Trying to trade on his service record, a political candidate found he couldn’t escape the judgment of his peers. Fellow veterans directed a crippling fusillade at the Democrats’ wannabe president: they alleged stolen glory, gaming the system, and borderline cowardice and they did so with devastating effect. So shamed was the pretender, so exposed and debunked were his pretensions, that nine years later he was confirmed as secretary of state by the United States Senate. Forty-one Republicans agreed with their Democratic colleagues that John Kerry would do fine as chief steward of foreign policy. The allegedly bogus Purple Hearts and Silver Star and Bronze Star seemed not to matter. One has heard of senatorial courtesy, but this is ridiculous. Or else the 41 Republicans knew that the charges were ridiculous, in which case we have some useful context for the Tim Walz controversy.
By now a half dozen hostile veterans of the Minnesota National Guard have had their say regarding this cycle’s Democratic candidate for vice president. Walz stands accused of inflating his service title, pretending to have seen combat, and leaving his men in the lurch once he learned they were headed for Iraq. Campus feminists have their way of talking about unwanted jokes and other faux pas. Ax-grinding ex-members of the service have their rhetoric too: “He failed his country. He failed his state. He failed the Minnesota Army National Guard, the 1-125th Field Artillery Battalion, and his fellow Soldiers” and “Traitor—a person who betrays a friend, country, principal [sic], etc.” If these particular vets find themselves talking in such a stark fashion, one realizes that contemplating death in the service of your country may not encourage a mellow, even-keeled discourse. But high feelings and heated words don’t guarantee accurate understanding. Tone down the rhetoric and it turns out Walz’s sins are a pile of microaggressions; really, not so much a pile as a small mound.
“Walz quickly retired after learning that his unit—southern Minnesota’s 1-125 FA Battalion—would be sent to Iraq,” a veteran alleged. J. D. Vance, Walz’s counterpart on the Republican ticket, took up the same theme: “When Tim Walz was asked by his country to go to Iraq, you know what he did? He dropped out of the Army and allowed his unit to go without him.” At issue is Walz’s retirement from the Guard in May 2005, before it deployed to Iraq. The order saying that some or all of the unit might be deployed came in March 2005. An order issued in July put the unit on alert for mobilization, and the mobilization order itself arrived in August. But Walz had filed his retirement papers in February, if you believe Politico, or else in October, November, or December of 2004—if you believe Fox News, which says it asked the Minnesota National Guard and was told that Walz put in his papers five to seven months before he retired. (This discovery shows up in the fifth paragraph of an article bearing the stormy headline “Former Member of Gov. Walz’s Battalion Says He ‘Ditched’ Them, Accuses Walz of ‘Stolen Valor’”). Walz’s country never asked him to go to Iraq, since he’d already become a civilian; further, he made that decision—if the country’s foremost right-wing media outlet can be believed—at least three months before the authorities said they were even thinking about deployment.
Major General Randy Manner, who was in charge of deploying National Guard units overseas, told The Washington Post that the usual processing time for a retirement request was 90 days or more. Two months would’ve been “extraordinarily fast,” he said, so the allegation appears to be not just false but a fantasy. A certain inflammation of the judgment would seem to be at work. For instance, the military doesn’t have to let personnel retire if they’re deemed still necessary; according to Manner, Minnesota’s adjutant general would’ve denied Walz his retirement if Walz in particular were needed for deployment. But the ax grinders aren’t deterred. “The big frustration was that he let his troops down,” says a fellow command sergeant major in Walz’s battalion. Another veteran: “For Tim Walz to abandon his fellow soldiers and quit when they needed experienced leadership most is disheartening.” They still had experienced leadership—one of the ax grinders moved into his old slot—so the troops weren’t let down. But where the National Guard saw a veteran’s change of direction, the ax grinders see dereliction by a coward.
Ducking combat involves an action, or alleged action, so it ought to be the heaviest charge against Walz. But most of the fuss has centered on words. Did Walz lie about his military record? We’re told that he did. “What bothers me about Tim Walz is the stolen valor garbage. I’d be ashamed if I were him and lied about my military service like he did,” says Vance (who served six months in Iraq as a Marine but makes no claim that he saw combat). Walz’s offenses, such as they are, have been hole-and-corner things. His career hasn’t featured bogus war stories or pious remarks about slain buddies. No ad or stump speech has turned up with falsehoods or misleading remarks. In the presidential race, Walz and his running mate have been circumspect about his military record. When he was introduced as Kamala Harris’ choice for vice president, the two kept it simple. “He is a veteran who served our nation in uniform for more than two decades as a member of the Army National Guard,” Harris said. Walz said: “For 24 years, I proudly wore the uniform of this nation. The National Guard gave me purpose.”
But there’s been just enough grist for the mill. The campaign furor over Walz’s record began after the Harris people, thinking to highlight Walz’s views about guns, posted a clip on Twitter from a talk he gave voters when he ran for governor of Minnesota in 2018. Walz capped his remarks with this tangle-footed flourish: “We can make sure that those weapons of war that I carried in war is the only place where those weapons are at.” Not the move of a smooth-tongued fabricator, this was possibly a bobble by somebody trying to pile up words until a sentence was safely finished. But the words added up to a claim and battle commenced (Vance: “Well, I wonder, Tim Walz, when were you ever in war?”).
Two other claims to combat duty were committed vicariously. In 2009, General Barry McCaffrey said Walz had spent “time in combat,” and Walz didn’t correct him; this was when they were both guests on Hardball. Back in 2006 Walz featured as Exhibit A when The Atlantic ran a piece about veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan who were running for office; the reporter appears to have been confused, and rather than straighten him out Walz offered an anecdote whose punchline, if correctly paraphrased, wasn’t true. The article says Bush flunkies were giving Walz and two of his high school students a hard time about getting into a campaign rally. Then: “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.” Walz hadn’t been fighting the war; he’d been supporting it by helping to guard European bases used by military aircraft en route to Afghanistan.
On the other hand, a clip that conservatives surfaced from 2021 appears to show Walz trying hard not to give a false impression. Now governor, he was delivering a speech that mentioned his National Guard service and, right after that, the time he’d seen a dead soldier being loaded onto a plane in Bagram. If delivered in its original form, the passage would’ve sounded as if Walz had served in Afghanistan. Walz improvised a muddled interjection that kept the two sentences apart: “And when I left I had a two-year-old, when I came home I had a three-year-old. But as I listened to, to Jill, and I listened to Mariah—the guilt. I came home, and my daughter went on, and when you’re two and three, she knew no difference. That’s not true for some, they can’t do that, and over the proceeding years of watching us, and as our nation changed, and as our political systems, uh, became more… more difficult for all of us to understand,” and at this point he arrived, finally, at “I stood one night in the dark of night” and the body being loaded. The idea, clumsily but tenaciously conveyed, was that years had passed. He’d come home from service abroad, after which the whole country and its “political systems” (sic) had time to change, and after this change the Bagram incident happened to occur. But he didn’t say outright that he’d been a congressman when he saw that body, and the speech’s original text later appeared in a book published by the Minnesota Military & Veterans Museum.
The charge that’s received the most attention is that Walz has exaggerated his rank. He’s repeatedly referred to himself as a retired command sergeant major when he should’ve said former; the error’s still there on his gubernatorial website but was banished from the Harris-Walz site once accusations began flying. Civilians, when considering retired versus former, must remember that changing a word or two can make a difference. For instance, “colored people” and “people of color,” the first an outdated term now considered an insult by the people it describes (black people), the second a stilted but sometimes useful umbrella phrase (for blacks, East Asians, South Asians, Latinos, and so on) that the people described don’t consider an insult. With retired and former, the difference is that Walz spent seven months with the duties of a command sergeant major, and then a month with the official title as well as the duties, but he didn’t retire as a command sergeant major. The day before retirement, he was bumped down a grade (to master sergeant) because he’d enrolled in the U.S. Army Sergeants Major Academy but was now leaving the Guard before finishing his coursework. If he actually were a retired command sergeant major, and not just a former one, he’d have a higher pension and a degree from the academy. So now we’ve located and fleshed out the difference between retired and former, and I have to wonder why it matters to anyone but Walz. The great majority of voters don’t think retired is better than former; the only advantage he gained from the phrase was an easier group of syllables to get out of his mouth.
The ax grinders say Walz is former and not retired because he was in such a hurry to get out of the Guard, a hurry that they find sinister—“he slithered out the door and waited for the paperwork to catch up to him.” They claim that with Defense Department permission Walz could’ve run for Congress while serving in Iraq. This assumes that permission would’ve been forthcoming, but Walz seems to have held open the possibility. From a press release his campaign issued during the wait for his retirement to be processed: “As Command Sergeant Major I have a responsibility not only to ready my battalion for Iraq, but also to serve if called on.” The statement came out March 20, 2005, days after the order that said there might be a deployment. The release might’ve mentioned that, when and if the call arrived, Walz wasn’t expecting to be a command sergeant major or any sort of active member of the Guard. But once the campaign began, voters certainly knew he wasn’t serving in Iraq: he was standing there in front of them. And so far from slithering in a hurry, he’d filed his papers as much as five months before the March order appeared.
If you’re running for office, being on a different continent may not seem the best way to win. But the ax grinders can’t see a difference between running your best race and ducking out to avoid combat. “Combat veterans know the truth. There are two! You run to the gunfight and stand with your brothers, or you dip and duck, run away and leave others to pay your tab,” tweets @William03395044 (“America first conservative, 5thGen. Flowridean, Happily Married!”), a fellow commenter on the Walz matter. It doesn’t matter why the escapee left or when he filed his papers. He could’ve gone and he didn’t, so he’s a coward. To give this argument a literal-minded response, Walz’s exit didn’t force anyone else to go when they might have stayed home, so the tab doesn’t seem like such a problem. But a bit more has to be said.
Thomas Behrends, command sergeant major (ret.), was the man who’d moved up to Walz’s old slot by the time the 1-125th Field Artillery Battalion shipped out. He’s also one of the most vocal of the Guard veterans denouncing Walz. In 2018, he posted some thoughts on Facebook. “Last summer, as I stood over the grave of Staff Sergeant Greg Gorter paying my respects, I was humbled,” the post began. It described how the late sergeant worked as a military recruiter but then chose duty in Iraq. The post quoted him on his choice: “It’s something I feel compelled to do and I don’t know how to explain it any more than that… I want to make the world a better place so my kid doesn’t have to go through a 9/11.” Behrends told of another soldier who’d gone to Iraq, and then added his own thoughts. These included: “What if everybody said, sorry I’ve got better things to do? We are the land of the free, because of the brave. We are not the land of the free, because of those who ran.”
I’d say Sergeant Gorter was noble but wrong. The people behind 9/11 weren’t in Iraq. Tearing up the place did nothing to make us safer, but it did plenty to cause hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis to die unnatural deaths; soon enough Isis would move in and America faced a new threat. The Americans who fought in Iraq were risking their lives on behalf of a huge botch by policymakers. Don’t ask me, ask J. D. Vance (“the disastrous invasion of Iraq,” “From Iraq to Afghanistan… the people who govern this country have failed and failed again”) and especially his running mate (“the single worst decision ever made,” “a big, fat mistake”). It took those two a while to figure this out. But in 2004, the year Sergeant Gorter made his decision, Master Sergeant (or Command Sergeant Major) Tim Walz was protesting the war.
Walz’s old unit spent 22 months stationed in a camp that was under fire from insurgents. Some of the soldiers died. The unit had been sent for 16 months; on the day it was supposed to go home word arrived of a six-month extension. That’s the account of Al Bonnifield, who went and who doesn’t consider Walz a coward for not going. I’ll add that all this happened because policymakers had expected an easy war and then found they had a very difficult war, one ready to eat up all available manpower. Rather than reconsider their policies, they searched around for more soldiers to throw into the mess.
Sergeant Gorter shouldn’t have gone and he shouldn’t have been recruiting people for the Guard, not if they risked being sent. If we’re the land of the free, one reason is that we have people willing to fight and die because their nation says so; any country needs people like that if it’s going to survive. But any country, and especially a free country, also needs citizens who think for themselves—not just react, but think. Walz was against a stupid and disastrous war, so he didn’t go. He located the real problem, that being the policymakers, and as a protester and a candidate he fought against them. Good for him.
A last point. The second man mentioned in Behrends’ Facebook post, Sergeant Kyle R. Miller, died in Iraq at the age of 19; an IED got him. But Sergeant Gorter didn’t die there. He returned to Minnesota after an 11-month tour and worked construction for about three years before a fall took his life. He was still brave and he still did what he considered right. But Behrends left out the facts of his death, and I expect that’s because they didn’t match the post’s intended mood. I won’t call Behrends slithery (his post denounces Walz for providing “a slithery politician’s version of what he wants people to hear”), and I’ll concede that Walz should’ve said “former” far more than he did, not to mention straightening out General McCaffrey and that long-ago Atlantic reporter. But I think a military sort of political correctness is needed to turn missteps like these into a dreadful indictment. After 20 years in the Guard, Walz signed up again because of 9/11. After four more years, he retired because of the Bush administration’s catastrophic policies. He wasn’t ducking combat; he was doing his best to protect his country from further catastrophes. Even if he hadn’t run for office, he was right not to go to Iraq. Behrends should’ve done the same thing.