Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Walz claimed to have carried guns "in war" during his career in the Army National Guard, according to a video released by the Kamala Harris campaign Tuesday. There’s one glaring problem with his claim.
Walz, the governor of Minnesota, served 24 years in the Army National Guard but never saw combat, according to his own résumé. Walz responded mostly to natural disasters in Minnesota and Nebraska, he told Minnesota Public Radio. He served overseas on a few occasions, but far away from any war zone: in Italy to support the European security force during the war in Afghanistan and Norway for joint training exercises with NATO forces.
According to Minnesota Public Radio, Walz said he reenlisted in the National Guard following the 9/11 attacks, but did not see combat before his retirement in 2005. "I know that there are certainly folks that did far more than I did. I know that," Walz told the outlet in 2018.
But Walz left a far different impression of his military service at a townhall event that the Harris campaign highlighted shortly after his selection as VP.
"I spent 25 years in the Army, and I hunt," Walz says at the beginning of the clip. He said he supports "common sense legislation" that "protects the Second Amendment," but said he favors extensive background checks.
"We can make sure those weapons of war, that I carried in war, is [sic] the only place that those weapons are at," he said.
Walz handled firearms and heavy artillery during his National Guard stint. According to Minnesota Public Radio, he said he won proficiency awards in sharpshooting and hand grenades. Walz suffered hearing loss from working with heavy artillery, an affliction he cited after his DUI arrest in 1995.
Walz’s military service is reportedly one of the top reasons Harris tapped the 60-year-old Midwestern governor to serve as her running mate. A Harris campaign spokesman posted a photo of Walz in uniform shortly after he was added to the ticket. And Walz has made his career as a "citizen soldier" a central theme of his political appeal.
But Walz has been accused of overstating his military career before.
Walz, who served in the Nebraska National Guard from 1981 to 1986 and the Minnesota National Guard from 1996 to 2005, has repeatedly claimed he reached the rank of Command Sergeant Major. But in 2022, retired Command Sergeant Majors Thomas Behrends and Paul Herr claimed Walz did not fulfill the qualifications to maintain that rank before he quit the National Guard in 2005. They said he retired after learning he would be deployed to Iraq.
The Harris-Walz campaign did not respond to requests for comment.