Bush Military Training Questioned

American Politics Journal — Fast-track Flyboy:
". . .Those of us in the real Air Force got commissioned in one of three ways: The Air Force Academy, ROTC, or -- if already college graduates -- the Officer Training School at Lackland Air Force Base, Texas. If you saw the film An Officer and a Gentleman, depicting the Navy's version, you have a rough idea of what that training was like. It was goddamned hard.

But young Georgie didn't have to go through it. If you examine his records, you will find that he was given a direct commission as a second lieutenant after completing enlisted basic training and nothing more! Bang: He went directly from Airman Third Class, which is the rank of someone just out of basic, to a second lieutenant with a few typewriter keystrokes. Then he went to flight school. . ."

Okay, I was an Air Force grunt during Bush's service and I don't want the somewhat snarky implication that Air Force basic training was easy go unchallenged. It was not easy but then again it wasn't Paris Island either [semper fidelis]. (I thought tech school was much more difficult in several ways, and later I had some escape and evasion training that was physical hell, but enlisted basic training was not show-up and loaf around.)

Anyway, I was squalling about this inconsistency in the Bush Flight School Record in 1999. So, yeah, how did that happen? The way I saw his record, it appeared to me that he went straight from enlistment to flight school, though the a/3c rank might have been assigned for bookkeeping and pay purposes-- I recall that OCS candidates had an e3 rank for pay purposes until they completed OCS at which point they become gentlemen and 2nd Lt's. (A very fuzzy 1966 era memory)

If Bush went through Air Force basic training, then he did it at San Antonio at Lackland AFB (for a very short period of time there was another base open for basic training, perhaps Shepherd AFB). So was anyone out there in basic training with the Future President of the United States?

As Graham says in the post, it should be easy to check-out. Look for all Bushes who were graduated from BMT at Lackland AFB from, say, 1965 to 1975-- that ought to uncover the man. Heck, you might even try the "Buddy Locator" at Military.Com.

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