In a way, you have to feel sorry for the Democrat Party regulars who are now supposed to support this twit.
Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Walz claimed to have carried guns "in war" during his career in the Army National Guard, according to a video released by the Kamala Harris campaign Tuesday. There’s one glaring problem with his claim.
Walz, the governor of Minnesota, served 24 years in the Army National Guard but never saw combat, according to his own résumé. Walz responded mostly to natural disasters in Minnesota and Nebraska, he told Minnesota Public Radio. He served overseas on a few occasions, but far away from any war zone: in Italy to support the European security force during the war in Afghanistan and Norway for joint training exercises with NATO forces....
And then there's this problem with his military resume:
...Walz, who served in the Nebraska National Guard from 1981 to 1986 and the Minnesota National Guard from 1996 to 2005, has repeatedly claimed he reached the rank of Command Sergeant Major. But in 2022, retired Command Sergeant Majors Thomas Behrends and Paul Herr claimed Walz did not fulfill the qualifications to maintain that rank before he quit the National Guard in 2005. They said he retired after learning he would be deployed to Iraq....
Thus he did not retire as an E-9, but rather as an E-8.
2 comments:
CSM is still an E-9. The Senior Enlisted ranks often have both a standard rank and a position rank; thus at E-8 you might be a Master Sergeant or a First Sergeant (the latter has a diamond on the rank insignia). They're the same paygrade, but the First Sergeant occupies the position of top sergeant in a company sized unit.
You get Sergeant Majors only at battalion and higher units. A Command Sergeant Major is like the First Sergeant for higher sized units: the top sergeant at the Brigade, say, which may have two or three sergeants major.
The CSM's job includes being the senior enlisted advisor to the commanding officer. If enlisted soldiers are being mistreated in any of the subordinate units, for example, the CSM's job is to alert his commanding officer and insist on their conditions being repaired. In general this role is taken very seriously in the Army; a battalion commander, who may be a lieutenant colonel, may end up called on the carpet by the brigade commander (full colonel) if the brigade CSM brings him a bad report on the conditions privates or specialists are facing in the field.
There's an informal version at the platoon level, too, where an E-7 is normally called a "Sergeant First Class," but if he's the top sergeant in a platoon he's called a "Platoon Sergeant." That one doesn't have a differenced rank insignia like First Sergeant/Command Sergeant Major.
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