This reminds me, when I had to look up all my old records - school, university, employment and ... navy - for clearance with the pension fond.
Instead of 18 month draft, I just had been a 6- month-conscript [even today it's still nine months].
They didn't have the original records any more at the district recruiting office, only the dates.
Because, they thaught, the pension fonds would make waves getting only the "hard facts", they wrote a completely new testification .... signed by exactly the person, who would have signed it 30 years back: on his very last day in his working life.
And to top it: they even used the seal with the same number as on the other papers :wink:
(I mean, I had been promoted in those 12 months, I "wasn't" in the navy, had undertaken some exams ....)
Exactly, Walter. This is done all the time and I suspect this won't die with "the dog ate my homework" ploy.
My husband served eight years in the Texas National Guard, the last two as a reservist. When he applied for social security last year, they needed his military pay records. They couldn't located three years of them. It's as if he didn't exist for the Army for those three years.
But we have his honorable discharge in the filing cabinet.
Well, actually the mistake they made in my case was, they wrote the wrong ending year in my demobilisation papers: instead of "31.12.1971" they wrote "31.12.70".
Nobody noticed this, because - and although - my time as emergency reservist started the other day.
They were very friendly at the recruiting office, and I it really would have lasted a long time and numerous writings to clear this with pension fonds.
We never did clear up my husband's missing three years. It's a good thing he isn't running for president huh? No doubt something sinister would have been made out of it.
Nothing more sinister than being AWOL.
It is my understanding that when an individual become president all of his public records are impounded, and that includes medical records. It would be unlikely that they records were over looked.
I would have thought it was also military records so why are they just now finding out there is a huge gap in the documentation? I can still smell the smoke from an overloaded shredder.
Foxfyre wrote:We never did clear up my husband's missing three years. It's a good thing he isn't running for president huh? No doubt something sinister would have been made out of it.
Poor dear. Honey, your husband wasn't missing. He was justing hiding from you.
Kuvasz--
Good to see you. Hold your dominion.
On the trail of Bush's missing past
On the trail of Bush's missing past
By Jim Spencer
Denver Post columnist
Friday, July 16, 2004 -
No one messed up.
That's what the spokesman for the Defense Finance and Accounting Service in Denver told me.
I had asked him if the agency punished anyone for destroying George W. Bush's Air National Guard pay records.
Destroy is not my word. It's the description the U.S. Department of Defense used to answer an open-records request that sought the truth about allegations that America's self-proclaimed "War President" didn't show up for his own military duty in 1972.
If the president was AWOL from the Air National Guard in the 1970s, nobody in Denver covered for him in the 1990s, insisted Roger Still, the local spokesman for the accounting service.
A one-time restoration project in 1996 and 1997 meant to preserve records, not destroy them, Still said. Washington may have used the word destroyed, but self-destruction was more like it.
Over time, said Still, microfilm of Bush's pay records became "brittle, cracked, bent and chipped." The president's data was among 4,000 individual records that fell apart during a process to attach them to a duplicator and transfer them to more durable acetate.
Those records, said Still, "were no longer readable."
Still likened the microfilm restoration project to the American Film Institute's efforts to preserve old movies.
Still wasn't sure about the science of the transfer process. He did know that all of the old microfilm, including the president's records, was burned.
That is why the government should dig deep to answer questions about this mysterious archival twist.
In 1972, Bush skipped a military physical. That cost him his ability to fly. The White House says this was OK because Bush still served in a "non-flying capacity" in the months for which his pay records were destroyed.
When I asked why the accounting service failed to reveal the destruction of the president's pay records until newspapers forced the revelation under the Freedom of Information Act, Still referred me to National Guard Lt. Col. Ellen Krenke.
Lt. Col. Krenke "very respectfully" informed me that "all questions concerning President Bush's pay records are being referred to the White House."
Meanwhile, I read that there's still a way to determine how many days Bush served on active duty in 1972 by using records kept by the Air Reserve Personnel Center, also here in Denver.
When I called the personnel center about getting hold of those records, a public affairs officer told me to speak to Dan Bartlett. Bartlett is the White House communications director.
Bartlett asked Bryan Whitman, the Defense Department's deputy spokesman, to talk to me.
The buck, it appears, never stops.
Whitman confirmed everything Still said. Whitman added that the missing records - from the first quarter of 1969 to the third quarter of 1972 - were logged by Social Security numbers. No one was sure which individuals were affected, Whitman said.
"It wasn't until there was a specific query" that anyone linked names with Social Security numbers, he explained.
As for the days Bush spent on active duty in 1972, Whitman passed me on to a colonel at the Pentagon who only wanted to be identified as a "spokesman."
But he assured me George W. Bush had accumulated enough days of service to meet his Air National Guard obligations in 1972.
Gosh, I hope so.
Imagine how Americans would feel if the "War President" skipped Air National Guard meetings after he enlisted in the Guard to escape service in Vietnam.
Think how hypocritical that would look compared with the president's recent policies, which have placed many current Guard members in combat in Iraq.
Those men and women face consequences Dubya never would have faced in 1972.
Even if he did show up for duty.
