In 2004, Tim Walz organized a protest outside a rally for President George W. Bush, holding a sign that read “Operation Enduring Freedom Veteran 4 Kerry” – a reference to the U.S. fight against terrorists in Afghanistan.

The problem is that in his 24 years with the Minnesota National Guard, Walz was never deployed to combat zones in Afghanistan or Iraq. The closest he came was thousands of miles away in Italy. But it’s a label he used again and again – including in his official biography when he ran for Congress two years later in 2006.

This photo shows just one way Walz, Kamala Harris’s vice presidential running mate, has repeatedly exaggerated and whitewashed his military record. Vice presidential candidate JD Vance, a Marine veteran who served in Iraq, accused the second-term Minnesota governor of “stolen valor garbage.”

At least one former member of Walz’s National Guard unit who served in Iraq expressed negative views about the uncoordinated manner in which the vice presidential candidate spoke about his deployment.

“This is stolen bravery,” said the former guardsman, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

“He used very specific language on his website that would suggest to a civilian that he had been in Afghanistan. At a rally for George W. Bush, he carried protest signs saying he had been part of Operation Enduring Freedom, which would indicate that he had fought in Afghanistan, even though he had not.”

The Harris-Walz campaign appeared to accommodate critics on Thursday when it deleted another controversial claim about his service history from his official biography on its website: that Walz retired as a command sergeant major.

(In fact, according to the military, Walz left the military with the rank of master sergeant because he had not completed the required additional courses.)

That, too, was a claim he made repeatedly. A recently surfaced video from 2009 shows then-Congressman Walz delivering a televised farewell message to a group of soldiers deploying to Iraq in which he referred to himself as a “retired command sergeant major.”

While this is by no means the worst omission, it does show how the questions asked force the campaign team to engage in editorial damage control.

Here’s the latest on Vice Presidential candidate Tim Walz’s time in the military

The most egregious incident – ​​which CNN’s own fact-checking service deemed “absolutely false” – occurred during a campaign appearance in 2018 when Walz was running for governor.

While trying to burnish his credibility as a gun control advocate before a small crowd at a campaign rally, Walz said, “We can study the effects of gun violence. We can make sure that these weapons of war that I carried in war are only carried in war.”

When pressed later that year, Walz admitted that he had “not carried any weapons of war” on the battlefield.

Iraq veteran and former Republican congressman from Michigan Peter Meijer also criticized Walz’s choice of words, but did not fully agree with Vance’s assessment that he was guilty of “stolen valor” – that is, lying about his military service or accomplishments in order to get ahead in civilian life.

“I believe Walz used his military background lightly to keep himself afloat as his congressional district drifted to the right,” Meijer wrote in a thread on X addressing the allegations against Walz.

“He let the audience paint a false picture in their heads. It was shady, but not stolen heroism.”

Alex Plintsas, a decorated Iraq war veteran and fellow at the Atlantic Council, called Walz’s statements about being an Operation Enduring Freedom veteran “true but misleading,” suggesting they were deliberately taken out of context to make people believe he fought in Afghanistan.

“Why misleading? If you ask a fellow veteran where they deployed or if they offer anything first, they say ‘Iraq,’ ‘Afghanistan,’ ‘Syria,’ etc. No one says ‘Operation Enduring Freedom Veteran.’ That goes on the hats you wear to doctor’s appointments at the VA. I don’t make the rules,” he wrote on X.

In 2009, David Thul, a National Guard veteran and Walz voter, marched into his campaign office with the protest photo to confront a staffer about the “Operation Enduring Freedom” claim.

“Do you have any questions about what Enduring Freedom is?” the veteran asks in a viral video of the encounter.

“No,” said the employee.

“Okay, so I guess most people, you included, associate Enduring Freedom with Afghanistan?” he pressed.

“Right, I think his audience understands that it encompasses a lot,” said the employee.

The veteran then asked, “Aside from this picture, I’m concerned that on the congressman’s website, in his official biography, it only says that he was (a veteran) who supported Operation Enduring Freedom. Don’t you think that without more details, it’s reasonable to assume that he served in Afghanistan?”

The employee mumbled in reluctant response, “Maybe, I guess.”

The veteran further said the photo could result in the congressman “presumably going to prison for violating the Stolen Valor Act (2005),” which “makes it a federal crime to falsely represent someone as the recipient of a U.S. military award or medal.”

In fact, Walz was also criticized for requesting retirement from the Minnesota National Guard before his unit first deployed to Iraq in 2005. Two men from his unit – Sergeant Kyle Miller, 19, and Sergeant First Class David Berry, 37 – were killed by explosive devices.

The Harris campaign and its supporters downplay these discrepancies as petty, but Meijer said he believes that given Walz’s high rank in the National Guard, “it is fair to hold him to a higher standard as a senior noncommissioned officer.”

“It is equivalent to the rank of lieutenant colonel and is a position of great responsibility. It is a high position and someone in that position will be expected to behave more highly within the service,” he said.

There was no comment from Harris’ campaign team.