An article about false claims of military service is today’s most viewed, e-mailed, and commented-upon story on the San Antonio Express-News’ Web site. But it’s a story that very easily could have gone untold. There were no press conferences announcing it. There were no photo ops for television crews to get their images and soundbites.
Thanks to MacCormack, readers of Sunday’s newspaper now know that Culp isn’t the Army Ranger he claimed to be. Contrary to what he told others, he wasn’t wounded in combat and wasn’t awarded the Purple Heart.
MacCormack does a nice job explaining how common it is for people to embellish or lie about their military service:
Embellishing military records has a long and rich history in the United States, dating at least to the Revolutionary War when a German soldier of fortune gained George Washington’s confidence with false credentials.
Claiming to be having been a key military aide to the King of Prussia but alas, having no papers to prove it, Baron Von Steuben proved to be the exceptional imposter, providing valuable service in training the rag-tag revolutionary army.
But more than two centuries passed before it became a crime to lie about military honors and achievements.
Since passage of the Stolen Valor Act, in 2005, such deceptions are punishable by up to a year in prison, and dozens of fake vets have since been prosecuted. Others have gone to prison for receiving financial and medical benefits based on false claims.
A force behind the new law was B.G. Burkett, an Army veteran of Vietnam who spent more than two decades exposing legions of fake heroes and co-authored the book “Stolen Valor” that documented the phenomenon.
“It wasn’t just post-Vietnam. It’s every single conflict that’s ever occurred. It happened after the Civil War and it’s happening right now in Iraq and Afghanistan,” he said of false claims by soldiers.
“The No. 1 reason people do this is low self-esteem. The second you say you are a heroic warrior, people treat you differently,” he said.
MacCormack’s story comes on the heals of a revealing investigation by the Chicago Tribune that found hundreds of people have made bogus claims of receiving medals of valor.
Related: How to contact an investigative reporter in Texas
Most readers thought this was a valuable article. The question is, how can newspapers continue to tell these kinds of stories when newsrooms are shrinking and we’re losing experienced reporters? MacCormack is a veteran reporter and it wasn’t very hard for him to disprove Culp’s war stories. MacCormack is the journalist, after all, who solved the murder mystery of the infamous atheist Madalyn Murray O’hair.
How can the next generation of John MacCormacks keep telling these watchdog stories?
