Kamala Harris’s running mate didn’t evade combat duty.
Republicans are trying to “swiftboat” Tim Walz (the term is explained here), and Vance is their point man. He’s falsely claiming Walz timed his National Guard retirement to avoid deploying to Iraq.
But Walz left the Guard to run for Congress before anyone knew the unit would deploy. He filed candidate paperwork on February 10, 2005, and retired from the Guard in May 2005. His former Guard unit was put on deployment alert in July 2005, and was sent to Iraq in March 2006, almost a year after Walz retired.
CNN notes that “service members need to submit papers several months before they can retire.” (Read article here.) This shows Walz began making plans to retire and run for Congress sometime in 2023, was already retired before the unit received orders, and it was deployed began nearly a year after he’d left the service. (More details here.)
Even if Walz had stayed in the Guard and gone to Iraq, he wouldn’t have seen combat. A 42-year-old command sergeant major would have a desk job in a battalion or division headquarters. So, any way you slice and dice it, accusing him of “avoiding combat” is a lie.
Disparaging a fellow veteran with a lie isn’t just beyond the pale. It’s also hypocritical. Vance wasn’t in combat either; he was a military journalist who spent 6 months in Iraq writing stories about our troops.
Normal people don’t disparage our veterans, but it seems anything goes in Republican politics. This isn’t the first time Vance has disrespected our military people; he did it to a combat-decorated general, too (see that story here).