138: The Real Thing
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"Jug Birkett is a businessman in Dallas, a Vietnam vet, and about 10 years ago he was in charge of a campaign that was trying to build a memorial to honor Vietnam vets from Texas. It wasn't easy." "The immediate public reaction was why should we give money for those bombs?" So Mr. Birkett started doing research, so he could prove to people that most Vietnam vets are not bombs. They have jobs, they didn't go crazy in the war, they're waiting utterly normal lives. "Then right in the middle of doing that, there was a murder here in Dallas, a vagrant killed a policeman at a traffic stop. And the headlines basically said Vietnam veteran goes berserk and for a week they were follow up stories about how Vietnam may even do it." "You were in the situation where this was going to hurt your fundraising efforts." "Well it was hurting my fundraising. I mean every time a bad story like that appeared, I would get kind of heckled by the people that I was trying to get money out of." "Hey Birkett, I saw another one of your boys went crazy last night kind of thing." Mr. Birkett is not the kind of man who sits by and idly watches things go to hell. He took action. "Anyway, I checked this particular fellow's individual military record, and turned out he never served in Vietnam. He'd only been in the Navy three months and he got kicked down on a psychological chart." We live in a world full of people faking this thing in that, and it turns out that spotting a fake Vietnam vet is one of the easier lives to get to the bottom of. Mr. Birkett started routinely checking the bona fides of anybody in the news who claimed to have served in the war. He claims that he's found hundreds of fakers. He discovered some famous people fiving about their service records to buff up their public images, like actor Brian Danyke. He found defendants in murder cases claiming to be war heroes, hoping to beat the rap. Or, alternately, claiming the war made them crazy, and they can't be held responsible. He found big public events, misreported. "You remember the killing up at Edmond, Oklahoma is one of the first mass killings in the post. I was 14 post-a-workers kid." "Sure." "Well, again, Vietnam veteran goes berserk story. I checked my man's military record, he never served in Vietnam." And often what's amazing about these cases is the outrageousness of the rise. VA officials and career officers who fabricated and exaggerated among people who could easily catch them out. A soldier who's quoted extensively in the book, "We were soldiers once and young. The history of the Battle of Vietnam's I Drang Valley." "There's a man in every name, Christ, who's right in the middle of the battle and of course that thing is an oral history type thing, skips around and he's talking about being on the treeline and all this thing. Christ, after the war, actually founded their alumni group, started that. He then became a big fixture in the first cab division organization, ultimately became its president. And somebody gave me a tip that this may not all quite be on the up and up and I got
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