Deserter: Bush’s War on Military Families, Veterans, and His Past – Ian Williams

Deserter: Bush’s War on Military Families, Veterans, and His Past – Ian Williams, Nation Books/Avalon Publishing Group, 2004, 235pp. (S) ****

Perhaps the most fundamental question raised by Ian Williams in Deserter, is what does it mean to be a chickenhawk. For many, it is indeed a rather pregnant term, calling into question as much of the moral weight of those who make the charge, as of those who receive it. In partial answer to this conundrum, Williams, early in his treatise, makes this astute observation: “ . . . I began to appreciate that the very absence of a genuine, hands-on, military career for Bush the younger may well be one of the forces driving us all toward Armageddon.”(p.1) In short, ideology and pretense can kill. He later quotes Romain Rolland who famously said, “‘I find war detestable. But even more detestable are those who praise war without participating in it.’”(p.84) In a nut shell, this is what we see in George W. Bush – a man who supported the Vietnam war but did not see fit to go fight in it. And such is the critical difference, when one who like Williams, has not served, feels compelled to call a spade a spade. Then the charge of chickenhawk becomes morally permissible, particularly when the one leveling the charge is opposed to war and makes no pretense about his position. Williams puts it more eloquently, when he writes, “But when that scion of moneyed and privileged family whose main qualification has always been his inspired choice of father and family, then runs for president on issues of “character,” and struts in borrowed military plumage on the world stage while launching a real war that has killed thousands of real people, then he becomes fair game.”(p.5)

Williams also makes compelling comparisons to the fine tooth comb approach to Clinton’s absence of military service, and the kids gloves handling by the major media with respect to Bush’s dubious record. “Although many in the military had scant time for Bill Clinton, at least he did not pass himself off as some reinvented, combat-hardened veteran, nor did he embroil them in a bloody and essentially unwinnable and misguided war in a far away land.”(p.203-204) He also cites the case of Camilo Mejia, who because of conscientious objection, refused to return for duty after leave and was subsequently prosecuted as a deserter, a much different fate than that of George W. Bush, whose service record for a least a half year’s duration, is still unaccounted for. Williams points up that the ultimate tragic irony is that while Guardsmen Bush Jr had the option of checking “no” to overseas deployment, for others today there is no such option. “More importantly, such choices are denied now to the National Guardsmen who were not only called up for service in Iraq, but have found their terms extended while they were out in the desert.”(p.20) The last part of this quote is an allusion to “stop loss orders,” or what others have kindly referred to as a “back-door draft,” but for all practical purposes, could just as well be called the ultimate in psychological torture, since it is his discharge date that every soldier lives for.

We can only hope that Williams is wrong when he writes that “ . . . the world’s number one superpower is within a Chinese whisper of bankruptcy because a spoilt ivy league jock is still trying to prove himself to his war-hero father and his roughneck Texas buddies.”(p.2) But he follows this with the suggestion that “ . . . Bush’s military career has more to do with fraud [than Freud].”(p.2) Indeed, these are salient points, and for a work that was likely hastily put together in order to get it to press in an election year, we can thank Ian Williams for both his courage, honesty, and humor in addressing so murky a subject. As a final note, it’s too bad the publisher didn’t stick with the original or alternative title, Deserter: George W. Bush, Soldier of Fortune, which seems to have a nicer ring to it.