Walz’s Fellow Guardsmen Set the Record Straight on Veep Candidate’s Military Career: ‘He Bailed Out’

It was late in the spring of 2005 when Tom Behrends, a farmer in his mid 40s with three kids, got the call from his superiors: The Minnesota National Guard’s 1st Batallion, 125th Field Artillery was being sent to Iraq. Tim Walz, the unit’s command sergeant major, had just resigned to run for Congress. Behrends was in line to take his place.

He’d need to talk with his family, Behrends told his bosses. He had a farm to run and his youngest child was still in elementary school. Because he wasn’t in the unit when it was activated, technically Behrends had to volunteer to go.

But Behrends told National Review it was clear what he needed to do.

“My first reaction was, I’m not going to let my soldiers down,” he said.

Behrends ended up spending 17 difficult months in Iraq with the unit. Among the unit’s tasks was maintaining a key supply route, keeping it clear of explosives. Three of his soldiers were killed and dozens more were injured during the tour, he said.

Although they were both first sergeants in the Minnesota Guard, Behrends said he didn’t really know much about Walz. They were in meetings together. “The only thing I knew about him is he talked too much, and he liked to hear himself talk,” Behrends said.

While he couldn’t believe that Walz would quit on his soldiers ahead of a deployment, he didn’t say anything publicly for years. He said he would see news items and campaign materials about Walz that incorrectly identified him as a command sergeant major; Walz briefly held the rank, but retired at a lower rank, master sergeant, because he never finished meeting all the requirements, according to Minnesota National Guard records.

Behrends said he decided to push back after a friend said he’d met Walz, then a congressman, at a military memorial and identified Walz as a command sergeant major.

“I said, ‘Well, he’s not one. He dropped out,’” Behrends recalled telling the friend.

He said he started by writing Walz a “nice letter,” urging him to correct the record. He didn’t hear back. He sent letters to various departments in Washington. Ahead of Walz’s first run for Minnesota governor in 2018, Behrends and a colleague posted their concerns on Facebook. They reached out to “every radio station, every TV station, every newspaper in Minnesota.” But their efforts to expose Walz struggled to gain traction.

Flash forward six years. Behrends’s concerns finally received national attention after Kamala Harris selected Walz to be her running mate for her presidential campaign.

While Walz has long touted his 24 years of National Guard service for political advantage — one 2006 campaign ad identified him as a solider who “served for two decades” and who was “ready when they attacked” — the inconsistencies between what he said he did and what he actually did in the Guard have come back to sting him this week.

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Here’s an ad from Tim Walz in 2006, in which he falsely claims to be a “command sergeant major” (he’s a retired master sergeant) who retired “four years late” (he quit early to run for Congress — abandoning his battalion just before they deployed to Iraq) pic.twitter.com/fWtTbgidX7

— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) August 8, 2024

As recently as Thursday, Harris’s campaign was still identifying Walz as a “retired command sergeant major.” The campaign has since tweaked the record to say that Walz once served at the command sergeant major rank, according to Politico.

He’s also been accused of pumping up his record to falsely suggest he saw combat. In a video that Harris’s campaign released this week, Walz called for background checks for gun purchases and ensuring that “those weapons of war, that I carried in war, are only carried in war.”

According to the Minnesota National Guard, Walz first joined the Guard in 1981 when he was living in Nebraska. He transferred to Minnesota’s 1-125th Field Artillery Battalion in 1996, and specialized in maintaining and operating cannons. He continued serving after September 11. In 2003, he mobilized with the 1-125th and was stationed in Vicenza, Italy, in support of Operation Enduring Freedom. He didn’t serve in Afghanistan.

A video from 2009 obtained by the Washington Free Beacon shows a veteran confronting Walz’s staff at his office, accusing the then-congressman of misleading voters into believing he deployed to Afghanistan by identifying himself as a “veteran of Operation Enduring Freedom.”

After returning to Minnesota in 2004, Walz, a teacher and assistant football coach, supported Democrat John Kerry’s presidential bid, and he organized a protest against George W. Bush in Mankato.

In February 2005, he filed paperwork to make a run for Congress as a Democrat in Minnesota’s first congressional district.

Having just returned from Italy, he likely did not expect to be called overseas again and assumed he could run for office while continuing to serve in the Guard.

“Instead, they dropped a bomb on us and said, ‘Okay, you are getting deployed again,’” Behrends said. “And then he had to scramble to figure out how the hell to get out of there so he could run for office and tuck his tail between his legs and stay back here.”

Jon Erickson, a retired chief warrant officer who was on battalion staff with Walz, said Walz retired after receiving a warning order alerting the battalion that it was likely going to be deployed, but before a stop-loss order was issued, which would have locked everyone in the unit into place so they could prepare to deploy. While Walz didn’t violate any military rules, the timing of his resignation was troublesome, Erickson told National Review.

“He agreed to take this position, to be the sergeant major. When you do that, you’re making a commitment. And when we get the warning order, you’re going to be deployed, he bailed out before the stop-loss order could go into effect,” he said. “There were guys in it who were killed in our unit, they probably would have chosen to do something different, too.”

Not every current and former member of the Minnesota National Guard agrees with Behrends’s and Erickson’s assessment. When reached on the phone, one former Minnesota National Guard leader who is now a state employee told National Review that Walz was “great,” though he declined to comment on the record because of his position.

Another soldier who’s served 26 years in the Minnesota National Guard and asked that his name not be used said he doesn’t take issue with Walz retiring so he could run for Congress. Walz, he noted, had made the decision to run for office “before the deployment cycle even began.”

“You don’t want to go and be running for office while going on deployment. Especially in that role, you don’t want to have those dual responsibilities,” the soldier said. “It was needed that somebody else fill that role if that was what he wanted to do.”

The national guardsman, who described himself as a political centrist who would prefer to vote for someone besides Harris or former president Donald Trump, said he believes many of the attacks on Walz’s record are being done for partisan purposes.

The guardsman has known Walz since high school. Walz, he said, was his high school global geography teacher and his defense coach on the high school football team. Walz was the coach who ended up benching him during his senior season, he said.

“It was appropriate, because I gave up the only passing touchdown of the season, and then I laid on the ground like a child and pounded my fist,” he said. “He did what was appropriate. He didn’t coddle me.”

The longtime Walz acquaintance said he joined the Minnesota Guard between his junior and senior years of high school, and Walz became his superior during the football season. Occasionally they’d have to skip Saturday film sessions to go to drill in New Ulm, he said.

As a National Guard first sergeant, he said Walz was a good mentor to junior soldiers. He said he believes Walz has been pulled to the left by the Democratic Party. And while he doesn’t share Walz’s increasingly left-wing politics, he said he believes his former coach and teacher makes choices for the right reasons.

“I know that in his mind he’s always doing what he thinks is the right thing for the people around him,” the guardsman said. “Again, not always the same as what I would believe in.”

Erickson said he had no reason to look down on Walz’s service before he abruptly retired. He called Walz an “affable guy, pretty friendly.” Walz related well to young soldiers, he said, and they seemed to like him. He called Walz a “competent” soldier.

“He wasn’t outstanding,” Erickson said. “He didn’t shine. I’d worked with soldiers that shined, they are exceptional. And he was not.”

Erickson said Walz’s decision to resign ahead of his deployment “says a lot about Walz as a leader.” But, in a way, he’s glad Walz did resign.

When it came to making decisions, he said, Walz was a waffler who would bend his words to try to make everybody happy. On the other hand, Erickson said Behrends, who took Walz’s place, was a stronger decision-maker and a “better choice for that position.”

“Behrends was an excellent addition to our unit in Iraq,” Erickson said. “I don’t think Walz could have done the job that Behrends did.”

Behrends and Erickson agreed that if Walz wanted to run for office instead of serving overseas, he should have retired immediately after filing his campaign paperwork. Because he didn’t, they said, he should have waited to run until he got back from Iraq.

Behrends also took issue with comments that Walz made when he was struggling to decide on whether he should call up the National Guard during the 2020 riots in the Twin Cities. Walz said that while some people may believe that “we’re going to have massively trained troops,” in reality “you’re going to have 19-year-olds who are cooks.”

Walz’s former student and fellow guardsman said there’s some truth to that, because most junior guardsmen in Minnesota haven’t been through riot training. “I remember one time in my entire enlisted career pulling out the riot gear, in Italy, because we had free time over there with the nature of that deployment,” he said, adding that Walz was there for that training.

Behrends countered that the Guard is “prepared to do anything, anywhere, at any time.”

He called Walz’s “cooks” comment “disparaging” and “absolutely ridiculous.” He said he had 19-year-old cooks serving with him in Iraq, and they “did a damned good job.”

“Here’s a big shoutout to all the 19-year-old cooks,” Behrends said. “I’d rather go to combat with you guys than him.”

Behrends also pushed back that his concerns are rooted in partisanship.

“This is about patriotism, not politics,” he said. “I don’t give a damn if you’re red, yellow, black or white or brown, or Republican or Democrat. If you’re in position and your country says we need you to go to war to take care of your soldiers, we’ve invested all this money in you, the taxpayers’ money all these years, and now it’s time for you to step up to the plate, and you bail, you’re nothing to me, then.”