I understand that a man who sits at the bar opens himself to conversation with those sitting on nearby stools. So I wasn’t offended when this guy I’ll call Steve started talking to my wife and me. I was, however, bothered by his lies.
Longtime readers may recall me explaining how all service members encounter people who lie about their military records. Some liars exaggerate their deeds. Others completely fabricate their entire enlistment. A few years ago, I told you about a liar who claimed he’d been a Marine in the Afghanistan War, only he knew nothing about Afghanistan or the Marines.
Steve began the exchange talking about his Vietnamese wife who’d recently moved to the Spokane, Washington area. We talked about the differences in climate and culture.
“Have you traveled internationally?” Steve asked.
“Oh, a swell vacation in Afghanistan,” I joked.
“Why did you go there?” he asked.
I explained I’d been in the Afghanistan War with the Army. He asked when I’d been there. I told him. He said he had been a sonar tech in the Navy. Fantastic. I thought that must be an interesting job, and my hopes rose for the possibility of interviewing him for this column.
“Yeah, I was in Afghanistan,” Steve said.
What would a Navy sonar guy be doing in a landlocked desert country? My wife and I exchanged an incredulous look. But Steve explained he had mostly been on guard duty during his tour.
I’m a trusting guy. I want to believe people. I supposed it was possible the military yanked a sonar tech for guard duty in Afghanistan. Our first outpost commander in Farah Province had been a Navy man, an engineer who designed and oversaw the construction of our base compound. With manpower shortages at the height of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars, anything was possible.
I pushed aside my skepticism. This was great. I love talking to fellow Afghanistan War veterans. “Where were you in Afghanistan?” I asked.
Steve looked away and took a few sips of his beer. “Um… I uh… I never did learn to pronounce the name of the place.”
Stop. I twisted my napkin. I accept that someone who served in Afghanistan might misspell the name of his duty station. Someone might mispronounce the name of an Afghan city he’d only read but never heard spoken. Both occurrences of the letter i in Mazar-i-Sharif, for example, are pronounced with the long e sound. But the name of the city is not hard to pronounce. Kandahar, Kabul, Herat, Nimruz, Farah, Jalalabad, and even Lashkargah are easy to pronounce, and anyone who so much as passed through or even heard about those places from other soldiers who’d been there could pronounce the names.
There was only one conclusion: Steve was a liar, and a bad one at that. If he were going to claim he’d served in Afghanistan, one would think he could have remembered a place such as Kandahar or Kabul from the news.
MAGAZINE: WE MUST NOT GO THIS WAY
Since we’d already paid, my wife and I simply left. But I remembered my earlier column about the liar who also claimed he couldn’t pronounce the name of his duty station. Back then, I asked readers if I’d done the right thing by not confronting him and letting him keep the delusion that people believed him. Apart from those who lie for financial gain, I don’t know why men lie about military service, but I know I’m done caring. I’ve answered my own old question.
I will no longer passively accept the lies. The next time I encounter a guy who claims he can’t pronounce the name of his duty station or who obviously doesn’t understand military rank or job structure, I’m going to ask him politely to stop lying to me. Other, better men didn’t make it home to tell their truths, so I will no longer continue to give people the opportunity to keep telling their lies.
Trent Reedy, author of several books including Enduring Freedom, served as a combat engineer in the Iowa Army National Guard from 1999 to 2005, including a tour of duty in Afghanistan.
*Some names and call signs in this story may have been changed due to operational security or privacy concerns.
