Category: Phony soldiers

The folks at Military Phony sent us their work on this Wesley Miller fellow. He was genuinely in the Army for nearly nine years and it looks like he served in Iraq with the 101st Airborne Division. He came in the Army as forklift operator and he left the Army as a recruiter. A pretty good career overall.

But I guess he didn’t think it was enough. His wife posted a set of orders a few weeks ago announcing the award of a Purple Heart Medal;

The orders say that he was awarded the medal “Posthumously” – and clearly he’s alive. He also doesn’t have a Combat Action Badge, which would indicate that he had participated in some sort of engagement with the enemy justifying the Purple Heart.

So, you know me, I don’t want to bust people that don’t deserve busting, I called Walter Avery, the man whose signature appears on the orders. He said that he couldn’t comment on the case, but he did tell me that he forwarded the case to the Army’s Criminal Investigation Division (CID) for an investigation and he said that their investigation would lead them to send it to the FBI if it warranted that action. I’m thinking that if there wasn’t anything wrong with the orders, Mr Avery wouldn’t have sent it to the CID.

Anyway, here are the rest of Miller’s records which don’t show any Purple Heart or any reason that he would have earned one;

I’m thinking that Dimbulb, here, thinks that “posthumously” means after his discharge and not realizing that it means after his death. But, you know, these guys are all smarter than the rest of us anyway.

A few weeks a go we wrote about Richard Lee Carr, a fellow whose mind was working pretty good when he told a reporter about his time in Vietnam which, according to him, included some time with the Viet Cong when, as a mechanic, he was shot down and captured.

He was able to escape, and eventually walked into a friendly military encampment. Carr said he was unsure exactly how far he traveled.

“You lay in by day and travel by night,” he said. “You’re scared to death of booby traps, so you travel by inches instead of miles.”

Of course, that turned out to not be true at all. He’d been busted by the old POW Network and since they took down their archives, he thought he could tell his tales again. Well, his local news media found out about his lies from our own AverageNCO and now, Carr claims that his mind hasn’t been right since his stroke;

When contacted last week, Carr claimed he had “never talked to anybody” at the POW Network.

“I don’t know what is going on,” he said, adding he had “forgot a lot of stuff since I had my stroke.”

Schantag confirmed that nobody from the group would have confronted Carr, but that they deal with official records and rely on public exposure of cases of stolen valor. She said Carr has apparently been embellishing his war record for some time, notably in the Branson, Missouri, area around 2007-2008.

He told the story to the media while he was going on an “honor flight”. He would have qualified for the trip just because of his actual honorable service in Vietnam, but I guess he thought that he needed to fluff his story up for the media.

The folks at Military Phony sent us their work on this Keith Mitchell fellow who has been making claims that he was a Marine Corps combat engineer, 1371 (Marine MOS) stationed with 1st Engineers at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, 2005 – 2010.

Yeah, well, no. The Marine Corps has never heard of him;

And his fiance isn’t happy that he lied to her, too;

He’s only 29 years old, so there’s still time for him to join up and deploy if he wants it that bad.

You might remember back in January when we talked about Joe Stetson when he was arrested by Oregon State Troopers for driving under the influence at a gas station when he stopped on his way to the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge near Burns, Oregon to join the militia boys there. Stetson claimed to the troopers that he was a retired special forces colonel whose records had been sealed by Ronald Reagan.

From the New York Daily News;

Joseph Stetson, 54, repeatedly touted his credentials as a retired U.S. Army Green Beret as Oregon State Police troopers cuffed him at 11:45 a.m. Monday.

The allegedly blitzed driver, a New York native, packed a pellet gun and intended to serve as the Bundy brothers’ bodyguard at the embattled Harney County refuge, police said.

[…]

“You unleashed a lethal freakin’ warrior,” said Stetson, whose violent diatribe was captured on body camera footage shared by Harney County Sheriff’s Office.

Well, Hondo tried to get his records anyway. The National Personnel Records center told us that they couldn’t find anything that would indicate that he was ever a member of the military, so Reagan did an especially good job at sealing his records.

I can tell by your faces that you’re shocked at this outcome. His comments at the first link are not indicative of a sane person. The fact that a person served in the military isn’t classified or “sealed” – only in Hollywood does that happen. I have the FOIA records of Delta Force soldiers that indicate their service, but not what they did. Joe Stetson did not serve in the military. Period.

The folks at Guardian of Valor got suspicious when we outed J. Thomas Burch, CEO of the National Vietnam Veterans Foundation for being a phony special forces officer last month. They decided to check into Hans Rudolph Gresham who was on the board of that fine organization. Rudi even convinced Lt. Gen. William P. Yarborough that he had served with the general in Vietnam. You can read that whole story over at GoV along with how he had insinuated himself into the George W. Bush Administration. But for our intents and purposes;

Yeah, special forces, if being a supply clerk, a chaplain’s assistant, a personnel clerk and about four months in a line company in the 82d Airborne Division before a trip to Germany makes you a special forces soldier in Vietnam. He never set foot in Vietnam and he was discharged as a private first class, not a lieutenant colonel.

The folks at Green Beret Posers Exposed sent us this fellow, John Lawton Medlock in Tallahassee, Florida. He claims that he was in Special Forces and that he was among the first in Delta. Funny, though, he can’t name anyone with whom he went through training. Here is his Facebook “About” page;

He loves to wear his 5th Special Forces Group hat, especially when he hangs out with Santa;

The Army doesn’t remember his career that way, though. He was in the service from 1972-1979 as a personnel clerk in the 1st Brigade of the 82d Airborne Division. It looks like he was on his way to Korea in 1978, but something interrupted him;

It probably had something to do with this special court martial;

It looks like it had to do with his clerk stuff, since all of the evidence is DA 4187s – personnel action requests.

And, oh, yeah, he’s a convicted tickle monster in Florida;

Someone sent us their work on this Marshall Morris fellow in Indianapolis, Indiana. According to his LinkedIn profile he claims to have been a “Special Operations Team Leader” who was an “Airborne Ranger attached to Task Force 160th Special Operations Aviation Unit”. I don’t know why 160th SOAR would need an Airborne Ranger since it’s an aviation unit, but there you go. He also claims that he was awarded a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star Medal with a “valor” device. In another LinkedIn account (he needs two, I guess) Morris claims that he earned those two medals “while saving a fallen soldier in the Gulf War”.

The Army remembers his career differently, though. They say he was discharged in June 1991 after his service in the Gulf War with the 101st Airborne Division. He served four years like he claims, but he trained as an “11 Charlie” mortarman and left the service as a specialist (E-4).

He earned an Air Assault badge, Parachute Badge and a Good Conduct Medal, but no Purple Heart, no Bronze Star Medal with or without a “Valor” device. He was an infantryman in Desert Storm, but I don’t see a Combat Infantry Badge, so I don’t know what’s up with that. He also has only 2 Service Stars on his Southwest Asia Service Medal, so that makes me think that he left the Gulf before the Ground War began for some reason. But there’s no Ranger training, no Special Forces training, no assignment to the 160th SOAR.

Rachel sends us a link to the story of Eric Wolfe out in Arizona who has found himself in a bit of a mess there. According to the state Department of Transportation, he tried to get a veteran designation on his driver license and specialty plates designating the same using a forged DD 214;

At one time, Wolfe partnered with a Valley nonprofit benefiting animals to train dogs for veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder, using his story of a military career and subsequent PTSD.

In March, Wolfe supplied a falsified DD Form 214, the document a member of the military gets when being formally discharged, to a Motor Vehicle Division representative when applying for the driver license designation reserved for veterans. Alerted by investigators from the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs Office of Inspector General that Wolfe never served in the U.S. Air Force, as he has claimed, ADOT detectives started an investigation and determined that the form was forged.

Wolfe used the same forged military document to apply for two specialty license plates designated for veterans, one for his vehicle in March and one for a newly purchased motorcycle about two months later.

Dude looks to be a border-line midget, I guess he figured he’d not get caught if he said he was Air Force it would be more believable than one of the other services.

The Arizona DOT wants to talk to you if you made donations to Wolfe, there’s contact information at the link.

ADDED: From ABC13;

Wolfe claimed he had suffered from PTSD himself after a deployment to Afghanistan as a canine bomb handler.

Dogs and PTSD – like no one thought of that before.

From KTAR;

Earl Fisher with ADOT said Wolfe used the paperwork of a veteran to forge his own copy.

“He took this (form), belonging to another veteran, and placed his own name and Social Security number on it,” Fisher said.