GOP vice presidential nominee JD Vance’s accusations against Walz’s military service are inaccurate and disgraceful

Recent events make this a good time to explain the ethos of our armed forces to the 92.6 percent of the nation’s population who never served in the military, and also to remind the “Band of Brothers” — and “Sisters” — who have, of the oath we all swore to uphold.

The attacks of Sen. JD Vance, Trump’s vice presidential running mate, on the military experience of his opponent, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, relies on the fact that the lay public has minimal understanding of the intricacies of how the military functions, as well as Sen. Vance forgetting the oath he took preceding his four-year hitch in the Marine Corps.

Tim Walz signed up with the National Guard as a patriotic 17-year-old (seen above in a 1981 public domain photo posted on wikimedia commons) and served 24 years, rising to the highest enlisted rank of command sergeant major.  Because he spent his last several years there taking care of his soldiers rather than trying to complete the courses required to retire at that rank (which would have maximized his retirement payments for life) Walz actually retired at the next lower rank.

He served four years longer than required to receive full military benefits, retiring only in order to run for Congress. The fact that his unit deployed to Iraq eight months after he submitted his retirement paperwork and two months after he retired is a totally normal occurrence.

Rather than honor nearly a quarter century of service, Vance tries to conflate these facts to be dishonorable acts, which is pretty hypocritical coming from someone who is running with Trump, a cowardly, draft dodger who avoided the Vietnam War era draft by getting his slumlord father to pay off some unscrupulous doctor to say Trump was physically unfit to serve, even though he played intercollegiate sports (both tennis and squash at New York’s Fordham University) at the time.

Vance knows well that most rich white boys like Trump do not serve, only people like Walz and himself do — people Trump has called suckers and losers for serving in our military.

Vance’s most egregious statement was accusing Walz of “stolen valor,” an extremely serious accusation in the military referring to someone who claims medals and awards they did not receive or major combat experiences they did not have. 

He based this false statement on the fabricated issues above as well as an offhand comment Gov. Walz made in 2018 while supporting reasonable gun laws after the mass murder at Marjory Stoneman High School in Parkland, Fla.

He said he wanted to get "weapons of war that I carried in war" off the streets.

Vance made this disgusting charge because Walz had not deployed to a designated “combat zone.” However, he did deploy for nine months to Italy in August 2003 to support U.S. operations in Afghanistan. He once even deployed to the Arctic Circle and did other long deployments. And, as most National Guard soldiers serving as many years do, he spent hundreds of days with his units, away from his family, for monthly weekend drills and for at least two weeks every summer for training.

Walz carried the “weapons of war” six years for every one year that Vance did. He provided major leadership in a heavy artillery battalion, won proficiency honors in sharpshooting, hand grenades and other small arms. He was a warrior.

Vance did spend about six months in Iraq, mostly in an air-conditioned office writing press releases as a military journalist. He said in his 2016 memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy,” “I was lucky to escape any real fighting,” which made it sound like his combat experience was limited to perhaps just a few minor firefights.

But since he is such a stickler over semantics, it would have been more accurate to say, “I was lucky to escape any fighting,” since Vance in fact participated in no fighting at all.

Regardless, I would never disparage the service of any of my fellow military veterans and neither would Tim Walz, particularly just to score some dishonest political points. Many members of the Minnesota National Guard have come forward to heap praise on Command Sgt. Maj. Walz, and a few have also criticized his service.

But I would be willing to bet that most of the latter have Trump yard signs in front of their homes, and that definitely would not be in keeping with the finest traditions of our uniformed services, on several levels.

In my last South Dakota Standard post, I mentioned the two young Marines killed during our evacuation of Saigon; they are often mentioned as “the last U.S. military personnel to die in Vietnam.”

But 50 or 60 miles south of Saigon in the South China Sea, ships of the 7th Fleet waited in the inky-black-night to recover the helicopters, both U.S. and South Vietnamese, involved in the mass evacuation. My crew and I had just landed onboard the aircraft carrier USS Hancock shortly before another CH-46D returning from rescue duties made its approach. For reasons we will never know, mechanical failure, pilot vertigo or simple exhaustion, the aircraft crashed.

Another aircraft saved the two crewmen but the pilots, 1st Lt. Michael Shea, and Capt. William Nystul, were lost to a dangerous and unforgiving sea. Were these pilots’ deaths combat-related enough to satisfy Sen. Vance’s personal criteria?

The fact of the matter is that more military deaths are usually caused by training or accidents rather than being combat-related. For example, between 2006-18, 31.9 percent of military deaths were the result of accidents whereas only 16.3 percent of service members who died during that time were killed in a “combat zone.”

Tim Walz was in the “danger zone” for 24 years. Vance’s comments about all this demonstrates how alarming it is to even consider that the young, dishonest, and inexperienced JD Vance, if elected with 78-year-old Donald Trump, could be just a Big Mac-induced heart attack away from becoming the commander-in-chief of our dedicated armed forces.

Jim Petersen was a Marine Corps officer during the Vietnam era for eight years, served 10 years in the USCG mostly as director of federal law enforcement at USCG Air Station Miami, and retired from the 1085th Medical Company, Air Ambulance, South Dakota National Guard.