{"id":58708,"date":"2015-03-12T08:30:16","date_gmt":"2015-03-12T12:30:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/?p=58708"},"modified":"2015-03-12T10:14:01","modified_gmt":"2015-03-12T14:14:01","slug":"matthew-cottom-active-duty-stolen-valor","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=58708","title":{"rendered":"Matthew Cottom; active duty stolen valor"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Matthew<\/a><\/center><\/p>\n

Our buddy, Coby, sent us a link to the Virginian-Pilot<\/a> a story about this Navy fellow, Matthew Cottom who was honored at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill Military Appreciation Day where he had claimed that he’d been wounded and suffered a heart attack upon his return from combat. He wore a Purple Heart, the Enlisted Surface Warfare Specialist insignia among some other stuff. The Navy thought that it was serious enough to hammer his appendage flat;<\/p>\n

Cottom was sentenced Wednesday to a reduction to the lowest rank, a seaman recruit; 45 days\u2019 confinement; and half pay for two months.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

Cottom told the judge he\u2019d hoped to accomplish something special in the Navy \u2013 \u201cto make my family proud, to go above and beyond\u201d \u2013 and felt disappointed that he\u2019d been held back by his health.<\/p>\n

\u201cI didn\u2019t feel very productive at all,\u201d he said in an unsworn statement during the sentencing portion of the trial. \u201cI responded by wearing the unauthorized ribbons.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI realize that was very wrong,\u201d he added. \u201cAnd I should have just been happy with where I was in the Navy and that I\u2019d be able to do better things down the road.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This was on his Twitter page and might be considered the understatement of the year, sent to us by one of our ninjas;<\/p>\n

\"Matt<\/a><\/center><\/p>\n

It looks like that if he hadn’t been busted, he may have come up on Don Shipley’s radar;<\/p>\n

\"Matt<\/a><\/center><\/p>\n

At least the active duty force takes this stuff seriously.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Our buddy, Coby, sent us a link to the Virginian-Pilot a story about this Navy fellow, … Matthew Cottom; active duty stolen valor<\/span>Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":58709,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-58708","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-phony-soldiers"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58708","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=58708"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58708\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/58709"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=58708"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=58708"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=58708"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}