{"id":26243,"date":"2011-08-19T10:30:27","date_gmt":"2011-08-19T14:30:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/?p=26243"},"modified":"2011-08-19T10:32:14","modified_gmt":"2011-08-19T14:32:14","slug":"those-green-berets-are-everywhere","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=26243","title":{"rendered":"Those “Green Berets” are everywhere"},"content":{"rendered":"

Someone sent us a link to a Philly.com article<\/a> about Philadelphia councilman David Oh who claims he was a “green beret”, but it turns out that he was an infantry officer assigned to 20th Special Forces Group in Maryland as the “detachment technician” when the unit was briefly called to active duty in 1991. He failed the selection course just before that.<\/p>\n

Jim Croall, Oh’s commanding officer in 1991, said that claim is “absolutely not” accurate.<\/p>\n

“That would be totally stretching it,” said Croall, who retired as a colonel after serving a tour of duty Iraq in 2003.<\/p>\n

Croall, who recalls Oh not completing the Special Forces training, said he resents it when “wannabes” call themselves Green Berets without justification.<\/p>\n

Croall said Special Forces units for all branches of the military must deal at times with people who make exaggerated claims about their military service. Some use Internet sites to expose Special Forces fakers, he said.<\/p>\n

“There are plenty of people out there who claim to be something they are not,” Croall said.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Another Republican in Florida, retired SOCOM colonel Mike McCalister<\/a>, who is branched Engineer according to Army Knowledge Online (AKO), claimed to be a Special Forces officer during his campaign for the Florida Senate seat. <\/p>\n

He’s drawn the ire of an ad hoc group calling themselves “Stolen Valor” (real original, guys). They claim that McCallister said he’d been involved with “black ops”, which is probably true in that he worked at planning while at SOCOM, but not in the way he’d intended voters to interpret the phrase. <\/p>\n

Now, I can’t find anything in print in which McCalister is reported to have said to particpate in “black ops”, but Mr Chuck Winn, McCallister’s main antagonist, tells me that he did. it should be noted that Chuck Winn also tried to derail Marco Rubio’s Republican primary campaign<\/a> last year while Winn was working for the Bob Smith campaign, so Winn, also an Army veteran, clearly has a problem with Republicans who are not his choice for office.<\/p>\n

However, a colonel should know better than to mince his words and give an inaccurate impression that can be used against him.<\/p>\n

Both Oh and McCallister are Republicans, if I didn’t make that clear enough. Both were officers and should certainly know better than embellishing their careers. The best way to attract doubters, though, is to call yourself a “green beret”…I don’t know anyone in the business who calls themselves that.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Someone sent us a link to a Philly.com article about Philadelphia councilman David Oh who claims … Those “Green Berets” are everywhere<\/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":[30],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-26243","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-phony-soldiers"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26243","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=26243"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26243\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=26243"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=26243"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=26243"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}