Tim Walz’s Stolen Valor

The battlefields of Vietnam were a crucible in which a generation of American soldiers were fused together by a common confrontation with death and a sharing of hardships, dangers, and fears. 
—Philip Caputo, A Rumor of War

There must be a dozen or more reasons to disqualify Kamala Harris from running for president, not the least being her choice of Tim Walz as her running mate. 

Could there be a worse candidate for high office than a governor who stood by and did nothing while vandals put the torch to his largest city? Or that in his zeal to protect unlimited access to abortion, he does not mind the occasional infanticide to ensure that the child will die? Or his animus, both obvious and longstanding, against any sort of institutional expression of faith, most especially from Roman Catholics, whose very existence appears to be an affront to his secularist agenda? 

Nevertheless, for all the egregiousness of these offenses against the common good, which it is the business of politics to secure, there is yet another issue that cries out for attention, even as it has received some already. Not, to be sure, from mainstream media, which have sought mightily to deflect attention from it. Thus do they belie their own claim to being truth tellers. 

And that is the question of stolen valor, which has greatly incensed veterans who, having been to war, actually know the difference between soldiers who put themselves at risk and others who merely lie about it.  

Even non-veterans, come to think of it, must find it off-putting to hear politicians portraying themselves as something they are not, especially when it dishonors the memory of those whose sacrifices were genuine and sometimes cost them their lives. Nor is it at all honest when media collude with deeply suspect politicians by keeping silent about their lies. Why weren’t questions raised twenty years ago when Tim Walz first entered politics and began fudging his record? 

These are not trivial matters, by the way, that will soon go away once we’ve steeled ourselves against distraction and start to face the really serious stuff in the race to the White House. You know, things like climate change, transgender rights and, of course, doing everything possible to portray Trump as the next Adolf Hitler. But if the guy asking for your vote cannot be trusted to tell the truth about his own past, including the fact that he bailed out on an entire battalion he’d been training to lead into battle, how can he be trusted to help run the country?

And here, full-disclosure-wise, I should say that I’ve got some skin in this game as well. I spent three years in uniform, a third of which was in what used to be called the Republic of South Vietnam, in whose defense I and thousands of other young Americans had pledged our lives and sacred honor. I took an oath, in other words, to uphold what many of us at the time regarded as a sacred promise to protect a brave people in peril of losing their country and, for many of them, their lives. Not something to be taken lightly. 

I still get a lump in my throat when I hear or recite the Pledge of Allegiance. The very word itself—pledge—is resonant with a beauty worth preserving. It must never be cheapened. Otherwise, we trash the memory of more than fifty-eight thousand members of my generation who did not return from Vietnam. The reason their names are etched across a smooth expanse of black marble in our nation’s capital is because they paid the price of admission in blood.

I knew a number of those men who did not make it back, one of whom, a 22-year-old Marine Corporal by the name of Bill Morgan, had been a close friend in high school. He volunteered soon after graduating and was killed less than three years later while saving the lives of two fellow marines in February of 1969. He would go on to receive (posthumously) the highest possible accolade a grateful nation can bestow for gallantry beyond the call of duty.                                     

And while he and I served in the same war, it is not accurate to say that our experiences were in any way comparable. To juxtapose his record of valor alongside the one I compiled over the course of a year spent typing reports in an office tucked safely away from gunfire would be ludicrous. I was probably safer in Saigon surrounded by generals than I would have been in many American cities. As for college campuses, there were some so convulsed by violence against the military that you’d think you’d stumbled upon a war zone. 

So, yes, he and I were in the same war; but unlike him, I was never in any real danger of losing anything. And while I did not shirk my duty when the nation required of me that I first be conscripted to go and train to be a soldier, then sent to Vietnam where I was expected to be one, I was never in a situation where I actually had to prove it. Perhaps this is why I stopped wearing the baseball cap my kids gave me with the Vietnam Vet logo splashed across the front. It seemed somewhat spurious to put that thing on, especially when strangers would come up and thank me for my service. If you’d never really done anything to deserve it, why would you want to give anyone the impression that you had? If you’d never really done anything to deserve it, why would you want to give anyone the impression that you had?Tweet This

“We learned the old lessons about fear, cowardice, courage, suffering, cruelty, and comradeship,” writes Philip Caputo in a Rumor of War, his searing memoir about going off to war and leading others with him. But what he and his men learned above all else was that death is not something meant only for the old and the infirm. It is meant for us all, and most especially for the young who imagine themselves immortal, like the pagan gods who do not die.  

Everyone loses that illusion eventually, but in civilian life it is lost in installments over the years. We lost it all at once, and, in the span of months, passed from boyhood through manhood to a premature middle age.

That was not an illusion I was likely to lose amid the clacking sounds of the typing pool where I spent my war. I have certainly lost it since, but only in installments, much like most men of my age. Including politicians like Tim Walz, who, not having any war to hide behind, has decided to lie about it anyway. For that reason alone, he is unfit to serve.