Minnesota Governor Tim Walz has come under fire for misleadingly stating that he handled weapons “in war,” a remark that Senator JD Vance recently criticized as an instance of “stolen valor.”
This statement from Kamala Harris’ running mate surfaced in a 2018 video shared by Walz’s gubernatorial campaign. In the clip, Walz spoke to a crowded room about gun violence, declaring, “We can research the impacts of gun violence. We can make sure those weapons of war, that I carried in war, are only carried in war.”
However, Walz’s critics quickly pointed out that, despite serving in the National Guard until his retirement in 2005, he never participated in combat.
“Walz did make a comment speaking to a group, he’s done it a couple of times, where he has used language that has suggested that he carried weapons in a fighting situation,” said CNN’s Jake Foreman.
“Coming from a military family, I know there’s a difference between being in a combat zone, being involved during wartime, and actually being in a situation where people are shooting at you,” he continued.
“There is no evidence that at any time Governor Walz was in a position of being shot at, and some of his language could easily be seen to suggest he was, so that is absolutely false.”
At a campaign event in Michigan on Wednesday, Vance, the Republican vice presidential candidate, accused Walz of exploiting “stolen valor.”
“He said we shouldn’t allow weapons that I used in war to be on America’s streets,” Vance remarked. “Well, I wonder. Tim Walz, when were you ever in war?”
“What bothers me about Tim Walz is the stolen valor garbage. Do not pretend to be something that you’re not,” added Vance, who served in the Marine Corps.
In response, the Harris campaign told the Washington Post that Walz had carried, fired, and trained others on “weapons of war innumerable times.”
“Governor Walz would never insult or undermine any American’s service to this country — in fact, he thanks Senator Vance for putting his life on the line for our country,” the statement read.
Although Vance spent six months in Iraq in 2005, his role was noncombat.
Walz enlisted in the Nebraska National Guard at age 17, later transferring to the Minnesota National Guard in 1996, where he served until retiring as a master sergeant in 2005.
Al Bonnifield, a former colleague, recalled that Walz struggled with the decision to leave his unit to run for Congress.
“It was a very long conversation behind closed doors. He was trying to decide where he could do better for soldiers, for veterans, for the country. He weighed that for a long time,” Bonnifield told the Washington Post.
Walz retired in May 2005, and a year later, he successfully unseated a Republican incumbent in the House of Representatives.
Some of Walz’s former National Guard colleagues expressed frustration over his decision to leave just as their unit was on the brink of deployment.
“Nobody wants to go to war. I didn’t want to go, but I went,” Doug Julin, a retired National Guard soldier who served with Walz, told the Washington Post.
“The big frustration was that he let his troops down.”
In an oral history interview with the Library of Congress, Walz mentioned that his unit, the 1st Battalion, 125th Field Artillery, was deployed to the “European theater” during the Afghanistan war.
A record of Walz’s battalion confirms that the unit was deployed in 2003 to Great Britain, Italy, Turkey, and Belgium in support of the war effort.
Walz stated that some of his soldiers were “disappointed” that they wouldn’t see combat, though another retired Guard member who participated in the deployment disagreed.
“He’s sugarcoating it to make it more than it was,” said Thomas Behrends, who has been a vocal critic of Walz since 2018.
“That was the mission from the get-go,” Behrends said of the European deployment. “There was nothing ever said about going to combat.”
{Matzav.com}