I tell young people who are considering joining America’s reserves that the first rule is, “Attend all wars.”
Until I went to war in Afghanistan, I felt sheepish whenever I happened to be in uniform and someone thanked me for my service. Honestly, I still feel there’s more I could do, which is a common thread among most veterans I know.
No matter what your service record contains, there’s always another soldier or sailor who has done more. The member who hasn’t deployed feels guilty. The member who has been to war but had a short tour feels guilty. The member who had a long tour but didn’t see combat feels guilty. The member who saw combat but didn’t get shot feels guilty. And on and on.
In 2020, I met the greatest war hero of my life: Hershel Woodrow “Woody” Williams, who received the Congressional Medal of Honor for his service during World War II in the Battle of Iwo Jima. In the middle of COVID, I’d taken Cpl. Williams to the White House to meet President Donald Trump. On the plane ride back to his home in West Virginia, the old Marine talked about his friends who didn’t come back from the hard fighting of that dreaded island. Though it was 75 years prior, he spoke about it as if it were the day before, and wiped away tears.
Even a Medal of Honor hero felt he could have done more for his country and his comrades in arms.
I believe a heart for service beats strongly within most service members. It is a call to duty, honor, and country. It is also a feeling that never quite subsides, no matter how many deployments, no matter how long retired, no matter how many medals for valor he wears on his chest. We can all do more.
Perhaps that is why many veterans get touchy when there’s even a whiff that a politician has inflated his military service. In his own words, Gov. Tim Walz claimed he was “the highest-ranking enlisted service member ever to serve in Congress.” Yet Walz did not retire as a command sergeant major, but as a master sergeant.
Worse, the governor called for gun control by saying: “We can make sure those weapons of war, that I carried in war, is the only place where those weapons are at.” That’s not a misquote or a paraphrase gone wrong. The Harris-Walz campaign even posted it on Twitter.
What so offends his fellow veterans, despite his 24 years of National Guard service, is that Walz claims to be a warrior but never deployed to war.
There’s an expression for that kind of bragging: stolen valor.
The Biden-Harris military record rings the same way. Biden called America’s humiliation in Afghanistan “a success.” Their administration ordered the Department of Defense to invest 8 million man-hours rooting out “extremists,” an exercise that came up with a whopping 10 cases. Biden even claims to be a warrior himself: “I’ve been all over the world with you. I’ve been in and out of battle.”
Between the delusions of grandeur and outright lies, it is any wonder that military recruiting plummeted under Biden-Harris?
If the Harris campaign thought bringing on Walz would shore up the disastrous Biden-Harris military record, it’s an inauspicious start.
Featured Image Credit: Gage Skidmore
