Category: Phony soldiers

The St Louis Dispatch tells the story of Mark B. Chartrand, of St Louis who makes Kyle Barwan look like a piker;

While on a trip to California while using another name, Chartrand showed his Purple Heart to his Airbnb hosts, and in consideration of that, they allowed him to stay even though his bill was delinquent, Albus said. They also loaned him money for car repairs, he said.

In all, received about $4,300 from his hosts before returning home, Albus said.

Chartrand pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor, which carries a maximum penalty of a year in prison and a fine of $100,000. He will also have to pay restitution. He still faces bad check charges in St. Louis and Jefferson County, court records show.

They also report that he was arrested in 2012 for pretending to be a federal agent and using that ruse to borrow money from his girlfriend. He got five years probation for that stunt.

Someone sent us their work on this Riley Williams fellow. He claims to have served in the Army infantry “during the war in Afghanistan” in this article from the Webster University Journal;

Williams spent his life in the U.S. Army as an infantryman when the U.S. was at war with Afghanistan. Those in the infantry are considered to be the mainland combat force and backbone of the army, according to Go Army. Although Williams did not go into detail about his time spent in the service, he did explain his realization behind his artworks concept.

“If you apply the realistic idea of what [war] is, and what it’s doing to the world or someone else, you don’t want to apply it to play anymore,” Williams said.

When it came to trauma, art was Williams’ comfort space. He said he has turned to art his whole life. In fourth grade, Williams’ family moved from California to North Carolina. The culture shock between the two communities sent him into solitude with a pen and paper. He began doodling as an escape. Williams didn’t really fall in love with art until after he was out of the military. The escape he once sought out in art during his younger age became more necessary.

The reason that he probably didn’t want to talk about his time in the Army is because he only had 56 days of it. He spent almost that much time at MEPS waiting to start his military career.

Of course we hear that his lies go much further than he expresses in the article, but without proof, I won’t publish rumors here.

The folks at Green Beret Posers Exposed discovered this fellow, Cesar Lorenzo, who claims the whole empanada – Ranger, Special Forces, combat veteran in the Viet of the Nam. In a video at Stories of Service he correctly tells his interviewer that he was born in 1954, but then he says that he joined the Army in 1968, when he was 15 years old (do the math, Cesar) and then he recounts his derring-do – you really have listen to it in order to appreciate the depth of the BS.

Here’s a teaser; he says he was in the 187th Ranger Battalion. He was also a POW and tortured for several days until he escaped and made his way back to US forces. But he doesn’t want to talk about it.

The Army doesn’t remember it that way;

Yeah, he joined seven years after 1968 in 1975, more than a month after Saigon fell to the communists. He was an artilleryman, so not Ranger or Special Forces qualified. His only deployment after 3 1/2 months on active duty, was to an Army Reserve unit in New York, not even close to Vietnam. He spent six years in the Army Reserves, got an honorable discharge as a Specialist (E-4) and then he shat upon his military career with tales of PTSD and heroism in a place where he never served.

Someone sent us their work on this Clarence Medeiros from Hawaii. He was featured in a story in West Hawaii Today about his time in the Army;

He enlisted at age 17, a natural step for someone whose male relatives had served in the armed forces.

But the U.S. Army was not going to send someone too young to vote to fight in Vietnam and stationed him outside of Washington, D.C., instead. While there he went to his commander, then the commanding general’s office, to get redeployed. Sens. Daniel Inouye and Spark Matsunaga both made sure he wanted the transfer.

It looks like he did enlist at the age of 17, but Senator Spark Matsunaga must have visited him from the future because he didn’t get to the Senate until 1977.

Medeiros wasn’t solely a tunnel man, as he was part of a group of specialists that recovered broken tanker trucks, built defenses, destroyed those defenses and what would be a public works project in a peacetime area.

That capacity wasn’t always safe, as seen during a firefight out of an abandoned LZ, but the tunnels have a special place for him. He avoided injury through the observation that delay was dangerous. If there was a lag between the tunnel being found and the soldier going in, the North Vietnamese would turn the tunnel deadly. So, whenever a service member found a hole, he was there as soon as possible.

“They were studying us as much as we were studying them,” he said.

They would vacate the area when the Americans showed up.

Sometimes the unit would send the unit’s dog in first to check to see if there was a trap or anyone down there. But it always came down to Medeiros going down into the unlit system, checking the way ahead with a flashlight, periodically prodding the tunnel for traps with his bayonet, with a .45 caliber pistol ready.

There is one in particular that has remained in his memory.

He was called in and went down into the complete blackness only possible in a hand-dug tunnel. The tunnel seemed to go on forever, but nothing sprang up at him. No traps poisoned him, no North Vietnamese shot him. Unexpectedly, the tunnel opened into a space with two coffins that was large enough to stand up in.

Blah-blah-blah, his story goes on, of course and you can read it at the link – about his derring-do.

Well, he joined the Army in 1969, a few months later, he was in Germany in the 507th Heavy Equipment Maintenance Company as a mechanic. by the end of 1970, he was an Engineer Equipment Repairman in the 43rd Engineer Detachment, which was part of the Da Nang Support Command, he wasn’t scurrying around in tunnels, but rather grease pits. Almost a year later, he was at Fort Hood, still an Engineer Equipment Repairman and he was honorably discharged (it appears) in 1972;

Clarence claims that he was an engineer which is a 12-series MOS, the Army says he was a 62-series maintenance guy.

From the Polk County, Florida Sheriff Grady Judd;

Sheriff Judd giving details about the arrest of 26 yr old Kyle Barwan, who has been arrested AGAIN by PCSO for stolen valor; he tells women he is in the military to dupe them into giving him money for charitable causes. He’s currently on felony probation

Barwan was barely out of court for his last arrest and we were getting tips that he was reoffending and we were hooking his victims up to the sheriff’s department. I say “we” but I mean Frankie who has been leading a posse for years and has connections to the PCSO.

I think the sheriff is tired of Barwan’s stank-ass.

We’ve been posting about him for almost seven years.

The folks at Military Phonies send us their work on the strange case of Wilfred Henry Belanger, known locally as Butch Belanger, the postmaster in Scotch Plains, New Jersey. Butch claims to be a retired Naval officer and commander of SEAL Team Six with 21 years of service;

So here comes the strange part; Wilfred did have military service as a Recon Marine for nine years, according to the National Personnel Center;

It looks like he even graduated from Army Ranger School in addition to being a Recon Marine, but he chose to be a SEAL team commander rather than boast about things he had actually accomplished.

The Navy said “Who?”

I don’t explain ’em, I just report on ’em.

A few weeks ago, we talked about Michael Lamb, the founder of Stoic Ventures. Back then, he had admitted finally that he wasn’t a member of any Marine Corps Force Recon units as he had claimed for years for the purpose of enhancing his business image;

“I’d rather just come on out and get it out there. There’s nothing more to say about it. I came into the Marines as an intel guy, started working at the NSA, and got some deployments out of it. The deployments were national intelligence teams [three letter agencies, ed]. That’s all true. But I was never Recon. Someone called me out on it, and I copped to it. It’s nothing I didn’t bring to my own doorstep. I could easily have shut it down, and I didn’t. It’s a lie I’ve been living for twenty years.

This is a soul cleanse for me after looking over my shoulder all this time.

I apologize to the community, to everyone for misrepresenting myself. I don’t ask or expect forgiveness. I can’t make up for what I did, but I can try to atone for it.”

Well, we went ahead and got his records anyway. It seems he was a Mustang LT after almost eight years enlisted, discharged as a Staff Sergeant (E-6). As an enlisted Marine, he served as a Morse Code Intercept Operator and the only deployment (singular) I see is five months with the NSA in Saudi Arabia. But he has the Kosovo (Kosovo Campaign Medal), but I don’t see a deployment to Kosovo. Then he went to Navy ROTC at the University of Arizona for a year, then off to OCS at Quantico and he got commissioned as an Air Defense Officer for almost 4 years – no deployments, no sea service.

It looks like as an enlisted Marine he did almost three years at Fort Meade, Maryland (NSA central) after more than a year of schooling. Then he did the commissioning thing, became an ADA officer, then decided all of that qualified him to tell people that he was a Raider. Aside from that stint in Saudi Arabia, he managed to miss the whole GWOT.