Vets Sound Off Over Quayle

Down at the waterfront building its members laughingly call the “only American Legion post with a marina,” 68-year-old Ray Gannett said Thursday that 41-year-old Dan Quayle is “too damned young to be President.”

An Air Force combat veteran of World War II and the Korean War, Gannett sneered at the Indiana senator who was picked by George Bush as the Republi can candidate for vice president; Quayle served in the National Guard during the Vietnam War and did not see combat.

“He’s a rich kid who lucked out,” Gannett said as he sipped a beer and munched a sandwich in the bar of the Newport Beach Legion post.

Out front, in the office of Legion Post 291, former Air Force medic Sally Chapman was less judgmental. “He did what he thought was right,” said Chapman, who served during the Korean War but never made it to Korea “even though I begged to go over.”

Random discussions Thursday of American Legion and Veterans of Foreign Wars members in Orange County--which the Republicans expect to carry by 200,000 votes or more in November and which has a national reputation for conservatism--turned up opinions about Quayle as divergent as those about the war 20 years ago.

Bush’s selection last week of Quayle as his running mate generated immediate controversy. Known as a conservative, hawkish senator, Quayle’s service in the National Guard during the Vietnam War spared him from combat that killed tens of thousands of Americans overseas and polarized Americans at home.

Born into a family of wealth and influence, Quayle said he did nothing wrong and pulled no strings to enlist in the Guard. Although units in many states often had no vacancies during the Vietnam War, one man who was a Guard officer at the time said last week that there were vacancies before, while and after Quayle enlisted.

However, a retired major general of the Guard, who was an employee of the newspaper owned by Quayle’s family, said that he called a Guard member to recommend that Quayle be accepted.

The senator “could have been activated as well as anyone else,” said Paul Allen, a volunteer bartender at American Legion Post 131 in Santa Ana.

Allen, who was discharged from the Army in 1969 without being shipped overseas after he contracted a lung disease, said, “You have no choice if your unit gets activated or not.”

Despite the widespread perceptions of 1969 that connections were needed to get into the National Guard and that it was a haven for men seeking to avoid combat, Allen said that Guard veterans were “better than most of them that ran off to Canada. It’s more honorable to be in the service. (Quayle) served his time. He didn’t run off to Canada, did he? He didn’t desert? I think the whole doggone play-up is they’re trying to find something wrong with somebody and they’re not finding it.”

Irene Porter is also a strong supporter of Quayle. In fact, she said she would put a sign on her lawn urging one and all to vote for Bush and Quayle.

Porter, commander of VFW post 6475 in Garden Grove, said one of her sons served in the Coast Guard, another in the Navy, a third in the Air Force and the fourth as an Army Green Beret, coming home from Vietnam “with a bum leg.”

Now 66, Porter herself served in the Army in New Guinea during World War II and her late husband was a retired Army master sergeant. “All my children were born in a military hospital. I’m GI, strictly GI.”

Porter said that Quayle “didn’t do anything wrong. He was a 21-year-old boy and he didn’t run away to Canada. He stayed and he went into the National Guard.” And Porter recalled the turmoil of the Vietnam years, saying that while working at the draft board in Santa Ana, she “had to have a policeman staying at my shoulder” to guard against violent protests against the war.

Standing beside Porter in the building on Dale Street, Bob Taft agreed.

“I was in the National Guard years ago, after I got out of” the Navy, Taft said. “And the training I went through with them, the constant training, I don’t think (Quayle) got away with anything.”

A veteran of the Korean War, Taft said his son died at age 32 of leukemia that Taft and his wife believe was contracted through exposure to Agent Orange, the chemical defoliant sprayed across Vietnam to deprive Communist forces of cover.

“I think this Quayle could have been over there just as well with (my son),” Taft said, because Guard troops can been be put on active duty and shipped overseas “for any reason.”