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Gets to decide which orders to obey

White House spokesmen said there was no point in Bush taking his required pilot's physical in 1972 because he had already decided to move to Alabama, where there were no F-102 planes. To fly another plane, he would have had to undergo extensive retraining.

Doesn't

Mejia, a 28-year-old Iraq war veteran, was convicted in a Fort Stewart military court of desertion on May 21 after refusing to return to his Florida National Guard unit after a two-week leave in October.

He was sentenced to a year in a military prison, received a dishonorable discharge and was reduced in rank from a staff sergeant to a private.

In his conscientious objector application, Mejia claims he saw Iraqi prisoners treated cruelly while he was overseeing the processing of detainees at al-Assad, an Iraqi air base occupied by U.S. forces.