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[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally posted by bilmore
(Sigh.) Okay. One more.

From the ANG website:

"Although the Air National Guard was not established as a separate component of the U.S. Air Force until 1947, National Guard aviators have played significant roles in all of America's wars and most of its major contingencies since the beginning of the 20th Century."

If you look at the org charts, it's considered a part of the Air Force. Always has been. (Well, since 1947.)

As to the Green Beret example, you're trying to go the wrong way on the charts. I'm in one particular unit of my company. I'm also in the company. But that doesn't mean I'm in another particular unit of my company.

If all of that's true, it wouldn't explain why Bush claimed that he served in the Air Force and the National Guard:

• The Air Force claim arose in 1978, when Bush ran unsuccessfully for the House of Representatives from west Texas. During the campaign he produced literature in which he said he had served in the Air Force as well as the Texas Air National Guard. Pressed by the Associated Press about the claim two decades later in 1999, Bush's spokeswoman, handler and biographer, Karen Hughes, insisted the assertion was accurate. Her explanation: As part of his 1968 training to become a Guard pilot, Bush served 120 days of active duty; therefore he served in the Air Force.
  
  * * * * *
  
  The signed document Drudge posted is titled "Statement of Understanding" and dated May 27, 1968, the day Bush joined the Guard. Among the stipulations Bush agreed to was entering "active duty for training for 120 days," bolstering Bush's later assertion about the Air Force. But a Pentagon spokesperson told the A.P. in 1999 that despite their four-month training, Air National Guard members are not counted as members of the active-duty Air Force.
  
  Bush's 1978 assertion that he served in the Air Force is "an embellishment, but not a lie," one former Air Force pilot says. Yet the story soon disappeared from Bush's official biography -- perhaps the best indication of his camp's recognition that the Air Force claim stretched credulity.

Salon

Like I said, puffery.