Sorry, Teribus, I served in the Regular Army and then in the Regular Air Force and was one of the folks that traveled around Guard and Reserve bases training their people on new-to-them aircraft or electronics systems. Initially I took a dim view of both of these fine organizations, but when I discovered that a Guard unit, flying nearly obsolete cargo aircraft, were performing weekly flights to Viet Nam, and often logging more time-in-the-air than local Regular units - having an old, slow aircraft helped there.

This having been said, I still found the Guard and Reserves filled with folks who counted their lucky stars that they were serving in the US as opposed to foreign shores, or had pulled strings to get this billit. The ones that got so slack that they started missing drills or skiving off during drills were frequently threatened with mandatory activation for a year, during which time they might get sent to Nam, and sometimes they were actually activated and did go overseas, which tweaked their attitudes nicely.

Serving with our forces and often beside your forces showed me lots of people who were working like slaves to perform the mission of their units. Sometimes they failed, but they always give it their all, and their units shone for their efforts.

Over the years I served in bomber, cargo and fighter wings so I have a fairly good idea of how AF and Army pilots are trained, and as someone already said, for the most part, individuals are usually not retrained into another type of aircraft uless the whole unit is retrained to change their mission, modernize their force, or occasionally allow an individual to transfer to a unit that is physically nearer to him or her work or abode.

If memory serves, Bush flew for an interceptor squadron located in Texas, and while his initial flight training was tough, I doubt he flew many bad weather missions; Texas rarely has fog, and only the occasional tornado, during which all aircraft are either tied down securely, of flown to another airfield out of the region of the bad weather. This in no way compares with serving in SE England, where fog and rain are a constant companion tha you either learn how to coexist with or die tryhing. It is also a far cry from serving in South East Asia with its monsoons, typhoons, and generally terrible weather, with others actually trying to shoot you out of the sky. By the time Bush was in the Guard most of our fighter air work in SEA was over, as we were trying to Vietnamese the air war. We did have many long range bomber missions from Guam and Thailand, done by large slow B-52s, flying hundreds of miles for a brief terrifying period over Hanoi or another area in North Viet Nam where even the civilians were shooting antique weapons at you.

I doubt that Bush would have been retrained into Buffs, since he hadn't enough time in his enlistment to upgrade and then serve a tour in StrategiC Air Command. But I still don't think he fulfilled his obligation to serve in his aborted Guard tour.

Dave