{"id":59766,"date":"2015-05-12T09:51:36","date_gmt":"2015-05-12T13:51:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/?p=59766"},"modified":"2015-10-03T11:24:36","modified_gmt":"2015-10-03T15:24:36","slug":"james-m-gattoni-another-beirut-phony","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=59766","title":{"rendered":"James M. Gattoni; another Beirut phony"},"content":{"rendered":"

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

The team at Military Phonies<\/a> send us their extensive work on this James Gattoni fellow. Mr Gattoni tells folks, anyone who will listen that he was on the ground at Beirut after the bombing attack there on October 23, 1983 and he treated some of the casualties. He also participated in Operation Urgent Fury in Grenada on October 25th, 1983.<\/p>\n

\"James<\/a><\/p>\n

\"Beirut<\/a><\/p>\n

\"gattoni-first-on-scene\"<\/a><\/center><\/p>\n

From the folks at Military Phonies;<\/p>\n

This is where Gattoni\u2019s story doesn\u2019t add up. The USS Guam (LPH-9) participated in the U.S.-lead invasion of Grenada (Operation Urgent Fury) on 25 Oct 1983. If he was on the USS Guam, Gattoni could not have been in Beirut on 23 Oct 1983 as he claimed on his Twitter account provided above (i.e. below the TIME magazine cover stating \u201cI was there.\u201d). Giving him the benefit of the doubt, Gattoni could have been making a general statement that he was in Beirut but for those not familiar with events it appears he claims that he was there at the time of the bombing. As a Twitter post that stands on its own, it makes this claim even more suggestive.<\/p>\n

In addition, the USS Guam (LPH-9) did travel on to Beirut, Lebanon but did not arrive until Thursday 17 Nov 1983. Although one could argue there is a highly remote possibility that HN (Hospitalman, E-3) Gattoni\u2019s presence was so badly needed that he flew in ahead of the 22nd MAU, Gattoni himself indicates that he arrived as part of the 22nd MAU. The point is that it\u2019s difficult to believe Gattoni was there during the bombing on 23 Oct 1983.<\/p>\n

As far as the claim that he rendered aid to \u201ctwo injured 8 dead\u201d, the only incident that Gattoni could be referring to in regard to eight KIAs and two WIAs would have been the battle at Checkpoint 76 (CP76) involving a squad of Marines.<\/p>\n

The problem with Gattoni\u2019s claim of being present at CP76 to render aid is that this battle occurred on Sunday 04 Dec 1983. This was over two weeks vs. \u201ctwo days after we deployed into Beirut\u201d since the USS Guam landed in Beirut, Lebanon on 17 Nov 1983. To attribute this to a nuance of language one can say New Year\u2019s is \u201cdays away\u201d which is technically true if you mean 213 days away. However, most would say \u201cweeks\u201d or \u201cmonths\u201d.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

What’s sad is that Mr. Gattoni has twenty years of honorable service in the navy. He even worked at Camp David – a testimony to his professionalism and competence;<\/p>\n

\"FOIA_Gattoni_pg2\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\"FOIA_Gattoni_pg3\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\"FOIA_Gattoni_pg4\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\"FOIA_Gattoni_pg5\"<\/a><\/center><\/p>\n

But, for some reason, despite his superior service, he decided that he needed to pump up his record with a couple of awards of the Combat Action Ribbon that he didn’t earn. He was a Fleet Marine Corpsman, he spent nearly seven years floating around, but he decided that he needed some combat experience despite all of his accomplishments. <\/p>\n

The folks at Military Phonies gets way down in the weeds in regards to the intricacies of Mr. Gattoni’s service, so you Navy folks will want to read all of that, but I don’t want to hijack their good work.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The team at Military Phonies send us their extensive work on this James Gattoni fellow. Mr … James M. Gattoni; another Beirut phony<\/span>Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":59775,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-59766","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\/59766","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=59766"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59766\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/59775"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=59766"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=59766"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=59766"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}