A former soldier who went AWOL during the Vietnam War era is among 17 individuals granted pardons recently by President Bush, the Justice Department announced yesterday.All of the grants of clemency went to people who had completed their sentences, which were imposed for drug trafficking, fraud, unlicensed alcohol production, and other crimes Since taking office, Mr. Bush has granted 97 pardons and two commutations, according to the Justice Department.

“He’s still on the road to becoming the stingiest pardoner in history,” a lawyer who oversaw clemency matters for the department between 1990 and 1997, Margaret Love, said yesterday.

Three of the most recent pardons went to people convicted in the military justice system. In 1968, an Army court-martial found William Frye of Indianapolis guilty of two counts of absence without leave and one charge of escape from confinement. He was sentenced to a year of hard labor and a bad-conduct discharge.

Efforts to contact Mr. Frye for this article were unsuccessful.

In 1977, President Carter granted amnesty to hundreds of thousands of young men who evaded the Vietnam War draft by failing to register or by leaving the country. However, the program did not cover military personnel who fled.

Mr. Bush’s political opponents have asserted that he was AWOL for six months or more in 1972 while in the Air National Guard. He was never charged with a crime and has insisted that he fulfilled the military’s requirements. Another recipient of a pardon from Mr. Bush was an occupational therapist from Medina, Ohio, Victoria Frost.

“It was a very big surprise,” Ms. Frost said, adding that her application was filed at least four years ago. “I just thought I got lost in the shuffle.”

Ms. Frost was convicted in 1994 on a charge of conspiring to distribute a drug used to manufacture methamphetamine. Like many female drug offenders, the Ohio woman said she was pulled into the scheme by an ex-boyfriend. “I was young and stupid,” she said.

Ms. Frost, who uses horses to provide therapy for handicapped children, said her conviction was causing problems getting credentials. “You have to deal with this,” she said.

A church pastor who received a pardon this week, Reverend Robert Eversole of Summerville, Ga., said his conviction for an insurance scam in 1984 limited his ability to minister to the faithful. “I’ve tried to do a little chaplain work at the prison, and I couldn’t because of this,” he said. Rev. Eversole said his error of judgment, which involved a staged theft of a decrepit tractor trailer engine, precluded one of his favorite pastimes.”I love to hunt, and I haven’t done it,” he said. “I will be out hunting this fall.”

Ms. Love said Mr. Bush’s reluctance to grant pardons was at odds with his bold view of presidential power. “The one place where he really has it, where could do anything he wants, where there is no check, he completely trivializes it,” she said.

President Clinton granted 396 pardons and 61 commutations, most of them during the last two of his eight years in office. In his four-year term, President George H.W. Bush granted 74 pardons and three commutations.