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Fakes Outnumbering Real SEALs, 300-to-1
In a culture enamored of superheroes and the glory of war, people unhappy with their status in life increasingly are falsifying claims of military service. Watchdogs say they cannot keep up with reports of phonies wearing combat medals they did not earn and uniforms implying dangerous duties they did not perform."Sometimes I'm getting 20 to 50 inquiries a day," said Steve Robinson, a former Navy SEAL who works to expose false claims of membership to that elite group of rigorously trained sailors. Nearly all of the inquiries alert him to impostors. In January 2002, four months after terrorists attacked the United States, a group called AuthentiSEALs received 1,182 reports of people claiming to be SEALs, Robinson said. "Three of them were real SEALs," he said. AuthentiSEALs disbanded in 2005 as reports flowed in and exhausted volunteers dropped out, Robinson said. He is the last of eight original group members who checked out such claims. Robinson estimates there are at least 300 impostors for every real Navy SEAL, and he believes the numbers are growing. "They are more and more outrageous," Robinson said. "There are people who want a piece of that respect, and they want it Wal-Mart cheap and McDonald's quick." Storylines in books and movies about the feats of Navy SEALs end up in fakers' tales. Video games provide skeletal facts about weapons and tactics that also find their way into those fabrications, he said. In the 1990 movie "Navy SEALs," starring Charlie Sheen, a SEAL-team sniper shooting from a rooftop goes by the radio call-sign "God." "I have lost track of the number of times I have heard that," Robinson said. "These things really resonate with those people who aren't who they want to be or where they want to be in life." Headlines also provide cues. Last year when SEALs shot dead three Somali pirates holding an American cargo-ship captain hostage on the Indian Ocean, reports flowed in of "heroes" claiming to have squeezed off one of those shots, Robinson said. Other red flags include stories in which the teller is the only survivor, which means no witnesses. And there is the ever-popular "black ops," which means you cannot verify the tale with military authorities because the information is classified, Robinson said. He uses a time-tested list that he said has been squared with Navy archives. Information about which class a SEAL trained in and the names of his classmates are not classified, he said. Those details, or lack thereof, often expose fakes, he added. Many of the reports Robinson receives are passed along from Mary Schantag, a founding member of P.O.W. Network. The network has a list of 3,600 phonies, she said, and it continues to grow. "We call it an epidemic," Schantag said. "It has gotten worse since 1991." That year marked the end of the first Gulf War and an attitude change from the days of Vietnam. "Since then, it's gotten more popular to be a veteran," said Schantag, who has been tracking phonies for more than 20 years. "And we are starting to see younger and younger guys. "They say they were wounded in Iraq or wounded in Afghanistan or that they rescued (former prisoner of war) Jessica Lynch. We always have one or two of those. It's just getting more and more bizarre." The network receives between 30 and 50 calls or e-mails on phonies every week, Schantag said. It is getting more cases involving falsified records. One alleged faker has been "trying to get himself a Medal of Honor," America's highest award for combat valor, Schantag said. "Over the years, he has been adding paperwork. He tells them, 'This was missing,' and he sends in paperwork that they insert without authenticating." But records from his file at the National Personnel Records Center in Missouri did not match those in his file at the National Archives and Records Administration in Maryland, according to a 2008 Army Times story. The Pennsylvania man was allegedly trying to upgrade a Distinguished Service Cross and a Silver Star, which also appear to be based on falsified documents, to a Medal of Honor. A trained eye finds small discrepancies, Schantag said. Identifying numbers sometimes do not match times or historic formats. But the obvious clues like white-out and different type styles are gone. Blank documents, including medal certificates with official headings and formatting, can be purchased for a small price, she said. "They show up at (Veterans Affairs) carrying those records, and they just say that their records haven't caught up with them," Schantag said. Another concern, she said, is oral history projects, which rarely authenticate the stories collected. On one federal project, numerous phonies were exposed, Schantag said. The official response was to remove references to unearned medals but to leave the stories, she said. "It's the rewriting of history," Robinson said. And throughout history, those who actually face enemy fire are few, he said. "For every person who goes into harm's way, there are eight to 24 in the rear with the gear and the beer," Robinson said. "The people who go on patrol with the intention of finding the bad guy and ruining his weekend --- that percentage is very small." Because the United States is at war, these watchdogs do not expect the number of phonies to drop off soon. "Twenty years from now, some people are going to say, 'I wish I had put my life on the line to defend freedom,' " said retired Maj. Gen. J. Michael Myatt, the Marines' Memorial Association chief executive officer. That's when they will feel the temptation to join a new generation of phonies, he said. Posted by: Anonymoose 2010-02-06 |
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