{"id":16225,"date":"2009-12-21T07:14:13","date_gmt":"2009-12-21T12:14:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/?p=16225"},"modified":"2009-12-21T08:34:55","modified_gmt":"2009-12-21T13:34:55","slug":"phony-soldiers-begging-in-nyc","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=16225","title":{"rendered":"Phony soldiers begging in NYC?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Now, I don’t have any real proof that this guy is a phony soldier, but his story is a bit unbelievable<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The first thing I noticed was his teeth – those teeth took years to get in that kind of shape and they would make him non-deployable. He claims he returned from Iraq last year after a nineteen month tour. You guys would probably know better than me whether any units did nineteen months in Iraq from 2006 to 2008, but that seems like an awful long tour. I’ve heard of fifteen month deployments, but none that were 19 months.<\/p>\n

He also claims he’d been wounded and underwent “lung surgery” which makes him unemployable. If he was wounded that severely, he would have been medically retired, not put out on the streets.<\/p>\n

Yeah, he hung an honorable discharge certificate around his neck – it costs $29.95 at this online retailer<\/a>. I went through the entire ordering process, and at no point was I asked for proof of my service – needless to say, I bought a discharge certificate that now makes me eligible to join IVAW.
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\nPhony soldier? Video File<\/object><\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019ve been homeless for over a year,\u201d Anderson said. \u201cRight now my main problem is housing. I got back from Iraq and I\u2019ve got nowhere to live. It ain\u2019t right.\u201d<\/p>\n

Now Anderson, 38, survives only on the good will of New York\u2019s straphangers. Everyday he is on the subway, begging strangers for money.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn order for me to make ends meet I got to get on the train and ask people to help me until I get my benefits,\u201d Anderson said. \u201cOn average, I make about $50 after being on the train for four hours. That\u2019s enough for food, but that\u2019s about it. A cheap hotel up in Harlem costs more a night than that.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Of course, IVAW’s Jose Vasquez piles on the story and adds his two cents about PTSD. I asked Jose if he met the guy and verified his story, no answer yet. I also asked for contact information for Elise Lagos, the author, and Jose hasn’t answered. The 25-year-old has an unlisted number in her New York apartment.<\/p>\n

I’ve been suspicious about these homeless vet stories since 1993 when I saw a CNN report on homeless Desert Storm veterans. In an interview they did with a homeless guy, they asked him when he went to Desert Storm. he answered he was there for the whole thing – he’d arrived in May, he said. Well, if that was the case, the guy was in theater three months before Hussein invaded Kuwait. The interviewer, blinked and asked “May?”. When the homeless guy responded in the affirmative, the interviewer kind of cut the interview short – but he didn’t expose the guy as a liar. That would ruin his story.<\/p>\n

I’m not denying that are homeless veterans, but it doesn’t help the cause to alert the public with “fake but accurate” veterans.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Now, I don’t have any real proof that this guy is a phony soldier, but his … Phony soldiers begging in NYC?<\/span>Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37,30,86],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-16225","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ivaw","category-phony-soldiers","category-veteran-health-care"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16225","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=16225"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16225\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=16225"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=16225"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=16225"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}