Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, accused Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz on Wednesday of quitting the Army National Guard two decades ago to avoid being deployed to Iraq and of exaggerating his service record to claim falsely that he had served in combat.
Both provocative charges amounted to some of the sharpest Republican attacks yet on the Minnesota governor, and appeared aimed at disrupting what has been a run of positive news coverage of the Democratic ticket since Vice President Kamala Harris replaced President Joe Biden as the party’s nominee.
The accusations by Vance, who served a four-year active duty enlistment in the Marine Corps, about Walz, whose career in the national guard spanned 24 years, also served to pit the military records of the two major party’s vice-presidential candidates against each other.
Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times
Speaking at the police department in Shelby Township, Michigan, on Wednesday morning, Vance said Walz had effectively deserted his fellow soldiers to avoid serving in Iraq because he retired from the National Guard in May 2005, several months before his artillery unit received orders to deploy there.
“You abandoned your unit right before they went to Iraq,” Vance said.
Vance based his accusations on a Facebook post from 2018, and a paid letter to the editor to the West Central Tribune that same year in which the writers, Thomas Behrends and Paul Herr, both retired command sergeant majors in the Minnesota National Guard, accused Walz of “conveniently retiring a year before his battalion was deployed to Iraq.”
The criticisms were first leveled by Behrends and Herr during Walz’s first campaign for governor.
But Joseph Eustice, a 32-year veteran of the national guard who led the same battalion as Walz and served under him, said in an interview Wednesday that the governor was a dependable soldier and that the attacks by his fellow comrades were unfounded.
“He was as good a soldier as you’d find, and to have two former sergeant majors say that he wasn’t, it’s just not true,” Eustice said, adding that he disagreed with Walz’s politics and most likely would not vote for him in November even though they were friends.
Eustice recalled that Walz’s decision to run for Congress came months before the battalion received any official notice of deployment, though he said there had been rumors that it might be deployed.
The two men were exercising in early 2005, when Walz, who was then a command sergeant major, turned to Eustice, who was then a first sergeant, and said: “I got to ask you something. I’m thinking about running for Congress,” Eustice recalled.
“I said, ‘What the hell’s wrong?’” he added. “I mean, why would you want to do such a thing?”
The Harris-Walz campaign did not provide any new details about the timeline of Walz’s decision to retire. Instead, it pointed to other past comments from fellow guardsmen who said that Walz had been considering running for office for some time and that the decision to retire from the military had weighed heavily on him.
“After 24 years of military service, Gov. Walz retired in 2005 and ran for Congress, where he chaired Veterans Affairs and was a tireless advocate for our men and women in uniform,” said Ammar Moussa, a campaign spokesperson, “and as vice president of the United States, he will continue to be a relentless champion for our veterans and military families.”
On Wednesday, Vance also seized on a remark by Walz in a video clip that the Harris campaign had promoted on social media Tuesday, in which the governor told a crowd about support for gun control, saying that “we can make sure those weapons of war, that I carried in war, are only carried in war.”
Walz never served in combat, however, which prompted Vance to accuse him of “stolen valor.”
“I’d be ashamed if I was him and I lied about my military service like he did,” Vance said.
Walz was deployed after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks as part of Operation Enduring Freedom, but not in a combat zone.
“The governor carried, fired and trained others to use weapons of war innumerable times,” Moussa said. “Gov. Walz would never insult or undermine any American’s service to this country — in fact, he thanks Sen. Vance for putting his life on the line for our country. It’s the American way.”
Vance assailed Walz over his military record in response to a reporter’s question about Walz’s suggestion, in his debut speech alongside Harris the previous night, that Vance had misrepresented himself as a voice of the working class.
“Like all regular people I grew up with in the heartland, JD studied at Yale, had his career funded by Silicon Valley billionaires and wrote a bestseller trashing that community,” Walz had said. “Come on. That is not what Middle America is.”
But Vance’s comments were also reminiscent of the “Swift boat” attacks in 2004 that effectively cast doubt on the military exploits of Sen. John Kerry, then the Democratic presidential nominee. A key strategist behind those attacks, which helped doom Kerry’s bid for the White House, was Chris LaCivita, who is a senior strategist for the Trump campaign.
Walz’s long years in uniform began when he enlisted as an infantryman in the Nebraska Army National Guard in 1981, a few days after his 17th birthday. When he transferred to the Minnesota National Guard in the 1990s, his job changed to artillery.
He retired in 2005 as a master sergeant but had served earlier as a command sergeant major, one of the Army’s highest enlisted ranks.
The accusation also recalled similar criticisms that former President Donald Trump has faced about avoiding military service. The three-time Republican presidential nominee sidestepped the war in Vietnam thanks to a deferment related to bone spurs in his heel, a medical assessment that was made as a favor for Trump’s father, the doctor’s daughter told The New York Times in 2018.
Patrick Murphy, a former U.S. Army captain who was a roommate of Walz’s when both served in the U.S. House, said he was dismayed by the attacks on Walz’s military record.
“Anyone who tries to criticize his record but looks the other way at Donald Trump’s six deferments to Vietnam is beyond the pale,” said Murphy, a Pennsylvania Democrat.
Vance was on active duty with the Marine Corps from 2003 to 2007 during the Iraq war.
Vance, who then went by the name James D. Hamel, was assigned to the 2nd Marine Aircraft Wing, one of the Marine Corps’ largest subordinate commands that oversees aircraft such as fighter jets and helicopters. He was deployed to Iraq in 2005 and 2006 with the aircraft wing but did not serve as a front-line combatant.
His official military occupation, known as a combat correspondent, meant he was tasked with basic communication roles such as writing articles about the happenings in his unit.
c.2024 The New York Times Company
