Stolen Valor: Tim Walz launched political career on false claim as combat veteran in the War on Terror

by Jordan Schachtel

The Tim Walz Stolen Valor story goes back to the very beginning of his political career. From the onset of his foray into national politics, Walz sold himself to the public and the media as a combat veteran of the Global War on Terror, masking the reality that he quit the military to run for office and avoid being deployed to Iraq.

Thanks to some quality reporting, we know that the Minnesota governor — who yesterday officially joined the Kamala Harris campaign for President as its VP on the ticket — quit the military in 2005, after learning that his battalion was about to be sent to Iraq. Walz spent his entire career in the Army National Guard learning to lead people into battle, with training and his lone six month overseas deployment to Italy provided at U.S. taxpayer expense. He then retired when he learned he was going to be leading people into battle in Iraq, leaving Minnesota’s 125th Field Artillery Regimen high and dry for a career in politics.

But that’s not what Tim Walz told the public when he decided to run for public office upon abruptly leaving the military.

Just months after leaving his battalion to go to Iraq without him, he announced a run for Congress, and the dissembling about his serivce record began immediately.

Instead of being honest about his early departure from the military, Walz told the media a much more heroic tale, one that was entirely ficticious.

 
Bloomberg’s Joshua Green, then employed at The Atlantic, was the first major reporter to profile Walz. In an interview with the then-congressional candidate, Green writes that in 2004, Walz left his hometown in Minnesota “to serve overseas in Operation Enduring Freedom.”

 
It’s unclear if this is Green, a veteran reporter, omitting major facts, or if Walz, the interviewee, is selling Green on a particular narrative. Nonetheless, the assertion is incredibly misleading, as it leaves the reader under the impression that Walz served as boots on the ground in the Global War on Terror, when in reality, he merely deployed to Italy in 2003 for a six month stint.

It gets much worse.

Green discusses a 2004 visit from former President George W. Bush to Gov. Walz’s hometown, in which a protesting Walz (who was still serving in the military) told the reporter about him supposedly demanding to speak to the then commander in chief.

“Walz thought for a moment and asked the Bush staffers if they really wanted to arrest a command sergeant major who’d just returned from fighting the war on terrorism,” Green writes.

 
While the first instance can be written off as an issue of unclear reportage, the second example cannot be explained away. Walz was not just serving in a support role for the war effort (from Italy), he had been “fighting the war on terrorism.”

According to the article, Walz was picked out of relative obscurity by Democrat operatives due to his military service. These operatives went out and recruited “veterans from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq,” Green writes.

To this day, Green remains under the false impression that Walz served and fought in the war. In a piece for Bloomberg on Tuesday, he wrote that Walz served “in Iraq as part of Operation Enduring Freedom.”

In marketing Walz as a veteran upstart politician, he created a false construct that involved heroism in the war in terror, when in reality, Tim Walz never fought in a war or anywhere near a war.

For many years, countless veterans of Minnesota’s 125th Field Artillery Regiment have been taking Walz to task about his ongoing mistatements and embellishment of his service record.

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