Category: Phony soldiers

Someone sent us their work on this fellow Albert Brum. He’s been a phony for years. In 2008, he convinced U.S. Senator Daniel K. Inouye to award him a Bronze Star Medal for his time fighting with the US Army in Europe. A Canadian journalist wrote about him in a local rag;

Brum is one of the few surviving members of the 1st Special Service Force, the joint American-Canadian commando unit that gained fame during the Second World War as the Devil’s Brigade.

In 2008, he received the Bronze Star for meritorious achievement as a jumper with the 2nd Canadian Parachute Battalion, a sub-unit of the 1st SSF, during the Italian and northwest European campaigns.

The medal will be presented to him by a delegation including members from the Canadian government and the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate.

Apparently, no one up there asks for proof of service, like Senator Inouye’s staff didn’t.

This discharge covers 1944 – he was in the Royal Canadian Air Force from April, 1944 until November 1944 – 222 days including 106 days of leave. He left the service as an AC2 – aircraftman 2d class (one step above private no class).

Then came 1945;

From the looks of the paperwork, he never left Canada that year either. It shows he went to paratrooper training in June and then his parachutist pay ended in July. By then, the war in Europe was over anyway. He was discharged in April 1946 at the rank of sapper (again one step above private according to Wiki). At no time during his service in the Canadian Army/Air Force did he deploy to the Second World War. But somehow a US Senator’s staff awarded him a US medal for his service in the European Theater.

Of course, his lies didn’t stop there. he claims that he joined the US forces in their war against communism in Vietnam. He enlisted in the Canadian Army’s miltia (Reserves) in 1949 until 1969 and he never left Canada;

I’m sure the reserves would have noticed if he was in Vietnam with the US Army while he was fulfilling his contract with the Canadian people.

The old POW Network had busted him, but that hasn’t stopped him from continuing his antics, apparently;

The folks at Military Phonies send us their work on this Kevin Mays fellow who can’t communicate on Al Gore’s internet without telling the world that he’s a Navy SEAL;

He likes Hillary for president, you know like most good Navy SEALs who are worth their salt;

And, oh, yeah, he killed bin Laden;

Or maybe he didn’t;

He’s a creeper, not a SEAL.

The folks at Military Phonies send us their work on West Virginian Joey Gibson who claims to be a former member of Navy SEAL Team 2 and a 22-year veteran of the Navy with eight deployments to the global war on terror;

From his LinkedIn Profile;

Since he can afford the uniforms, you know he’s legit;

The Navy remembers his service differently;

If you look in block 12 of his DD214 you’ll see that his term of service was from July 1990 to December 1997 but the math says that he had 3 years and 10 months of service. I’m guessing that he had a couple years worth of “bad time” AWOL and/or jail time. His last unit was listed as TPU PSD Norfolk. According to the Navy website, that means Transient Personnel Unit, Personnel Services Detachment;

TPU Norfolk consists of five departments: Administrative Services, Operations, Discipline, Maintenance and Training. Each of these departments is responsible for specific types of Sailors.

I’d guess that the department that dealt with Mr Gibson was the discipline portion of the TPU. The folk at Military Phonies found a record on Mr Gibson that wasn’t military in origin;

There is no SEAL Training in his records and it looks like he sailed through the Persian Gulf during the period which the Navy awarded the Southwest Asia Service Medal (between August 2, 1990 and November 30, 1995) but he’s not a real Gulf War veteran because he was in boot camp during the actual shooting portion of the Gulf War.

Someone sent us their work on this fellow, James Blanton who, for some reason, claims to be a Navy SEAL in order to enhance his roofing business as you can see in the image of his business card above. Of course, because he’s being featured on TAH, you can guess it’s not true;

All of that paperwork and not one mention of any SEAL training or SEAL assignments. He was a Seaman, Electronics Technician Striker on the submarines USS John Adams and USS Tecumseh for more than eleven years. But not a SEAL.

NOTE: The folks at Specialized Roofing and Insulation, Inc. tell us that Blanton no longer works for them, so don’t bother to call them about him.

Someone sent us their work on this Anthony Joseph Colombo fellow who claims that he’s a Marine Corps captain with 20 years of service;

Apparently he uses this persona to sell military surplus items – and he doesn’t fill the orders. He just takes the money. Well that doesn’t sound like any Marine Corps officers that I know. It doesn’t sound like any Marine Corps officers that the Marine Corps knows either;

Someone sent us their work on this John Coker Howard fellow from Fort Mohave, Arizona. According to folks that know him, he claims to be a Navy SEAL and a Vietnam veteran. These are pictures of his truck;

The Navy disagrees with his memories of his military service;

He had less than a month of service several months after US combat troops left South Vietnam to it’s own devices. No SEAL training, no Vietnam service, hell, hardly any service at all. Even Dan Rather served longer than his guy.

Our friends at Military Corruption called last night to tell us about their latest post. It seems that iconic news reader, Dan Rather, put the above picture in his book, Rather Outspoken; My Life in the News. If you do an image search on Google, it’s pretty much everywhere, for example it’s posted at The Academy of Achievement.

The truth about Rather’s brief career in the Marine Corps is that he was discharged before he finished basic training, according to BG “Jug” Burkett in his book “Stolen Valor: How the Vietnam Generation Was Robbed of Its Heroes and Its History“;

“Rather never made it out of recruit training. He couldn’t do the physical activity,” Burkett declared. The exposer of many a wannabe and phony hero, says Rather was discharged as “medically unfit” on May 11, 1954.

Rather claims that he was discharged because the Corps found out that he had rheumatic fever as a child. From Rather’s bio on Wiki;

In 1954, Rather enlisted in the United States Marine Corps but was soon discharged because he had rheumatic fever as a child.

Regardless of the reason, he was not a Marine, as any actual Marine will tell you because he didn’t graduate from boot camp and he wasn’t awarded the Eagle, Globe and Anchor, but here he is wearing the EGA in this picture.

Rather also starred in another section of Burkett’s book according to Wiki;

On June 2, 1988, Rather hosted a CBS News special, The Wall Within. In it, he interviewed six former servicemen, each of whom said he had witnessed horrible acts in Vietnam. Two of the men said that they had killed civilians, and two others said that they had seen friends die. Each talked about the effects the war had upon their lives – including depression, unemployment, drug use and homelessness.

In their self-published book Stolen Valor: How the Vietnam Generation Was Robbed of its Heroes and its History, authors B. G. Burkett and Glenna Whitley said they had obtained the service records of all six men, documenting where each was stationed during the Vietnam War. According to the records, the authors said, only one of the men was actually in Vietnam; he claimed to have been a 16-year-old Navy SEAL but, said Burkett and Whitley, the records listed him as an equipment repairer.

Dan Rather – Reporting fake news before it was popular,

Someone sends us their work on this Jonathan Lineberger fellow. He used to build Jeeps for veterans who need vehicles adapted to their disabilities – a worthwhile endeavor, indeed. But, for some reason, he felt that he needed to embellish his own career in the Marine Corps. He told the Idaho Mountain Express that he’d spent eight years in the Marine Corps until he was forced out for injuries he had suffered in combat;

The Marine Corps doesn’t remember it like that at all;

He spent about six months in the Marine Corps and never left Camp Pendleton, California.