Posted on 08/18/2008 2:51:29 PM PDT by Interesting Times
John Smith said he was a Navy SEAL who was imprisoned in Vietnam after his helicopter was shot down.
Troy Brodrick spoke in schools about his 30-year military career in which he earned three Purple Hearts and flew President Eisenhower as an Air Force One pilot.
William Whitely, a former University of Oklahoma professor, told stories of his career as a Navy SEAL while he served as a mentor to Naval ROTC students who wanted to follow in his footsteps.
Trouble is, they were lying.
Smith, Brodrick and Whitely are among a growing nest of military imposters, people who make up military careers or exaggerate their service.
Such lies might seem harmless, especially when legitimate veterans have been known to tell aggrandized tales to make their service seem a bit more exciting. But it's a source of frustration for those who truly earned such accolades, and in many cases it's a violation of federal law.
(Excerpt) Read more at military.com ...
"They really want to be the hero elite, and they forget that it takes every member of the military to make a mission successful," Schantag said. "It doesn't matter whether they are the clerk typing in orders or the cook making meals or the guy on the front lines."
Or even, say, a US Senator...
Phony veterans ping...
Oh yeah? Well not to brag or anything- but I was the 301st Spartan Hopelite at Thermopylae.
No, not the squatty one with the forty pound wart on his back and a penchant for treason. The *secret* one. My orders were so classified that Herodotus never heard of it.
Now you know.
Three Purple Hearts!!!
Kudos to Schantag, Robinson, et al for exposing these phonies.
And a bump for all those who truly sacrificed for their country.
Don’t know about other wars, but my father and most of those in the World War II generation talked very little about their service. Dad served on a landing ship which took dead and wounded out of hot battles like Iwo Jima and Okinawa when it dropped off supplies. Even when I got older and asked him about it, the cost in lives still bothered him, but he did it because it was his duty. The real heros, he said, were those who didn’t come home.
In my experience, veterans themselves are some of the worst. Anyone with a military ID card can walk into any base uniform shop and walk out with a bunch of ribbons and any special qualification badges.
There was a Chief at my last command who wore the Combat V on his Bronze Star until he got called on it. That was the same reason Boorda shot himself.
I take reasonable pride in my 13 years of Naval Service, but God knows I didn’t do anything heroic or earth-shaking in that time.
As for the civvie pukes who claim to be SEALs and snipers. They always get caught eventually. I have more pity for them than anything else. Especially given the huge numbers of actual combat vets out there these days who can spot a phony in a heartbeat.
Are you talking about the Senator who’s sleazily shopping for the coming Democrat VP pick, or the Senator who was the last Democrat nominee and loser to President Bush?
Do you still have your Special Spartans helmet?
It would be churlish to name names. Suffice it to say that you're paddling up the right river.
Go tell the Spartans, oh stranger passing by That here, obedient to their laws I lied.
And POWs, which is a grievous error considering that the list of real POWs is quickly available via the POW Network and elsewhere.
YES!
Is Hanoi John next?
Ah yes. Doesn’t it remind you when we served together in the Confederate 3rd Division back in 63.
You mean the one with the steam-powered night vision device that I invented? Nah- gave it away centuries ago. To some Roman.
Heh, it’s funny. They’re so dumb about it. Ugh... no time to post. I got to get my lazy butt to work.
Then there was the notorious case of Professor Joseph Ellis, who liked to regale his college history classes of malleable young minds with tales of his supposed heroics in Vietnam. I think he ‘suffered’ a year’s suspension from teaching at Mt. Holyoke, which for a professor just meant a sabbatical to pursue his own writing and research...... just a hiccup in his career, really, despite his extensive and contemptible frauds:
http://www.mobylives.com/Joseph_Ellis.html
During the war in Vietnam, he said, he wasn’t just a soldier assigned to some obscure Army base — he saw action “clearing out” the area around My Lai. He wasn’t just a grunt, either — he was commander of a platoon of combat paratroopers from the legendary 101st Airborne. In fact, he was such a good leader that he was elevated to the staff of American commander General William Westmoreland.
Not a word of it was true, of course — Ellis never left the States during Vietnam.
But the thing is, Joseph Ellis isn’t some poor slob in a bar. He’s a Pulitzer Prize–winning biographer and professor of history at prestigious Mt. Holyoke College.
And he told those stories to students in a class he taught on Vietnam. He repeated them in interviews and even on television. And the war stories weren’t the half of it.
He told the Boston Globe last year that he was repulsed by what he saw in Vietnam and joined the peace movement when he returned home. He did civil rights work in Mississippi, too, he said, and was seen as such a threat by the white power structure that state police followed him.
And, as if claiming heroic involvement in nearly all of the era’s significant historical events wasn’t enough, he told the Globe he’d scored the winning touchdown in the last game of his senior year in high school.
He wasn’t even on the team.
...... [more at link]
http://www.mobylives.com/Joseph_Ellis.html
Many years ago, my ship pulled into Ft Lauderdale. Of course sailors are going to be hitting the local night club and we hit the Baja Beach Club. Well, there was this short guy, dressed in summer whites with ensign bars, gold flight wings and a chest full of ribbons. But he had black shoes on. With summer whites, you wear white shoes! Needless to say, we confronted him and chased his sorry a$$ out of there.
What number was George Patton? I heard he was there, too.
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