A leader of little green plastic men

What with all his disparaging the parents of an Iraq war hero and his own lengthy record of sacrifices for the good of his country -- like getting rich and having to trade up for newer, younger wives when his old ones bored him -- Donald Trump's own record as a war hero is receiving renewed attention, because who doesn't enjoy pointing and laughing at a big lying hypocrite? The New York Times takes us on a walk down memory lane -- a walk hindered by bone spurs on Donald Trump's heels, which got him a draft deferment in 1968 when lots and lots of American boys were getting sent off to the fields of martial glory in Vietnam:

Back in 1968, at the age of 22, Donald J. Trump seemed the picture of health. He stood 6 feet 2 inches with an athletic build; had played football, tennis and squash; and was taking up golf. His medical history was unblemished, aside from a routine appendectomy when he was 10. But after he graduated from college in the spring of 1968, making him eligible to be drafted and sent to Vietnam, he received a diagnosis that would change his path: bone spurs in his heels. The diagnosis resulted in a coveted 1-Y medical deferment that fall, exempting him from military service as the United States was undertaking huge troop deployments to Southeast Asia, inducting about 300,000 men into the military that year.

What a lucky ducky he was, to suddenly develop a debilitating condition that kept him out of combat but didn't interfere with golfing and other sports! As with any journalism about Donald Trump's past, the Times story catches him in a number of very fanciful reconstructions of several events in his life. Or as the Grey Lady puts it in that delicate way when Trump is being a big lying liar yet again,

Mr. Trump’s public statements about his draft experience sometimes conflict with his Selective Service records, and he is often hazy in recalling details.

On those bone spurs, for example, Trump told the Times last month that the condition had been "temporary" and had no real impact on him, and darned if he could remember the name of the doctor who wrote the letter for him. Oh, but it was a really serious malady, too, at least for documentation purposes:

“I had a doctor that gave me a letter — a very strong letter on the heels,” Mr. Trump said in the interview. Asked to provide The Times with a copy of the letter, which he had obtained after his fourth student deferment, Mr. Trump said he would have to look for it. A spokeswoman later did not respond to repeated requests for copies of it.

Also, the records from the time don't specify the condition that won Trump an exemption, although the Times carefully notes many Selective Service records have been discarded. Trump has said before that he suffered -- a little, at least -- from heel spurs, but also was a bit vague on how he got all better:

Mr. Trump said that he could not recall exactly when he was no longer bothered by the spurs, but that he had not had an operation for the problem. “Over a period of time, it healed up,” he said.

Trump also explained that the heel spurs were “not a big problem, but it was enough of a problem." To his credit, he somehow managed not to wink and add, "If you know what I mean, heh-heh." Still, it's absolutely clear he'd been in no condition to be slogging through the boonies and thinking about the Things He Carried:

“They were spurs,” he said. “You know, it was difficult from the long-term walking standpoint.”

Yeah, that's the ticket. Somehow, the bone spurs weren't even a significant enough part of his medical history to even make it into that fabulous medical report written up by his personal physician, who proclaimed Trump would be "the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency,” although Dr. Spaceman Bornstein did remember to include Trump's childhood appendectomy.

So that's the medical deferment, and it was totally legit, please shut up, even though Trump couldn't remember which heel it was. Besides, the campaign later issued a statement saying it was both feet, so there.

Beyond that, Trump appears to have embellished a little about remembering his yoooge relief when he got a "phenomenal" draft lottery number, seeing as how the draft lottery, which began in 1969, would have been irrelevant since he already had the medical deferment. Oh, and the man with the greatest memory in the world also completely made up a story in 2011 about having watched the draft lottery on TV in college:

“I’ll never forget; that was an amazing period of time in my life,” he said in the interview, on Fox 5 New York. “I was going to the Wharton School of Finance, and I was watching as they did the draft numbers, and I got a very, very high number.” But Mr. Trump had graduated from Wharton 18 months before the lottery -- the first in the United States in 27 years -- was held.

In the pantheon of Trump Lies, that little fabrication hardly even merits mention. The important thing to remember is that Donald Trump had already completed his military service anyway, since, as he told a biographer, having gone to a military academy for high school made him feel like he'd been in the military anyway, and going to that school gave him "more training militarily than a lot of the guys that go into the military." Plus, the Times informs us, he was sort of against the Vietnam war anyway, at least as he recalls it now:

Although he “hated the concept of the war,” he said, he did not speak out against it. “I was never a fan of the Vietnam War,” he said. “But I was never at the protest level, either, because I had other things to do.”

Busy man. Very busy man, keeping the blacks out of his father's apartment blocks. But he had his own battles to fight, too, like the time he told Howard Stern about how venereal diseases were out there everywhere, waging guerrilla war against Donald Trump's penis. Like Charlie, every minute herpes squatted in the bush, getting stronger:

I’ve been so lucky in terms of that whole world. It is a dangerous world out there — it’s scary, like Vietnam. Sort of like the Vietnam era. It is my personal Vietnam. I feel like a great and very brave solider[.]

Trump has seen some shit, man. The horror. The horror.

[NYT / Buzzfeed]