Donald Trump was reportedly mocked by his former schoolmates as “Cadet Bonespurs” because a medical deferment allowed him to avoid the Vietnam-era draft.
That’s according to Art Davie, who once shared a room with Trump at the New York Military Academy when they were teenagers in the early 1960s.
The boys went their separate ways, and Davie eventually enlisted in the Marines and fought in Vietnam. However, he told The Daily Beast he still remembered the future president, recalling him already bristling with a sense that he should be a star.
“He was an egomaniac when he was 16,” Davie told the outlet. “He was a great flag waver for himself. He wanted everyone to recognize he was the GOAT in everything he did out there.”
The Independent has contacted the White House for comment.
open image in galleryTrump, meanwhile, received four educational deferments and then a medical deferment for bone spurs.
The daughters of the podiatrist who gave the diagnosis claimed he did so as a favor to Trump’s father, Fred Trump, who owned the building in Queens where the doctor practiced.
They told The New York Times in 2018 that it was unclear if the doctor ever even examined the younger Trump.
Over the years, Trump has been criticized over his lack of military service at times, including during his frequent attacks on the late Vietnam War hero and U.S. senator John McCain, as well as after the Trump Organization released a line of military-inspired clothing.
The president has been talking about Vietnam again recently, however, in the context of the U.S. war with Iran.
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open image in galleryIn an April interview with CNBC, Trump claimed he “would have won Vietnam very quickly” and has argued the Iran conflict is a brief and lower-cost war by comparison.
“I just looked at a little chart: World War I, four years and three months. World War II, six years. Korean War, three years. Vietnam, 19 years. Iraq, eight years,” Trump said at the time.
A peace deal to fully end the Iran war has eluded Trump so far, just as the Vietnam war dragged on for years in what was often called a strategically pointless “quagmire.”
This week, despite an ostensible ceasefire and pronouncements a deal was close at hand, the president vowed to attack Iran “very hard” after the crash of a U.S. Apache helicopter near the Strait of Hormuz that the U.S. blamed on Tehran.