The public wrangling over Tim Walz military service continues. Most of the media seems very eager to help the Harris campaign get around this speed bump as quickly as possible. Case in point, this Politico story with three credited authors is titled “Vance runs a Swift Boat attack against Walz’s military service.” Despite the three authors, the article manages to mangle the story pretty effectively. Here’s the opening paragraph:
Ohio Sen. JD Vance slammed the timing of Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz’s retirement from a more-than-two-decades-long military career as a means of avoiding a deployment to Iraq on Wednesday, calling it “stolen valor garbage” and testing a new line of attack on the newly minted Democratic vice presidential contender.
If you’ve followed this closely, you know that there are two different issues here. First, Walz claimed during a 2018 town hall event that he wanted to make sure weapons of war like the ones he carried “in war” were not available on the street. But as Vance pointed out, Walz never deployed to a combat zone and thus was never “in war.” Not mentioned anywhere in the Politico story is that the Harris camp has already conceded Walz was embellishing in those comments. NBC News reported this yesterday: “Asked about the video, a Harris campaign spokesperson did not deny that Walz had embellished when he spoke of carrying weapons in war.”
Vance also said that that Walz “abandoned [his] unit right before they went to Iraq and he has not spent a day in a combat zone.” The part about Walz leaving his unit before it went to Iraq is undeniably true, the only issue is whether or not that would constitute abandoning the unit. That’s a bit open to interpretation and there are voices on either side who disagree.
Rep. Mike Waltz (R-Fla.), a former Green Beret, characterized the timing of Walz’s retirement from the Army National Guard with a football analogy in a video posted on X: “It is kind of like the quarterback of a big team walking away from their team right before they go to the Super Bowl. I’ve never heard anything like it.”
In fact, Walz filed paperwork for his congressional run in February 2005, about a month before reports emerged that the Minnesota National Guard might be deployed. Walz then announced his run in May of that year, two months before the Minnesota National Guard’s directive was officially issued.
Again, Politico is bungling the story here. Walz may have filed to run in February, but that didn’t require him to retire. In fact, we know from a report published by the Washington Post yesterday that Walz already knew of rumors his unit was deploying to Iraq before he decided to quit. His supervisor at the time says Walz went over his head to avoid being challenged on his retirement.
“Nobody wants to go to war. I didn’t want to go, but I went,” Doug Julin, a retired National Guard soldier who worked with Walz, said in an interview. “The big frustration was that he let his troops down.”…
Julin, who oversaw Walz as a more senior command sergeant major, said that Walz approached him in 2005 and said he was prepared to go on their upcoming deployment to Iraq, but also was interested in running for Congress. Julin said he thought “no big deal” because other members of Congress had deployed.
But a couple of months later, Julin learned from another member of the Guard that Walz had retired. Julin was frustrated, he said, because Walz had arranged his retirement with two officers who outranked Julin.
“I would have analyzed it and challenged him,” Julin said. “It would have been a different discussion, but he went to the higher ranks. He knew I would have told him, ‘Suck it up, we’re going.’”
Another soldier Walz served with said he remembers Walz telling him he was thinking about leaving after rumors of the deployment spread.
Tim Walz was weighing a life-altering decision when he stepped into a supply room at the National Guard Armory in New Ulm, Minn., nearly two decades ago. He closed the door behind him, recalled a colleague, Al Bonnifield, and confided he was considering whether to leave their unit even though it was preparing to go to war so he could run for Congress…
The deployment to Iraq turned out to be grueling for their unit, which was deployed to Camp Scania, a way station between Baghdad and Kuwait constantly targeted by insurgents with rockets and other long-range fire, Bonnifield said. On the day their deployment was supposed to end, he said, it was extended an extra six months. The soldiers were away from home for a total of 22 months, he said, and multiple people died.
Bonnifield is a Democrat who voted for Walz and doesn’t think he did anything wrong by leaving on the cusp of deployment. He says he might have done the same thing under the circumstances.
So there you have it. The facts are that Walz knew deployment was likely before he quit even though it didn’t become official until a couple months after he quit. Whether that decision was abandoning the unit or not is something the people who were there at the time feel differently about. But the fact remains that some of them do feel Walz ducked combat for a shot at congress and that’s exactly how Vance characterized it yesterday.
Read the full article here
