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The folks at Military Phony<\/a> send us their work on this fellow, Vernon Allen Smith<\/a>, a local celebrity in Houston, Texas. He was a “Trivia Master” with a local sports bar on Thursday nights. Unfortunately, he passed away last month. Local media celebrated his military service;<\/p>\n

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From the Houston Chronicle<\/a>;<\/p>\n

Vernon was the squad commander of a special US Army long-range reconnaissance patrol (“LLRP”) before and after the cease fire of the Vietnam War. His unit secretly parachuted into and worked only in Laos with the objective of search and rescue for US prisoners of war (“POWs”). He took “point” almost every day and deeply cared for his men and his mission. Vernon received commendations and was honorably discharged in 1975.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Not according to the National Personnel Records Center. He enlisted in March 1972 and he was honorably discharged in February 1975. He was a mechanized infantryman, an 11D in those days and he did all of his time in Germany;<\/p>\n

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His obit said that he parachuted in Laos to look for POWs, but there is no parachute training. There are no service awards for his service in Southeast Asia. Of course, it’s possible that family told the media those stories about his military service with no prompting by Smith himself, but not likely.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The folks at Military Phony send us their work on this fellow, Vernon Allen Smith, a … Vernon Allen Smith; phony Vietnam veteran<\/span>Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":66728,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30,391],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-66722","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-phony-soldiers","category-valorvultures"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.azuse.cloud\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/07\/smith-trivia-night-1.jpg?fit=644%2C675&ssl=1","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66722","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=66722"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66722\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/66728"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=66722"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=66722"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=66722"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}