By Dan Fesperman
The Baltimore Sun
Times are tough for fake sailors and soldiers.
Latest casualty: distinguished historian Joseph Ellis, exposed as a phony Vietnam veteran, besmirching an otherwise brilliant career as an author and professor.
Other notables among the recently fallen: a Pennsylvania schools superintendent who claimed to have been a decorated Navy SEAL; a retired police chief in Ohio who told stories of Green Beret heroism and brutal captivity as a prisoner of the Viet Cong; a leader of Wal-Mart’s executive security detail who claimed to have been not only a SEAL but also a master killer, supposedly dispatching one of his 16 victims with a rolled-up newspaper; a Major League Baseball manager who told his players hair-raising tales of Marine missions in Vietnam.
Impostors, one and all.
Who keeps shooting down these nonwarriors, exposing their lies and exaggerations?
In an increasing number of cases — thousands, in fact — it is people such as Larry Bailey, Steve Waterman, Chuck and Mary Schantag and a dozen or so others running a linked network of databases and Internet "gotcha" sites. Together these dogged folks, many of them retired soldiers, keep tabs on those who claim to be POWs, Medal of Honor winners, SEALs, Green Berets and just about any other brand of military pretension you could imagine.
"It’s not so much the guys in a bar saying, ‘Yeah, I was a SEAL,’ that we’re after," explains Waterman, a Navy veteran from South Thomaston, Maine, who wrote the book "Just a Sailor."
It’s the ones who use their tales to advance their careers and their image that anger him, he says, duping bosses, girlfriends, the news media and sometimes even the Veterans Administration, collecting benefit payments and free medical service.
This driven core of debunkers is responding to what Chuck and Mary Schantag’s site at pownetwork.org calls "a nationwide epidemic."
"Every time we expose a new one, it seems like we get reports of two or three more," says Mary Schantag of Skidmore, Mo. She and her husband have turned up 668 fake POWs since they checked out the first claim in 1998.
"It just keeps growing and growing and growing," she says, so much that the fake warriors sometimes outnumber the real ones.
Retired Navy Capt. Larry Bailey, an ex-SEAL from Mount Vernon, Va., who helps run a database for the Web site cyberseals.org, says about 7,000 phony SEALs have been identified over the past six years. In reality, roughly 10,000 people have completed either SEAL training or, prior to the founding of the SEALs in 1962, the Navy’s frogman training, which began during World War II. As of May, there were 2,220 active-duty SEALs.
"About 19 of every 20 people we get inquiries about are fake," says Bailey, whose site lists 622 impostors in alphabetical order under the heading, "Meet some of the most despicable people on Earth."
The reasons for their fury sometimes are emotional.
"You read about a guy who dies, someone who was either poisoned by Agent Orange or was an alcoholic," Waterman says, genuine veterans who never got over their wounds or their nightmares of combat. "And then this other guy’s out there in a fake uniform parading in front of The (Vietnam Memorial) Wall, and you just want to rip his lungs out."
So, if you falsely promote yourself as some sort of war hero long enough, one of these people might track you down. Once they do, they’ll haunt you forever, and in the age of e-mail and cyberspace, they’ve achieved a deadly efficiency in spreading the word.
In Pennsylvania, Panther Valley district schools superintendent Raymond Aucker lost his job when he was exposed as an impostor who’d been boasting about his exploits as a SEAL, and the sleuths made sure his subsequent employers found out as well.
Federal law prohibits the unauthorized wearing of military uniforms or medals, although the statutes are seldom enforced. The greatest penalty for most impostors is public humiliation. That was the case with the most recent notable example, historian Ellis, who in the past few years had won a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award for books on Thomas Jefferson and the nation’s founding fathers.
Ellis had been telling war stories of his Vietnam experiences to his students at Mount Holyoke College for several years, as well as to interviewers. But he never served there, and Boston Globe reporter Walter Robinson exposed his deception.
"Basically, what it amounts to," Bailey says, "is a guy who for some reason has a feeling of inadequacy."
Ellis has offered an apology but no public explanation. But he might have inadvertently offered a clue to his motives during a recent online interview conducted before the controversy emerged.
When asked about what Thomas Jefferson did during the American Revolution, Ellis said he didn’t serve in the Army, even though he was young enough. That later became a source of embarrassment for Jefferson, Ellis added, saying, "When he runs for office later on, they keep calling this moment back to him that he didn’t serve. It would be like now if somebody missed service in Vietnam, and basically being told, ‘Where were you when it was time to be counted?’ "
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