Posted on 09/12/2004 12:07:44 PM PDT by dennisw
LINK post #19
BTW - Today on CSpan2 John O'Neill mentioned that JFK got 4 deferments before being turned down for Paris study. He then joined the Navy. So his remark about Cheney's 5 deferments takes on a new twist.
LINK post #47
I keep hearing that Cheney got 5 deferments. Didn't everyone who went straight through college get 4 deferments, one for each year? Can someone from that era clear that up for me, please.
bump
I was a few years ahead of sKerry and his people but I was classified "1S" for the 4 years in college. When you graduated you went back to "1A" if you were qualified.
Kerry was in the Naval reserves. I believe he got four deferments from being moved to active duty.
I entered college in Sep 1968. I turned 18 in Apr 1969. I had a 2-S (student) deferment each year I was in college. IIRC, if you dropped out or were no longer in college, the school notified your draft board and you'd get a notice to report.
I'm just a shade too young.
When I turned 18 and registered in July '70, I was automaticly given a 2-S deferment because I was a college freshman attending summer school. But they had changed the law and I was quickly reclassified 1-H when they started the Lucky Lotto. I had one of those limbo birthdates where you didn't know whether they were gonna call you or not. As luck would have it, they apparently didn't need me.
Too bad they turned him down. If he'd have gotten one more he might have gone to France--and stayed there!
So, let's have a reality check:
Dick Cheney got 5 deferments, 4 for being a student and 1 for having a child.
John Kerry had 4 deferments, for being a student, and his fifth one, for study in France, was denied, so he joined the Naval Reserve picking a service that he KNEW wasn't near the action.
What is the difference?
I remember those days. Parents did all they could to get their children into college so they could get a deferment. That is why it is often said that war was fought by poor the black and the non connected.
Only a mad man would have wanted their child in that hell pit. Swamps and leeches and snakes and secret passages booby trapped and never ending rice paddies and a population that you never knew if they were friend or foe as our guys got blown up giving candy to kids.
That was an ugly time and an ugly political no win war. God bless all the men that went and came home in boxes or so damaged that their lives have never been normal.
Exactly.
Not quite right.
In early 1966, Kerry asked his draft board to let him have a FIFTH deferment to study in Paris; they refused, so he then enlisted in the Naval Reserve.
But he, too, got 4 2-S deferments for his four years of college.
There was also a 2-SH for high school students. I know. I had one (turned 18 in December of 1970 while still in high school).
I think they are also referring to Cheney's additional reclassification due to his marriage/first child. College, being married and a child all had different classifications if I remember correctly... Nothing unually about getting them if you qualified....
When I was surfing around on that Cheney deferment thread, I was stunned to find out that Kerry and the Dems are counting each year as 1 deferment, and then are insinuating that people who took the legal routes offered to the by the Congress of the United States of American "draft dodgers."
A lot of people sure were surprised to hear that!
"Of the 26.8 million men who were eligible for the draft between 1964 and 1973, only 2.2 million were drafted while 8.7 million joined voluntarily, according to "Chance and Circumstance: the Draft, the War, and the Vietnam Generation," a 1978 book by Lawrence M. Baskir and William A. Strauss. Mr. Cheney was among the vast majority of 16 million men " about 60 percent of those eligible " who avoided the draft by legal means."
And then there was this great quote:
I think the point is that, although Vice President Cheney is apparently a bad guy for opting to stay home with his wife and daughter instead of volunteering, the unmarried Senator Edwards, with no family at home to support, is a great guy even though he didn't volunteer either
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1206498/posts
You had to request a school deferment, underweight meant a physical every time the local board got bored.
Kerry joined the Naval Reserves AFTER his request for deferrment to study in Paris was declined.
Ah, thanks for the correction.
I wonder why "war hero" Kerry wanted to go to Paris? Maybe he wanted to go on some sort of lone Rambo-esque mission to take out the NVA spies that had infiltrated cafes throughout Paris before joining his "band of brothers" in Vietnam?
I saw you post that very thing on those threads the day we were discussing this.
I am floored that the Dems would try to make their case on the backs of the young men of this country.
Such nasty things to say about people who were NOT breaking the law and who were making their own choices.
I suspect he wanted to go anywhere except Vietnam. In fact, he said that himself:
Per Boston Globe regarding Kerry's request for swift boats - http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2004/03/07/wkerr07.xml
"I didn't really want to get involved in the war," Kerry said in a little-noticed contribution to a book of Vietnam reminiscences published in 1986. "When I signed up for the swift boats, they had very little to do with the war. They were engaged in coastal patrolling and that's what I thought I was going to be doing."
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Per the Telegraph regarding Kerry's request to avoid Vietnam to study in Paris - http://www.boston.com/globe/nation/packages/kerry/061603.shtml
I registered for the draft in 1969 and was classified, in sequence, as 2-S, 1-A (briefly), 1-H, and, last as 2-M (medical school).
This is usually ignored by the MSM, but Mr. Cheney did serve his country as Secretary of Defense from March 1989 to January 1993, and he was a notably more successful Secretary of Defense than Mr. Kerry's Robert McNamara.
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