slatten49 Loc: Lake Whitney, Texas

Tim Mak, CHICKENHAWK; 02.16.16

In a 1997 Howard Stern interview, future presidential candidate Donald Trump likened sleeping with multiple women to service in the war he repeatedly avoided.

Draft-dodger Trump once said that the danger he faced from getting sexually transmitted diseases was his own “personal Vietnam.”

In a 1997 interview with shock jock Howard Stern, Trump talked about how he had been “lucky” not to have contracted diseases when he was sleeping around.

“I’ve been so lucky in terms of that whole world. It is a dangerous world out there. It’s scary, like Vietnam. Sort of like the Vietnam-era,” Trump said in a video that resurfaced Tuesday on Buzzfeed, “It is my personal Vietnam. I feel like a great and very brave soldier.”

It wasn’t the only time the Republican front-runner for president would liken his personal life to wartime service: Trump has claimed that his military-themed boarding school education was essentially equivalent to having being trained in the military.

When Trump had his chance to join the military and fight in Vietnam, he did not take it. Instead, the rich kid got multiple student deferments from the draft and a medical deferment. Meanwhile, men like John McCain were being tortured as prisoners of war, but Trump has said that is dishonorable.

“He’s not a war hero,” Trump said of McCain last year. “He’s a war hero because he was captured. I like people that weren’t captured, OK?"

Trump has wrapped his campaign in Veteran's issues, routinely lamenting that they’ve been treated “terribly.” The candidate even held a fundraiser for Veteran's groups in lieu of attending a debate just before the Iowa caucuses.

Since running for office, Trump has made a show of fundraising for Veterans—offering Veteran's groups six-figures to be props at campaign rallies. But when Vet's groups have stood up to him, refusing to be dragged into the campaign, scores of Trump fans have sent them vile and harassing messages.

It’s in line with how Trump treated Veterans before he started running for president.

In the 1980s, Trump tried to have disabled Veteran street vendors thrown off Fifth Avenue, accusing the Vietnam-era soldiers of ruining how the street in front of Trump Tower looked. Before his presidential campaign, Trump’s charitable foundation gave more to the Clintons than to Veteran's organizations.

Trump has suggested he would be tremendous for Veterans if elected president, but his efforts so far have been questionable.

In July 2015, Trump announced that he would be setting up a hotline for Veterans to share their stories about the need to reform the VA.

Today, a call to the hotline leads merely to a voicemail box, which instructs the caller to send them an e-mail.
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By Googling 'donaldtrumpspersonalvietnam' one can find numerous website links regarding this story.

LG Loc: TENNESSEE

This is what a draft dodger looks like and what a person who's not man enough to live up to their word and what they agreed to do, after they were given an alternative way to meet their required military duties at that time. I know their were a hell of a lot young men that were living up to their required military duties at that time would have loved to have had such of a opinion.


While Clinton was a student at Oxford, he was drafted and supposed to be inducted into the army in July 1969, but Arkansas Senator William Fulbright allegedly pressured Colonel Eugene Holmes, the head of the ROTC program at the University of Arkansas, to admit Clinton into the ROTC – which would result in a different draft classification for Clinton and allow him to receive a deferment.  Clinton had promised to leave Oxford and enroll in law school at the University of Arkansas in order to enter the ROTC program and receive a draft deferment since the military required a student to be attending classes full-time before they could be admitted to a University’s ROTC program.  Colonel Holmes supposedly bent to the pressure and admitted Clinton to the ROTC program which resulted in Clinton receiving a deferment that allowed him to avoid induction into the Army.  However, instead of enrolling at the University of Arkansas and joining the ROTC, Clinton returned to England for another year at Oxford.  The temporary ROTC status was enough to keep Clinton out of the Army.
While Clinton has denied that he received any preferential treatment or lied about enrolling at the University of Arkansas and joining the ROTC in order to evade the draft, he also wrote a revealing letter just a few months later to the same Colonel Holmes who headed the ROTC department at the University of Arkansas.   Clinton’s letter to Colonel Holmes, written on December 3, 1969 while Clinton was in England attending Oxford, allows us to better interpret his actions and his thinking at the time (all emphasis in bold letters is mine, not Clinton’s):
Dear Col. Holmes,
I am sorry to be so long in writing.  I know I promised to let you hear from me at least once a month, and from now on you will, but I have had to have some time to think about this first letter.  Almost daily since my return to England I have thought about writing, about what I want to and ought to say.
First, I want to thank you, not just for saving me from the draft, but for being so kind and decent to me last summer, when I was as low as I have ever been.  One thing which made the bond we struck in good faith somewhat palatable to me was my high regard for you personally.  In retrospect, it seems that the admiration might not have been mutual had you known a little more about me, about my political beliefs and activities.  At least you might have thought me more fit for the draft than for ROTC.
Let me try to explain.  As you know, I worked for two years in a very minor position on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.  I did it for the experience and the salary but also for the opportunity, however small, of working every day against a war I opposed and despised with a depth of feeling I had reserved solely for racism in America before Vietnam.  I did not take the matter lightly but studied it carefully, and there was a time when not many people had more information about Vietnam at hand than I did.  I have written and spoken and marched against the war.  One of the national organizers of the Vietnam Moratorium is a close friend of mine.  After I left Arkansas last summer, I went to Washington to work in the national headquarters of the Moratorium, then to England to organize the Americans for the demonstrations Oct. 15 and Nov. 16.
Interlocked with the war is the draft issue, which I did not begin to consider separately until early 1968.  For a law seminar at Georgetown I wrote a paper on the legal arguments for and against allowing, within the Selective Service System, the classification of selective conscientious objection, for those opposed to participation in a particular war, not simply to “participation in war in any form”.
From my work I came to believe that the draft system itself is illegitimate.  No government really rooted in limited, parliamentary democracy should have the power to make its citizens fight and kill and die in a war they may oppose, a war which even possibly may be wrong, a war which, in any case, does not involve immediately the peace and freedom of the nation.
The draft was justified in World War II because the life of the people collectively was at stake.  Individuals had to fight, if the nation was to survive, for the lives of their countrymen and their way of life.  Vietnam is no such case.  Nor was Korea an example where, in my opinion, certain military action was justified but the draft was not, for the reasons stated above.
Because of my opposition to the draft and the war, I am in great sympathy with those who are not willing to fight, kill, and maybe die for their country (i.e. the particular policy of a particular government) right or wrong.  Two of my friends at Oxford are conscientious objectors.  I wrote a letter of recommendation for one of them to his Mississippi draft board, a letter which I am more proud of than anything else I wrote at Oxford last year.  One of my roommates is a draft resister who is possibly under indictment and may never be able to go home again.  He is one of the bravest, best men I know.  That he is considered a criminal is an obscenity.
The decision not to be a resister and the related subsequent decisions were the most difficult of my life.  I decided to accept the draft in spite of my beliefs for one reason: to maintain my political viability within the system.  For years I have worked to prepare myself for a political life characterized by both practical political ability and concern for rapid social progress.  It is a life I still feel compelled to try to lead.  I do not think our system of government is by definition corrupt, however dangerous and inadequate it has been in recent years.  (The society may be corrupt, but that is not the same thing, and if that is true we are all finished anyway.)
When the draft came, despite political convictions, I was having a hard time facing the prospect of fighting a war I had been fighting against, and that is why I contacted you.  ROTC was the one way left in which I could possibly, but not positively, avoid both Vietnam and resistance.  Going on with my education, even coming back to England, played no part in my decision to join ROTC.  I am back here, and would have been at Arkansas Law School because there is nothing else I can do.  In fact, I would like to have been able to take a year out perhaps to teach in a small college or work on some community action project and in the process to decide whether to attend law school or graduate school and how to begin putting what I have learned to use.
But the particulars of my personal life are not nearly as important to me as the principles involved.  After I signed the ROTC letter of intent I began to wonder whether the compromise I had made with myself was not more objectionable than the draft would have been, because I had no interest in the ROTC program in itself and all I seemed to have done was to protect myself from physical harm.  Also, I began to think I had deceived you, not by lies because there were none but by failing to tell you all the things I’m writing now.  I doubt that I had the mental coherence to articulate them then.
At that time, after we had made our agreement and you had sent my 1-D deferment to the draft board, the anguish and loss of my self-regard and self confidence really set in.  I hardly slept for weeks and kept going by eating compulsively and reading until exhaustion brought sleep.  Finally, on Sept. 12 I stayed up all night writing a letter to the chairman of my draft board, saying basically what is in the preceding paragraph, thanking him for trying to help in a case where he really couldn’t, and stating that I couldn’t do the ROTC after all and would he please draft me as soon as possible.
I never mailed the letter, but I did carry it on me every day until I got on the plane to return to England.  I didn’t mail the letter because I didn’t see, in the end, how my going in the army and maybe going to Vietnam would achieve anything except a feeling that I had punished myself and gotten what I deserved.  So I came back to England to try to make something of this second year of my Rhodes scholarship.
And that is where I am now, writing to you because you have been good to me and have a right to know what I think and feel.  I am writing too in the hope that my telling this one story will help you to understand more clearly how so many fine people have come to find themselves still loving their country but loathing the military, to which you and other good men have devoted years, lifetimes, of the best service you could give.  To many of us, it is no longer clear what is service and what is disservice, or if it is clear, the conclusion is likely to be illegal.
Forgive the length of this letter.  There was much to say.  There is still a lot to be said, but it can wait.  Please say hello to Col. Jones for me.
Sincerely,
Bill Clinton

PeterS

Well, we all had to make sacrifices Slate. It couldn't have been easy for Donald to screw so many women when his fellow Americans were dying in his place. Someone had to do it though--all that pussy can't go unsatisfied. He did his small part to uphold the spirits of females as they waited for their men to come home. It wasn't an easy thing to do but each of us had to sacrifice in our own ways...

speed 1

somehow, in his mind, trump thinks that he was in the war. lets draft him and send him to the middle east, I'm sure he could win all by himself. army, class of '70.

slatten49 Loc: Lake Whitney, Texas

I see no comparison between the text of Bill Clinton's letter and the arrogant, condescending attitude exhibited by Donald Trump several decades later in his televised interview...mocking other's service to country by comparing that service to the dangers involved in his getting laid...other than they both illicitly, IMO, dodged the draft, or, maybe 'two wrongs don't make a right.' I find it loathsome that young men I served with died, in essence, to preserve contemporaries' (such as Trump) dangerous, romper-room sex lives.

I remain troubled by envisioning any Veteran, especially those from Viet Nam, voting for this man, especially after his aforementioned comments. But, you see, there is a difference, IMO. Veterans DISTINCTLY earned that citizens' right, and I would not challenge their choice.

BTW, I will gone for much of the weekend to help my son in his move to a new home. I will not respond again, at least, until I return.

Hemiman Loc: Communist California

[quote=LG]This is what a draft dodger looks like and what a person who's not man enough to live up to their word and what they agreed to do, after they were given an alternative way to meet their required military duties at that time. I know their were a hell of a lot young men that were living up to their required military duties at that time would have loved to have had such of a opinion.


While Clinton was a student at Oxford, he was drafted and supposed to be inducted into the army in July 1969, but Arkansas Senator William Fulbright allegedly pressured Colonel Eugene Holmes, the head of the ROTC program at the University of Arkansas, to admit Clinton into the ROTC – which would result in a different draft classification for Clinton and allow him to receive a deferment.  Clinton had promised to leave Oxford and enroll in law school at the University of Arkansas in order to enter the ROTC program and receive a draft deferment since the military required a student to be attending classes full-time before they could be admitted to a University’s ROTC program.  Colonel Holmes supposedly bent to the pressure and admitted Clinton to the ROTC program which resulted in Clinton receiving a deferment that allowed him to avoid induction into the Army.  However, instead of enrolling at the University of Arkansas and joining the ROTC, Clinton returned to England for another year at Oxford.  The temporary ROTC status was enough to keep Clinton out of the Army.
While Clinton has denied that he received any preferential treatment or lied about enrolling at the University of Arkansas and joining the ROTC in order to evade the draft, he also wrote a revealing letter just a few months later to the same Colonel Holmes who headed the ROTC department at the University of Arkansas.   Clinton’s letter to Colonel Holmes, written on December 3, 1969 while Clinton was in England attending Oxford, allows us to better interpret his actions and his thinking at the time (all emphasis in bold letters is mine, not Clinton’s):
Dear Col. Holmes,
I am sorry to be so long in writing.  I know I promised to let you hear from me at least once a month, and from now on you will, but I have had to have some time to think about this first letter.  Almost daily since my return to England I have thought about writing, about what I want to and ought to say.
First, I want to thank you, not just for saving me from the draft, but for being so kind and decent to me last summer, when I was as low as I have ever been.  One thing which made the bond we struck in good faith somewhat palatable to me was my high regard for you personally.  In retrospect, it seems that the admiration might not have been mutual had you known a little more about me, about my political beliefs and activities.  At least you might have thought me more fit for the draft than for ROTC.
Let me try to explain.  As you know, I worked for two years in a very minor position on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.  I did it for the experience and the salary but also for the opportunity, however small, of working every day against a war I opposed and despised with a depth of feeling I had reserved solely for racism in America before Vietnam.  I did not take the matter lightly but studied it carefully, and there was a time when not many people had more information about Vietnam at hand than I did.  I have written and spoken and marched against the war.  One of the national organizers of the Vietnam Moratorium is a close friend of mine.  After I left Arkansas last summer, I went to Washington to work in the national headquarters of the Moratorium, then to England to organize the Americans for the demonstrations Oct. 15 and Nov. 16.
Interlocked with the war is the draft issue, which I did not begin to consider separately until early 1968.  For a law seminar at Georgetown I wrote a paper on the legal arguments for and against allowing, within the Selective Service System, the classification of selective conscientious objection, for those opposed to participation in a particular war, not simply to “participation in war in any form”.
From my work I came to believe that the draft system itself is illegitimate.  No government really rooted in limited, parliamentary democracy should have the power to make its citizens fight and kill and die in a war they may oppose, a war which even possibly may be wrong, a war which, in any case, does not involve immediately the peace and freedom of the nation.
The draft was justified in World War II because the life of the people collectively was at stake.  Individuals had to fight, if the nation was to survive, for the lives of their countrymen and their way of life.  Vietnam is no such case.  Nor was Korea an example where, in my opinion, certain military action was justified but the draft was not, for the reasons stated above.
Because of my opposition to the draft and the war, I am in great sympathy with those who are not willing to fight, kill, and maybe die for their country (i.e. the particular policy of a particular government) right or wrong.  Two of my friends at Oxford are conscientious objectors.  I wrote a letter of recommendation for one of them to his Mississippi draft board, a letter which I am more proud of than anything else I wrote at Oxford last year.  One of my roommates is a draft resister who is possibly under indictment and may never be able to go home again.  He is one of the bravest, best men I know.  That he is considered a criminal is an obscenity.
The decision not to be a resister and the related subsequent decisions were the most difficult of my life.  I decided to accept the draft in spite of my beliefs for one reason: to maintain my political viability within the system.  For years I have worked to prepare myself for a political life characterized by both practical political ability and concern for rapid social progress.  It is a life I still feel compelled to try to lead.  I do not think our system of government is by definition corrupt, however dangerous and inadequate it has been in recent years.  (The society may be corrupt, but that is not the same thing, and if that is true we are all finished anyway.)
When the draft came, despite political convictions, I was having a hard time facing the prospect of fighting a war I had been fighting against, and that is why I contacted you.  ROTC was the one way left in which I could possibly, but not positively, avoid both Vietnam and resistance.  Going on with my education, even coming back to England, played no part in my decision to join ROTC.  I am back here, and would have been at Arkansas Law School because there is nothing else I can do.  In fact, I would like to have been able to take a year out perhaps to teach in a small college or work on some community action project and in the process to decide whether to attend law school or graduate school and how to begin putting what I have learned to use.
But the particulars of my personal life are not nearly as important to me as the principles involved.  After I signed the ROTC letter of intent I began to wonder whether the compromise I had made with myself was not more objectionable than the draft would have been, because I had no interest in the ROTC program in itself and all I seemed to have done was to protect myself from physical harm.  Also, I began to think I had deceived you, not by lies because there were none but by failing to tell you all the things I’m writing now.  I doubt that I had the mental coherence to articulate them then.
At that time, after we had made our agreement and you had sent my 1-D deferment to the draft board, the anguish and loss of my self-regard and self confidence really set in.  I hardly slept for weeks and kept going by eating compulsively and reading until exhaustion brought sleep.  Finally, on Sept. 12 I stayed up all night writing a letter to the chairman of my draft board, saying basically what is in the preceding paragraph, thanking him for trying to help in a case where he really couldn’t, and stating that I couldn’t do the ROTC after all and would he please draft me as soon as possible.
I never mailed the letter, but I did carry it on me every day until I got on the plane to return to England.  I didn’t mail the letter because I didn’t see, in the end, how my going in the army and maybe going to Vietnam would achieve anything except a feeling that I had punished myself and gotten what I deserved.  So I came back to England to try to make something of this second year of my Rhodes scholarship.
And that is where I am now, writing to you because you have been good to me and have a right to know what I think and feel.  I am writing too in the hope that my telling this one story will help you to understand more clearly how so many fine people have come to find themselves still loving their country but loathing the military, to which you and other good men have devoted years, lifetimes, of the best service you could give.  To many of us, it is no longer clear what is service and what is disservice, or if it is clear, the conclusion is likely to be illegal.
Forgive the length of this letter.  There was much to say.  There is still a lot to be said, but it can wait.  Please say hello to Col. Jones for me.
Sincerely,
Bill Clinton[/deleated

Hemiman Loc: Communist California

As long as your sense of honor is appeased that's all that matters,the destructive forces this woman will bring too the White House if elected be damned.

Coos Bay Tom Loc: coos bay oregon

Tell us of the constructive forces that Trump will bring if elected.

vernon

read what ol bill had to say about military service,then look at how the military was treated at the demorat convention.as far as sleeping around just how many young men did the same thing.to me that's just how young studs did thing ,ask ol bill about that.

LG Loc: TENNESSEE

SLATTON
I may be wrong, I don't view what Trump did as being a draft dodger, I see it as he used the system in his favor, by seeking a draft deferment to go to college and he did as the deferment required. And I agree what Trump said is a total disrespect to the men and women who are and those like yourself who have served so that we can live in such a great country. I have a 25 year old son that's in the AIR FORCE now has been for the last 4 years, he went to college for two years and it wasn't giving him what he wanted, he's was/has always been a good student., My grand dad fought in WWII and my dad was drafted in the mid 60's, because I was born in 1966 and he was still in, he never was sent over to Vietnam and served his required time.
But I see what Bill Clinton did was an act of a draft dodger, because he also requested a draft deferment, which he was granted with the requirements of attending Law School at Arkansas and join the ROTC, which he agreed too. But instead he runs off back to England, and proves his word is not worth SHIT and he will and would lie his way around things, but he's given us many of those examples since then.

Hemiman Loc: Communist California

I don't know what he will do,no one does.It's enough to know what she will do.

USMC 70

2 amendment is that good enough for you.

vettelover Loc: Richmond Va

Yes, good point. Same could be said of Bill Clinton as well. By not mentioning Clinton's escape from the draft makes your argument meaningless. I am sure Bill was hitting a lot of ass as well.

reconreb Loc: America / Inglis Fla.

tell you what slatton , many served and many serve today who do not agree with your position , thank god and good luck,, our choice is Trump over Clinton , have a good time with your vacation and thank the good lord for your right to oppose freedom !

slatten49 Loc: Lake Whitney, Texas

You might want to read subsequent posts by me in response to other's bringing up Clinton's draft-dodging. I did not disagree, but pointed out it was The Donald's comments, decades later, of the equal dangers in his dating...as compared to those faced by combat Veterans of the Viet Nam War that most upset me. In his twisted, narcissistic mind, he saw/sees himself as a "brave soldier." He was and remains a coward disguised as a bully. I doubt seriously if he could defend himself against a 13-yr. street punk. IMO, his false facade is as weak and pathetic as he is.