A Parade of Fake War Heroes

Heroes rarely materialize out of thin air. When one appeared a year ago in the barrel-chested figure of Donald R. Nicholson, the Vietnam War veterans of this hill county took to him like love-struck suitors. He was everything they were not.

A retired small-town police chief, Nick Nicholson, 62, walked into the Clermont County Vietnam Veterans of America post with a soldier’s stride uneroded by three decades of civilian life. The men of VVA Chapter No. 649 sagged in the throes of middle age. Nicholson, who recounted tales of a harrowing stint as a prisoner of war, owned medals for battlefield valor. They had yellowing discharge papers.

The vets came along as an honor guard when Nicholson spoke to school assemblies. In February, they saluted him after he was pinned with a Distinguished Service Cross, the Army’s second-highest award for bravery in combat.

“Here we were, rubbing elbows with a bona fide hero,” said David Murrell, leader of the VVA chapter that welcomed Nicholson into its ranks. “We couldn’t believe he wanted to join us.”

When the Clermont County vets met a month later, they voted to expel Nicholson. He had never fought in Vietnam. His storied Army career was an invention, his medals bought from a memorabilia dealer. An ex-Navy sailor, Nicholson had been living in Florida in the late 1960s when he claimed to have fought and been captured by the Viet Cong. He was a prisoner only of his fertile imagination.

As the Vietnam War recedes into history, the collective experience of its veterans has become grist for a wave of counterfeit heroes. Their usurping of aging soldiers’ honors is a peculiar mutation of war and remembrance, a phenomenon detonating like buried land mines in places like Batavia, communities where the exploits of Vietnam vets long have been cherished.

The homecomings that followed American wars almost always have produced sporadic outbreaks of fakery. Pretenders abounded among elderly veterans who claimed to be the last living survivors of the Civil War. Bogus World War II heroes still occasionally come to light.

But nearly three decades after the end of the Vietnam War, the surge of impostors has come as evidence, some observers say, that middle-age charlatans are making their last-chance run at glory now that the nation has renewed its respect for its warrior culture.

Some are con artists using glory as a cover for their crimes. Some are politicians and businessmen eager to pad their resumes. But many are ordinary men with a consuming need for recognition, whose tall tales spin into fantasy lives replete with forged papers, fake medals and surplus uniforms.

“They do it for all sorts of reasons,” said Loren Pankratz, a clinical psychologist in Portland, Ore., who encountered scores of war fakers during a medical assignment with the Veterans Administration hospital there. “It’s a spectrum. There are losers, pathological types, guys trying to impress women. What they all have in common is this internal need to impress themselves and a feeling of power that they can pull it off.”

Among those ferreted out in recent years have been congressmen, principals and ministers. Tim Johnson, manager of the Toronto Blue Jays baseball team, was fired this spring after his claims of Marine experience in Vietnam turned out to be contrived. Last year, Larry E. Cable, a respected historian of counterinsurgency operations who lectured at West Point and other military colleges, suddenly retired from his faculty post after he was accused of trumping up a Marine past in Vietnam.

Some impostors trip themselves up with their own lies. But hundreds more have been exposed by a small but growing network of former Navy commandos, decorated soldiers, war prisoners and veterans who use the Internet and public records to scour for pretenders’ real pasts.

“If there were just a few of them, we could all pack up and get on with our lives,” said B.G. “Jug” Burkett, a Dallas stockbroker and Vietnam vet whose office is cluttered with the files of pretenders--some caught, many still living their false lives. “But it’s like a bottomless pit. Who knows how many of these guys are still out there?”

A Growing ‘Wall of Shame’

Until recent years, most sham heroes were exposed randomly and in small numbers. Few die-hard ex-servicemen had the patience to build cases against impostors. The most obsessed was Mitchell Paige, a Marine awarded the Medal of Honor in World War II for preventing Japanese troops from erecting an airstrip on the South Pacific island of Guadalcanal. The 81-year-old retired colonel, who lives in La Quinta, Calif., spent 40 years tracking down more than 500 spurious Medal of Honor claimants.

But as Vietnam-era impostors have spun off into new permutations of unreality--some pretending to be former Navy SEALS, others claiming a multitude of service medals--Paige’s successors have built extensive archives of fraud, documenting thousands of cases in a few years’ time.

Their handiwork is circulated at veterans’ halls and posted on Web sites. A “Wall of Shame” compiled by former Navy SEAL R.D. Russell lists more than 400 fakes--mostly Vietnam War impersonators revealed in recent years. An archive compiled by a national prisoner-of-war group, NAM-POWs Inc., lists the names of an additional 250 suspected Vietnam-era deceivers.

Burkett, 55, who estimates he has hunted down more than 2,000 impostors in 13 years, lists scores of them in “Stolen Valor,” a history of Vietnam War deceptions.

“It’s like ESP,” Burkett said. “You get so you can sense a phony even before you check him out.”

Critics contend that the impostor hunters’ zealousness sometimes spills into obsession. Richard Verrone, a Vietnam historian and former Cable student, warns that, in the hunt for fraud, exposers “need to be extra careful because they can potentially ruin people’s lives.” Verrone and others point to the 1996 suicide of Adm. Jeremy “Mike” Boorda, who was accused of wearing Vietnam combat decorations he did not earn, as a cautionary episode.

“You don’t fudge the truth,” Burkett responds.

One Veteran’s ‘Eternal Vigilance’

Misuse of military honors and service records are federal crimes, carrying minor fines and prison sentences, “to protect the integrity of the awards and the honor of the soldiers who received them in the past,” said Shari Lawrence, deputy public affairs officer for the U.S. Total Army Personnel Command in Alexandria, Va.

Driven by a sense of outrage and “the thrill of the chase,” Burkett figures he has lost $250,000 in stock commissions while pursuing impostors. “The price of eternal vigilance,” he joked.

A former Army lieutenant stationed in Saigon who oversaw armament shipments, Burkett saw only limited action during his two-year hitch. Like many vets, he felt ignored and maligned on his return to civilian life.

He traces his awakening to 1986, when he tried to raise funds for a $1.5-million memorial to Texas Vietnam vets. He was turned down repeatedly by businessmen who cited news accounts of crimes committed by troubled ex-soldiers. Exasperated, Burkett began sending off to government archives for their war records.

Spare form letters came back. One Vietnam vet accused of gunning down a Dallas police officer turned out to be a sailor who had never served in the war zone.

Burkett slowly mastered the paper trails left by impostors. By 1995, he had helped a news organization expose Oregon Rep. Wes Cooley, who claimed a Korean War assignment with the Special Forces--despite having never left the United States. Cooley resigned.

Burkett’s expert perusal of military files is matched by an army of archivists who oversee acres of military files buried in warehouses at the National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis and the National Archives in Washington.

“There’s a real appreciation for what he’s doing,” said Clifford G. Amsler, a Vietnam combat veteran who is assistant director of the St. Louis facility’s massive Military Records section.

Documents from St. Louis proved Nicholson’s downfall.

Burkett and several other whistle-blowers targeted the former police chief after they saw accounts in the Cincinnati Enquirer of his receiving an Army Distinguished Service Cross.

Nicholson used altered Navy discharge papers, Murrell said, to join the county vets chapter and may have similarly gulled a National Guard commander into publicly pinning him with his unearned war commendation.

Dave Conley, a 53-year-old former infantryman, still rages about having joined Nicholson in an honor guard for a retired Army officer buried last year. When he heard of the deception, he said, he “cried for two damn days.”

Notified about the allegations of Nicholson’s deception, Army authorities in Alexandria and St. Louis pulled his service files. They found no evidence of Army service or action in Vietnam, Lawrence said. The case could be referred to the Justice Department. But more often than not, she said, impostor cases fade away without legal action. “For a lot of these people,” she said, “public embarrassment is punishment enough.”

Impostors Are Rarely Cited

Medal of Honor fraud cases became a priority after 1994, when Congress raised the maximum fine for their misuse to $100,000. But other pretenders are rarely cited because the “penalties are so low, it isn’t worth going after them,” said New Jersey FBI agent Thomas A. Cotton Jr., who specializes in award abuses.

Nicholson’s fellow veterans would have preferred their own punishment. “Some of the guys wanted to drag him behind a truck a few miles,” Murrell said.

Reached at his home in Amelia, Ohio, Nicholson acknowledged only that “this is a terrible thing.” He then deferred to a lawyer, who did not return repeated calls.

Some still insist that Nicholson is a Vietnam hero. Chuck Schlemmer, a retired Army sergeant who introduced Nicholson to the Clermont County veterans’ chapter, insisted the Army fears admitting “the real story”--that his friend was a covert agent.

The excuse of a secret life is a classic war impostor dodge, said psychologist Pankratz, who depicts them as much the same as those suffering from Munchausen syndrome, in which people fake afflictions to get attention. The pathological condition is ironically named for an 18th century German baron who invented fanciful war stories.

“It’s a perfect way out,” Pankratz said, “because it gives them complete deniability.”

At the University of North Carolina in Wilmington, historian Larry Cable’s insistence that he led a secret life as a covert operative in Vietnam has left administrators and faculty members uncertain.

Administrators rushed to Cable’s defense last year when Burkett and Vietnam War historian Mark Moyar accused the professor of concocting a past as a Marine and intelligence agent. Cable abruptly retired and disappeared. His lawyer, William Lamb, was vague about Cable’s past, saying only that the historian is “a great patriot.”

Cable, who wrote several histories of counterinsurgency operations in Vietnam, was not a Marine. Both Burkett and Moyar said checks of government files produced no evidence of war service.

Even military officers who took in Cable’s lectures at training and command schools from the U.S. Military Academy in West Point, N.Y., to the Army Special Forces School at Ft. Bragg, N.C., wondered if the impostor hunters were wrong.

James H. Willbanks, an instructor at the U.S. Army Command and Staff College at Ft. Leavenworth, Kan., said the school’s faculty at first dismissed the allegations. But after the school conducted its own back-channel investigation, Cable quickly was dropped as a lecturer. “He was at the top of his game,” Willbanks said sadly.

Fitting In With the Veteran Culture

Most impostors have had some form of military service, say Burkett and other exposers. Some spent the Vietnam War years in the National Guard or military reserves. Others, like Nicholson, enlisted but served outside Vietnam. Many others were sent to Vietnam but never saw combat.

They all manage to blend in with the authentic veterans around them, mimicking their culture, memorizing their battle lore. Some even dare to ape veterans’ disdain for impostors.

Massachusetts veteran Wayne Higley was always vocal about his loathing for counterfeit heroes. “You got to look out for these cowards,” Dick Del Rossi said Higley told him.

Del Rossi, a Vietnam veteran who is a police officer in Stoneham, Mass., said he was awed by his friend’s credentials. Higley professed to be a former SEAL with a Navy Cross, the service branch’s second highest medal, and three Purple Hearts. As Higley recounted his war exploits, Del Rossi recalled, he would roll up his pants to show off a leg pocked with scars he claimed were war wounds.

Higley’s emotional speeches to Vietnam veterans’ groups were so overpowering that he was soon sought out as a keynote speaker. “He could reduce anyone to tears,” said Becky Coit, a hairdresser who works with veterans’ groups. On a 1997 trip to the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, Higley told his war tales to a national TV audience on “Good Morning America.”

But like Nicholson, Higley is not a Vietnam War hero.

Last May, Del Rossi messaged Russell’s Colorado-based SEAL archives, hoping to find some of Higley’s old commando colleagues to surprise his friend on another trip to the Wall. “When I got home that night, my machine was practically smoking with messages from ex-SEALS,” Del Rossi said. “They all said, ‘This guy’s a phony.’ ”

Higley, 52, has a Navy record, but he was no SEAL. The St. Louis archives show he was a lowly “beachmaster” from 1964 to 1966. Higley probably was assigned to “scraping the bottoms of boats” at the Coronado Island naval base where SEALs train, Russell said. Records show Higley has no commendations, no medals, suffered no war wounds. His scars, Higley admitted to Del Rossi, came from an old fracture.

In an e-mail message, Higley claimed there is a “real story” to his masquerade. He declined to comment further. But in a message to Coit, he wrote: “I am a lowlife.”

“I won’t quarrel with that,” Del Rossi said. The men no longer speak.

In Ohio, at the hall where Clermont County’s Vietnam vets show up one night a month for meetings, no one has any interest in hearing from Nicholson, either. “We know all we need to know,” Murrell said recently as he watched his fellow veterans prepare for a Memorial Day celebration.

The event is the highlight of their year. Every Memorial Day, they gather near an old Huey helicopter. The veterans erect 540 crosses and then stand vigil around the chopper for 24 hours, night into day. Each cross stands for a county son killed in action during the war.

It would have been fitting, Murrell mused, to have a real hero there as they put up the crosses.

“I guess we’ll have to do,” he said.