Even those currently serving in the National Guard can be guilty of stolen valor.

I know a kid whose dream was to be a soldier. His grandfathers both served in WWII, and he idolized them, as he rightfully should have. He saw WWII and the 1940’s era as glorious and great. It wasn’t a great era, but fortunately we had many great people during that era who refused to lose.

This kid had many old veterans that he hung out with and considered his best friends. He had few if any friends around his age. He thought he was too good and too smart for them, and he was often ridiculed.

During high school, this kid bragged about his school baseball team, how much he loved it, and how much he would miss it; he had one at bat with a strikeout the whole time he played.

After graduation, he enlisted in the Army. To his credit, he completed boot camp and went into the 82nd Airborne. He got a concussion in jump school, was transferred out, went into the 4th ID in Colorado, and became a cook. After a whirlwind romance during which he caught his fiancé in bed with another man, he played on his concussion symptoms and was discharged. He called himself a vet, and he bragged about his service. 

Awhile later, he mustered back into the National Guard. His unit is in the Pittsburgh area, even though he lives in the upper Susquehanna Valley in the central part of the state.

He wants to be a combat veteran, and he equates his service with theirs, but he won’t go into a unit that will be deployed. His enlistment in the Guard is nearing its end, and now he’s trashing the military as an excuse not to re-enlist. He’s also engaged to his lifelong neighbor. 

This kid has a pretend antique and relic business, and fancies himself as an entrepreneur. He wants to be like Donald Trump, but his business is doing so poorly that he had to take a job elsewhere. 

He constantly spouts off on social media about how great he is, how phony other people are, how he can spot fakes, how he’s authentic and everyone else are phonies, and how he knows more about militaria than just about anyone else. The truth is that if he really wants to see a fake, a phony, or a pretender, he only needs to look in the mirror.

The following pictures are how he presents his military service on social media. He’s trying to create the illusion that he’s a hardened combat vet; he’s not, but he wants people to treat him like he is. Is he trying to steal valor that he didn’t earn? I say yes.