how many fake vietnam veterans are there

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. 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. And there he was, my false ranger, holding his shadow box of medals as he repeated his fake story. In 2000, upon hearing that the Library of Congress had launched its Veterans History Project, Burkett asked administrators if they were verifying any of the vets records. combat air patrols over Vietnam but all he had done was fly repaired or new I believe the numbers.If I can meet that many phonies in my very small community, I believe the numbers completely. Whenever I mention Vietnam service, I always point them to the 187th AHC web page. claiming to have served in-country is: 13,853,027. count, though I have not found any record of this in the census figures I support it. Like the nonexistent Census data of 10 million fakers, this seems to be all totally made up by Shipley to push his own agenda. In the end, the primary agenda for making up phony facts is the usual one of scammers: $$$$$$$$Yes, there are liars out there, but there is NO VALID evidence for literally millions and millions of Americans claiming to be Vietnam vets who werent, although you obviously still very much want to believe this considering you keep repeating the claim. It's not as widespread as it was the first 10-30 years immediately after the war,its still out there. 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. IF one was there & received the home coming I did, one would not bother. As for the issue of phony vets: 'Those people have a mental problem. Burkett candidly admits he's not a writer. Type falsify military service into an online search engine window, and one yields tens of thousands of hits relating case after case in which someone has either exaggerated or completely fabricated their military service. His story was detailed, yet he under played his role. Bureau of Economic Analysis, and many other Federal agencies and private The project, it would turn out, had a profound effect on her. 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. My newspaper, the Daily Press of Newport News, Virginia, published an open invitation for those who had taken part in the grand and awful amphibious assault to contact us and share their stories. All others should not be accepted to have served either on land or at sea in Vietnam. Between March 1, 2008, and Feb. 25, 2009, the VA investigated 96 cases of "stolen valor" fraud, according to James O'Neill, assistant inspector general for investigations. He hadn't been trained in intelligence and he hadn't been a master sergeant. facts being unverified. But they soon discovered that Maughn was a fake, one who had earlier flim-flammed other vet groups, employers and newspapers. Here are some notable tales, along with the less glamorous versions found by Burkett: REALITY: He spent the war behind a desk as an intelligence officer, was "wounded" when he got drunk at a party, fell down a ladder and broke his leg. You're a person of value," says B. G. "Jug" Burkett, a Vietnam veteran who was the first to expose military imposters in a systematic way, and who coined the term stolen valor. The story was essentially done at that point, but I said, Sure. Bob Fazio, chapter president, refuses to discuss if Castagna was a combat vet. Who knows? They want to be around real vets,' said Martin. . Robert Bateman, who teaches military history at West Point. But other men (and women) I've run into over the past 4 decades, thousands of them, have mentioned nothing about being Vietnam vets. Since the . They're all around you. actually in Vietnam and that about 8.5 million served during the Vietnam era. No, he said, but a former Ranger up in New York did. from it to arrive at the 9.4 million. 87% of Americans hold Vietnam Veterans in high esteem. Although it was said that no reputable site had posted The Vietnam War was the nation's longest and costliest conflict of the Cold War. After nearly 20 years of living thousands of miles from his family so he could claim his French army pension, the old soldier is finally being allowed to return to live in his native Senegal. A casual mention of military service. He deployed to Iraq, near Fallujah, in 2009. 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.I reject out of hand because there is no evidence to support the statistic, certainly not in the source ALWAYS given (U.S. Census). statement. Whitley, 43, is of a generation that, as she said, learned about the war largely through their TV sets. I had decided that I would $174k/yr for a new Daytona in a month. Did you get drafted, go in the military? Rather than say, No, I avoided the draft, the guy says, I dont like talking about it.Well, I was in the Army. You serve overseas? Yeah, I was in Vietnam. The next thing you know, the guys being asked to join the VFW., DePaulo more or less agreed: You say something, almost as a trial balloon. We would like to show you a description here but the site won't allow us. "I said no such thing. 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. Nor was his name actually Daubmann; it was Karl Hummel, and hed taken his new name from a passport retrieved from an old uniform hed bought. 'Some claim to be vets just out of a need to be macho.'. Burkett predicted that half would be frauds. The universal attitude was, 'Why should we give money for these bums?' And Shipley's estimate of 1000 times the true number is also made up and worthless, not based on anything other than Shipley wanting to believe there is some sort of Navy Seal imposter epidemic.Just as a basic gut check that these huge numbers are preposterous, how many people have any of us run into bragging about being Navy Seals or in Vietnam? In 2019, approximately 3.4 million Vietnam War Veterans were enrolled for Veterans Health Administration services (12). I think you can find fakers very far back, said Bella DePaulo, a visiting professor of social psychology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who studies the communication of deception. Along the way, Burkett has picked up a few enemies: "There had been some threats, and the brokers and secretaries were afraid of being killed, so they moved me way down the hall to this office." Lest Burkett sound like some wild-eyed zealot, seeking phonies at every turn of a Memorial Day parade, he likes to point out that he fell into this avocation by accident and, now that his book is out, wonders how much longer he is going to be called upon as the nation's expert in tracking down military records. This is well within the range of possibility. Perhaps the idea that the lie about military service ultimately becomes a truth in the phony veterans mind explains what happened with my aspiring D-Day Ranger about two weeks after Id caught him lying. 02 Up to 2 million civilians died in the war. That guy, the real Ranger told me, got killed on D-Day. claiming Vietnam service who were not there and that there are many claiming the same that has been used at many of the sites that I visited. was not saying it was for service in Vietnam. People younger than Whitley have, for the most part, only the faintest of clues when it comes to understanding the military, and they don't really care about it anyway. It also notes that information on total personnel abroad (Vietnam and elsewhere) was not available.Finally No. Local community celebrities appear no less prone to telling such tales. I got wounded many times by the same guy. Retired Vietnam veterans have a lower unemployment rate than the same non-vet age groups. So it becomes (The ONLY question EVER asked by the Census, NOT if they were actually serving in Vietnam.) David -You said, "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. Moreover, 30-50% of those meeting criteria for PTSD had mild . The efforts of latter-day watch-dogs such as Sterner, Burkett, the Schantags, fake Navy SEALcatcher Steve Robinson and others have given military fakery the appearance of being a modern phenomenon, particularly during the Vietnam era. Joining is simple and . It is noted that these dates may differ from those used to define various veterans benefits. How many fake Vietnam veterans are there? That is the one common thread., In Burketts mind, most fakers do so because of low self-esteem. provide a source, I dont know where to take this. By this census, FOUR much of this other than there were 2.7 million service members who were Or maybe you dont even mean it consciously as a trial balloon, but you put something out there, and it works and maybe gets a good reaction. A couple of weeks before June 6, 1994, I was at my desk when the phone rang. A Department of Defense report suggested that the total number of service members serving during the war was 8,744,000 but this might have included Reserve and National Guard as well as active duty and it also includes the veterans who actually served in country.According to those same DoD figures, 3,403,000 were actually deployed into Southeast Asia, which includes some 700,000 who were not in Vietnam but stationed in Thailand, Guam and the deep water Navy. I'm interested in real vets who have their own problems.'. He had been a prisoner, but not in Vietnam. But in a broader sense, DePaulo said, people lie for the same reasons, no matter what they claim to be. Burkett's quest for that evidence started in 1986, when he was asked to help raise funds from private donors for the Texas Vietnam Veterans Memorial. During that same Census That came from everybody. But we aren't going to discuss this with the news media,' he said. copies of the VFW magazine or the ROA magazine so that we can see if they Heres However, veterans groups estimate that today approximately 9 to 12 million Americans fraudulently claim they served in Vietnam. Reject it if you wish, but that doesn't mean it is wrong and look at all the Stolen Valor sites where you will find claimant after claimant who has been exposed. Veterans Today site also wrote, in big letters, . Starting on page 12 of this pdf in parts No. B.G. If fact it is close to the total that served and suggests that Viet vets don't die as quickly as others.Either the 2010 figures haven't been digested yet or I could not find them. "They give me a blank look.". identified about 1.7 million Vietnam Veterans still alive at the time of the There can be problems, however. I was a Army platoon leader. Small wonder. "It all started when I was shooting my mouth off in bars 35 years ago . Thailand, Guam and in the deep water Navy, and some statistics on those Another at a Veterans Day celebration couldn't identify where he had served other than up north somewhere and seemed unfamiliar with the tactics employed. flights over Cuba but that wasnt true either. (Video) A Vietnam Vet. OUT OF FIVE WHO CLAIM TO BE Vietnam vets are not. (Yes, this is somewhat an email address so they might have been there and I therefore did not find the I said that this provided an insight into those who claimed inside knowledge of Roswell. As I say again, the alleged 10+ million Vietnam vet fakers figure, promoted by various Vet organizations and publications, has absolutely no basis in fact, no actual documentation anywhere to support it, certainly not any ACTUAL Census report that has been cited repeatedly as a reference. 76% of the men sent to Vietnam were from lower middle/working class backgrounds. ago. I personally believe there are as many American males claiming military service falsely as there are living veterans in America, said B.G. does not seem to be accurate and my review of the census doesnt bear this out. As a Massachusetts state representative, Royall Switzler portrayed himself as former member of the Army special forces in Vietnam. During the war, more than 58,000 servicemen and women lost their lives. But the real truth is that nearly everyone was exposed to indirect fire, ground attacks at base camps, and other elements of combat based on the nature of the war. U.S. While the charts do not specifically ask about incountry vets it does show the number grew by almost a million in ten years. I have run into many of them and I don't get out all that much. 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. He was driven out of the group. A long time ago, I had at least one case of a World War I guy, claiming a Medal of Honor that hed received.. 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.) has said that for every real SEAL he identifies, there are a thousand who were State Vietnam Veterans Vietnam Veterans (per 100k) Utah 42,774 1,272 How [] But I know this didnt just occur starting with the modern wars. If you are also in a position of power or authority or prestige, then you might also feel less vulnerable, because you think that people wont challenge you, she said. confusing and contradictory, but I think they were referring first to the 1995 with the Bronze Star Medal for actions during my tour in Iraq and I have the It was much easier to do before. These are a At Pointe du Hoc., As you might imagine, I almost fell out of my chair. I don't think this matter to anyone but us anyway. Well-known actor Brian Dennehy often shared stories of his service with the Marines in Vietnam. used seem to have been gleaned from this 1995 census and it seems that everyone But, some of them are so good that they have done the research though once one of them told me he had been a door gunner with the Hornets at the time I was a pilot in the unit. I found out quickly IF I listed military service, early on for jobs, I did not get the job!Its only since 9/11, that I did start seeing 'Nam unit hats!When I see one or a bumper sticker & the vast majority seem to be genuine. Dennehy did play football for a Corps team on Okinawa, Burkett reported. Same for number of active duty personnel during this period (in No. authentic though I suspect the number is close to accurate. He wasn't even sent overseas until September 1968, six months after the Khe Sanh siege was over. 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. According to the inflated faker statistics, they would represent about 7% of all adult males, or 1 in 14 men we would run into. 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. I explained that given the way some of this was explained on the various sites was somewhat misleading and I was mislead, but you have nothing to prove that it is wrong other than your own beliefs. "I've got other things I want to do in life, and chasing down phony Vietnam vets is not the way I want to spend it. Vietnam veterans' personal income exceeds that of our non-veteran age group by more than 18 percent. 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.". I certainly haven't come across it personally. Robert French tells us about his remembered involvement with the Roswell crash, but his military record did not support some of his claims. fight over the statistics but there is too much information here. think I have been able to deduce what has happened. Im a retired Marine of 25 years, Alvarez told the attendees. for the last few years I have started asking those wearing the hats where they served in Vietnam. That in no way suggests dismissing most Roswell witnesses. Ironically, maybe the true millions are those vets defrauded by The VVF, not Vietnam vet imposters. After one local vagrant killed a policeman, the next days headline read, VIETNAM VETERAN GOES BERSERK. Accounts vary as to how Daubmanns lies unraveled, but five months after his glorious return, he admitted hed never served in the German army. Very rare and usually done by people looking for high profile jobs. He was driven out of the group. "Pressure is Vietnam,". Nor has military fakery been limited to Americans. 1,713,823 of those who served in Vietnam were still alive as of August, 1995 (CENSUS FIGURES). Steph Curry killed off the Kings with a smile, On an island of resorts, this Hawaii hotel is the budget option, Des Linden unveils new book, shares race day must-haves, Why every Californian needs an air quality monitor, Things to do in Napa Valley during Bottlerock, plus hotels, Your Privacy Choices (Opt Out of Sale/Targeted Ads). Maybe creating phony statistics on nonexistent vet imposters was designed to get vets understandably angry so they would send their hard-earned money to scam vet charities like the VVF. . The United States Vietnam War Commemoration is hosting a "welcome home" event in Washington DC. But at the dedication ceremony, despite the hundreds of "normal-looking" vets in the audience -- suits, jackets, neckties on some -- the television news teams immediately gravitated toward "the guys in fatigues and boony hats, the bearded bums. There they can find independent confirmation of my service as a helicopter pilot and aircraft commander.The other thing is that if you ask the impostor for names of places, unit designations, or other information, they are often hard pressed to come up with any sort of intelligent answer. Because of the homecoming we got I never brought up Vietnam let alone wore a hat with Vietnam vet on it. For the past three years, Burkett has worked behind the scenes with the Department of Veterans Affairs Office of the Inspector General on Operation Stolen Valor, aimed at uncovering people in the Pacific Northwest whove fabricated military service in order to obtain VA benefits. Why bother to be a faker unless you are going to brag about it to people you meet? CHECKED. But he'd like it if some of this eased up. Now, extrapolate that across the nation, and imagine the millions of dollars that this runs into.. When I started noticing all the Vietnam Veteran hats I was perplexed. census and then to the 2000 census but did not explain this problem. You can find the figures here:https://www.va.gov/opa/publications/factsheets/fs_americas_wars.pdf Using both the census and the DoD numbers, Navy Captain Scott Beaton conducted a survey for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund. People are impressed. what I do know. Published Sep 24, 2018. 'I owe an apology to those who served in Vietnam,' he said. In Sterners experience, its all about the financial advantages fakers can obtain. As it turned out, my guy wasnt on the list. Vietnam Veterans represented 9.7% of their generation. DURING THIS CENSUS COUNT, the number of Americans falsely claiming to have served in-country is: 13,853,027. In 1999, Donald R. Nicholson, the police chief of Amelia, Missouri, in the 1980s, admitted that he had lied about being a Vietnam veteran and a prisoner of war to obtain better veterans benefits. They range from the one time publisher of a Phoenix newspaper The event will include displays related to the Vietnam War, a jump by the Golden Knights (Army parachuting team . claiming Vietnam service and have been exposed as frauds. REALITY: Yandle did serve in the Marine Corps but never received combat medals and was never in Vietnam. His words were recorded. He was telling the truth about prison, it turned out; but hed done time for burglary, not as a POW. That same web site published an article, Who Are the Real Viet Point prevalence of PTSD for Vietnam veterans was 9% in the 1980s and for OIF/OEF veterans was 8% (Richardson, Acierno, Frueh, 2010). After killing a prison guard, he said, hed been transferred to a labor camp in French-governed Algeria, where, after years of torture, good behavior had earned him a job as a prison tailor. count, the number of Americans falsely claiming to have served in-country was: Jack Smith, head of the VA's National Center for Stress Recovery in Cleveland, said of the 650 persons treated at his facility in the past two years, just six proved to be fakes. 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. Once you start getting away with it, then I think you get more emboldened. And, oh by the way, a Purple Heart and a few other honors earned.

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