It occurred to me over breakfast to ask Google about Trump's record in the Vietnam war. He is, after all, only a little older than we are and must have been in the frame for the draft in the late nineteen sixties. No idea what prompted this wonder.
Google rapidly turns up some press coverage about the matter and according to a piece in the New York Times of 2016 we have it that:
'Back in 1968, at the age of 22, Donald J. Trump seemed the picture of health.
He stood 6 feet 2 inches with an athletic build; had played football, tennis and squash; and was taking up golf. His medical history was unblemished, aside from a routine appendectomy when he was 10.
But after he graduated from college in the spring of 1968, making him eligible to be drafted and sent to Vietnam, he received a diagnosis that would change his path: bone spurs in his heels.
The diagnosis resulted in a coveted 1-Y medical deferment that fall, exempting him from military service as the United States was undertaking huge troop deployments to Southeast Asia, inducting about 300,000 men into the military that year.
The deferment was one of five Mr. Trump received during Vietnam. The others were for education'.
So yet another right wing type who talks big about military action and whacking the axis of evil, but who, when push came to shove, managed to dodge the action. Along with people like John Wayne and George Bush the younger. Maybe a psycho-analyst would say that all the bluster is a cover for not having actually done it; a protective cover for an essentially fragile personality. A bit like the adolescents (and others) who talk most about sex often being those who have the least access to it.
Reference 1: https://www.usa.gov/selective-service. Selective service being the name used in the US for a sort of deferred conscription.
Reference 2: http://www.psychoanalysis.org.uk/.
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