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John Bolton, WimpA Vietnam hawk who remained stateside.

By Timothy NoahPosted Friday, April 29, 2005, at 9:01 PM ET

Scratch a saber-rattler, find a war wimp. You can just about set your watch by it, can't you? So it's entirely unsurprising to read the following about John Bolton, Yale '70, in the Yale Daily News:

Though Bolton supported the Vietnam War, he declined to enter combat duty, instead enlisting in the National Guard and attending law school after his 1970 graduation. "I confess I had no desire to die in a Southeast Asian rice paddy," Bolton wrote of his decision in the 25th reunion book. "I considered the war in Vietnam already lost."

President Bush's nominee for ambassador to the United Nations obviously never got the memo explaining that service in the National Guard during the Vietnam war requires no justification or apology—that's sooo Dan Quayle!—and that to suggest the National Guard was anything other than a major contributor to the fighting forces in Vietnam is a grievous insult to the National Guardsmen who really are a major contributor to the fighting forces in Iraq. Never mind that the overall mortality rate for National Guardsmen during the Vietnam War was lower than the mortality rate for rock-throwing antiwar protesters and bystanders in the Prentice Hall parking lot at Kent State on May 4, 1970. It's a little bit rude to put it that way, but I'm told the future U.N. ambassador admires bluntness.

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Timothy Noah is a senior writer at Slate.
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