Gov. Tim Walz' military record has always been at the center of his political career. The presumptive Democratic vice presidential nominee enlisted in the National Guard at age 17 and retired honorably 24 years later.
But former President Donald Trump's campaign has launched a series of attacks aimed at discrediting Walz' service just as the Democratic presidential ticket, headed by Vice President Kamala Harris, has surged in the polls. The attacks, spearheaded by Trump's VP pick Sen. JD Vance, claim Walz ducked a Guard deployment to Iraq and lied about his military record.
Walz, who has denied the allegations, has been dogged by such claims since he first ran for Congress and then governor of Minnesota. Despite the renewed attacks by Vance, himself a Marine Corps veteran, the facts around Walz' retirement before his unit deployed, the references to his Guard rank and his own description of his wartime service appear much less cut and dry.
The Trump campaign claims may also be missing nuances in National Guard deployment and retirement timelines that see citizen-soldiers juggling a desire to serve their country with sometimes erratic military schedules and ambitions to do more in their civilian lives.
"I'm not criticizing Tim Walz' service," Vance said on CNN's "State of the Union" on Sunday. "I'm criticizing the fact that he lied about his service for political gain. I do think it's scandalous behavior."
Vance himself served four years in Marine Corps public affairs, effectively a job consisting of publishing press releases and photos of the service for public distribution. He deployed to Iraq for six months in 2005.
After serving in the National Guard for 24 years, Walz retired two months before his unit received official orders for a deployment to Iraq in 2005, though it's possible Walz could have known a deployment order was imminent because he was in a senior enlisted position.
At the time he retired, he was the command sergeant major of the Minnesota National Guard's 1st Battalion, 125th Field Artillery, the top enlisted rank for the formation.
It's unclear when Walz made the decision to retire, and the paperwork process for retiring often starts months beforehand. Guardsmen can retire after 20 years of service, but Walz has said he decided to reenlist rather than retire after 20 years because of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
Guardsmen have to juggle civilian careers and, at the time of his retirement, Walz, who was a teacher before entering politics, was pursuing a run for Congress. Deployment rumors are frequently rampant, and were especially so during the peak of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Missions are also routinely canceled or rescheduled.
Guardsmen serve roughly 50 days per year on average, and that does not include missions or prolonged training events. Troops in senior roles, such as Walz, would be expected to put in much more time planning for training or operations.
Walz first filed paperwork with the Federal Election Commission and announced that he was considering running for Congress in February 2005, according to the paperwork available on the commission's website and an archived statement from his campaign.
About a month later, in March 2005, Walz put out a statement saying the National Guard informed his unit that it could deploy to Iraq "within the next two years." Walz said in the statement that he still intended to run for Congress but that he also understood his "responsibility not only to ready my battalion for Iraq, but also to serve if called on."
In May 2005, at that time 41 years old, he officially retired from the National Guard, according to his military service records. His unit received official deployment orders in July 2005.
Walz' unit went to Iraq for a 22-month deployment in March 2006. Four Guardsmen died during the deployment, according to service component casualty reports.
In a 2009 interview with the Library of Congress for its veterans' oral history project, Walz said he retired in order to "focus full time on running" for Congress. He added that he was concerned about balancing his campaign with the Hatch Act, a law that bars politicking by federal employees while on the job. The act does not apply to members of the military, though there are other policies that bar politicking in uniform.
A spokesperson for the Harris-Walz campaign did not respond Monday to a request for comment, including about when exactly Walz first filed his retirement paperwork. But Harris has previously defended her running mate.
"I praise anyone who has presented themselves to serve our country, and I think that we all should," Harris told reporters last week.
Republican criticism of Walz has also focused on whether he embellished his service record.
In various biographies on campaign and government websites over the years, Walz has described himself as having deployed "in support of" Operation Enduring Freedom, the official name for the U.S. mission in Afghanistan from 2001 to 2014. While the mission encompassed operations outside of Afghanistan, most of which did not put troops in harm's way, most of the public understands it as just Afghanistan operations.
Walz was part of a 2003 deployment to Italy, where his unit provided security at Air Force bases under the Operation Enduring Freedom banner. But Republicans charge that, by linking himself to Operation Enduring Freedom, he is implying he deployed to Afghanistan.
Walz himself took offense to that type of criticism when it was first leveled during his 2006 campaign for Congress. After a letter to the editor in a local paper criticized Walz for "strongly suggest[ing] that he fought in Iraq or Afghanistan," Walz wrote his own letter hitting back at the "ridiculous claim that I am misleading voters."
"If you were confused about my service, you could have checked my website, or simply had the decency to call and ask me," Walz wrote in the letter published in the Winona Daily News, a newspaper in his congressional district. "When you dishonor a veteran, you dishonor all soldiers and veterans. You owe an apology to all those who serve honorably."
There have been times when others have referred to Walz as an Afghanistan veteran, and he did not correct them. But in several other interviews over the years, Walz has been clear he never served in combat or deployed to a war zone.
"I know that there are certainly folks that did far more than I did. I know that," Walz said in a 2018 interview with Minnesota Public Radio.
Walz enlisted into the Nebraska Army National Guard in 1981, at the height of the Cold War, as an infantryman, but later went into field artillery. At the time of his retirement, he was a command sergeant major, but because he did not complete the Sergeants Major Academy -- required schooling to hold onto the rank -- he was reverted to the rank of master sergeant when he retired.
References to Walz being a sergeant major have also generated criticism and political attacks.
The Harris campaign last week updated its online biography for Walz, which previously referred to him as a "retired command sergeant major." It now says he once served at that rank.
At a campaign rally last week, which served as Walz' coronation as her running mate, Harris referred to him as "sergeant major." Walz was also criticized for misrepresenting his rank during the 2018 Minnesota gubernatorial race, and was commonly referred to as "sergeant major" during his time in Congress.
Vance and Republicans have also pointed to a clip, first circulated by the Harris campaign itself, touting his support for gun control, in which Walz said he carried weapons of war "in war."
"I never criticized what Tim Walz did when he was in the military. I criticized his retirement decision, and most importantly ... I criticized his lying about his own record," Vance said during the Sunday interview on CNN. "This is a guy who was captured on video saying, 'I carried a gun in war.' He never went to war."
The Harris campaign gave a statement to news outlets over the weekend that said Walz "misspoke" then.
As Republican attacks against Walz ramp up, Democratic members of Congress with military backgrounds have been jumping to his defense.
"We saw 20 years ago with the swift-boating of John Kerry, who served honorably in Vietnam, that we cannot presume that unfounded attacks will implode under their own lies," Rep. Jake Auchincloss, D-Mass., a Marine Corps veteran, said last week on a press call hosted by the Democratic National Committee.
"Swift-boating" refers to the infamous and debunked campaign in the 2004 election that disparaged Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry's service in the Vietnam War. The man considered the architect of the swift boat attacks, Chris LaCivita, a Marine Corps veteran, is now a co-manager of the Trump campaign.
Auchincloss said Walz decided to run for Congress before his battalion got notice of the Iraq deployment and that "we have officers and enlisted who have all said he was an exemplary, admirable soldier."
Related: JD Vance's Marine Corps Service Would Set Him Apart from Most Vice Presidents
