White House releases Bush Vietnam records

10.00am

WASHINGTON - The White House has released President Bush's National Guard pay and service records in a bid to refute charges he shirked his Vietnam War era military obligations.

"These documents clearly show that the president fulfilled his duties," White House spokesman Scott McClellan said, seeking to quell a controversy that has sidetracked the Bush team as his re-election effort gets under way.

The White House learned late on Monday that previously unreleased records had been found that document Bush's service in the Texas Air National Guard, which is part of the US part-time military system, McClellan said. The White House also reissued previously available documents.

"He completed his military obligation in a satisfactory manner," retired Air Force Lt. Col. Albert Lloyd, a personnel specialist, said in a written description of the records that were also issued by the White House.

The records show Bush received 56 points for service, six more than required, in each of the two years in question -- May 1972 through May 1974, and that he was paid for service on specific dates. There were no pay records for the third quarter of 1972, and he earned no service points for that period.

Bush spent part of the fall of that year helping with a political campaign in Alabama, but he performed "equivalent duty" to his Texas guard obligations while out of state, McClellan said. The records show he earned service points and was paid for duty in late October and November of 1972.

The records, however, may not end the controversy. A columnist writing in The Washington Post on Tuesday recalled his own Vietnam-era Guard experience and said he was paid despite skipping service for two years.

Bush left the National Guard with an honourable discharge eight months shy of the obligatory six years on Oct. 1, 1973, to attend Harvard Business School. The pay records show his heaviest service in his final two years came in July 1973, when he was paid for 19 days.

During the Vietnam War, Guard units were rarely called up, and, "the Reserves and the Guard acquired reputations as draft havens for relatively affluent young white men," the Air National Guard says in a history posted on its internet site.

In an NBC interview broadcast on Sunday, Bush acknowledged he had not volunteered to go to Vietnam and called the war a "political war." But he said he supported the government and would have gone had his Guard unit been called. "I put in my time, proudly so," he said.

Years-old questions over whether Bush skipped his service obligations while in Alabama were given new life by this year's Democratic presidential primaries.

Front-runner Sen. John Kerry, a Massachusetts Democrat who volunteered and was decorated for his duty in Vietnam, has said Bush should answer questions over his military record.

Kerry declined comment on Tuesday.

'WAR PRESIDENT'

The Bush team has fought back aggressively against the criticism -- which could tarnish the president's self-portrayal as a "war president" leading the country in a fight against global terrorism.

Bush campaign manager Ken Mehlman, in an online session on the campaign internet site, said on Monday "we should be able to disagree without making personal attacks."

"For instance, we honor Senator Kerry's patriotic service during the Vietnam War. Yet we question the judgments of his votes to consistently cut defence and intelligence funding, his vote against the first Gulf War, and his recently stated belief that the war on terror is primarily about law enforcement and intelligence."

Officials at an Air Reserve personnel centre in Colorado began looking for the records after the issue of Bush's military record was revived, McClellan said.

Questions about Bush's military history date back to his 1994 campaign for Texas governor.

McClellan said the payroll records are proof of Bush's service. "You are paid for the days on which you serve in the National Guard," he said.

But Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen, writing of his own Guard service two years ahead of Bush, said, "I was supposed to attend weekly drills and summer camp ... For two years or so, I played a perfectly legal form of hooky. To show you what a mess the Guard was at the time, I even got paid for all the meetings I missed."

- REUTERS