enator Bob Kerrey, a Nebraska Democrat who won the Medal of Honor for his service in Vietnam, expressed disgust yesterday at evidence that George W. Bush sidestepped National Guard duty for months in 1972 and 1973, a lapse that Kerrey said amounts to Bush being AWOL - absent without leave.
''It upsets me,'' Kerrey said in an interview, ''when someone says, `Vote for me, I was in the military,' when in fact he got into the military in order to avoid serving in the military, to avoid service that might have taken him into the war. And then he didn't even show up for duty.''
Bush, Kerrey said in an interview, ''needs to explain where he was when he was supposed to be fulfilling his military obligation. If he is elected president, how will he be able to deal as commander in chief with someone who goes AWOL, when he did the same thing?''
Dan Bartlett, Bush's spokesman on the issue, said Kerrey's remarks were ''an outlandish claim to make in the closing stages of a campaign.'' Bartlett noted that Bush received an honorable discharge and said Bush fulfilled his obligation.
Kerrey was reacting to a Globe article, published yesterday, that cited evidence that Bush, as a Texas Air National Guard pilot in 1972, stopped flying after 22 months with his unit. Then, during a six-month stay in Alabama, Bush failed to report for required Guard drills. And six months after he returned to his home in Houston, his superior officers wrote that they had not seen him at his Houston air base for the previous year. Shortly after that, Bush was given an early discharge.
Neither Gore nor officials in his campaign would comment publicly on the issue, because, Kerrey said, they are fearful that the Bush campaign will respond by pointing to President Clinton's active avoidance of the draft - as a Bush spokesman did last week when the Globe asked questions about Bush's service.
Kerrey, who is not seeking reelection, said he called the Globe of his own volition, and in expressing his anger at Bush's service record referred twice to Clinton as a ''draft dodger.''
But, referring to Bush's attacks on Gore's character, Kerrey said the Texas governor has a moral obligation of his own to search his conscience and answer questions about where he was when he was supposed to be attending National Guard training.
''For someone who wants to be commander in chief, this stinks,'' Kerrey declared. ''I can understand if he forgot a weekend. But 18 months?''
Since the Globe first reported on the absences in May, Bush has declined to be interviewed on the issue. Bartlett has said Bush did appear for drills in Alabama. But there are no records that he did, and the commander of the Alabama unit which Bush was assigned to in 1972 has said that Lieutenant Bush never showed.
In both Alabama and Texas, Vietnam veterans and Gore partisans have recently offered reward money for any Guardsman from that period who can verify that Bush appeared for duty between mid-1972 and mid-1973.
Kerrey, who won the nation's highest award for heroism as a Navy SEAL in a 1969 action that cost him part of his right leg, said he is amazed that Bush's military service has escaped any real scrutiny. ''George W. Bush got into the Guard because of his father, and he got out because of who he was,'' Kerrey said.
