An examination of Governor Tim Walz.
I was only seventeen when I enlisted in the military. I chose the Air Force National Guard because I planned to go to college on the dime of the Department of Defense and because my father, a former Marine, thought the Air Force might be the “gentler” branch for his young, petite oldest daughter. I had nothing to lose. The Air Force would pay for my education, and I could prove, to myself and everyone else, that I was actually as tough as I thought myself to be. From the moment my terrified feet took hesitant steps onto the bus that transported me to my basic training unit my fellow trainees and I began our indoctrination into the rites and rituals of the United States Military. In 8 weeks of intensive warfighter training, I was transformed from a civilian teenage know-it-all to a gun-toting Airmen in the greatest military on earth. I had the jargon, I had the physical military bearing, and I had the war time strategy and philosophies essentially implanted into my brain via a Military Training Instructor’s spitting, screaming repetition. We all did – all twenty or so members of my female military graduating class stood shoulder to shoulder at attention, and for that brief moment we were all young Airmen on the lowest rung of our career totem poles. Each of our brains was a well-programmed military encyclopedia, but our military experiences had no nuance yet. Soon our careers would launch, and the differences within each of our individual paths would emerge to tell a story about our accomplishments as veterans. But the way we talk about those accomplishments, whether we flaunt them, embellish them, keep them tight within us, or cloak them with humility, says something about who we are as people, and about our character. Our interpretation and recapitulation of our experiences, the way we recount them and reimagine them, is an effective moral barometer. For those who treat their military experience like a man narrating a fish tale, full of fanciful flourishes bordering on outright fabrications, it’s reasonable to ask, “How much of anything this individual says can be trusted?” If the person in question is someone of high political standing – say, a potential Vice President of the United States such as Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, we are wise to sound the alarm. When individuals conflate their service record, especially people in political positions, we are required to examine their character a little deeper.
To have enlisted in the military at all and for any reason is brave and honorable. To embellish your service record, to pretend or insinuate that you’ve done more than is truthful, is shameful. Embellishing your service record is easy to do – that’s what makes it spineless. It’s often referred to as “stolen valor” – falsely claiming military position, awards, or recognition. I don’t believe Governor Tim Walz stole valor in the way it’s traditionally recognized. Certainly, he made shady claims about rank, insinuated experiences of war, and made a calculated career slither out of a potential deployment. Rather than full blown stolen valor, he did the next most egregious thing you can do publicly and expect to get away with: To buy credibility for himself, he bloated his rank and insinuated war zone experience, knowing all the while that he shadily sidestepped his chance at gaining real war experience. All branches of the United States Military retain a rigid code of ethics. You earn your rank. You earn your war stories. You earn your medals. There is a hierarchy to every component of the establishment, for good reason. It is one huge, churning conglomerate of individual human beings all working in perfect synchronicity to be a war machine. And while the machine needs each individual to function, it is the individual who risks life and limb. Young men and young women die. They are maimed. They go far away from their families and come back changed. The United States Military is a sacred, reverent, fantastic, horrible machine. To look into the eyes of millions of Americans and claim to have played a bigger role in the functioning of the machine, no matter how trivial the fabrication, indicates a darkness of character that should give every one of us pause. We are used to politicians lying. To lie about something so sacrosanct, and also so disprovable, as military service is deeply concerning. What else are you willing to lie to the American people about? Do you expect yourself to be above logical and necessary scrutiny?
Governor Tim Walz did serve in the United States Army. He did honorably reach the rank of Master Sergeant, and retired at that rank. Walz however has claimed that he retired at the next highest rank, Command Sergeant Major. According to the Minnesota National Guard, Walz did not in fact complete the necessary coursework and paperwork to maintain the rank of Command Sergeant Major. In the military, your rank is your entirety. It determines your level of privilege, your capacity for responsibility, and your necessary degree of respect. It is cut and dry. It drives your pay. It showcases the power you wield and how scared of you the lower ranks should be. To claim a higher rank, especially when Governor Walz reached a desirable and high rank within the Army, is curiously unnecessary. Did he feel as though the Army owed him that rank, and simply decided to claim it as his own? I certainly do not know his motivations, but I am deeply dubious of an individual who can look the public in the eye and tell a needless and easily provable lie about military rank.
More egregious and more shameful are the accusations surrounding Governor Walz regarding his skirting of a deployment, then claiming in retrospect a wartime overseas service. Walz was never deployed to a Middle East location during wartime. His battalion had the opportunity to go, and as a senior non-commissioned officer, he would have been tasked with leading his troops in their overseas location. Reports are hazy and conflicting about when the official order for deployment to Iraq in 2005 for Walz’s battalion came down to the troops. However Walz, being a high ranking senior man, would unquestioningly have been hearing rumblings and scuttlebutt about the impending mobilization. Walz chose to retire at that time – a decision he was entitled to make after 24 years of dedicated service. He planned to run for congressional office. Although he could have deployed and made his congressional run at the same time, he chose not to. He walked away from his battalion and allowed his men to step into the theater of war without him. Was it cowardice? Strategy? Regardless, his retirement, and the careful timing of it, could all be quietly justified and glossed over, except for his later combat claims to come. Thanks to retirement, Walz did not have to deploy to Iraq or Afghanistan. It is confounding that Walz would tell a crowd in 2018 that “we can make sure those weapons of war, that I carried in war, are only carried in war.” He did not carry weapons in war. He carried weapons of war, sure. But the distinction is important, and the word choice is calculated. It implies combat. A reasonable person, especially a civilian, would assume he carried a gun and engaged in combat. He similarly implied combat in a 9/11 commemoration speech where he spoke about his experience at Afghanistan’s Bagram Air Base. He claimed he came back from Afghanistan a changed man due to his experiences there, like witnessing bodies being loaded onto an aircraft carrier. He was at Bagram on a congressional visit. He was undoubtedly flanked by security and never took a step off the comfort of the base. His insinuations are purposeful. The man left the military before he could serve in combat, and then fabricated a combat experience to buy himself more credibility without having to put his life on the line to gain it. Walz did not necessarily steal valor, but he certainly pumped a degree of valor into his time in service that did not exist otherwise. The military is composed of men and women who have earned their war experience by making a gamble with God in service of the country. Governor Walz never had to make that gamble, and he knows it. To feel like a bigger man, he leads you to believe otherwise. There is nothing more egregious than ravaging the sanctity of real combat experience by fabricating your own for false prestige.
My own time in the military was straight forward. I did eight weeks in basic training and completed further specialized job training. After that, I served in my position as a member of the Security Forces, the Air Force’s version of Military Police. When 6 years of enlistment came to pass and I had a brand new daughter to focus on, I was honorably discharged. My military accomplishments amounted to, essentially, nothing. I wasn’t good at the military. I felt no desire to climb rank. When the time to reenlist rolled around, not doing so was an easy decision. It simply wasn’t a good fit. Still, a twinge of jealousy comes over me when I see my former military peers leaving for interesting deployments or advancing their military schooling or rank. Having served at all though, whether I personally enjoyed my time or not, lends me a reasonable level of credibility. Any commitment to enlist, regardless of duration, allows a level of credibility shared by all military personnel. I realized that just mentioning my prior service gave me a little shining red, white, and blue halo over my head in the eyes of just about every civilian. There is a jolt of pride that comes along with that positive feedback. When people ask what I did during my time of enlistment, it’s hard to say “basically… not a thing.” For someone in a bland military career, it’s easy to see how the temptation might arise to insinuate grander experiences and accomplishments. When inquiries come up about whether I ever spent time overseas with the military, the answer is “yes”. The Air Force sent me on a cushy, small assignment to England, and a few other assignments in the continental United States. But when someone asks about time overseas, they are not asking about pseudo vacations to the UK. I know what they are actually asking: “Have you ever been deployed?” I could say yes. It would technically be true. I could leave them wondering, but not comfortable asking, about where, and under what circumstances. Their minds would go to movies and pop culture – deserts, guns, and explosives – and they would think highly of my dedication to the country. When someone asks about where I was stationed, the truth is a tiny but highly functioning National Guard unit in Pennsylvania, and only on my required one weekend a month at that. But what I could say, and what would also be the truth, is “I worked for an Air Force Special Operations Unit on the East Coast”. That sounds impressive, mysterious, and serious. That begs no follow up questions. That makes me sound like a total badass. When people ask about things I’ve done during my enlistment, I can talk about all of the time I spent in the presence of some quiet and kind but very scary Special Operations men from every branch of the United States Military and many from the UK as well. It’s all true. But aside from a polite passing “hello” every now and then, the majority of my interactions with these guys was sitting on airport tarmac alone in a car with a gun keeping watch over their parked airplanes for hours on end. I chose not to stay in the military because it didn’t fit me just as much as I didn’t fit it. Yet I still often wish I had done more, and had more to show for 6 years of enlistment. I imagine better stories to tell, higher rank to claim, a successful deployment to an overseas location to commiserate about with fellow vets. I could claim more than is fully truthful. No one would know the difference. Not only would doing so be slimy and dishonest, but to embellish my own experience is a cheapening of the sacrifice of those who actually did more – who did the most. People died for the American cause. Men and women put their lives on the line, and some lost the bargain. What kind of darkness of soul must you have to denigrate these men and women and their families by cutting and pasting yourself into the same situations that ended their lives in an effort to buy yourself more public credibility? Governor Tim Walz is an embellisher of valor and a careful liar. As a former Air Force Airmen myself, having just dipped my toe into the expansive lake of the military machine, I can tell you that we look at people like him with disgust. He might be among the ranks of the greatest military on earth on paper, but in spirit he lacks the backbone so crucial to the values of American service men and women. What the United States does not need, and what we must vote against in 2024, is another ethically bankrupt man in office. And to those members of the military who fight bravely and keep this great country safe and sound without question, we value you, and we thank you.
Jordan Musser 