EDITORIAL
Bush Guard record is a legitimate issue

President Bush's Air National Guard service three decades ago has acquired surprising new "legs" as an issue in the unfolding campaign.

The voters already knew, when he ran for his first term in 2000, that Bush had sought refuge in the Guard at a time when the other option might have been combat in Vietnam.

He wasn't alone in choosing Guard duty, and many saw that background as appropriate for a candidate promising to reduce the nation's foreign entanglements. Now Bush presents himself as a "war president," uniquely qualified to pursue two-and-a-half wars.

Bush, like Bill Clinton (called a "draft dodger" by Bush's war hero father in the '92 campaign) and thousands of other men of their generation, found a variety of strategems to avoid inclusion among the 58,000 Americans who perished in the Vietnam War.

Bush has been candid about why he enlisted in the Guard. He told one reporter: "I was not prepared to shoot my eardrum out with a shotgun in order to get a deferment. Nor was I willing to go to Canada. So I chose to better myself by learning how to fly airplanes."

That option wasn't technically available to Bush. He didn't qualify for either a direct commission or flight training. But he received both when he jumped several waiting lists for a coveted spot in the Texas Air National Guard.

Bush was a fully trained pilot who had undergone a rigorous two-year flight-training program that cost the Pentagon nearly $1 million when, in April 1972, he climbed out of a military cockpit for the last time. He still had two more years to serve.

The question that persists today is whether Bush actually and fully performed his Guard duties in the last two years of his commitment. The payroll records released by the White House this week hardly put this issue to rest.

Rather, they show that, at best, Bush performed no Guard duties at all for more than half a year in 1972. They also raise questions about how he could be credited with at least 14 days of duty during subsequent periods when his superior officers in two units said they had not seen him.

The White House acknowledges that it has other records from Bush's Guard years, but declines to release them. Aides backed away from Bush's televised weekend pledge to release all his military records.

Now the release of a record of a dental visit by Bush confirms that he was physically present at his Alabama duty station, at least for that one visit. It also suggests that we'll be subjected to what the Nixon White House termed a "limited hang-out" as Bush records dribble out with a November timeline in mind.

Meanwhile, it's hard to believe the White House can't find the resources to locate witnesses to corroborate the president's claims.

Why are these questions relevant three decades later? They bear on Bush's character, because he has continually claimed that his Guard performance was beyond reproach. Some voters may also feel they bear on his moral authority to send Americans into combat — an issue that faced Clinton as well.

And Bush himself helped make the issue of military service fair game by posturing as a swashbuckling pilot under a "mission accomplished" banner aboard an aircraft carrier returning from Iraq combat.

The president owes the nation — and voters should demand — a fuller explanation of his absences from Guard duty. The issue is less about how he did his service then than it is about candor today.