Stolen Valor Walz

Since 2018, there has been a large-scale controversy surrounding Tim Walz: his stolen valor.

Stolen valor has a long history in American politics, where people who run for high office exaggerate their military service. Many of the comrades whom they shivved become angry about it.

For example, John Kerry in 2004.

He exaggerated his heroism in Vietnam, which came back to haunt him. That was only after he had made his bones by returning from Vietnam and slandering his fellow soldiers as torturers and sickos who taped electrodes to genitals and tortured the Vietnamese people, among other such claims. He made his name doing that.

Then, he came around making statements such as, “I liked serving in Vietnam with all my brothers.”

And all the Vietnam vets reacted: “This jackass? This one?”

Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) was also involved in a stolen valor controversy. He was a Democrat from Connecticut running for the Senate who said that he served in Vietnam.

He didn’t.

The long history of stolen valor continues. It turns out that Tim Walz is also a stolen valor guy, by all available evidence. He served in the National Guard for 24 years. But two separate claims about Walz also exist. One claim is that the minute he found out he was going to be deployed to Iraq, he quit. The minute that those rumors even began, he quit and then ran for Congress. So, a timeline is called into question.

And then, he apparently claimed for years and years that he’d been deployed to war zones, though he never was. Now, there’s nothing wrong with being in the military and not being deployed to a war zone. Plenty of members of the military were never deployed to a war zone, and we thank them for their heroic service.

There is a problem when you lie about it.

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In a 2007 interview that aired on C-Span, Walz stretched some definitions to imply very strongly that he was in a war zone:

I spent 24 years in the National Guard, some of that full-time; I was an artilleryman. I deployed in support of Operation Enduring Freedom. My battalion provided base security throughout the European theater from Turkey to England in the early stages of the war in Afghanistan. And that same battalion is now in Iraq at this time.

He was talking about how his battalion ended up in Iraq. He was not in Iraq. He was talking about how he provided support for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, stretching some definitions at the very least. Somehow, almost every article from 2007 to 2018 about him included the lie he was actually in Afghanistan or Iraq. There are many, many of these. He actually endorsed a book that claimed he was in Afghanistan.

And a lot of veterans are very, very angry about all of this.

And then there’s the question of the timeline because the claim from many of the members of his old battalion is that he quit on them the minute he found out they were going to Iraq. In 2018 after Walz first ran for governor, retired Command Sergeant Majors Thomas Behrends and Paul Herr wrote and posted a letter on Facebook:

On August 5th, 2004 he was photographed holding a sign at a protest outside a President Bush campaign rally in southern Minnesota.

On September 17th, 2004 he was conditionally promoted to Command Sergeant Major. The conditions had been outlined to him when he was counseled and he signed the Statement of Agreement and Certification. If the conditions are not met, the promotion is null and void, like it never happened.

In early 2005, a warning order was issued to the 1-125th Field Artillery Battalion, which included the position he was serving in, to prepare to be mobilized for active duty for a deployment to Iraq. Between the time the warning order was given and his “retirement”, he told the Brigade Command Sergeant Major not to worry, that he would be going on the mission. It appears that was a lie.

On May 16, 2005 he quit, betraying his country, leaving the 1-125th Field Artillery Battalion and its Soldiers hanging; without its senior Non-Commissioned Officer, as the battalion prepared for war. His excuse to other leaders was that he needed to retire in order to run for congress. Which is false, according to a Department of Defense Directive, he could have run and requested permission from the Secretary of Defense before entering active duty; as many reservists have. If he had retired normally and respectfully, you would think he would have ensured his retirement documents were correctly filled out and signed, and that he would have ensured he was reduced to Master Sergeant for dropping out of the academy. Instead he slithered out the door and waited for the paperwork …

They added:

On September 10th, 2005 conditionally promoted Command Sergeant Major Walz was reduced to Master Sergeant. It took a while for the system to catch up to him as it was uncharted territory, literally no one quits in the position he was in, or drops out of the academy. Except him.

In November of 2005, while the battalion trained for war at Camp Shelby, Mississippi, it received an offer from retired Master Sergeant Walz. He offered to fund raise for the battalion’s bus trip home over Christmas that year. The same Soldiers he had abandoned just months before, trying to buy their votes.

On November 1st, 2006, Tom Hagen, Iraq War Veteran, wrote a letter to the editor of the Winona Daily News about Walz, saying:

But even more disturbing is the fact that Walz quickly retired after learning that his unit — southern Minnesota’s 1-125 FA Battalion — would be sent to Iraq. For Tim Walz to abandon his fellow soldiers and quit when they needed experienced leadership most is disheartening. It dishonors those brave Americans in his place.

This is a major scandal for Walz because when you exaggerate your military career, other veterans get angry.

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