In the days since Kamala Harris named Tim Walz as her running mate, the Minnesota governor’s military service record has drawn scrutiny. Attention has focused on two topics: the circumstances surrounding the Minnesota governor’s retirement from the National Guard during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan nearly two decades ago, and the way in which Walz and his various campaigns have described the nature of his military record. This scrutiny — and sober-minded criticism of Walz’s statements — is warranted.
Here are the facts as they are presently known.
Tim Walz enlisted as an artilleryman in the Nebraska Army National Guard in 1981, the day after his 17th birthday. Over the next 20 years, Walz reenlisted several times and by all accounts served honorably as he rose up the ranks. Shortly after 9/11 and now living in Minnesota as a high-school teacher, Walz reenlisted again, despite the fact that he was eligible for retirement after 20 years in the service. In the summer of 2003, Walz’s unit, the 1st Battalion, 125th Field Artillery of the Minnesota National Guard, deployed to Italy to augment Air Force security forces in Europe.
After the unit returned home in 2004, Walz was selected to serve as the battalion’s command sergeant major — the senior non-commissioned officer in the battalion, a soldier who holds a critically important role and who serves as the senior enlisted adviser to the battalion commanding officer. The command sergeant major, among other things, is responsible for monitoring and advocating for the welfare of the troops in his unit. As is the norm, Walz’s September 2004 promotion to command sergeant major was conditional on his completion of the Army’s Sergeants Major course and two additional years of service.
In early 2005, as the insurgency in Iraq was growing worse, the 1-125th Field Artillery Battalion received a warning order notifying the unit to prepare to deploy to Iraq. According to a 2018 letter to the editor written by retired Command Sergeants Major Thomas Behrends and Paul Herr to Minnesota’s West Central Tribune newspaper, the unit began its training workup in the fall of 2005, and then spent 18 months in the combat zone in 2006 and 2007.
Tim Walz, however, retired on May 16, 2005, and ran for Congress.
It is true that after 24 years of service, Walz rated retirement. It is also true that if Walz’s retirement package was processed before his unit received its official mobilization orders in July 2005, then he was under no legal or administrative obligation to go on the deployment.
It is not true, however, as has been claimed inaccurately in the press and in pushback to J. D. Vance’s criticism of Walz, that Walz did not know that his unit would be deployed to Iraq when he retired. Walz, as the battalion’s command sergeant major, would certainly have had early insight on whether a mobilization was likely in the months before he retired. And indeed, in March 2005, two months before his retirement, while he was already running for Congress, the Walz campaign put out a press release, which stated:
Although his tour of duty in Iraq might coincide with his campaign for Minnesota’s 1st Congressional seat, Walz is determined to stay in the race. “As Command Sergeant Major I have a responsibility not only to ready my battalion for Iraq, but also to serve if called on. I am dedicated to serving my country to the best of my ability, whether that is in Washington DC or in Iraq.”
Clearly, that changed. In fairness, Walz has said that he left the National Guard and ran for public office because he believed he could more effectively advocate against the war, which he had publicly opposed, in the halls of Congress than from the battlefields of Iraq.
But Walz’s retirement in the months before his unit went to war surprised and rankled fellow soldiers. And it is worth noting that it is not at all unusual for national guardsmen and reservists to run for public office while staying in uniform. For example, Lindsey Graham deployed briefly to both Iraq and Afghanistan with the Air Force Reserve while serving in the Senate, and Pete Buttigieg deployed to Afghanistan as a naval reservist, requiring a leave of absence as mayor. As Walz grew in public stature and ran for subsequent higher office, many of his former comrades began to speak out. Behrends and Herr, the retired command sergeants major, wrote in 2018 of Walz, “The bottom line in all of this is gut wrenching and sad to explain. When the nation called, he quit.” They added:
He failed to complete the United States Army Sergeants Major Academy. He failed to serve for two years following completion of the academy, which he dropped out of. He failed to serve two years after the conditional promotion to Command Sergeant Major. He failed to fulfill the full six years of the enlistment he signed on September 18th, 2001. He failed his country. He failed his state. He failed the Minnesota Army National Guard, the 1-125th Field Artillery Battalion, and his fellow Soldiers. And he failed to lead by example. Shameful.
As early as 2006, Tom Hagen, an Iraq veteran, wrote to the Winona Daily News stating “that Walz quickly retired after learning that his unit—southern Minnesota’s 1-125 FA Battalion—would be sent to Iraq. For Tim Walz to abandon his fellow soldiers and quit when they needed experienced leadership most is disheartening.”
And in 2009, two Minnesota National Guard Iraq veterans confronted Walz campaign staffers about their concerns about Walz’s characterizations of his service.
Tim Walz may view his motives for leaving the National Guard and running for Congress as noble. But it is not true that Walz did not know a mobilization was coming, and these former soldiers are entitled to their opinion and deserve to be listened to instead of being rejected as partisan hacks, as some have claimed they are.
Unfortunately, the controversy over the timing of Walz’s retirement is not the only issue at hand. From the beginning of Walz’s political career, Walz and his campaign staff have been loose with their characterization of Walz’s overseas-deployment record in a way that seems intended to leave the uninformed with the impression that Walz served in a combat zone.
Usually, these statements have been phrased in ways that could be plausibly defensible if Walz had been pressed on them. His 2005 press release, for example, states that Walz served overseas “including an eight month deployment during Operation Enduring Freedom.” On other occasions, Walz has said that he deployed “in support of Operation Enduring Freedom.” These statements, referring to Walz’s 2003 deployment to Italy, are of course technically true, but it’s easy to see why some veterans would complain that Walz’s statements are intended to obfuscate the reality of Walz’s service and imply that Walz spent time in Afghanistan.
The fuzziness over Walz’s deployment record moves into the realm of outright inaccuracy when a friendly press has become involved.
In 2006, reporter Joshua Green, then at the Atlantic, profiled Walz and described him as having left Minnesota to “serve overseas in Operation Enduring Freedom.” In the same article, Green describes an amazing incident in which Walz claimed to have confronted George W. Bush campaign staffers and asked “if they really wanted to arrest a command sergeant major who’d just returned from fighting the war on terrorism.”
Just this week, Green, now at Bloomberg, wrote that Walz was “in Iraq as part of Operation Enduring Freedom.” The Bloomberg article has been subsequently corrected.
A 2008 book, Winning Your Election the Wellstone Way, which Walz went out of his way to endorse and blurb, describes Walz as a “longtime National Guardsman who served in Afghanistan.”
While misunderstandings and mistakes happen in journalism, it beggars belief that all of these instances are mere accidents in the same direction, and of course, the through line connecting the mischaracterizations are discussions and interviews with Walz himself.
In the spirit of Oscar Wilde, for Walz to leave the impression with one journalist that he was a combat veteran might be a misfortune, to have it happen again and again seems like carelessness.
Even more concerning, on a few occasions, Walz himself has crossed the line into what can colorably be argued to be “stolen valor.”
A video tweeted out by the Harris campaign itself — intended to highlight Walz’s veteran status and gun-control policies — arguably shows Walz declaring that “we can make sure that those weapons of war, that I carried in war, is the only place where those weapons are at.” (You can decide for yourself whether Walz was saying that he carried the weapons in a combat zone or that those weapons should only be carried “in war.”)
More seriously, in 2004, Walz was photographed holding a sign that read, “Enduring Freedom Veterans for Kerry,” which any fair-minded observer would take to mean that Walz was saying he was a veteran of the war in Afghanistan. He was not.
National guardsmen and reservists are a critical if misunderstood component of America’s armed forces. Their service is rarely glamorous. It’s fairly common for a guardsman to lose money on net during a drill period after travel expenses and lost civilian wages are taken into account. The “one weekend a month and two weeks in the summer” recruiting slogan is just that, as many citizen soldiers’ service regularly adds up to multiple months per year away from home and jobs and family. Guardsmen and reservists like Tim Walz should have the thanks of a grateful nation, and Walz should be commended for his more than two decades of service to his country.
But as he campaigns for the vice presidency, that service should not shield Walz from scrutiny over the circumstances of his retirement and his suspect claims about his service. At the very least, Walz should apologize for the 2004 “Enduring Freedom Veterans for Kerry” sign incident and for allowing his service to be mischaracterized for nearly two decades by the press.
In the end, however, it’s up to the voters to decide whether Walz dropped his pack.