Hardly after the Harris campaign announced Governor Tim Walz as Kamala Harris’s running mate in the 2024 presidential election, the scrutinizing began of his military service narrative. Everything has been probed, from Walz’s actual rank (sergeant major versus command sergeant major); the timing of his withdrawal/retirement from the National Guard shortly before his battalion was scheduled for an active-duty Iraq deployment; the nature of his service (“garrison duty” in Italy in support of Operation Enduring Freedom versus actual war-fighting in Afghanistan); and his portrayal of citizen-soldier community awards. And with each of these subjects, Walz’s characterization has frequently been found wanting in strict accuracy.
This has prompted charges of “stolen valor” from some (frequently, but not solely, partisan) quarters. A group of 50 Republicans holding office who are also military veterans published a public letter to Governor Walz condemning these “egregious misrepresentations” on August 21. This was answered promptly by the Harris campaign sharing a statement by progressive political action committee VoteVets, calling out several of the letter’s signatories for misrepresenting their own service records. (Notably, Texas Congressman Rony Jackson, for continuing to call himself a retired rear admiral rather than a retired captain despite his rank having been reduced as a result of a 2021 Pentagon investigation into his conduct as a White House physician.)
Is this just another squabbling descent into finger-pointing political partisanship with veteran characteristics due to the latest high-stakes election cycle in the United States? Or does the squabbling reveal the dynamics of legitimate, historical concerns about the uses and abuses of military service—for professional purposes in general, but on the campaign trail in particular?
The answer is regrettably yes and no; it’s complicated. Ben Kesling, himself an author and former Wall Street Journal reporter who served as a Marine Corps infantryman and deployed to Afghanistan and Iraq, has published a succinct, informative little primer for Politico for confused civilians. Kesling notes that one fundamental issue here is language—military terminology. “Just as people might not fully recognize the subtlety of a foreign language’s words and phrases, civilians frequently miss—or misinterpret—the language service members use to talk about the nature and scope of their service.”
But as Kesling also notes, that widespread unfamiliarity of most American citizens with anything having to do with the military also translates into a very humanly understandable, easily exploitable situation when veterans turned political candidates go along with misleading overgeneralizations about the nature of contemporary military service and their own service histories. Kesling points to the educative efforts of (Iraq war veteran) former Rep. Peter Meijer on X (formerly Twitter) to dissect “the complicated nature of understanding Walz’s record and the way he has handled discussing it,” to show how this all can happen in real life situations despite the veteran’s best intentions. But as Meijier also alludes to, even if the veteran doesn’t have the opportunity in the heat of the moment of a live discussion, for instance, to correct an inaccurate description of his or her military service, it’s one thing to clarify after the fact, and it’s another to allow those misrepresentations to continue to be perpetuated in speech and writing, especially by one’s own campaign.
Kesling emphasizes that there’s “generally a code among veterans and the public that anyone who served in the military deserves thanks for their service, but if someone even vaguely claims to have done more than their record bears out, veterans become ruthless in their criticism.” Why this latter is so is part of an open secret in the veteran community, what Kesling calls veterans eating their own. But there are deeper social and historical currents to these surface kerfuffles, as I’ve attempted to explain in previous work.
As I delved into onIWF.org in “Not All Veterans Are Created Equal”, the very word “veteran” doesn’t even have one consistent definition, in part because the U.S. military is no monolith. No individual joins “the military,” but a particular service branch, in a particular designation, with a specific military occupational specialty, at a specific moment in history, that defines the contours of one’s service (wartime, peacetime, All-Volunteer Force, conscript-era, active duty, reserve duty, National Guard, for instance). And, as I explored in “The Veteran” for American Purpose, these differences are very much historical, and tend to bubble up to more public notice, especially during election seasons when politically-minded veterans decide to run for elected office, and mistakenly believe that emphasizing their military record over any policy platforms will result in triumph at the ballot box. Stay tuned for additional pieces from me, exploring further aspects of how veterans and the public alike should think about military service on the campaign trail.
What we are currently terming the “stolen valor” debate (itself an unfortunate overgeneralizing use of the term, as Kesling also points out) is not something new to the 2024 presidential election. It’s been ongoing since America first held elections after ratifying the new United States Constitution. But the persistence of the phenomenon should remind us all of this more fundamental truth: when military veterans run for political office, they are all choosing to act no longer apolitically or nonpolitically. They are now politicians. Given the high electoral stakes for the veteran and the general public’s lack of attention and knowledge of military things, the temptation for the veteran to bank on the public’s “Thank you for your service” attitude and to purposefully misrepresent their service is great indeed. The voting public has every right, and a duty even, to maintain an informed skepticism about those who would use the fact of having worn the nation’s uniform as a proxy for character and actual policy positions.
