One of Sen. Lindsey Graham's big qualifications for president, in his own mind if not in the popular imagination, is "his 33 years of military service," as his campaign website puts it. Graham spent most of that time in the Air Force Reserve, retiring as a colonel. It all sounds very impressive, but a new
Washington Post investigation suggests his rank was
less about what Graham did in the Air Force Reserve than what he could do
for the Air Force while in Congress.
According to his personnel file, between January 1995 and January 2005 he received credit for a total of 108 hours of training — the equivalent of less than a day and a half per year.
During that span, however, the Air Force kept awarding him promotions. In 1998, he attained the rank of lieutenant colonel in the Judge Advocate General’s Corps. Six years later, he was promoted to colonel by President George W. Bush.
Clearly those promotions were all about his personal merit and committed service.
From 2006 until the start of this year, Graham’s official biographies stated that he worked as a senior instructor at the Judge Advocate General’s School at Maxwell Air Force Base in Montgomery, Ala., the training hub for the service’s legal corps. That description has been cited in virtually all news coverage of Graham’s military career.
In fact, Air Force officials said they had no record of Graham teaching any courses on behalf of the school or even visiting it during that period.
Graham admitted to the
Post that he hadn't done anything for the school because he instead persuaded the Air Force to allow him to do "deployments" of as much as two whole weeks in Iraq and Afghanistan. So why did he keep the school he wasn't teaching at in his biography? He claims that:
... he kept the inaccurate job description in his biographies because he didn’t want to draw attention to his war-zone missions. Although many of his trips to Afghanistan and Iraq were documented by the news media and publicized by the Defense Department, Graham said he tried to minimize coverage for fear that the Pentagon would view his desire to serve there as a political stunt.
I'm sorry, is Lindsey Graham trying to tap out the world supply of side-eye? That he wanted to avoid attention for his trips to war zones is a solid entry in the "most ridiculous thing said by a Republican presidential candidate this cycle" competition, and in case you're forgetting, that's a competition for which everything Donald Trump has said is eligible. It's especially ludicrous in light of Graham's campaign website, which returns to his military service roughly every other sentence.