http://www.macon.com/mld/macon/15094538.htm Cheney re-enlists wounded soldier at rally for troopsFORT STEWART, Ga. - During a rally for more than 8,000 Georgia troops, Vice President Dick Cheney administered the re-enlistment oath Friday to a 24-year-old Army gunner determined to remain in the ranks after losing his left leg last year to a bomb blast in Iraq.
Flanked by risers crowded with his fellow 3rd Infantry Division troops, Cpl. Jerrod Fields of Chicago raised his right hand before Cheney and pledged to serve another four years. The Army approved Fields to remain in his cavalry unit after he passed his physical fitness test with flying colors, including running 2 miles in 14 minutes, 9 seconds with a prosthetic leg.
"I wasn't going to let the bad guys, the enemy, affect a decision I'd already made," said Fields, who was wounded by a roadside bomb while driving a Bradley armored vehicle near Rustamayah, Iraq, in February 2005.
Fields opted to have his leg amputated below the knee to improve his chances of returning to active duty. He said Cheney offered words of personal praise offstage.
"He just told me job well done," Fields said. "He was happy that I decided to stay in and said just to keep pushing."
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/01/politics/campaign/01C... Cheney's Five Draft Deferments During the Vietnam Era Emerge as a Campaign IssueWASHINGTON, April 30 — It was 1959 when Dick Cheney, then a student at Yale University, turned 18 and became eligible for the draft.
Eventually, like 16 million other young men of that era, Mr. Cheney sought deferments. By the time he turned 26 in January 1967 and was no longer eligible for the draft, he had asked for and received five deferments, four because he was a student and one for being a new father.
Although President Richard M. Nixon stopped the draft in 1973 and the war itself ended 29 years ago on Friday, the issue of service remains a personally sensitive and politically potent touchstone in the biographies of many politicians from that era.
For much of Mr. Cheney's political career, his deferments have largely been a nonissue.
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