Oops. I take back what I posted earlier. The Fox interview is a summary of a fuller, earlier interview with Der Spiegel:
http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,626703,00.html
Here’s the relevant passage in Der Spiegel:
Payne: He wanted to know where this camp was that I had helped liberate. I told him that it was Ohrdruf and that it was a subcamp of the Buchenwald concentration camp. I described a little bit of what I had seen.
SPIEGEL: You were barely an adult as a soldier back then — how did you wind up at such a place?
Payne: Everybody who was able-bodied was drafted. I went down right at the time I graduated and told the lady that ran the Selective Service office. I said, “I’m ready to go,” and she said: “Don’t you worry about it, honey. You’re on the list.” Since I had been colorblind since birth, I was first turned down by the Air Force, then by the Navy and the Marines. Only the Army didn’t care and put me into the infantry.
So, this still doesn’t prove that Payne isn’t bending the truth for Obama, but it doesn’t sound too likely, frankly.
From the same Der Spiegel article. Note the irony in Payne’s statement.
SPIEGEL: What do you think about the Germans today?
Payne: I am puzzled by intelligent people who stand by and allow their country to be taken over and run by extreme radical types. I’m still somewhat puzzled by that. And I am fully aware that it could happen and has almost happened in this country. You know, I lived through the McCarthy era in the 1950s, when it was getting dangerously close to that sort of thing.
Payne also says he admires Obama. He himself is a long time Dem.
Air Force?