He is back in prison. There are no firm estimates on the number of fake combat vets. Yep, that was my outfit, he said. Burkett predicted that half would be frauds. Vietnam Vets, Are There Any Vietnam Vets Still Alive Fully Explained Im not sure why this has become such an issue here but I If fact it is close to the total that served and suggests that Viet vets don't die as quickly as others.Either the 2010 figures haven't been digested yet or I could not find them. For a very long time I couldn't summon up the courage to stop it. Although it was said that no reputable site had posted veterans of which according to other sources, about 2.7 actually served in "Man, I was scared to death. In 1999, Donald R. Nicholson, the police chief of Amelia, Missouri, in the 1980s, admitted that he had lied about being a Vietnam veteran and a prisoner of war to obtain better veterans benefits. How Many Vietnam Veterans Are Still Alive In 2022? There have been hundreds of fakers exposed in the press in the does not seem to be accurate and my review of the census doesnt bear this out. served in-country, on those who served in areas surrounding Vietnam such as Thailand, Guam and in the deep water Navy, and some statistics on those What I havent found It lasted about three years. the same that has been used at many of the sites that I visited. I cant find good numbers on They're all around you. I think I have finally unraveled the great Vietnam Veteran impostors statistics. 1,713,823 of those who served in Vietnam were still alive as of August, 1995 (CENSUS FIGURES). Dennehy later gave a public apology. His first stop was the U.S. Department of Labor, where an economist dredged up some figures showing that Vietnam veterans, as a group, had the lowest unemployment rate in the nation of any group listed in the department's tables. Fake Vietnam combat vets UPI NewsFeature - UPI Archives He had been a prisoner, but not in Vietnam. How many times do these real FACTS have to be repeated?BTW Kevin, you should do a Google search on The Vietnam Veterans Fund which was closed down only a few months ago by New York for charity fraud, raising $9 million a year, mostly from veterans, but distributing only 2% for charity purposes. Seven years later, Chuck and Mary Schantag, whose P.O.W. Is this evidence of ~200,000 fakers, or is there some other explanation, such as how you define active duty military personnel? I found out quickly IF I listed military service, early on for jobs, I did not get the job!Its only since 9/11, that I did start seeing 'Nam unit hats!When I see one or a bumper sticker & the vast majority seem to be genuine. So I turned the television on and checked the local news. Service Members, Not Citizens: Meet The Veterans Who Have Been - NPR I retired in the year 2001. Heres parlance of those of us who were there), I found a number of them. in the census documents is a number for those falsely claiming Vietnam service. Vietnam War veterans, and their families, are being invited to this event to be held at the National Mall on May 11, 12, and 13. Fakery was reportedly widespread during the Civil War and its long aftermath. ), It seems, I dont think its particularly modern., I cant prove that there were phonies among King Arthurs Knights of the Round Table, Burkett said. I don't need to pretend to be some super secret squirrel sniper badass force recon dude. is in agreement that there were only , 1,713,823 recorded by the census in 1990 and 2000. Some of the statistics being Quora - A place to share knowledge and better understand the world It is headed by Bob Castagna of Talent, Ore., whose been accused of being a bogus combat vet himself. These The result is that for more than 25 years, many Americans have thought of Viet vets as jobless, homeless, addicted, suicidal or deranged "victim-heroes.". On the US Census web site www.census.gov/prod/cen1990/cp2/cp-2-1.pdf on page 45 there is a chart that lists veterans and which era they served in. Burkett verified that the movie tough guy was indeed a former Marine but had been discharged in 1963, before any Marines were sent to Vietnam. This is Richard Blumenthal Not the First Public Official to Misstate Military Well, to cite my own anecdotal experience, I have run into many people claiming to be Vietnam vets. a regular post. 76% of the men sent to Vietnam were from lower middle/working class backgrounds. 'My pretense took on a life of its own and almost became real. of other fakers. Most claim to have been on a ship in the South China Sea, but never got near the country. According to a January 1893 article about veterans pensions in Harpers New Monthly Magazine, during a three-year period ending in 1879, out of 4,397 affidavits filed for wartime pensions, 3,084 were false at a cost to the government of more than a half million dollars. Starting on page 12 of this pdf in parts No. I have been unable to find that precise survey, but this seems to be the place where the 13,853,027 number of impostors comes from. In 1995, Burkett helped an Oregon newspaper uncover Republican U.S. Rep. Wes Cooley's false claims of Army service in the Korean War. Accounts vary as to how Daubmanns lies unraveled, but five months after his glorious return, he admitted hed never served in the German army. bio to reflect his service in the Vietnam era and before anyone says much In an interview with UPI, Castagna said he was a Marine during the Vietnam era, but refused to say if saw combat. What you see in these big lies and to some extent, in some little lies as well is a yearning, DePaulo said. He has a weekly caseload of about two dozen real vets. Of those who said they were in-country most appear to be fake. the wording is where everything slides off the rails. That came from everybody. Now, with this book, we have the evidence.". Reject it if you wish, but that doesn't mean it is wrong and look at all the Stolen Valor sites where you will find claimant after claimant who has been exposed. We have been reduced to repeating ourselves and you actually point me to a source that I pointed you to in the beginning. The Medford Mail Tribune, in Medford, Ore., reported in Maythat Castagna has claimed to have fought in Vietnam, but that his military records show he served in Japan. Another at a Veterans Day celebration couldn't identify where he had served other than up north somewhere and seemed unfamiliar with the tactics employed. I was a Ranger. facts being unverified. Last year, he dropped out of the state's gubernatorial race, admitting he never got closer to Vietnam than peacetime Korea. More than 3.4 million deployed to Southeast Asia (1) and approximately 2.7 million of those served in the Republic of Vietnam (2). combat air patrols over Vietnam but all he had done was fly repaired or new Robert French tells us about his remembered involvement with the Roswell crash, but his military record did not support some of his claims. And? Military vets were among the Capitol Hill rioters, protesters | CNN (I will note that this is also a politically driven But mistakes have been made. Who knows? David -You said, "Kevin, the only reason I waded into this whole 'Stolen Valor' thing to begin with was because you used this Stolen Valor 'statistics' as justification for dismissing most Roswell witnesses, who you said you previously believed. Like many people who had never served in the military -- a growing number in this country, given that the draft ended on June 30, 1973 -- Whitley had only a vague and disconnected notion of a war in Southeast Asia that was tearing the nation apart when she was growing up. Marshal Hanson (and apparently quoted by every vet site as complete gospel), he provides the U.S. Census as the source, just like everybody else:www.veteranstoday.com/2009/02/26/vietnam-facts-vs-fiction/Had you read my post, you would have seen that I quoted this source, including its negative note at the end that was highlighted in yellow and typed in boldface. DePaulo says its not surprising a person already held in high esteem would choose to fabricate a military background. whole record for the breakdown of the numbers. The news must have been slow that day, because the reenactment was the lead story. The Intercept is an independent nonprofit news outlet. (The ONLY question EVER asked by the Census, NOT if they were actually serving in Vietnam.) But the real truth is that nearly everyone was exposed to indirect fire, ground attacks at base camps, and other elements of combat based on the nature of the war. According to research by historian William Marvel, published in a 1991 issue of Blue and Gray, Williams would have been too young to have served in the war. How One Epic Document Exposed the Secrets of the Vietnam War - The New In 2019, approximately 3.4 million Vietnam War Veterans were enrolled for Veterans Health Administration services (12). Are there people involved in the Roswell case who lied? More than a few 20th century men tried to pass themselves off as the last surviving veterans of the Civil War. I called, telling this former Ranger that my guy had claimed to be the assistant platoon leader. Overall, about 3.5 million Americans served in Southeast Asia during the war. Torres came back Monday with a U.S. birth certificate it was fake, but for a good cause, he thought. After nearly 20 years of living thousands of miles from his family so he could claim his French army pension, the old soldier is finally being allowed to return to live in his native Senegal. Vietnam. "It . Its all done for personal gain, he said. 'You can normally tell who is a phony. You know, you could get yourself a sword and say, Hey, Im home from starving in the Mideast with the Crusaders.. He talks too much.'. In 1990 and again in 2000, there was a question on the census long form that asked if the respondent was a Vietnam era veteran, and the number generated there was about 8.4 million. fight over the statistics but there is too much information here. Some men were never in the service, many were in the armed forces but never left the United States or never got the medals they claimed, and a few were in Southeast Asia but were far from any of the hot spots in Vietnam, where the war killed more than 58,000 Americans. The number of personnel serving in Vietnam year by year (No. the giveaway as to their agenda because, as a Vietnam Vet I know that most of Heres As it turned out, my guy wasnt on the list. $174k/yr for a new Daytona in a month. After the war ended, reports began to circulate of veterans so depraved from their war experiences that they turned to crime, with estimates of the number of incarcerated Vietnam veterans as high as . Aren't those the guys who are unemployed and on drugs? to 14 million number originated, how it was collected, or if it was part of Before it was revealed, in 2001, that he spent the war teaching history at West Point, for example, Joseph Ellis was known to lecture his students at Mount Holyoke about his experiences in the vicinity of My Lai at the time of the massacre. It's not just Vietnam fakers: there was a USA Today story some years back about phony Gulf War vets. State Vietnam Veterans Vietnam Veterans (per 100k) Utah 42,774 1,272 How [] John Martin, a volunteer at at a make-shift POW information center in Washington, D.C., near the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, figures he has seen a half-dozen pretenders in the past month alone. It doesn't seem to exist. 9,492,958, and During this Census count, the number of Americans falsely "The ones who always hit me up on the streets, I ask them, 'What was your MOS?' Castagna was quoted by the newspaper as saying the records were in error and that he was even wounded in battle. Missing in Action: How Military Families Spurred the MIA Movement - History That guy, the real Ranger told me, got killed on D-Day. That negative image was fresh in Burketts mind when he decided to help a friend in Dallas raise money for Vietnam veterans a quarter century ago. 'Vietnam veterans? There is no question that there are a large number of them including women who talk about their combat roles and even how they had been POWs. ". but then remembered that if you set foot in a combat zone even for an hour or You have extrapolated meaning into somewhat innocuous sentences. So were 47 claiming to have earned service crosses. Vietnam veterans have a lower unemployment rate than the same non-vet age groups. 'We're becoming more and more aware of it (fake combat vets) and more and more wary of it,' said Mary Stout, national secretary of the 35,000-member, 235-chapter VVA. For further reading, William McMichael recommends: Stolen Valor: How the Vietnam Generation Was Robbed of Its Heroes and Its History, by B.G. In the end, the primary agenda for making up phony facts is the usual one of scammers: $$$$$$$$Yes, there are liars out there, but there is NO VALID evidence for literally millions and millions of Americans claiming to be Vietnam vets who werent, although you obviously still very much want to believe this considering you keep repeating the claim. After killing a prison guard, he said, hed been transferred to a labor camp in French-governed Algeria, where, after years of torture, good behavior had earned him a job as a prison tailor. Jack Smith, head of the VA's National Center for Stress Recovery in Cleveland, said of the 650 persons treated at his facility in the past two years, just six proved to be fakes. VA experts says others fabricate stories to grab attention, or in an effort to get disability benefits for bogus combat injuries or fake post-war stress. In 2003, he addressed a rally in Bridgeport, where about 100 military. Other careers, in a variety of fields, have been damaged by similar disclosures. You can find the figures here:https://www.va.gov/opa/publications/factsheets/fs_americas_wars.pdf Using both the census and the DoD numbers, Navy Captain Scott Beaton conducted a survey for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund. 1999-08-13 04:00:00 PDT Dallas -- Jug Burkett's cozy office high up in a big glass-and- steel tower looks more like the cluttered, haphazard digs of a college professor than the lair of a successful stockbroker. this seems to be correct, I cant find anything in the census figures to REAL Vietnam War veterans are all those who are officially authorized the Vietnam Service medal and possess official military-issued documentation to confirm their medal authorization. I personally believe there are as many American males claiming military service falsely as there are living veterans in America, said B.G. 11 Reasons that Combat Veterans With PTSD Are Being Harmed He said he was a decorated ex-Air Force fighter pilot and former prisoner of war in Vietnam who couldn't get a job. few: http://www.uswings.com/about-us-wings/vietnam-war-facts/, http://www.military.com/forums/0,15240,84591,00.html, http://www.veteranstoday.com/2009/02/26/vietnam-facts-vs-fiction/. I've come across some folks that tell stories that are hard to believe.I was amazed to find a guy, walking in a wash at Arches NP that had a MWSG-17 unit cap, which floored me! claiming to have served in-country is: 13,853,027. 'It was out of the high esteem that I hold for you that I took your honor as my own and in doing so did you a grave injustice.'. Copyright 2023 United Press International, Inc. All Rights Reserved. In Sterners experience, its all about the financial advantages fakers can obtain. 5. Burkett might be accused of hyperbole had he not spent the past 25 years uncovering military fakers, often working with authorities whove come to view him as the real authority. Did you get drafted, go in the military? Rather than say, No, I avoided the draft, the guy says, I dont like talking about it.Well, I was in the Army. You serve overseas? Yeah, I was in Vietnam. The next thing you know, the guys being asked to join the VFW., DePaulo more or less agreed: You say something, almost as a trial balloon. If you are also in a position of power or authority or prestige, then you might also feel less vulnerable, because you think that people wont challenge you, she said. what I do know. And rather than doing the hard work of actually trying to become that person, they just do a shortcut of claiming to be that person., DePaulo believes that most people who tell such lies probably are doing so consciously. How Many Vietnam Veterans Are Still Alive? - MilitaryPerson.com Foreign Wars (VFW) magazine and from the Reserve Officers Association magazine which Some individuals who do this also wear privately obtained uniforms or medals which were never officially . They are NOT to be used for official government findings Bob Fazio, chapter president, refuses to discuss if Castagna was a combat vet. There is no hard count of how many people have lied about their military service, but one of the best sources on the topic thinks the number is in the millions. 'It tears you up inside to see this sort of thing.'. As for Burkett, he still gets calls from cops seeking advice on how to run records, or even from skeptical wives and girlfriends who suspect their men may be playing a bit loose with the truth about their exploits in "the 'Nam." statement. "But, you know, maybe I'll do a book on all the heroes of Vietnam. Slessler said many of the imposters he sees suffer from 'survivor guilt.' have been able to find reliable statistics on the number of men and women who "I lied about serving in Vietnam and I'm sorry," he told Globe magazine this year. In the military-rich Hampton Roads region, we struck gold: From the pilots who flew the paratroopers to the infantrymen who stormed the beaches, I was able to relate the entire D-Day narrative chronologically, all through veterans eyes. What did you do?, I was in the Army, the voice replied. I know that there are many Regardless of what they thought of you before, theres suddenly more substance to you., The lie often starts modestly, Burkett said. OUT OF FIVE WHO CLAIM TO BE Vietnam vets are not. (Yes, this is somewhat His story was detailed, yet he under played his role. At about 11 p.m., I remembered that local enthusiasts were reenacting the Normandy invasion on the beach at Fort Story, an Army base nearby. Williams was said to be 117 years old at his death in 1959 in Houston, Texas. He had served time in Georgia for auto theft. His was the classic story, embraced and portrayed by the media in endless permutations until it became the stuff of legend. The Secrets and Lies of the Vietnam War, Exposed in One Epic Document. On this Memorial Day 2021, VA honors their service and recommits itself to . Kevin, the only reason I waded into this whole Stolen Valor thing to begin with was because you used this Stolen Valor statistics as justification for dismissing most Roswell witnesses, who you said you previously believed. Committee votes on major defense policy bill expected in May, Military families share workout with first lady Jill Biden, US conducts first evacuation of its citizens from Sudan war, Ukrainian drones strike Crimea oil depot, Russian official says, Army identifies 3 soldiers killed in Alaska helicopter crash, Understanding the role of artificial intelligence, Mark Kitz keynote speech at the C4ISRNET conference, The latest on software, data and artificial intelligence, Army grounds helicopter fleet for force-wide safety stand down. Retired Robert Bateman, who teaches military history at West Point. Cooley had claimed Korean War service with Army Special Forces. Blank says despite the problems, fakes can be screened out, often through military records, sometimes just by having them interviewed by vets. I'm interested in real vets who have their own problems.'. I now sometimes wear a hat & look forward to talking to other 'Nam vets.But, for those, playing, I just shake my head.MOS 1141 ElectricianUSMC/DogpatchFeb '69/March '70Semper Fidelis. They want to be around real vets,' said Martin. More than 8 million people served in uniform during Vietnam and those who are alive are typically in their 60s and 70s. figures).. What Medals Can A Vietnam Era Veteran Wear? - CLJ Someone An informal survey by United Press International of about a dozen VA facilities, veteran employment services and vet groups found that all had seen fake combat vets in the past year, most in rising numbers. The alleged 13.8 million fakers or four out of five who claim to be Vietnam vets is CLEARLY stated as being based on U.S. CENSUS DATA, not some independent survey. (If you are interested in pursuing this, just type Stolen Valor into your search engine and see the numbers of those caught pretending to be what they are not.). Burkett, who served as an Army lieutenant in Vietnam during the war -- he stresses he was no hero and simply did his job as an ordnance officer -- has investigated more than 2,000 cases and found. This has become pointless and I just dont any more time to devote to it. "I'd say, 'Well, I'm a Vietnam veteran,' and they'd say, 'but you seem so normal.' There have been cases too, such as with Maughn, where once a vet gets a copy of his form, he doctors it to show combat service. address this in a comment rather than a new post so not to annoy those of you He said that 90% of the Vietnam Veterans never saw combat but that is probably based on the idea that for every service member in combat there were nine supporting him. aircraft into Vietnam. Very rare and usually done by people looking for high profile jobs. Good grief, I thought. awards and decorations they did not earn. Lest Burkett sound like some wild-eyed zealot, seeking phonies at every turn of a Memorial Day parade, he likes to point out that he fell into this avocation by accident and, now that his book is out, wonders how much longer he is going to be called upon as the nation's expert in tracking down military records. ago. I certainly haven't come across it personally. All too often, these suffering "veterans" never set foot in Vietnam and yet, the images they offer have permanently shaped the way Americans view soldiers from this war: As slovenly,. however, that the information is not drawn from the 1990 census and might be related to one that claiming Vietnam service who were not there and that there are many claiming The 'Some claim to be vets just out of a need to be macho.'. B.G. I run into far more than my share of World War II fakers, said Sterner. I don't think this matter to anyone but us anyway. Vietnam War Facts, Stats and Myths - US Wings With the Pentagon Papers revelations, the U.S. public's trust in the government was forever diminished. Instead the standard Census question on the long form is whether somebody has ever been active duty military and lists multiple war and peace eras, including the Vietnam era from 1964-1975. In 2007 Xavier Alvarez, a member of the Three Valleys Water Board in Claremont, California, was asked during a visit to a neighboring board if he wanted to introduce himself. an email address so they might have been there and I therefore did not find the Women Vietnam Veterans and PTSDAnother paper using data from the HealthVIEWS study, published in 2015, found that 20.1 percent of women Veterans who served in Vietnam have . 'I'm not going to say we don't care. Sources: "Stolen Valor" by B.G. But tracking this back to the US Some are just shysters,' he said. He was telling the truth about prison, it turned out; but hed done time for burglary, not as a POW. magazine so that I have nothing on their sources. You'd need to make $108k/yr after-tax annually to afford a Datejust in a month's time. There were an estimated 58,318 U.S. soldier casualties alone. And 97 percent of Vietnam veterans received honorable discharges, exactly the same rate for the military in the peaceful 10 years prior to the war. I then told him what Id learned and asked, Did you lie to me?, In a voice that suddenly sounded creaky and 10 years older yet sort of childlike, as though fearing a reprimand he replied, slowly, Yes.. This is well within the range of possibility. That is the one common thread., In Burketts mind, most fakers do so because of low self-esteem. REALITY: Cooley's Army records indicated no Korean service - he did not even finish training until after the war ended. In 1932 a German, Oscar Daubmann, turned up in his homeland claiming hed been a French prisoner of war for the previous 16 years after his capture at the 1916 Battle of the Somme. We don't have ads, so we depend on our members 35,000 and counting to help us hold the powerful to account. The Schantags discovered that 24 of those were false entries. The My Lai Massacre and other news stories created for some a public image of troops as baby killers, an image since exacerbated by films such as 1986s Platoon. The post-Vietnam period recorded countless news accounts of hundreds of thousands of angry and sometimes homeless and desperate veterans. an ex-Marine who survived combat during two tours of Vietnam, a record he used as a motivational tool. Along the way, Burkett has picked up a few enemies: "There had been some threats, and the brokers and secretaries were afraid of being killed, so they moved me way down the hall to this office." It's not as widespread as it was the first 10-30 years immediately after the war,its still out there. Thats eight individuals in the Seattle area, in one bust, said Doug Sterner, a longtime private watchdog who now maintains the Military Times newspapers Hall of Valor database. Really?As for another claimed but phony reference used by vet websites, the Census Statistical Abstract of the United States: 1995, that allegedly has that 13+ million Vietnam veterans statistic, that Census Report can be found here:www.census.gov/library/publications/1995/compendia/statab/115ed.htmlThis provides a link to Section 11 pertaining to military and veteran statistics:www2.census.gov/library/publications/1995/compendia/statab/115ed/tables/defense.pdfWhere, AGAIN, nowhere can be found anything like 13 or 14 million people that allegedly the U.S. Census documented people saying they were Vietnam Vets. and reports. My newspaper, the Daily Press of Newport News, Virginia, published an open invitation for those who had taken part in the grand and awful amphibious assault to contact us and share their stories. ', 'For years, Vietnam vets were portrayed as crazies. Originally published in the March 2010 issue of Military History. I did find a claim That same year, however, American journalist Lowell K. Bridwell wrote that he couldnt find one single scrap of evidence to verify Williams age or veteran status. "I think Jug Burkett is doing something truly from the heart and something that is truly important," says Vietnam veteran James Webb, author of the Vietnam War novel "Fields of Fire" and a former secretary of the Navy. Tag Archives: Fake Vietnam Veteran - militaryphony.com Vietnam War Veterans, and honoring all who served: Memorial Day 2021 Disclosure of the facts contributed to his demise. DURING THIS CENSUS COUNT, the number of Americans falsely claiming to have served in-country is: 13,853,027. Burkett, Chronicle News Services, Associated Press photos, Unmasking Phony `Vietnam Vets' / Fakes big factor in negative image, Texas author finds, Dubs fans picking apart video of possible Poole-Draymond incident, Bay Area preschool teacher suspected of dumping body along road, Bay Area mom influencer found guilty of lying about kidnapping, More rain, 'unseasonably chilly' temperatures coming to Bay Area, 'Horrible': Oakland rapper dumps on Chase Center Warriors fans, Destructive landslide closes historic California institution, 49ers out in full force at Warriors-Kings Game 7, Sold-out Berkeley crowd gets rowdy at country star's concert, Shock, fear as 2 killings in 3 days rock quiet Davis. How many Vietnam veterans are still alive? (2023) As I say again, the alleged 10+ million Vietnam vet fakers figure, promoted by various Vet organizations and publications, has absolutely no basis in fact, no actual documentation anywhere to support it, certainly not any ACTUAL Census report that has been cited repeatedly as a reference. Burkett was able to prove that Yandle had never been in combat.
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