Okay. the burning question sits on our collective lips. Did aspiring singer Tim Poe, recently of America’s Got Talent, lie to the nation about his alleged “injuries” in Afstan and Iraqistan? Was it the RPG that broke his back in two places that he “remembered” last year during the show? Was it the hand grenade he threw himself on more recently? Perhaps the through and through GSW in Iraqistan in 2005 before he “actually” was in the service? So many questions. So many war injuries and so few scars.  Without touching on the grammatically incorrect part ( America Has Talent) what disturbs many is the recalcitrance to take a polygraph to get to the bottom of all this. If you honestly believe you were wounded and awarded the BS and PH for these injuries, you would have no problems doing the test. It happened in your mind, therefore it is.

As Dr. Phil said, either these events happened or somewhere there is a village missing its idiot. Let’s look at this more closely. I am no fan of Maury Povich and his ilk. I do not find it important to know whose DNA is responsible for Shaniqua’s pregnancy. I worry about more mundane things like lettuce depression and getting an ILP greenhouse. I’m lying. Actually I worry about getting the earlier effective date of 1994 for hep. and PCT. There. I said it. The facts of the matter here are incontrovertible. Timbo ain’t no Special Forces honcho. He apparently was brushing up on his stutter as early as 2003, long before the alleged Traumatic Brain Injury in Afstan in 2009. Pre-delayed TBI anyone? Perhaps karaoke was the culprit. Who knows after a decade or more? The only definitive evidence of this lies inside the mind of the affected individual.

Why is it that some of us feel obligated to embellish an otherwise mundane service enlistment? Is it a desire to “be more that you could have been?” What caused the inevitable crash and burn back to Earth is the revelation on the National Stage of AGT of these exploits. Telling your buddies at the VFW bar how you picked up and carried 10 wounded guys to safety with a 7.62 round in your buttocks is one thing. Going on TV and affecting a stutter while professing to be GI Poe is asking for undue attention. If they begin to pick apart your story and find an ear infection instead of SFWs, you may have to turn on the tears and claim you simply disremember. What you don’t do is call your (former) friends liars or impugn “some”their recollections. Dr. Phil must have had a premonition this would be the case. The more the Timster clung to his newer versions of the RPG/hand grenade/ GSW mishaps, the more witnesses the Philster dragged out to refute it. Personally, I would remember getting a Bronze Star or a Purple Heart. That’s the problem. He “remembers” it whereas no one else who was there does.

We all learned something when we were kids. Telling lies is an art form. Some of us could get away with it. Some couldn’t. The ones who did had some nugget of truth to cling to, thereby making their story plausible. I found that holding up the rubber shield and bouncing the question back at the interrogator was extremely effective when we were up country. As an example, any post-op briefing regarding ordnance deployment had to be carefully parsed with the magical rhetorical question. So the interrogatory lead-in “Tell me about the secondaries after the Sandys naped the truck park.”  required a rubberband   “Huh? Napalm? That’s not permitted without prior authorization from the Ambassador. We assumed that the large secondaries from what appeared to be inflammable liquids were nothing more than residual gasoline or other petrol products on board the PT-76s located in the camouflaged truck park. Perhaps you should contact the 432nd TFW and inquire as to what ordnance they were carrying today. We simply marked the site and did a BDA (Bomb Damage Assessment) afterwards. I personally didn’t see any nape cannisters-just the CBUs and 82s.”

What you don’t want to do is get bogged down in the weeds and admit you were perfecting your  Raymond Babbitt”Rain Man” imitation in Karaoke bars back in 2003 in preparation for your 2012 Oscar performance on AGT. Timmy Twotones started to change his story as the show progressed and Dr. Phil pointed this out. Much like the vA, he allowed Tim a shred of dignity to retreat with by offering him free forensic reconstruction of his defective memory circuits.

Going further afield in search of the missing village idiot, I found this BVA decision that has many similarities. Here are some of his problem areas.

The Veteran seeks service connection for a psychiatric condition separate from his major depressive disorder, to specifically include PTSD, which he asserts resulted from combat experiences during the Vietnam War. He asserts that his specific stressors – which he refuses to discuss in any detail – consist of experiences on a secretive Special Forces-type covert operations “hunt and kill” team which “did not exist” in 1968, 1969, and 1970. He alleges that he received a Bronze Star, a Silver Star, three Purple Hearts, and a Combat Infantry Badge for this service, all of which are not acknowledged by the military because they are classified. In support of his claims he has submitted photos of two groups of men in uniform and one of a single soldier, presumably the Veteran.

The Board notes that the Veteran’s contentions with respect to the nature of his service are not supported by his DD Form 214, his service treatment records, or his service personnel records. The service records provided to VA show that his military occupational specialty (MOS) designations throughout his military service were cook or cook’s helper (1967), refrigerator repairman helper (1969), food service specialist (1971), military police (1981), and food service specialist (1982). His service personnel records do show participation as a student in Basic Airborne Training at Fort Benning from June to August 1967, eight weeks of artillery school in 1967, and one tour of duty in Vietnam from January 1969 to January 1970. Discussion of his training and certifications does not indicate that he ever earned a Parachutist Badge or attended a Special Forces Qualification Course or other similar training and there is no evidence to suggest he was ever assigned to Fort Bragg, North Carolina, the central training facility for Special Forces. Nor is there any documentation of assignment to or participation on a “hunt and kill team” or deployment to Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, or Thailand beyond the one tour of duty mentioned. However, the personnel records do contain an undated notation that the Veteran was not to be assigned to any location where definitive medical care was not available nor to any unit where “sudden loss of consciousness would be dangerous to self, or others, such as work on scaffolding, handling ammunition, vehicle driving, or working near moving machinery.”

A big problem with that “classified stuff” is it can’t be entered in the records nor can it be discussed. We call that the “If I tell ya, I gotta kill ya.” clause. Looks like this probably ruled out handling hand grenades, too. However, the Board failed to consider the possibility that this gentleman was such a horrific culinary artist that he regularly poisoned his customers. In that narrow context he could very possibly have been deployed on a “kill team” that dispatched many a Viet Cong when they came upon some of his bacon and egg e. coli booby traps. For that reason alone, I feel he deserves a remand to clear it up.

And then the problem with war wounds and scars always surfaces. vA has no idea how good plastic surgeons are nowadays. They can make an elephant’s wrinkles disappear right up his own anal sphincter.

The record shows that the Veteran has been consistent in his statements that he was involved in covert operations and that he informed examiners that he sustained three wounds in combat: a gunshot wound to the left forearm, a shrapnel wound to the right ankle, and a knife wound to the right chest, all of which he said were treated by Special Forces medics. The Veteran’s service treatment records do not reflect any such injuries in service, nor do the periodic examinations show scars on the right ankle or right chest areas. A scar is shown on the left forearm in several in-service examination reports; however, the record also shows treatment in September 1972 for a puncture wound to the left forearm during a motor vehicle accident. The Veteran has also stated that he was treated in a military mental health facility in 1968 for paranoia following his first tour of duty in Vietnam. The service treatment records show that in September 1968 he was seen at the emergency department after fainting out and was afforded a mental health consultation due to exhibiting extreme anger and apparent concern that he would be sent to Vietnam.

Turning to the medals…

The Veteran seeks service connection for a psychiatric condition separate from his major depressive disorder, to specifically include PTSD, which he asserts resulted from combat experiences during the Vietnam War. He asserts that his specific stressors – which he refuses to discuss in any detail – consist of experiences on a secretive Special Forces-type covert operations “hunt and kill” team which “did not exist” in 1968, 1969, and 1970. He alleges that he received a Bronze Star, a Silver Star, three Purple Hearts, and a Combat Infantry Badge for this service, all of which are not acknowledged by the military because they are classified.

Just a word to the wise before you embark on one of these reinvented histories. The Government has very good records of what happened in the wars. Unless you have good extraneous evidence to buttress your arguments, your DD 214 is going to be the definitive document the vA uses to determine combat exposure. Between that and your Service treatment records, if it isn’t listed, discussed or annotated, it’s simply a fig newton of the imagination.

This is a pretty innovative though.

Moreover, if the Veteran’s assertions of inpatient mental health treatment in 1968 were to be accepted as true, such treatment would almost completely negate the likelihood of his assignment to a subsequent third tour of special operations duty. The Board also notes the Veteran’s assertions to his mental health provider in 2006 that he had been beaten during a six month period as a political prisoner in Nicaragua while serving as an advisor to both sides, apparently during the 1980s. Given that his service treatment and service personnel records show him to have been assigned as a cook in Texas, Oklahoma, and Germany, this claim is viewed by the Board as further evidence that his alleged covert operations are not credible.

Time for a forensic reconstruction of the brain box. Too many Fig Newtons floating around in there.

Before

After

As we used to say: ” War is pure Hell. Combat, on the other hand, is something else.”Imagine little red piss-ants all over those fig newtons. That was war. Combat was when they got soaking wet and you ate them anyway-with the ants.