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Letter: What was behind Cheney’s deferments?

Monday, March 6, 2006 | 7:32 a.m.

A short while ago I had a letter to the editor published. It spoke of a suggestion that our president might rate a white feather for cowardice if his hiding in the Texas Air National Guard during the Vietnam War was done to avoid facing the enemy over Hanoi. Now I read in a recent issue of Time magazine where the vice president requested and was granted five deferments from military service during the Vietnam War. His reasoning was that he had "other priorities."

How ironic that the two most senior men in our government, and the most determined of hawks regarding the Iraq War, were able to avoid military conflict when they were of fighting age and, now that neither has to risk his own skin in battle, has no reluctance in sending the flower of our country's youth to die by the thousands in a war of their own making.

Could one of the "other priorities" have been a desire to avoid qualifying for a second white feather?

Fil Cornell, Las Vegas

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