J.D. Vance, the 2024 Republican vice presidential nominee, slammed Vice President Kamala Harris’ running mate, Gov. Tim Walz (D-Minn.), on Wednesday as “absolutely shameful” for reportedly retiring from his Army National Guard battalion before being deployed to Iraq.
Discussing reports that claimed Walz retired from the Army National Guard before his battalion was deployed in 2005 during a Wednesday interview with The Daily Mail, Vance said, “I mean, your job as a senior enlisted guy in a unit is to keep your people safe. That’s not a job you can switch out of on a moment’s notice.”
Former President Donald Trump’s running mate added that it was “absolutely shameful” if Walz “abandoned his troops before they went to Iraq or wherever.”
“There was a clip the Kamala campaign posted about him where he’s making a gun control argument. He said, ‘Look, you should not be able to carry the weapons that I carried in war,'” Vance added. “And I’m, I’m thinking to myself, well, when did you go to war? What weapon did you carry in the war, Tim, because apparently you skipped out on your unit before they went to Iraq.”
Vance questioned why Walz was “lying to make a political point” since it was public knowledge that the Minnesota governor had not been deployed to a combat zone during his service with the National Guard.
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The Daily Mail noted that while Walz previously admitted that he was never in combat, the Harris campaign shared a video about gun control on Tuesday featuring Walz claiming that he carried guns “in war.”
In the video, Walz can be heard saying, “I’ve been voting for common sense legislation that protects the Second Amendment, but we can do background checks. We can do CDC research, we can make sure we don’t have reciprocal carry among states, and we can make sure that those weapons of war, that I carried in war, is the only place where those weapons are at.”
According to The Post Millennial, Walz told Minnesota Public Radio in 2018 that he did not experience any combat during his time with the Army National Guard and acknowledged that there were “certainly folks that did far more than I did.”
In a letter published by West Central Tribune in 2018, retired Command Sergeant Major Thomas Behrends and retired Command Sergeant Major Paul Herr claimed Walz “embellished and selectively omitted facts and circumstances of his military career for years.”
The two National Guard Sergeants Major also claimed that Walz left “the 1-125th Field Artillery Battalion and its Soldiers hanging; without its senior Non-Commissioned Officer, as the battalion prepared for war” when he retired in 2005.
