Veterans of the Army National Guard are accusing Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz of being a “habitual liar” about his military rank and the reasons he left his unit before it deployed to Iraq, with one joking that “a good place” for the Democratic vice presidential candidate to end up would be Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
Tom Behrends, Paul Herr, Tom Schilling, and Rodney Tow told SiriusXM host Megyn Kelly in an interview released Monday about their time serving as Guardsmen with Walz, who last month was chosen as a running mate by Vice President Kamala Harris.
“He’s a habitual liar,” Herr said. “He lies about everything. He lies about stuff that doesn’t make sense.”
“We have stolen valor [because] people make decisions that are cowardly, and they come back and they try to live vicariously by robbing … all the other soldiers of all the benefits … and all the sacrifices,” Herr went on.
“They want a piece of that — they feel slighted,” he told Kelly.
“He’s a military impersonator,” added retired Command Sgt. Maj. Tom Behrends. “He took his uniform, and he literally turned it inside out and went off into whatever other realm he did, which was vote against anything that went on in Iraq, vote against Gitmo, vote against whatever.”
“And by the way, Gitmo would be a good place for him to end up at,” Behrends joked, prompting laughter from the other three vets.
Walz, 60, when he served in Congress voted to close down the US military prison at Guantanamo Bay in 2009, but had a mixed record of voting on the Iraq war: at times, approving supplemental funding; at others, backing a full withdrawal of US troops.
He has repeatedly claimed since his first run for public office that he was a “command sergeant major,” but he retired before finishing the necessary coursework for the rank and was subsequently demoted in September 2005 to master sergeant.
Both Herr and Behrends retired as command sergeant majors.
Other accusations of “stolen valor” that have dogged the Democratic vice presidential pick have included his statements suggesting that he deployed to combat zones in Afghanistan or Iraq.
Those embellishments had often been floated while Walz recounted his military service to voters, either as a US House candidate or Minnesota gubernatorial candidate.
During his first run for the governor’s mansion in 2019, Walz said at a campaign event, “We can research the impacts of gun violence. We can make sure those weapons of war, that I carried in war, are only carried in war.”
His political campaigns have had to walk back the misleading comments about his rank and service record — including the Harris campaign, which has said he “misspoke” in the past and updated its webpage to reflect that Walz rose “to the rank of Command Sergeant Major,” without mentioning his demotion.
Asked about the misleading remarks over the years, Walz told CNN last week that his “wife, the English teacher, tells me my grammar is not always correct.”
“I speak candidly,” he also said, attributing his fabrications to his passion about gun control: “I wear my emotions on my sleeves, and I speak especially passionately about about our children being shot in schools and around, around guns.”
He has also gone on the offensive at campaign rallies, declaring that he is “damn proud of my service to this country. And I firmly believe you should never denigrate another person’s service record.”
Some Democrats have also pushed back on the attacks as politically motivated “lies,” including Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.), the ranking member of the House Armed Services Committee.
“He decided to run for Congress in February. He got out of the military in May, and his unit was called up in July, and I believe didn’t deploy until, like, six months after that,” Smith told Kelly.
“He did not get out of the National Guard because he didn’t want to deploy. To claim that is an absolute lie,” he said.
But those who served with him quibbled with that timeline, including Behrends who said Walz was well aware by late 2004 of the potential deployment to Iraq and filed his paperwork to run for Congress in February 2005.
In fact, Walz’s own 2005 congressional campaign in March of that year touted that the then-candidate would go to Iraq if deployed, failing to mention his planned retirement just two months later.
Herr noted that the future congressman had also sworn to his foxhole buddies: “You can count on me.”
“He told me and other sergeant majors in the meetings that, ‘You can count on me. I will deploy with my unit,’” said Herr. “His words to my ear and others.”
“You think their parents didn’t want their soldiers to take a pass, take a knee and maybe go on the next one or go on something that maybe isn’t so dangerous? You’re darn skippy,” he explained of the 500 service members under Walz’s leadership.
“We’re all long in the tooth. We could’ve retired,” added Herr, who served 34 years in the National Guard. “We didn’t.” … And that’s the position that he was in.””
“And that’s the position that he was in,” Herr continued. “He didn’t care. It was all about him.”
