Fabulators

On Monday Secretary of the Veterans Affairs Department Robert A. McDonald, apologized for falsely claiming last month that he had served in the US Army Special Forces.

This happened in a conversation with a homeless veteran in Los Angeles and was unfortunately for him captured on camera. That’s the great thing about the video age, casual lies get caught. Either someone says something that gets recorded, or someone lies about something that happened and it turns out there’s an audiovisual record of what really happened.

But this is just plain weird. Service records are just that – records. They can generally be accessed with a Freedom of Information request.

I think we have probably all known some pathetic loser who claims he was an Army Ranger, a CIA agent, a “mercenary” or whatever. Sometimes it’s someone who’s never been in the military, or perhaps someone who was a truck driver in the Army who reinvented himself as a combat hero like former University of Colorado professor and fake Indian Ward Churchill.

Sometimes someone lies for tangible benefits, like Churchill or Sen. Elizabeth Warren who parlayed fake Indian ancestry into lucrative jobs reserved for affirmative action appointments. (And by the way, my ancestry is about one percent African, and by the old “one known drop” rule…)

But most of that kind we’re likely to run into are people with no significant accomplishments of their own who simply invent the glorious self they wish they could be, but don’t dare.

But what are we to make of people with real, substantial accomplishments who tell self-aggrandizing lies?

McDonald is, unless this also turns out to be fraud, a graduate of the United States Military Academy at West Point (1975), served in the Army’s 82nd Airborne Division, and completed jungle, arctic, desert warfare and Ranger training. I think it unlikely these claims would have remained unchallenged this long if they were false.

McDonald had nothing to gain and everything to lose by lying. For God’s sake why would he do that?

We’ll probably never know. Perhaps he doesn’t even know himself.