by Nicole Silverio
Republican vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance knocked presumptive Democratic vice presidential candidate and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, who “disgracefully” retired from the Army National Guard before his deployment to Iraq, during a news conference Wednesday.
Veterans who served in an Army National Guard battalion with Walz accused him of abandoning them when they learned of their impending deployment to Iraq in 2005. According to to a 2018 letter posted on Facebook. Vance said Walz should be ashamed of allegedly “lying” about his military career.
“As a Marine who served his country in uniform, when the United States Marine Corps, when the United States of America asked me to go to Iraq to serve my country, I did,” Vance said. “I did what they asked me to do, and I did it honorably, and I’m very proud of that service. When Tim Walz was asked by his country to go to Iraq, you know what he did? He resigned from the Army and allowed his unit to go without him, a fact for which he was aggressively criticized by many of the men he served with.”
Vice President Kamala Harris’ HQ Released video material on Tuesday, Walz said civilians should not have the weapons he carried in war. Vance accused Walz of committing an act of stolen valor by claiming he ever fought in combat.
“I think it’s disgraceful to prepare your unit to go to Iraq, make a promise to keep it, and then back out just before you actually go. I also think it’s dishonest…. He said we shouldn’t allow the weapons that I used in the war to be on the streets. I wonder, Tim Walz, when have you ever been to war? What kind of weapons were those that you took to war, since you abandoned your unit just before you went to Iraq, and he never spent a day in a combat zone. What annoys me about Tim Walz is this stuff about stolen valor.”
JD Vance slams Tim Walz’s ‘shameful’ departure from the military after learning of his battalion’s impending deployment to Iraq photo:twitter.com/iSwfuWEIR2
— Daily Caller (@DailyCaller) August 7, 2024
Vance reportedly enlisted in the Marine Corps after graduating from high school in 2003 and later served in Iraq as a combat correspondent for six months in overdue 2005. fragment from his 2016 bestselling memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy.” His time in Iraq helped motivate him to change his expectations of himself by “giving it my all.” [his] All.”
“That experience taught me a valuable lesson: that I could do it. I could work twenty-hour days when I had to. I could speak clearly and confidently with television cameras shoved in my face. I could stand in a room with majors and colonels and generals and get by. I could do a captain’s job even when I was afraid I couldn’t,” Vance wrote in his memoirs.
Walz served in the Army National Guard for 24 years, retiring in 2005 as a staff sergeant with the 1-125th Field Artillery Battalion, according to the governor. website.
Harris’ campaign and Walz’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the Daily Caller News Foundation.
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Nicole Silverio is a reporter at the Daily Caller News Foundation.
