietnam, either by joining the National Guard or by getting draft deferments. Less than 10 percent of college students volunteered for active duty.

"There was nothing atypical about Bush joining the National Guard, which was considered a nice, safe haven from Vietnam," said Flynn, author of "The Draft, 1940-1973."

"It was Kerry who was the exception."

Kerry was a stand up guy in his youth and remains a stand up man as an adult.

Kerry, by contrast, decided to volunteer for the Navy, inspired in part by the example of his political hero, John F. Kennedy, even though he had growing misgivings about the U.S. role in Vietnam. In a commencement day address to the Class of 1966, Kerry complained that the Johnson administration had moved from "an excess of isolationism" to "an excess of interventionism."

"We have not really lost the desire to serve," Kerry told classmates. "We question the very roots of what we are serving."

"Remember, we were the generation that heard John F. Kennedy say, 'Ask not what your country can do for you,' '' said Kerry's roommate, Dan Barbiero, who enlisted in the Marine Corps at the same time. "The doubts were not strong enough to fail to obey a call to arms."

Barbiero and others noted that there was a "huge difference" between Kerry's Class of '66 and Bush's Class of '68. While volunteering for active-duty military service was unusual in 1966, it was practically unheard of by 1968. A Bush roommate, Clay Johnson III, could think of only one close Yale acquaintance who served in Vietnam.

"By 1968, no one I knew would have considered going to Vietnam," said Lanny Davis, a Washington lawyer and former chairman of the Yale Daily News, who knew Bush and Kerry. "The place was awash with antiwar protests."

Bush, however, did not share those sentiments.

In an interview with The Post in 1999, he said he had no recollection of any antiwar activity on campus -- a remarkable statement, considering what was going on. The school's legendary chaplain, William Sloane Coffin, was a national leader of the antiwar movement and had been arrested for aiding draft resistance during Bush's senior year. Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey and Lady Bird Johnson were greeted by protesters when they visited Yale that year.

"George Bush had no political visibility whatsoever," said Gaddis Smith, professor emeritus of diplomatic history, who taught Bush and Kerry. "He was more like a student from the decade before, the mid-'50s, people who enjoyed their fraternity life."

According to Coffin, Bush "missed the great action and passion of his time." While Bush told The Post in 1999 that he generally supported the Johnson administration's position on the war, he did not feel strongly enough to speak out publicly.

"We were very apolitical," Clay Johnson said. "We didn't talk politics."

Some friends believe that Bush associated the antiwar movement at Yale with intellectual snobbery. "He had little sympathy for the antiwar people and their behavior and antics. They were pompous and pretentious," said roommate Robert J. Dieter. "They were 22-year-olds who thought they were going to run the world."

For Bush, deciding how to respond to the draft was a "practical" rather than a "moral" question, according to Clay Johnson, now deputy director for management of the president's Office of Management and Budget. Bush would later tell a reporter that he decided to join the National Guard because he was "not prepared to shoot my eardrum out with a shotgun" to get another deferment and was unwilling to move to Canada.

Bush's lack of curiousity, intellectual and otherwise and his oblivion regarding national and international events is not new.

Cheney had dropped out of Yale four years earlier because he could not keep up with the academic pace. Returning to Wyoming to attend community college, he received four student deferments, plus a fifth for "family hardship." Critical biographers have noted that Richard and Lynne Cheney had their first child in July 1966, nine months and two days after the Johnson administration expanded the draft to include married men without children.

The deferments kept Cheney out of the military until 1967, when he turned 26 and became ineligible for the draft. He would later insist that he complied with the conscription laws and would have been "happy to serve" had he been drafted. But as he told The Washington Post in 1989, "I had other priorities in the '60s than military service."

Pray tell, Mr. Cheney, what were those priorities? Were they to position yourself to be VP and send our kids and siblings in the military on suicide missions? Or embark on a unjust war with 1100 dead US Troops, 5,000-7,000 injured or maimed, 100,000 injured or maimed Iraqi civilians and 20,000 dead innocent Iraqis?

For people who were very eager to evade combat in the draft, Bush and Cheney sure have created draft-like conditions and if we have four more years of Bush/Cheney, it is hard to see how we don't have a draft.