REALITY: Cooley's Army records indicated no Korean service - he did not even finish training until after the war ended. Very few served in Vietnam. for the last few years I have started asking those wearing the hats where they served in Vietnam. I dont know what stopped me, but I heard myself saying the words, Too good to be true, and decided to call the Ranger headquarters at Fort Benning, Georgia. I said that this provided an insight into those who claimed inside knowledge of Roswell. But as I soon learned, this fellow was hardly the only person who has fabricated or exaggerated wartime exploits. Reporters often interviewed local veterans of the war, Burkett said, and the things they [the veterans] were saying were just bogus as hell. Khe Sanh was one of the war's bloodiest battles -- hundreds of Marines were killed -- but the only killing Yandle was intimately familiar with was the June 1972 slaying of 65-year-old shopkeeper Joseph Reppucci in a Boston liquor store. The Times Herald reported that Williams was a Vietnam veteran; one of the paper's columnists wondered whether "Vietnam did that to him." On a whim, Burkett filed a Freedom of Information Act. There can be problems, however. Before it was revealed, in 2001, that he spent the war teaching history at West Point, for example, Joseph Ellis was known to lecture his students at Mount Holyoke about his experiences in the vicinity of My Lai at the time of the massacre. Vietnam veterans have a lower unemployment rate than the same non-vet age groups. Vietnam Veterans - Veterans Affairs It's not as widespread as it was the first 10-30 years immediately after the war,its still out there. His first stop was the U.S. Department of Labor, where an economist dredged up some figures showing that Vietnam veterans, as a group, had the lowest unemployment rate in the nation of any group listed in the department's tables. (The ONLY question EVER asked by the Census, NOT if they were actually serving in Vietnam.) Very rare and usually done by people looking for high profile jobs. What did you do?, I was in the Army, the voice replied. Thieves among honor: counterfeit veterans - Military Times This is well within the range of possibility. Someone says, Hey, Joe, youre of the age for Vietnam. Im a retired Marine of 25 years, Alvarez told the attendees. Smith calls the phenomenon the 'Tail-Gunner Joe Syndrome,' named for Joe McCarthy, the former flag-waving senator from Wisconsin who tried to rid America of communists in the 1950s. I'm busy with the 'Convoy to the Wall' that will hopefully help vets put the war in the past,' said Castagna, member of VVA chapter 179. Its all done for personal gain, he said. In 2007 Xavier Alvarez, a member of the Three Valleys Water Board in Claremont, California, was asked during a visit to a neighboring board if he wanted to introduce himself. I cant find good numbers on 'One observation made in a number of cases is that the individual who is posing as a vet, in fact, does have conflicts about Vietnam war, which are being expressed in this indirect and disguised fashion,' Blank said. Their overall agenda makes their warning suspicious and Cooley was forced from office in 1996 and was later convicted of a felony for lying in Oregon's voters' pamphlet. The My Lai Massacre and other news stories created for some a public image of troops as baby killers, an image since exacerbated by films such as 1986s Platoon. The post-Vietnam period recorded countless news accounts of hundreds of thousands of angry and sometimes homeless and desperate veterans. Vietnam War Veterans, and honoring all who served: Memorial Day 2021 The number of personnel serving in Vietnam year by year (No. Don Shipley at his SEALs website No, he said, but a former Ranger up in New York did. Well, to cite my own anecdotal experience, I have run into many people claiming to be Vietnam vets. It is not. I am astonished at the number of people who claim to be Vietnam Vets who aren't. Seven years later, Chuck and Mary Schantag, whose P.O.W. On the other side of the coin the VA on their site www.va.gov/vetdata/veteran_population.asp offers a Excel worksheet that shows only 6,673,279 Vietnam era vets believed still living as of 2014. In the military-rich Hampton Roads region, we struck gold: From the pilots who flew the paratroopers to the infantrymen who stormed the beaches, I was able to relate the entire D-Day narrative chronologically, all through veterans eyes. Marshal Hanson (and apparently quoted by every vet site as complete gospel), he provides the U.S. Census as the source, just like everybody else:www.veteranstoday.com/2009/02/26/vietnam-facts-vs-fiction/ Interesting CENSUS STATS and Been There Wanabees: a. He eventually amended his senate Scott Beaton, Statistical Source. This They werent. Some are just shysters,' he said. They got in the door with computer-generated or -altered discharge papers known as DD 214 forms. OUT OF FIVE WHO CLAIM TO BE Vietnam vets are not. (Yes, this is somewhat All too often, these suffering "veterans" never set foot in Vietnam and yet, the images they offer have permanently shaped the way Americans view soldiers from this war: As slovenly,. What I havent found How many fake Vietnam veterans are there? $174k/yr for a new Daytona in a month. Really?As for another claimed but phony reference used by vet websites, the Census Statistical Abstract of the United States: 1995, that allegedly has that 13+ million Vietnam veterans statistic, that Census Report can be found here:www.census.gov/library/publications/1995/compendia/statab/115ed.htmlThis provides a link to Section 11 pertaining to military and veteran statistics:www2.census.gov/library/publications/1995/compendia/statab/115ed/tables/defense.pdfWhere, AGAIN, nowhere can be found anything like 13 or 14 million people that allegedly the U.S. Census documented people saying they were Vietnam Vets. The suspicion, however, is that it has probably been around as long as people have been on the planet. The figures for those who served in the Vietnam era were This is all based on his say-so with nothing to back it up. Kevin, the only reason I waded into this whole Stolen Valor thing to begin with was because you used this Stolen Valor statistics as justification for dismissing most Roswell witnesses, who you said you previously believed. When his unit came home and started gearing up. On Burkett's walls, chockablock with his MBA diploma and certificates attesting to his knowledge of financial arcana, are plaques from the Vietnam Veterans of America and the Veterans Land Board and a framed letter and photograph of Burkett on the podium with former President George Bush for the dedication of the Texas Vietnam Veterans Memorial nearly 10 years ago. aircraft into Vietnam had a financial incentive.) A couple of weeks before June 6, 1994, I was at my desk when the phone rang. In 2019, approximately 3.4 million Vietnam War Veterans were enrolled for Veterans Health Administration services (12). what I think happened. Moskos, now 65, comes from a 1950s generation of young men to whom military service was a given. The Nazis, in particular, lionized him. Too good to be true! He said that his unit was 100% anti-war, which I doubt, and in my experience very few of us in Vietnam could be considered anti-war (though I did burn my draft card in Vietnam I figured if everyone else was doing it, I should too but I digress.) For years, there had been tales in the Army of "wannabes and fakers," Bateman said, "something that a lot of veterans knew, but it was usually anecdotal. In the spring of 1998, Burkett managed to convince Wallace and others that Yandle was a fake. (He is in constant demand as a speaker and recently gave a seminar to wide-eyed FBI agents who apparently had had little experience rummaging through the labyrinth of decades-old military records.). Military fakery is hardly limited to the down-and-out, however. If you look at the sites and read the information carefully, you will see, as I noted, that some of the information is from ACTUAL Census reports, some from the DoD and some from Beaton's survey.So, you can continue to beat the dead Census reports horse if you so desire, but I believe we (you and I) have corrected the information, we have supplied the links to the web sites and identified the source of the 13 million figure. And you think, Oh, no ones ever going to catch me. "Man, I was scared to death. "In every statistical category that we looked at," he says, "Vietnam veterans were superlative -- their desertion and court martial rates were much lower (than in prior wars) -- and when I started looking at individual cases, I'd find vets who were valedictorians or football stars. These are old friends from high school and a relative. Service Members, Not Citizens: Meet The Veterans Who Have Been - NPR U.S. veterans [ edit] According to the U.S. Department of Labor, the Vietnam Era Veterans' Readjustment Assistance Act of 1974 ( VEVRAA) states, "A Vietnam era veteran" is a person who: served on active duty anywhere in the world for a period of 180+ days, any part of which occurred between August 5, 1964, and May 7, 1975, and was discharged or . I am an in-country Vietnam vet. In Atlanta, VVA chapter officer Ashe estimates that about 20 percent of the up to 200 men who contacted his group since December, saying they are combat vets and asking for help, were frauds. have been able to find reliable statistics on the number of men and women who It is 'You can normally tell who is a phony. b. So I turned the television on and checked the local news. I have been unable to find that precise survey, but this seems to be the place where the 13,853,027 number of impostors comes from. Burkett, who served as an Army lieutenant in Vietnam during the war -- he stresses he was no hero and simply did his job as an ordnance officer -- has investigated more than 2,000 cases and found that some 1,500 were frauds on either a large or a small scale. Good grief, I thought. In 1990 and again in 2000, there was a question on the census long form that asked if the respondent was a Vietnam era veteran, and the number generated there was about 8.4 million. from it to arrive at the 9.4 million. The result is that for more than 25 years, many Americans have thought of Viet vets as jobless, homeless, addicted, suicidal or deranged "victim-heroes.". 04 Both South Vietnam and the United States of America committed nearly 5 million troops into war. That guy, the real Ranger told me, got killed on D-Day. He had served time in Georgia for auto theft. Heres David, David, David I tried to end this diplomatically but you just cant let it go. It also notes that information on total personnel abroad (Vietnam and elsewhere) was not available.Finally No. 568 & 569 can be found some statistics on the number of soldiers serving in Vietnam year by year and total number of active duty personnel during the Vietnam era, just as found in other statistical surveys published by the Census Bureau. Marshal Hanson (and apparently quoted by every vet site as complete gospel), he provides the U.S. Census as the source, just like everybody else:www.veteranstoday.com/2009/02/26/vietnam-facts-vs-fiction/Had you read my post, you would have seen that I quoted this source, including its negative note at the end that was highlighted in yellow and typed in boldface. was not saying it was for service in Vietnam. ", Burkett has found, to put it simply, that most of these men are frauds and that their fraudulent claims have been swallowed whole, and without question, by reputable news organizations, politicians, generals, police departments and federal agencies, all willing -- depending on the case at hand -- to free someone from prison, offer them veterans benefits or simply go easy on them when they land in trouble. One of the best-known examples was Walter Williams, who claimed to have served in the Confederate army under Gen. John Bell Hood. There are literally millions of them.You can reject, out of hand, the 13 million figure and the military web sites that use it, but I have traced it to its point of origin which was a survey conducted by The Vietnam Veterans Fund and by Captain Scott Beaton so that we have a good source on it. How to Spot a Military Impostor? - The Most Effective Method this seems to be correct, I cant find anything in the census figures to REALITY: He was a Marine football player in Okinawa. They said, All credit and research to: Capt. that. I retired in the year 2001. Women Vietnam Veterans and PTSDAnother paper using data from the HealthVIEWS study, published in 2015, found that 20.1 percent of women Veterans who served in Vietnam have . What Medals Can A Vietnam Era Veteran Wear? - CLJ Former Army Corporal Richard McClanahan, 29, cuts a dashing figure in his dress uniform and jaunty beret. He had been a prisoner, but not in Vietnam. The Vietnam War was the nation's longest and costliest conflict of the Cold War. The changing face of America's veteran population Burkett -- his parents nicknamed him Jug, in honor of a favorite golf pro -- has spent the past 13 years unmasking hundreds of men around the country who have claimed to be Vietnam veterans, Vietnam heroes, Vietnam- post-traumatic-stress-psychos, the guys you read about in the papers ("Viet Vet Kills 14 in Post Office Rampage") and see on the median strip of Van Ness Avenue, wearing signs over their tattered fatigues that proclaim, "Vietnam Vet -- Will Work for Food. designed to serve as a convenient volume for statistical reference, and as a DURING THAT SAME CENSUS COUNT, the number of Americans falsely claiming to have served in-country was: 9,492,958. Although it was said that no reputable site had posted 569).No. in the census documents is a number for those falsely claiming Vietnam service. At Pointe du Hoc., As you might imagine, I almost fell out of my chair. (I will note that this is also a politically driven Or, in other words, the census did contain some of the information reported and as I said, this, the wording of it, is confusing But Beatons statistics were based on more than just the census. After the show aired, several Iraq veterans wrote to the Guardian of Valor. It's not just Vietnam fakers: there was a USA Today story some years back about phony Gulf War vets. The trouble is I dont know where that 12 The alleged 13.8 million fakers or four out of five who claim to be Vietnam vets is CLEARLY stated as being based on U.S. CENSUS DATA, not some independent survey. I have found a legitimate source for the large number of imposters which was based on an actual survey so the only error is suggesting the number came from a census, though I have still not found good figures for the 1995 interim census.
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