http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A60557-2004Sep29?language=printerAlthough both President Bush and Sen. John F. Kerry have repeatedly said they have made public their complete military service records, neither presidential candidate has yet permitted independent access to original files held in a high-security vault.
The lack of outside verification of the military personnel records of the candidates has made it more difficult for journalists and historians to evaluate their Vietnam War-era service, which has been the subject of lively election-year debate. In Bush's case, Texas Air National Guard officials have also delayed or prevented public access to 30-year-old unit records that could shed light on whether he received favorable treatment from the Guard because of his father's political connections, as his Democratic opponents have alleged.
More than seven months after the White House announced that Bush's records had been "fully released," files continue to trickle out almost weekly from the Pentagon and elsewhere. Some of the newly released records contradict earlier claims by the Bush camp, such as his assertion in a 1999 campaign autobiography that he gave up flying "because the F-102 jet I had trained in was being replaced by a different fighter."
In the past few weeks, both candidates have been forced to deal with questions about what they were doing in the Vietnam War even as they honed their debating points about Iraq and the war on terrorism.
Assembling a full Vietnam War-era record for the two men is complicated by the fact that the files are scattered around more than a dozen repositories. In addition to master personnel files on each candidate, which are at the National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis, researchers have been looking for the records of the units in which they served. Typically, unclassified unit records are available to the public under much less restrictive conditions than individual files.