It's worth remembering Cheney's speech at the Republican Convention last year. He was bleating about how the US military was unready under Clinton. His proof was a news interview with a commander somewhere who said his troops were not presently up to strength; what Cheney didn't mention was that this commander already had half his troops in Kosovo so his comment really meant that with about half his force already in the field, the remaining half - by itself - was not ... etc. After making such a fuss at the Convention, about a year later the Bush DOD announced it now had a change of goals, rather than try to maintain sufficient readiness, it was giving up on any hopes of being able to fight two wars simultaneously - essentially conceding to the situation Cheney had bitched about in his Convention speech.
It's also worth remembering what sort of troops Cheney himself had mustered when he was Secretary of Defense under Old Bush. When Operation Desert Storm started an appalling number of our volunteer servicemen and servicewomen - most of them recruited under Cheney - suddenly decided that although they had freely enlisted they suddenly had scruples about going where the action was and wanted out of the Army in the worst way. Not exactly a ringing indorsement for Cheney's notion of readiness.
Yep, Cheney managed to avoid the draft .... not like Clinton, who earned a deferment by being a top scholar, but by pulling strings. And of course Dan Quayle served ... on a golf course, and Boy George got cushy stateside duty that apparently didn't even mind his ducking out of active duty training. And all the while the Republicans were belittling the comparatively less-risky-than-combat service of Dukakis in Korea and Gore in Vietnam; heck, Republicans can avoid those war zone assignments.
Sort of like my uncle who spent the Korean war inside of an adjacent country doing things the government of that adjacent country didn't know about and wouldn't appreciate if they did. I doubt it showed on his records either, LOL. But the old boy sure had a lot of friends and officials who seemed to know exactly what it was he did, LOL, and their respect for him was VERY obvious.
'Curious' records don't always mean what conspiracy-theorist anti-CIA people would like them to mean.