If George W. Bush was AWOL when he was serving in the National Guard, why was he never prosecuted for that alleged offense?
Hello nonesofew, welcome to the SDMB. You should make your thread titles as descriptive as possible; in fact, you should ask a mod to change the title of this thread to make it more descriptive. You will get a much better response.
Sorry, I don’t have an answer to your question.
I’m certainly no expert on military law, or the specific circumstances of GWB’s (ahem) service.
But I would assume that some military authority is responsible for designating of someone as AWOL and initiating courtmartial proceedings. A private citizen observing an apparent irregularity in someone’s service record does not make that person AWOL. In other words, I suspect you may need to distinguish between the common and legal definitions of AWOL.
Further, I suspect the responsible military authority has considerable discretion in making and pursuing such a charge.
Given these assumptions, it does not seem inconceivable to me that someone might have exerted some influence on GWB’s behalf to have his situation viewed leniently.
BTW - welcome to the boards.
As I understand it, he didn’t just up and disappear. He was assigned to an active duty unit, and in 1972, asked to be assigned to an Air Reserve Squadron that has been referred to as a “paper unit”. The had no active airplanes, and he would have a no pay position. He actually was going to work on an election campaign for one of his father’s associates.
The Commander of this unit accepted his transfer. However, the Commander of Personnel rejected it, as he wasn’t eligible since he was still required to serve active duty until 1974 or thereabouts.
It looks like by the time the rejection came through, he had already left his active unit. But he never reported to the Reserve Unit; there are no records of him reporting for duty. which makes a certain kind of Catch 22 sense; his transfer was rejected, right?
However, he didn’t go back to his old squadron either.
I would guess that the paperwork kind of fluttered about for a while, and the officers involved never really found clarity on the situation, so they never chased him down. The career men also probably decided it wouldn’t help their careers to chase down one of the Bush clan.
And given his other accomplishments, it wouldn’t surprise me if his commanding officer kind of prefferred that he not come back, also.
So, short answer, two reasons:
One, Bureacratic paper trail snafu
Two, political connections.
Hi nonesofew
Here’s a link where Cecil talks about this linky
My personal take: remember the song “Fortunate Son” by CCR?
I think it had to do with daddy.
Actually, I discovered it is slightly more complex than I outlined. Tom Paine web site has an excellent article here:
Thank you all for your commentary. It should have been titled better, more specifically perhaps George W. Bush AWOL?
Thank you all for answering the question that I asked.
Perhaps I should have asked the question in a different term.
Was George W. Bush a “shirker?”
Was?