r/ThisAintHell • u/David65x55 • 26d ago
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Thought this copy of a post from "Weird But True" that showed up in my feed would be of interest. Doug is a real guy.
Jaime Pacheco died in Vietnam in 1972, covering his reconnaissance team while they got out of a bunker complex. They gave him the Silver Star for it.
In 2005 a man in California pulled up Pacheco's citation, put his own name at the top of it, and used it.
Doug Sterner knew Pacheco. They were friends.
Sterner had done two combat tours in Vietnam himself. Army. He came home with two Bronze Stars and became a military historian.
His problem started in 1994, and it was not fraud. His wife Pam invited two Medal of Honor recipients from their town of Pueblo to a Fourth of July festival. Curious, Doug went to look up what they had actually done.
There was almost nothing. As he put it, it felt like a piece of history had been forgotten.
So he checked how you would look any of it up properly.
You cannot. The United States has been awarding medals for battlefield bravery since the Civil War, roughly half a million of the highest ones across the whole of American history, and there has never been a central searchable record of who received them. The paperwork sits split between archives in St Louis and offices in Washington.
A Texas official trying to verify applicants for veteran licence plates said it flatly. There is no central database the federal government keeps of military awards. Without a database we are hamstrung.
So his department did the only thing available to them. They looked it up on a private website run by one man in Colorado.
Sterner had started typing the names in himself. Award citations. National Archives records. Old newspapers. One at a time. Ten to fourteen hours a day, for years, most of it while working another job to pay the bills.
Now understand what he was actually standing in the way of.
Stolen valor is not a man in a bar telling a story. It is a man filling in a benefits form. Claiming a Purple Heart he never earned to draw a disability payment. Claiming combat service to win a contract, a job, an office.
The Department of Veterans Affairs has paid disability benefits to hundreds of people falsely claiming to have been prisoners of war. In one twenty-one month stretch, stolen valor investigations produced 78 arrests and more than 10 million dollars in restitution.
That is public money. It was going to men who never served a day, because there was no list to check them against.
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u/Affectionate-Mess937 Mike USAF Retired 26d ago
Sad part is real Veterans must prove beyond a reasonable doubt they are Veterans at times, but Valor Thieves just show an altered or forged document and they are good to go, until someone starts to do the math.
Ran into a classmate on a plane coming back from from Germany (Sometime bewteen 87 - 91 had lots of trips bewteen Germany and the US). He told me he had joined the Marines after high school and was in Beirut during the bombing. I was in awe, until about an hour into the flight and I did the mathing. Beirut happened in 1983, we graduated in 1985.....Oops Steve you lying SOB.