{"id":29484,"date":"2012-04-12T10:18:03","date_gmt":"2012-04-12T14:18:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/?p=29484"},"modified":"2012-04-12T10:18:18","modified_gmt":"2012-04-12T14:18:18","slug":"carl-john-pequignot-update","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=29484","title":{"rendered":"Carl John Pequignot update"},"content":{"rendered":"

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<\/a>. The News Sentinel<\/a> is now questioning their own article from more than a year ago about him. Kevin Leininger writes;<\/p>\n

When I wrote about Carl John Pequignot last April 23 in a front-page column headlined \u201cThe soldier the Japanese Couldn’t Kill,\u201d the story generated a lot of interest \u2013 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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u201cMany of the places on that summary, I’ve never been,\u201d he said. \u201cThe 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.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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 \u201csufficient evidence\u201d of his Purple Heart in order to remain a member. Pequignot’s car also bears a Purple Heart license plate.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Yeah, if the unit wasn’t on Okinawa, neither was he, that’s the funny thing about publicly available historical records.<\/p>\n

[P]ast Chairman [of the Allen County Council of Veterans Organizations] Craig Savage, a Navy veteran himself, is the most blunt of all.<\/p>\n

\u201cI know (Pequignot’s) been lying,\u201d he said. \u201cA lot of guys do it.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Your emails and Doug Sterner’s activism is apparently having some impact in the case of Carl … Carl John Pequignot update<\/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-29484","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\/29484","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=29484"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29484\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=29484"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=29484"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=29484"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}