B. U. G. S.

What I say about war comes from what The Greatest Generation would call “an armchair general.” The tiny little incidents I was in were not part of a Real War. I have never been in Real Combat.

Until this was explained to me, I honestly thought I had been. That was because of a brain trauma, I suppose. One time I did something stupid and was on my feet when a high explosive went off in front of me. It knocked me backwards on my neck and I lay there for what seemed like an hour, but was probably a few minutes, thinking I was crippled from the neck down.

Then the feeling came back. It was the best pain I ever felt. I was not a permanent paraplegic; I had just had the hell knocked out of me. A blow like that shakes the brain. I naturally would end up with delusions like the one that I was in a real fight.

So, speaking as Armchair General Bob, I would caution you about some problems with military statistics.

Let me begin with a very practical poitical matter. One of the big issues in the 2004 presidential campaign was the question of whether John Kerry was a real hero and whether George Bush the Younger was a draft dodger hiding in what the media agree was the cowardly National Guard.

When George Bush became a combat pilot in the National Guard, what the media refer to as a “draft dodge,” a person who trained as a pilot stood a better chance of dying during training than the average man who went to Vietnam in uniform.

But I STILL cannot compare Bush and Kerry in any meaningful way.

I wish I could refine this statistic. “A man who went to Vietnam in uniform” could be somebody like Al Gore, who was always kept in a relatively safe position when he went to Vietnam as a volunteer.

I do not condemn Al Gore for being in a “relatively safe position” in Vietnam. First of all, there were no really “safe” places for any American in uniform in Vietnam. Al Gore was a volunteer from the Volunteer State when he could have avoided the draft very easily.

Gore was NOT given any special privileges because his father was a United States senator. It was military policy to keep actual volunteers in relatively safe positions. I would like to make him the villain.

The problem is that he simply wasn’t.

Facts really screw up a good story.

I would like to compare Bush and Kerry, but the statistics aren’t there.

At the height of the Vietnam War there were about half a million uniformed American troops in Nam. But only about eighty thousand of those men were on “man with gun” assignments.

So I cannot compare the risks John Kerry took with the risks George Bush took. Anyone who has had practical, professional experience in dealing with military statistics will understand the difficulties involved here.

Many of the guys “in the paddies” were not in the “man with gun” classification. On the other hand a lot of the “man with gun” category did not serve “in the paddies” (which is a curious expression if you have ever seen a paddy). Many in the “man with gun” category were guards in relatively safe places.

If history were a “just so” story, I could join all the people who think Gore or Bush or Kerry was just being sneaky and evil. I could find a statistical category that Kerry was in and use it prove he was in very little real danger. I could find another statistic to prove he was in the most endangered category.

I could denounce Bush as a cowardly draft dodger as so many people do.

I would love to prove that Bush and Kerry and Gore were all getting credit for nothing. I don’t like any of them.

What stymies me is the fact that I have been cursed with a conscience. Many, many times I have wished that medical science would find a way for me to have the damned thing surgically removed.