PCS sends us a link to the latest “reportage” (and I use the term ever-so-loosely) from Erica Perdue, who started this whole Anthony Vanderhoof thing. Here’s the link, and a screen shot (because ABC12 has just removed the video and the link to their article, so I’m back to pirating screen shots to maintain the integrity of this blog.
Now, I’m pretty sure that the Navy has no records of Vanderhoof selling trinkets like the headline says, why would they? I’m aware that editors usually write the headlines of articles, Erica’s editor needs to be fired.
In the meantime, Terry Camp who wrote the article in the ABC12 website told me that he was going to address the issue with his editor. It appears that the editor’s solution was to pull the video and the story and running this tiny little disclaimer leaving Saginaw with the impression that a Navy SEAL is homeless on their streets.
Of course Vanderhoof is still claiming he’s a SEAL. With dunderheaded reporters (and their editors) like these, why would he stop? They should have reinterviewed him with a couple of Saginaw’s finest in attendance.
AverageNCO sends us a slew of links to this smoldering turd by the name of David Groves of Utah who although POW Network outed him in 2005, he’s still playing the part of a POW who escaped from the Vietnamese after six months of imprisonment. The problem is that he didn’t enlist until November 1973, according to his records. Since by November 1973, the combat troops had left Vietnam, that’s hardly possible. Here’s an article from the Salt Lake Tribune;
One of the three Vietnam POWs honored Friday, Dave Groves, of West Jordan, was a Green Beret in the Army’s 5th Special Forces when his unit was ambushed while on patrol. He was the only survivor, shot in his upper leg and captured by the North Vietnamese.
He spent six months in a prison camp before he and other American servicemen escaped. “We lived in the jungle for two weeks. We ate off the land,” Groves recalled Friday.
Eventually, they came across a Marine patrol and were rescued. Groves, who had grown up in Santa Fe, N.M., served four more years in the Army before returning to civilian life. He later moved to Utah and worked many years for the West Jordan street department.
His idiot story will live on after he’s gone (which can’t come soon enough) as a local “Veterans Day Honoree” by the University of Utah;
David Groves enlisted in the Army in 1962 and joined the paratroopers. He volunteered to serve with the Army’s 5th Special Forces Group, one of first Green Beret units in Vietnam. Groves fought the Viet Cong in frequent close-quarter engagements. During his second tour in Vietnam, he was wounded in a VC ambush and captured . He was starved and tortured for six months until eluding his guards and hiding in the jungle for two weeks. He was finally able to contact U.S. Marines and reunited with U.S. forces. Groves is the recipient of three Silver Stars, three Bronze Stars and two Crosses of Gallantry.
And the local TV station uses this photo of Groves in the introduction to their report on a gathering of POWs; (more…)
We discussed Brian Camacho earlier this month, here and here. He convinced the folks at Military Minds to fly him to Canada for treatment of his PTSD that he caught on his multiple deployments as a MARSOC stud to Iraq and Afghanistan.
Redacted1775 sends us a link to Gina Cavallaro of the Marine Corps Times who has been following up on the story;
And he won’t, because according to Brian Khan’s brother, Ian Khan, the 45-year-old has never served in the military.
“My brother’s a fraud. He’s obsessed with the Marine Corps but he never went in,” Ian Khan said in a phone interview.
It became clear that Camacho was really Brian Khan after a cursory search for him and his likeness online. Though his Facebook page quickly vanished after the fraud was uncovered, videos of him and his kids at a cellphone store in Harrisburg, and his true last name, were an easy match with his kids’ Facebook pages and those of other family members.
At a loss to explain his brother’s eagle, globe and anchor tattoo, Ian Khan said, “It’s all a game to him. He really believes that he went to Iraq and Afghanistan.”
Yes, his name is really Brian Khan and he’s freakin’ 45 years old and still playing dress-up. He’s never spent a day in the military, but, obviously, he has enough money to buy up all kinds of shit to stick on his uniforms. Maybe he caught the PTSD from his uniforms, especially if he’d bought them in surplus stores and the former owner had the PTSD. You just can’t get the PTSD virus out of your clothes.
So, if you’re in Philadelphia and see the little turd wearing his fake finery about town, send him our regards.
Someone, who wants to remain anonymous, contacted me last night on Facebook. The gentleman told me that he was Jake Diliberto’s unit when the unit deployed to Afghanistan. Jake Diliberto is one of the founders of the organization “Rethink Afghanistan” which opposes the war against terror in Afghanistan.
Jake has been on Larry King, al Jazeera and Russia TV using his supposed service in Afghanistan as his “moral authority” on speaking to that issue. We’ve written about him in the past. Most recently, he was quoted by Adam Weinstein in Mother Jones, as Jake is also a Ron Paul supporter – another one of those combat veterans for Ron Paul. And Diliberto is a pal of Adam Kokesh. Anyway, here’s Diliberto on Larry King. King tells his audience that Diliberto is an Iraq and Afghanistan veteran at about 1:45 into the video;
Anyway, this person on Facebook told me last night that their Marine Corps unit did deploy to Afghanistan, but that Diliberto only got as far as Pakistan, when he fell asleep on guard duty and his leadership lost confidence in him and sent him back to the ship to pull kitchen duty while they continued on to Afghanistan.
I contacted Diliberto this morning to verify this information, he deleted my post to his wall saying that he didn’t want “hate mail” on his FB page. Of course, it wasn’t “hate mail”, I just asked Jake if it was true.
So we had a PM discussion on FB and all he would tell me is that the story is inaccurate. He wouldn’t explain how it was inaccurate. I asked him if he had been to Iraq, he responded that he had, but that his records showed that he was in Kuwait and not Iraq and that he was a “security augment” and not involved in combat operations. I told him he should show me his DD214 and he wanted me to make the trip to DC to see it. When I said he could email it to me, he dropped the subject abruptly.
Diliberto claimed that he had tried to be honest about his military service, but if you watched the video of the Larry King Show, did anyone notice whether or not Jake corrected Larry when he said Jake was an Iraq and Afghanistan War veteran? And where would Larry get the idea that Jake had deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan if Jake hadn’t told one of the producers that before the show?
When I made the point that Jake is no better than Matthis, he got huffy. But at least Matthis was inside Afghanistan, no matter how briefly. Jake never made it that far and still calls himself an Afghanistan veteran.
So sorry, I don’t have paperwork, but I could publish the Facebook discussion I had with Jake and you can judge for yourself how much of this is true or not. Like I said, he only told me that the story was inaccurate, but he wouldn’t tell me how it was inaccurate. He didn’t deny that he wasn’t deployed to Afghanistan, so this guy who came to me last night says he can assemble several others who served with Diliberto to verify his account. Diliberto won’t even send me his DD214 to prove them wrong. Yep, it’s all circumstantial, but the circumstances aren’t Diliberto’s friends.
Your emails and Doug Sterner’s activism is apparently having some impact in the case of Carl John Pequignot who we discussed the other day. The News Sentinel is now questioning their own article from more than a year ago about him. Kevin Leininger writes;
When I wrote about Carl John Pequignot last April 23 in a front-page column headlined “The soldier the Japanese Couldn’t Kill,” the story generated a lot of interest – much of it from veterans and others across the country who doubted whether any of it was true. Although the 85-year-old Pequignot stands by his account, skepticism from credible individuals and groups, based on official military records indicating Pequignot didn’t even leave the United States until the fighting had ended, have now cast too much doubt to be ignored.
Pequignot, however, contends the record is wrong and insists his story would be corroborated by records that were thrown out or destroyed by his ex-wife.
“Many of the places on that summary, I’ve never been,” he said. “The service can be very wrong. I don’t know where they get this information. I don’t know why they’re doing what they’re doing. How I got caught up in this mess I’ll never know.”
Ex-wives have destroyed more military records than all of the National Archives fires put together. It must be hard to let go of a story that he cultivated for decades. All of that forgery work tossed out the window.
The Military Order of the Purple Heart, an organization of people wounded in combat, is even more direct. On April 5, National Adjutant John Leonard III wrote to Pequignot in response to questions he had received about the validity of Pequignot’s story. Noting that Pequignot’s alleged unit was not on Okinawa at the time Pequignot cited, Leonard asked Pequignot to provide “sufficient evidence” of his Purple Heart in order to remain a member. Pequignot’s car also bears a Purple Heart license plate.
Yeah, if the unit wasn’t on Okinawa, neither was he, that’s the funny thing about publicly available historical records.
[P]ast Chairman [of the Allen County Council of Veterans Organizations] Craig Savage, a Navy veteran himself, is the most blunt of all.
“I know (Pequignot’s) been lying,” he said. “A lot of guys do it.”
Way too many guys do it. And as long as they think it’s their freedom of speech to do so (thanks Ninth Circuit), they’ll continue to do it. And the internet is our only defense against them.
The author of the previous article told me that the Saginaw News also did an article on Mumbles McQueasy, so I went looking for it and sure enough, the little turd isn’t just telling people that he’s a SEAL, apparently, the SEAL thing is relatively new;
Vanderhoof moved to Saginaw with his parents when he was 13 years old. In 1973, he joined the U.S. Navy.
He was discharged two years later and went to California to look for a job.
“I found a job. A different job. I became a body guard for Randolph Hearst. It was right after the incident with his daughter,” said Vanderhoof referring to the 1974 kidnapping of Patty Hearst when she was 19 years old.
“If anybody wanted to see Hearst, they had to to see first. I searched everyone looking for weapons. There were a few incidents but nothing serious,” said Vanderhoof.
He moved back to Saginaw in 1979 to be with his parents and siblings who lived in the city.
“I lost some of my toes in an accident, the toes on my right foot. But I can still walk. I’ve gotten pretty used to it,” he said.
He’s a regular Forrest Gump, ain’t he?
The toes he lost in a landmine “game of tag” were now lost in an accident. He was probably chewing on them. And i’m surprised that he found the Department of Veterans’ Affairs, since he can’t spell “veteran” (see the sign), or “please” or “donation” or “disabled”.
Yeah I knew this guy was FOS when I saw him in the link sent to us by PCS, but I went through the motions of verifying first with POW Network and Captain Larry Bailey. A local news station found Anthony Vanderhoof on a street corner in Saginaw selling cheap plastic crap to get by;
For the last several weeks, a former Navy Seal has been on a street corner in Saginaw, on another mission: A mission of survival.
“When I came home, I was spit on and called a baby killer, all that,” said Anthony Vanderhoof, disabled Vietnam veteran.
Vanderhoof says that’s how he was treated when he returned from Vietnam in 1975, but while those words hurt, he says, in a way, they were accurate.
“I unwrapped a baby, it was wrapped up in grenades, so it was a bomb. There were 7,000 men in Da Nang, that would have destroyed the base.”
He has that memory from the war, and there was also the time he was injured.
“I played tag with a landmine, lost my toes, got into a firefight, I was hit and on my left hand, I lost my index finger,” he said.
The disabled veteran now lives in a Saginaw apartment and is just getting by on Social Security disability payments.
“All that does is pay my bills and utilities. I have no money for myself,” Vanderhoof said.
Vanderhoof had a steady job until 2005, but hasn’t been able to get a job since. He says he has applied to the Veteran’s Administration for other benefits, and is waiting to see if he is eligible for other financial assistance.
Yeah, Mary says that he doesn’t appear in her database of Vietnam veterans. She also points out that combat troops were withdrawn from Vietnam in 1973, and Vanderhoof says he came back in 1975, of course because he’s a secret fucking squirrel. He even holds up the place where the finger he lost in the war used to be. Well played Anthony. And a baby wrapped in enough grenades to blow up the base at Da Nang would have to be moved by a truck.
I’ve emailed the author of the story and I’m awaiting a response but there’s strength in numbers; terry.r.camp@abc12.com .
Obviously, he fit the stereotypes, so they didn’t have to check on him. I’m pretty sure Mumbles McQueasy couldn’t even get into the military, unless he was in Jimmy Carter’s VolAr with his 64 GT score. I think it’s pretty disgusting that the author thought this guy could have been a SEAL – they do have standards after all.
Veteran Robert Vaughn, in front wearing a hat, waits for the Ride of Pride journey to Washington, DC. The group gathered at the Cleveland Freightliner Plant for the send off ceremony centered around the patriotic custom designed Freightliner Cascadia truck. Vaughn is a VietNam vet with 72 decorations during the 5 years he was in VietNam in the 101 Airborn.
72 decorations is probably pushing it. And five years in Vietnam was probably more rare than journalists might think. The picture was taken at the freightline plant in Cleveland, NC
