{"id":69620,"date":"2017-01-01T08:00:26","date_gmt":"2017-01-01T13:00:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/?p=69620"},"modified":"2017-01-13T04:06:10","modified_gmt":"2017-01-13T09:06:10","slug":"eric-schmitt-matzen-santa-claus","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=69620","title":{"rendered":"Eric Schmitt-Matzen; Santa Claus"},"content":{"rendered":"

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

You probably remember the story<\/a> of Eric Schmitt Matzen<\/a> and while in his role as Santa Claus held a dying child in his arms during the child’s last moments on Earth. The story was in the Knoxville News Sentinel<\/a>. In the story, Eric said that he was a Ranger for four years;<\/p>\n

\"Schmitt-Matzen<\/a><\/center><\/p>\n

The Ranger Regiment confirmed that he had served with them in some role, when I got his FOIA, I had some questions;<\/p>\n

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

So, I did a telephone interview with Mr Schmitt-Matzen. <\/p>\n

The FOIA only mentioned his Army Reserve service and his time as an ROTC cadet – he admits that he wasn’t commissioned. He was in a five-year engineer program at Tennessee Tech, so he dropped out of the ROTC program when he had to make a decision on one or the other but not both. <\/p>\n

He tells me that he went to Ranger School in lieu of attending Advanced Camp for ROTC cadets, since the Regiment confirms he had some kind of contact with them, I have to think that it was possible. The Army used to do that, substitute Ranger School for Advanced Camp, however, the FOIA doesn’t support his completion of Ranger School. <\/p>\n

Schmitt-Matzen doesn’t remember his Ranger School class date and the Ranger Regiment has pulled the post on Facebook about his service with them. He admitted that he didn’t serve with the Rangers for four years like the interview says – he claims that he didn’t tell the reporter that part.<\/p>\n

He’s still standing by the story of the child dying in his arms, so I have to support him in that, unless the media can dig up evidence to the contrary. I did my part.<\/p>\n

The 75th Regiment folks sent me this message on Facebook;<\/p>\n

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

Unfortunately, we are unable to fill in the gaps. We had been told by a couple of former Rangers that he had served with 2\/75. We pulled the story because it had not been confirmed by a second source and we were unable to officially verify his service in the Army.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

You probably remember the story of Eric Schmitt Matzen and while in his role as Santa … Eric Schmitt-Matzen; Santa Claus<\/span>Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":69621,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[170],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-69620","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-who-knows"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69620","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=69620"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69620\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/69621"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=69620"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=69620"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=69620"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}