JD Vance Rips Tim Walz For Dipping From National Guard Before Iraq Deployment

Republican vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance knocked presumptive Democratic vice presidential nominee and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz’s “shameful” exit from the Army National Guard before his deployment to Iraq during a Wednesday press conference.

Veterans who served in the Army National Guard battalion with Walz accused him of abandoning them upon learning of their upcoming deployment to Iraq in 2005, according to a 2018 letter posted to Facebook. Vance said Walz should be ashamed of allegedly “lying” about his military career.

“As a Marine who served his country in uniform, when the United States Marine Corps., when the United States of America asked me to go to Iraq to serve my country, I did it,” Vance said. “I did what they asked me to do and I did it honorably and I’m very proud of that service. When Tim Walz was asked by his country to go to Iraq, you know what he did? He dropped out of the army and allowed his unit to go without him, a fact that he has been criticized for aggressively by a lot of the people that he served with.”

Vice President Kamala Harris’ headquarters posted footage on Tuesday of Walz saying civilians should not own the weapons he carried in war. Vance accused Walz of committing an act of stolen valor by claiming he had ever fought in combat.

“I think it’s shameful to prepare your unit to go to Iraq, to make a promise that you’re gonna follow through and to drop out right before you actually have to go. I also think it’s dishonest … He said we shouldn’t allow weapons that I used in war to be on the streets. Well I wonder, Tim Walz, when were you ever in war? What was this weapon that you carried into war given that you abandoned your unit right before they went to Iraq and he has not spent a day in a combat zone. What bothers me about Tim Walz is the stolen valor garbage.”

Vance enlisted in the Marine Corps. upon graduating from high school in 2003, and later served in Iraq as a combat correspondent for six months in late 2005, according to an excerpt from his 2016 bestselling memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy.” His time in Iraq helped motivate him to change his expectations for himself by “giving it [his] all.”

“The experience taught me a valuable lesson: that I could do it. I could work twenty-hour days when I had to. I could speak clearly and confidently with TV cameras shoved in my face. I could stand in a room with majors, colonels, and generals and hold my own. I could do a captain’s job even when I feared I couldn’t,” Vance wrote in his memoir.

Walz served in the Army National Guard for 24 years and retired as a Command Sergeant from the 1-125th Field Artillery Battalion in 2005, according to the governor’s website.

The Harris campaign and Walz’s office did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.