Army National Guard veterans are accusing Minnesota Governor Tim Walz of “habitual lying” About your military rank and the reasons for leaving your unit Before deploying to Iraq, one joked that “a good place” for the Democratic vice presidential nominee would be Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
Tom Behrends, Paul Herr, Tom Schilling and Rodney Tow tell SiriusXM host Megyn Kelly an interview In their statements released Monday, they spoke about serving as Guardsmen alongside Walz, who was selected last month by Vice President Kamala Harris as her running mate.
“He's a habitual liar,” Herr said. “He lies about everything. He lies about things that don't make any sense.”
“We've stolen heroism (because) people make cowardly decisions, and they come back and they try to live vicariously by depriving all the other soldiers of all the benefits … and all the sacrifices,” Herr added.
“They want a piece of that — they feel disrespected,” he told Kelly.
“He's a military impersonator,” said retired Command Sergeant Major Tom Behrends. “He took his uniform, and he literally turned it inside out and went into whatever he did, which was to vote against anything that was going on in Iraq, vote against Gitmo, vote against whatever it was.”
“And by the way, Gitmo would be a good place for him,” Behrendz joked, causing the other three veteran players to laugh.
When Walz, 60, served in Congress, he voted to close the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay in 2009, but his voting record on the Iraq war has been mixed: at times he approved supplemental funding, at other times he supported a full withdrawal of American troops.
He has repeatedly claimed since his first attempt at public office that he was the “Command Sergeant Major”, but he retired before completing the required course for the position and was subsequently demoted to the rank of Master Sergeant in September 2005.
Both Herr and Behrends retired as command sergeant majors.
other charge “stolen valor” His statements have troubled the Democratic vice presidential nominee, suggesting that he Deployed to combat zones In Afghanistan or Iraq.
Those embellishments often surfaced when Walz touted his military service to voters, whether as a candidate for the U.S. House or for Minnesota governor.
During his first bid for governor in 2019, Walz said at a campaign event, “We can do research on the effects of gun violence. We can be sure that the weapons of war that I carried into battle, These are only carried into war.”
His political campaigns have had to walk back misleading comments about his rank and service record — including the Harris campaign, which has said it had “misspoken” in the past and updated its webpage to reflect that Walz “rose to the rank of command sergeant major,” without mentioning his demotion.
When asked about misleading comments he has made over the years, Walz told CNN last week that His “wife, who is an English teacher, tells me that my grammar is not always correct.”
He also said, “I speak plainly”, attributing his passion for gun control to his fabrications: “I express my feelings openly, and I speak particularly passionately about our kids getting shot in schools and around guns.”
He also left Aggressive stance in election ralliesHe said he was “very proud of my service to this country. And I firmly believe you should never denigrate another person's service record.”
Some Democrats have also pushed back, calling the attacks politically motivated “lies,” including Rep. Adam Smith (D-Washington), the ranking member of the House Armed Services Committee.
“He decided to run for Congress in February. He got out of the Army in May and his unit was called up in July and he deployed, I believe, about six months after that,” Smith told Kelly.
“He did not get out of the National Guard because he didn't want to be deployed. To claim that is a lie,” he said.
But people who worked with him objected to that timeline, including Behrends, who said Walz was well aware of a potential deployment to Iraq by late 2004 and had filed his papers to run for Congress in February 2005.
In fact, Walz In March of that year, 2005, during his congressional campaign, he said that the then-candidate would travel to Iraq. He did not mention his planned retirement two months later, if he is deployed.
Herr said the future congressman also vowed to his friends: “You can count on me.”
“He told me and the other sergeants major at the meeting, 'You can count on me. I will deploy with my unit,'” Herr said. “His words reached my ears and the others' ears.”
“You think their parents didn't want their soldiers to take a pass, kneel and maybe go on to the next pass or do something that maybe isn't so dangerous? You're being very casual,” he said of the 500 service members under Walz's leadership.
“We're all pretty old. We could have retired,” said Herr, who served 34 years in the National Guard. “We didn't do that. … And that's the situation he was in.”
“And that was the situation he was in,” Herr added. “He didn't care about that. It was all about him.”
