Bush: The missing years

According to August's GQ, Bush was part of a super-secret and clandestine military unit: the Special Undercover Missions Service (SUMS).

Here are a few newly discovered acts of espionage by elite agent Bush in the interest of national security while supposedly attending National Guard drills in Alabama:

It's hard to pinpoint exactly when Bush's service with SUMS began. Almost all the offcial documentation on the agency remains classified by the Department of Defense, and SUMS personnel are required to sign lifelong confidentiality agreements. But Bush is believed to have completed his SUMS training in March 1972, not long before he disappeared from Guard duty in Texas.

Several sources with knowledge of SUMS's operations during that period say Bush was immediately dispatched on a string of low-level training missions to build up his experience in the field. First was Russia, where Bush worked with CIA operatives to break up a gunrunning operation orchestrated by disgruntled Soviet troops. From there he moved to India, where he helped train a mounted brigade assembled to kidnap the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi (a mission that would fail due to an untimely monsoon). Next for Bush was New Zealand, where he assisted officials with helicopter surveillance of sheep poachers, and then Monaco, where he taught the crown prince's bodyguards how to fire assault rifles while waterskiing in tuxedos. He then returned to the United States for several weeks in the spring.

This led to more important duties in fighting the culture wars.

Bush was assigned to the Stones' 1972 North American tour. He was asked to infiltrate the band's inner circle and report on any illegal or possibly un-American activities.

This time Bush chose to take on the identity of a roadie named Bo Bannister, an itinerant concert-business employee. Though cleaner-cut than most of the Stones' crew, Bannister enthralled his fellow roadies with tales of life on the road with acts that included Chuck Berry and Mel Tormé. Soon, he was given a position of great honor at the Stones' shows: inflating an enormous, forty-five-foot pink plastic penis at the beginning of "Honky Tonk Women."

After tackling the Stones and then Andy Warhol, brave Bush was sent on more dangereous missions.

Meanwhile, Henry Kissinger was concerned that Bush was spending too much time in the domestic culture war. In late 1972, he ordered Bush to the White House's most urgent battleground: Vietnam.

Aware of Bush's history as a college prankster, Kissinger wanted Bush to travel to that country with the specific mission of disrupting Vietcong activities using fraternity-style gags. Guns and mortars hadn't worked. Kissinger theorized that perhaps the best way to defeat the Vietcong was to humiliate them.

Bush's mission was code-named Operation Goldfish Swallow. He received clearance from the White House to bring along a former college chum, Pinky Buhrman, who had nearly been kicked out of Yale for painting the flags of the fifty U.S. states on the penises of all the statues in the New Haven school's art museum. Pinky was the best, Bush thought—and the country needed the best.

Operation Goldfish Swallow commenced on Christmas Eve, 1972. Over a series of weeks, Pinky and Bush engaged the enemy numerous times. They TP'd enemy installations in Haiphong and Hanoi. They sneaked into VC barracks and short-sheeted beds. They made repeated phony phone calls to enemy leaders in the field.

There is much more to be learned from this dossier and justice cannot be done here, in such a brief time, to all the un-thanked service that formed Bush as a young man.