Shortly after Vice President Kamala Harris chose Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate, the Trump-Vance campaign called into question claims he previously made about his military service, opening a broadside against the U.S. Navy veteran that some Republicans now liken to “sort of a Swift Boat 2.0 attack.”
It is a reference to the highly contentious playbook the GOP used against Sen. John Kerry when the Massachusetts Democrat ran for the White House in 2004, in large part on his record as a junior naval officer in Vietnam. Those character attacks, widely panned at the time, called into question whether Kerry really deserved his combat medals, notably the three Purple Hearts he was awarded while commanding Swift Boats in the Mekong Delta. For better or worse, this line of criticism has now been rebooted for Walz in the 2024 election.
Walz likely remembers the history well. His first foray into politics was as a volunteer for the Kerry campaign in Minnesota, and later, as the district coordinator of an organization called “Vets for Kerry.” So does Chris LaCivita, a senior advisor to the Trump campaign, who worked as the chief strategist for the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, a veteran’s group that worked to scuttle the 2004 Kerry campaign.
LaCivita made the comparison explicit in an interview with RealClearPolitics. “Birds of a feather,” he said of Walz and Kerry, “will be tarred together.”
The battle to define the vice-presidential candidate was joined the moment Harris brought him on stage in Philadelphia Tuesday evening. Her running mate was “more than a governor,” she told an at-capacity crowd in Philadelphia Tuesday. To his constituents, he was “Congressman.” To his high school football players, “Coach.” And, she added, “to his fellow veterans, he is Sergeant Major Walz.”
Walz retired from the Minnesota National Guard in 2005, ending a 24-year career shortly before his unit, the National Guard’s 1st Battalion, 125th Field Artillery, deployed to Iraq.
“When Tim Walz was asked by his country to go to Iraq, do you know what he did? He dropped out of the Army and allowed his unit to go without him – a fact that he’s been criticized for aggressively by a lot of the people that he served with,” said Trump running mate Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance. A Marine Corps veteran who served in Iraq, Vance added, “I think it’s shameful to prepare your unit to go to Iraq, to make a promise that you’re going to follow through, and then to drop out right before you actually have to go.”
The Harris-Walz campaign responded to those allegations in a statement to RCP, saying that “after 24 years of military service, Governor Walz retired in 2005 and ran for Congress, where he chaired Veterans Affairs and was a tireless advocate for our men and women in uniform – and as Vice President of the United States he will continue to be a relentless champion for our veterans and military families.”
The unit in question deployed to Iraq for 22 months after Walz left it and suffered casualties. At the time, Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty ordered state flags lowered to half-staff in honor of Sgt. Kyle R. Miller who was killed by a roadside bomb when “assigned to Army National Guard’s Headquarters and Headquarters Battery, 1st Battalion, 125th Field Artillery Regiment.”
Army Lt. Col. Kristen Augé, public affairs officer for the Minnesota National Guard, told NBC News that Walz “culminated his career serving as the command sergeant major for the battalion” and “retired as a master sergeant in 2005 for benefit purposes because he did not complete additional coursework at the U.S. Army Sergeants Major Academy.”
That specific rank has added a wrinkle to the debate. A command sergeant major is the most senior enlisted noncommissioned officer in a battalion, and Walz has faced scrutiny for representing himself as “the highest-ranking enlisted service member ever to serve in Congress.”
These questions were first raised when Walz ran for governor in 2018. In a letter to the editor of a Minnesota newspaper, two command sergeant majors from Walz’s unit wrote that Walz was only “conditionally promoted” to that rank “but was never qualified at that rank, and will receive retirement benefits at one rank below.”
Minnesota Public Radio reported in 2018 that a public affairs office for the state National Guard stated that it was appropriate for Walz to say he served at the rank of command sergeant major. And others who served with Walz were quick to defend him in subsequent years. Joseph Eustice, a 32-year National Guard veteran who later led the same battalion as Walz, told the Star Tribune that the “he was a great soldier” and that “when he chose to leave, he had every right to leave.”
“I love him as a soldier; I don’t care much for him as a politician,” Eustice told the Tribune in 2022, before adding, “the man did nothing wrong.”
When running for reelection that year, the Walz gubernatorial campaign responded to criticism with a letter signed by 50 veterans praising his record. “Gov. Walz secured additional funding for new veterans’ homes,” read the letter obtained first by NBC News. “In his first term, Minnesota was one of just seven states initially selected by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs to participate in the ‘Governor’s Challenge’ to eliminate veteran deaths by suicide.”
While running for governor, Walz did not emphasize his military tenure, focusing instead on his time as a teacher and coach. “I know that there are certainly folks that did far more than I did. I know that,” Walz said in 2018. “I willingly say that I got far more out of the military than they got out of me, from the GI Bill to leadership opportunities to everything else.”
But Republican Rep. Michael Waltz, a Green Beret who retired from the Florida Army National Guard last year as a colonel, said the debate over Walz’s rank is not clerical. It isn’t just a point of mistaken emphasis either. “From a veteran’s perspective,” Rep. Waltz said in an interview with RCP, “these are not slip-ups that you would make. I would never purport myself to be a one-star general if I retired as a colonel. Those are just clear-cut lines that he has crossed.”
The Harris-Walz campaign invited more controversy when they shared a video of the governor calling for gun control. “We can make sure those weapons of war, that I carried in war, are only carried in war,” the vice-presidential candidate can be seen saying in the undated clip.
But did he really carry weapons in a war zone? The Harris campaign said Walz fought flooding and responded to tornadoes stateside while also spending months on active duty deployed in Italy. As a gubernatorial candidate, he told the Star Tribune that his battalion was deployed in 2003 to protect against potential threats in Europe while active military forces were deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan.
Vance called out Walz over this claim. “Well, I wonder, Tim Walz, when were you ever in war?” Vance asked at a Michigan campaign stop. “What was this weapon that you carried into war, given that you abandoned your unit right before they went to Iraq?”
“What bothers me about Tim Walz is this stolen valor garbage,” Vance added. “Do not pretend to be something that you’re not.” During a subsequent Wisconsin campaign stop Vance added, that while he “served in a combat zone,” he had “never said that I saw a firefight myself … I’ve always told the truth about my Marine Corps service.”
A spokesperson for the Harris-Walz campaign did not dispute that the governor may have overstated his case when claiming he carried a weapon in war. “In his 24 years of service, the governor carried, fired and trained others to use weapons of war innumerable times. Gov. Walz would never insult or undermine any American’s service to this country – in fact, he thanks Senator Vance for putting his life on the line for our country,” the campaign said in a statement to RCP. “It’s the American way.”
So is negative campaigning, as John Kerry can attest. The liberal Democrat, who later served as secretary of state under Obama and special presidential envoy for climate under Biden, maintained that the Swift Boat accusations against him were “lies.” He earned a Silver Star, a Bronze Star, and three Purple Heart medals, one for each time he was wounded in battle. “They lied and lied and lied about everything,” Kerry told the New York Times in 2006. “How many lies do you get to tell before someone calls you a liar? How many times can you be exposed in America today?”
In political ads blanketing the airwaves, Swift Boat veterans argued that Kerry embellished his record and that his medals had been awarded erroneously. A fellow veteran, the late Arizona Sen. John McCain, criticized the ads, noting that some of the Swift Boat veterans making claims against Kerry had not served aboard his boat.
As NBC News recently noted, however, FactCheck.org concluded at the time that after exhaustive research, “at this point, 35 years later and half a world away, we see no way to resolve which of these versions of reality is closer to the truth.”
Republicans have already come to their conclusion. “This is a series of events that shows he was a fraud,” Mike Waltz said of the Democratic vice-presidential nominee, “or at a minimum that he was grossly exaggerating his record.”
The waters continue to be muddied, sometimes by sloppy mistakes. Tim Walz wrote an endorsement of a book in 2008 called “Winning Your Election the Wellstone Way,” describing it as “a refreshing look at how to run an election.” The book pointed to his first campaign as “a great example of telling your story and conveying authentic motivation.”
It later misidentified Walz as “a longtime National Guardsman who served in Afghanistan.”
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