 B.G. Burkett (right) with U.S. Rep. John Salazar | |
| Born | B.G. Burkett |
| Notable works | Stolen Valor |
B.G. Burkett is a retired Army officer and financial advisor. He is best known as co-author of the self-published book Stolen Valor (1998), written with journalist Glenna Whitley. It received the Colby Award for military writers in 2000.
Burkett was the son of an air force colonel and his wife, and grew up on military bases. As a child, he felt his "heroes were not sports figures like Mickey Mantle and Willie Mays but the fighter pilots who had blasted the Luftwaffe out of the sky". Burkett states that life on a military base imbued in him "an understanding that the military was the guardian of the freedoms enjoyed by the civilian population." [1]
As a young man, Burkett enlisted in the U.S. Army in June 1966. He joined the 199th Infantry Brigade and fought in the Vietnam War. After returning from the war, he started a career in finance. [2] Burkett has a Master of Business Administration. [3]
Burkett says he decided to write the book now known as Stolen Valor after hearing too many news reports about Vietnam veterans characterized as mentally unstable. Burkett began fact-checking whether such identified people were veterans by applying for their military records through Freedom of information process. [2] [4]
Burkett says he checked over 3,500 people's claims to have served in Vietnam, [2] and found 1,700 of them had fabricated their stories. [4] [5]
According to the Columbia Journalism Review , the self-published Stolen Valor gained a "cult status" among military members. [3] The book was awarded the Colby Award in 2000. [6] [7] It has been credited for inspiring the Stolen Valor Act of 2005 passed by Congress, making it a crime for an individual to falsely claim to have been awarded military medals. [2] [3]
Burkett was instrumental in returning a man named Joe Yandle to prison. [2] Yandle, who was serving a life-sentence for killing a liquor store attendant during a robbery in 1972, had claimed he had turned to drugs and crime after returning scarred from two tours of duty in Vietnam. Yandle's story was covered by Mike Wallace for 60 Minutes. Sympathy for his account was credited with his gaining a commutation of his sentence and being released on parole. While researching his book, Burkett learned that, while Yandle had served in the military, he had never been deployed to Vietnam. Burkett took his evidence to 60 Minutes, who subsequently re-interviewed Yandle. After the veteran admitted he had lied about Vietnam, his parole was revoked in August 1998 and he returned to prison. [8]
In 2005, Burkett co-authored a paper with B.C. Frueh, J.D. Elhai, and J.D. Monnier that was published in the British Journal of Psychiatry. [3] It focused on concerns "regarding the validity of combat exposure reports of veterans seeking treatment for combat-related post-traumatic stress disorder". [9]
Tim O'Brien is an American novelist who served as a soldier in the Vietnam War. Much of his writing is about wartime Vietnam, and his work later in life often explores the postwar lives of its veterans.
Frank William Dux is a Canadian-American martial artist and fight choreographer. According to Dux, a ninjutsu expert named Senzo Tanaka trained him as a ninja when he was a teenager. He established his own school of ninjutsu called Dux Ryu Ninjutsu, and has said he won a secret martial arts tournament called the Kumite in 1975. His alleged victory at the Kumite served as the inspiration for the 1988 film Bloodsport starring Jean-Claude Van Damme. Dux's victory at the Kumite has been disputed, as has the existence of both the Kumite he described and Senzo Tanaka.
Stolen Honor is a 45-minute anti-John Kerry video documentary that was released during the September 2004 election season. It features interviews with a number of American men who contend they were prisoners of war in North Vietnam and suffered increased maltreatment while prisoners as a direct result of Kerry's Fulbright Hearing testimony in April 1971. The subtitle of the film is Wounds That Never Heal; on the production company's website the complete title is given instead as Stolen Honor: John Kerry's Record of Betrayal. Its name was based on the book Stolen Valor: How the Vietnam Generation Was Robbed of Its Heroes and Its History by B.G. Burkett and Glenna Whitley.
Francis J. "Bing" West Jr. is an American author, Marine combat veteran and former Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs during the Reagan Administration.
Stolen Valor: How the Vietnam Generation Was Robbed of Its Heroes and Its History (1998) is a self-published book by B.G. Burkett, a Vietnam veteran, and Glenna Whitley, an investigative journalist. It reveals that numerous people claiming to have been mentally injured by serving in the Vietnam War never served there. In addition, it reveals persons who were mistakenly given military awards. It won the Colby Award for military writers in 2000.
Saved by the Light is a 1994 nonfiction book by Dannion Brinkley describing his near-death experience (NDE). It is co-authored by Paul Perry. The book was adapted for a 1995 FOX TV film of the same name starring Eric Roberts.
Joseph Lee Galloway was an American newspaper correspondent and columnist. During the Vietnam War, he often worked alongside the American troops he covered and was awarded a Bronze Star Medal in 1998 for having carried a badly wounded man to safety while he was under very heavy enemy fire in 1965. From 2013 until his death, he worked as a special consultant for the Vietnam War 50th anniversary Commemoration project run out of the Office of the Secretary of Defense and has also served as consultant to Ken Burns' production of a documentary history of the Vietnam War broadcast in the fall of 2017 by PBS. He was also the former Military Affairs consultant for the Knight-Ridder chain of newspapers and was a columnist with McClatchy Newspapers.
No Gun Ri: A Military History of the Korean War Incident is a 2002 book by United States military officer Robert Bateman about the events that took place at No Gun Ri in 1950 and the controversy that followed. Bateman contested the veracity of a Pulitzer prize-winning account published earlier. The book was awarded the 2004 Colby Award for military history.
The Stolen Valor Act of 2005, signed into law by President George W. Bush on December 20, 2006, was a U.S. law that broadened the provisions of previous U.S. law addressing the unauthorized wear, manufacture, or sale of any military decorations and medals. The law made it a federal misdemeanor to falsely represent oneself as having received any U.S. military decoration or medal. If convicted, defendants might have been imprisoned for up to six months, unless the decoration lied about is the Medal of Honor, in which case imprisonment could have been up to one year. In United States v. Alvarez (2012), the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that the Stolen Valor Act of 2005 was an unconstitutional abridgment of the freedom of speech under the First Amendment–striking down the law in a 6 to 3 decision.
The William E. Colby Military Writers' Award was established in 1999 by the William E. Colby Military Writers' Symposium at Norwich University in Vermont in order to recognize "a first work of fiction or non-fiction that has made a major contribution to the understanding of intelligence operations, military history, or international affairs." It is named in honor of William Egan Colby. As of 2021, Alex Kershaw is the chair of its selection committee.
Patrick K. O’Donnell is an American author of books on military history.
James Douglas Bremner is an American physician, researcher, and writer based in Atlanta, Georgia. He has conducted research on posttraumatic stress disorder and the relationship between depression and suicide and the acne drug Accutane.
Karl Arthur Marlantes is an American author and Vietnam War veteran. He has written three books: Matterhorn: A Novel of the Vietnam War (2010), What it is Like to go to War (2011), and Deep River (2019).
Jon Elhai is Distinguished Professor of clinical psychology at the University of Toledo. Elhai is known for being an expert in the assessment and diagnosis of Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), forensic psychological assessment of PTSD, and detection of fabricated/malingered PTSD; as well as in internet addictions.
Because of the substantial benefits available to individuals with a confirmed PTSD diagnosis, which causes occupational impairment, the distinct possibility of false diagnoses exist, some of which are due to malingering of PTSD. Malingering of PTSD consists of one feigning the disorder. Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is an anxiety disorder that may develop after an individual experiences a traumatic event. In the United States, the Social Security Administration and the Department of Veterans Affairs each offer disability compensation programs that provide benefits for qualified individuals with mental disorders, including PTSD. Malingering can lead to a decline in research and subsequent treatment for PTSD as it interferes with true studies. Insurance fraud may also come about through malingering, which hurts the economy.
United States v. Alvarez, 567 U.S. 709 (2012), is a landmark decision in which the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that the Stolen Valor Act of 2005 was unconstitutional. The Stolen Valor Act of 2005 was a federal law that criminalized false statements about having a military medal. It had been passed by Congress as an effort to stem instances where people falsely claimed to have earned the medal in an attempt to protect the valor of legitimate recipients. A 6–3 majority of the Supreme Court agreed that the law was unconstitutional and violated the free speech protections under the First Amendment. Despite reaffirming the opinion that was previously issued by the Ninth Circuit, it could not agree on a single rationale. Four justices concluded that a statement's falsity is not enough, by itself, to exclude speech from First Amendment protection. Another two justices concluded that while false statements were entitled to some protection, the Stolen Valor Act of 2005 was invalid because it could have achieved its objectives in less restrictive ways.
William Warren "Will" Northrop was an American-born military historian, investigator and writer. He was best known for the controversy regarding his claims of military and combat service in the Vietnam War, and prior to that for his role in the so-called "Brokers of Death" arms case, a precursor to the Iran–Contra scandal in 1986. He was a writer and wrote articles over the years for such diverse venues as Penthouse, New Dimensions magazine, and The Jerusalem Post. He also wrote several articles in Recall, the magazine of the North Carolina Military Historical Society, mostly battle analyses.
The Stolen Valor Act of 2013 is a United States federal law that was passed by the 113th United States Congress. The law amends the federal criminal code to make it a crime for a person to fraudulently claim having received a valor award specified in the Act, with the intention of obtaining money, property, or other tangible benefit by convincing another that he or she received the award.
Bartley Christopher Frueh is a clinical psychologist and American author.
A military impostor is a person who makes false claims about their military service in civilian life. This includes claims by people that have never been in the military as well as lies or embellishments by genuine veterans. Some individuals who do this also wear privately obtained uniforms or medals which were never officially issued to them.
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