On Joe Cafasso fake Vietnam hero and others posers from the Voice of Vietnam Veterans of America

Joe Cafasso isn't even old enough to have served in Vietnam, yet he's too dumb for complicated math like that.

Here's an article written by Bernard Edelman entitled "A Legend In Their Own Minds: Posers, Fakes and Wannabes", the cites numerous examples of this fraudulent military hero phenomenon, including a reference to Joe Cafasso's claims that he is or was a military veteran from that era.

Vietnam veteran wannabes, imposters, fakes, frauds, pretenders, poseurs - call them what you will. You rarely heard about them when the stereotyped image of the Viet vet was the dysfunctional baby killer who just couldn't seem to get his act together back in The World. Today, they're a growing plague, and a pox on the community of veterans.

"They're a nationwide epidemic," said Mary Schantag, who with her husband, Chuck, devotes countless hours to the POW Network they operate out of their home in Skidmore, Missouri. Said Chuck: "We've documented over seven hundred phony prisoners of war from Vietnam - more than the total number of POWs who were repatriated in '73. Every time we expose an imposter, it seems like we get reports of two or three more. Their numbers just keep growing and growing."

"We see it everywhere," VVA President Tom Corey told the New York Times last year. Acknowledging VVA had discovered that several veterans had claimed to have been prisoners of war, he said, "A lot of times they say they're Navy SEALs or special forces or POWs, and a lot of them never left stateside."

Of course, fake warriors are not a new phenomenon. "Historically there have always been pretenders," points out Bob Greene, staff assistant to the director of the VA's New York Harbor Healthcare System and a member of VVA Chapter 126. "This is nothing new."

One of his VA colleagues, who has studied about the psychological implications of phony vets for years, cites the last reunion, in 1913, of troops from both the Union and the Confederacy who had fought at Gettysburg, one of the pivotal battles of the Civil War.

"So many showed up, thousands upon thousands of old men, that the organizers had to regroup," he recounted. By 1913, only a few hundred legitimate Gettysburg veterans were thought to still be alive. So many of their contemporaries, he feels, "just wanted to be there," to be, however vicariously, part of history.

Most recently, after the release of the movie Black Hawk Down, there was a rush of poseurs claiming to have been Rangers in Somalia, said Steve Jaeger, president of the U. S. Army Ranger Association.

It is precisely this inherently dishonest pose that angers many veterans like Jaeger. "Their lies break down all trust. All we have is our good name. If we've lied, what's left?"

The liars roil vets like Chuck Schantag. "I see some dirtbag pretending to have been a prisoner of war who's being comped with free room and meals at some hotel in Branson based on a lie and I boil," he said. "Because to know real ex-POWs, you know they are the most humble men you'd ever want to meet. By their lies, the fakes diminish the suffering of the real POWs: They have no conscience."

Too many veterans never get over their combat experiences, their wounds, their nightmares. Imposters, Mary Schantag added, "steal the stories of heroism, but they're not stealing the nightmares, or the pain."

Different Degrees Of Phoniness

Frauds and wannabes are of two types: Many are legitimate veterans, men and women who have rendered honorable service but feel the need to inflate their records with deeds of derring-do. They often elevate themselves into SEALs or Green Berets or Rangers or LRRPs, veterans of special ops, recipients of the nation's highest decorations, up to and including the Medal of Honor.

Others never served a day.

Legitimizing their claims, they falsify their DD-214s, which is about as difficult to do as going to Staples to buy the whiteout they'll need.

While the VA requires an original or a certified copy of a veteran's 214, most VSOs and employers that accept the DD-214 as proof of service are not so demanding. Even third-generation copies are accepted. How intently they are scrutinized for discrepancies is open for discussion. It is usually when a fraudulent veteran attempts to rise within the organization or run for office that his lies crumble.

The wannabes know no boundaries of race or class or ethnicity, of enlisted man-- and, in a few instances, woman - or officer. More than a few have led lives of prominence and success: The onetime publisher of the largest daily newspaper in Arizona, Darrow Tully. A congressman from Oregon, Wes Cooley. A sitting judge in Missouri, Michael O'Brien. The Pulitzer Prize-winning historian at Mt. Holyoke College, Joseph Ellis. The onetime manager of the Montreal Expos baseball club, Tim Johnson.

An article that ran on the first page of the business section of the venerable New York Times on April 29, 2002, related the fall from grace of one Joseph A. Cafasso. Described as a "gruff, barrel-chested military man" who "claimed to have won the Silver Star for bravery, served in Vietnam and was part of the secret, failed mission to rescue hostages in Iran in 1980," Cafasso befriended real military men and hoodwinked Fox. Claiming to have been a lieutenant colonel in Special Forces, Cafasso's total military experience amounted to 44 days in basic training at Fort Dix, New Jersey, in 1976.

If the math holds up and he didn't FLUNK...he must have graduated Carteret High School in 1974.

Here's a brief explanation of the psychology of the man, although I stop short at feeling sorry for someone as vindictive and nasty as Joe Cafasso...

Why do these people - wannabe-hunters call them "pukes" and "scum" and other less flattering names - live a lie?

"I still don't know," 84-year-old Mitchell Paige said recently in response to a reporter's query. Almost 60 years ago, Paige, then a platoon sergeant in the Marine Corps, received the Medal of Honor for his heroism during a battle in the Solomon Islands. He has been pursuing those who sell fake medals and those who wear them since the 1950s.

Others offer educated guesses. Poseurs have in common an almost visceral need to confabulate, to "be all that they can be," to paraphrase Army recruiting commercials of 20 years ago. For many, the lie they have lived has become their reality.

Ben Weisbroth, who spent two decades as a benefits counselor with the VA and is now deputy director of the New York State Division of Veterans' Affairs, offers this: "These guys are looking to impress people. They want to pretend they were part of something they weren't part of."

Steve Maguire, who served as a Ranger in Vietnam and is vice president of the U.S. Army Ranger Association, explains it this way:

"If you want to be an airborne Ranger, you have to meet a certain standard." The wannabes, they wake up in their 40s and time has passed them by. So they read adventure novels and spy stories, and a lot of them begin to fantasize and create fake personas.

"It wasn't that many of them eschewed going through the training back in the ‘60s, they just didn't. And now they wish they had really gone through it when they had the opportunity."

Bob Greene, a combat veteran who has been with the VA in Manhattan for more than 20 years, adds this caveat:

"Liars are lonely people. What you have in essence is a weak person who wants to project the image of a hero, then uses this false persona as a credential - a credential he has not earned."

Liars aren't all that bright, either. Because it doesn't take long before their history is revealed to those around them, and the only have themselves to blame. I think it was Mark Twain who said "If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything." Too bad for Cafasso he's been living a lie for so long he can't figure out what he told whom, and it is all unraveling.

Thanks to Stop the ACLU