Veteran sets record straight on Tim Walz ‘swift boat’ attacks

Former GOP Congressman Adam Kinzinger is raging.

The U.S. Air Force veteran unleashed on Donald Trump and his running mate, JD Vance, for pulling an attempted “Swift Board” type attack against Tim Walz, Kamala Harris’ pick for vice president.

Kinzinger, a never-Trumper, responded to Vance accusing Walz of “stolen valor” because he retired from the National Guard shortly before his unit was deployed to Iraq. For starters, Kinzinger says, Walz retired at least a month before his unit was notified they’d be deployed, so Walz couldn’t have known the orders were coming because, he says, the military doesn’t give its troops a heads up on those decisions.

Though as Walz ramped up for a congressional bid in 2005, his campaign in March of that year issued a statement saying he still planned to run despite a possible mobilization of Minnesota National Guard soldiers to Iraq. According to the Guard, Walz retired from service in May of that year.

In August 2005, the Department of the Army issued a mobilization order for Walz’s unit. The unit mobilized in October of that year before it deployed to Iraq in March 2006.

Kinzinger spoke to The Bulwark’s Tim Miller recently to express his outrage:

If you’ve ever served in the United States military, why in God’s name would you run for office? Because what you have done — yes, you have done what 99% of the country won’t do — but now it has become acceptable to parse through your military records, look for anytime you said something in a public comment that might be a little bit inaccurate, or take a completely normal thing they happens in a military career, explain it as something differently to people who don’t understand, for instance, how military retirement works, and make it look like you abandoned your unit.

Walz retires at 24 years in the military. Let me be clear about one thing, he could have retired at 20 with a pension. He stayed for 24. That was four years after 9/11 and two years after the start of the Iraq war, so I retired from the Guard as well. I rented at 20 years. He stayed four more years.

Eventually, he makes the decision to retire. Now, it just so happens that a month later his unit gets called to say ‘You’re going to deploy.’ But he had made the decision to retire prior to that. …

If he had known they were deploying and then made the decision to retire, there is still nothing cowardice or unethical about that. Once you pass 20 years of service, you have every right to retire at the moment you decide to retire, and if it happens to be a bad moment and the military is like, ‘Sorry, you will leave this unit unmanned if you retire.’ They do what’s called a stop loss, which thousands of people got, which says you cannot retire until this mission is complete. So it is an unhinged and wrong, sick attack against a man that did 24 years of service.

.@AdamKinzinger on those uninformed attacks on Gov. Walz's service record on today's Bulwark Podcast. 🌶️🌶️🌶️Catch the rest on our YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts. pic.twitter.com/Fot8rj1E91 — The Bulwark (@BulwarkOnline) August 8, 2024

For context, Vance accused Walz of embellishing his record that’s reminiscent of the “Swift Boat Veterans for Truth” campaign that badly damaged Democrat John Kerry’s 2004 presidential prospects.

Chris LaCivita, the Republican strategist who was behind the movement, is a senior strategist for Trump.

Walz, 60, was in the Army National Guard and reached the rank of command sergeant major prior to retiring. He did in fact achieve that rank, but personnel files show he was reduced in rank months after retiring. That left him as a master sergeant for benefits purposes.

Trump, meanwhile, avoided service in the Vietnam War through student and medical deferments.

He said he got a medical deferment for a bone spur in a foot, but could not remember which foot when he talked about it in 2015. He added that he did not serve because he “was not a big fan of the Vietnam War. I wasn’t a protester, but the Vietnam War was a disaster for our country.”

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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Matt Arco may be reached at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter at @MatthewArco.