Veteran with disputed status

Veterans with disputed status are people whose status as, or claims of being a military veteran has been questioned, disputed or debunked.

Such veterans have existed for as long as wars have been fought.

Types of disputed status
Various kinds of veterans with disputed status exist:

Exaggerated details
Soldiers who served in the military and exaggerate parts of their experience, such as saying that one was in combat for 50 days when one was only in combat for 10 days, or that one had been 100 miles behind enemy lines when one was only 10 miles behind the lines. This is the most common type of falsehood.

Falsified details
Soldiers who served in the military but lie about awards medals or honors; prisoner of war status; membership in elite groups; or participation in battles. If a veteran claims to have earned a purple heart when in fact he never received one, for example, that veteran is falsifying details.

Fraudulent status
People who claim to have served in the military but never did, or who did serve in the military for a time but were not discharged properly and are not considered veterans in a legal sense.

Disputed veteran status as a cultural phenomenon
"They're a nationwide epidemic," says Mary Schantag, who, with her husband Chuck Schantag, operates The POW Network, a web site dedicated to honoring American prisoners of war. "We've documented over seven hundred phony prisoners of war from Vietnam - more than the total number of POWs who were repatriated in '73. Every time we expose an imposter, it seems like we get reports of two or three more. Their numbers just keep growing and growing."

The Schantags now spend most of their time not honoring real POWs, but exposing fake ones -- their list of phonies is thousands long and they long ago stopped counting. Similarly, Doug Sterner, who runs the Medal of Honor tribute site from his Pueblo, Colo. home, routinely fields calls from people and reporters trying to expose frauds.

Many experts believe that people who either pad their military records or fabricate them outright do so not only due to low self-esteem, but also because of the military's high status since the September 11, 2001 terror attacks.

These local groups like the Schantags carry much of the burden of exposing phony veterans. The Department of Veterans Affairs only gets involved and presses charges if someone has illegally received veterans benefits as a result of the deception.

In the United States the giving of government aid to Veterans has long provided incentives for men to lie about such things as their ages, the cause of life altering injuries, and their financial state. In addition, there have been impostors who claim to have served but did not.

Men falsified their ages in order to qualify for pensions especially during the Depression, and some people also claiming to be vets were in fact dishonorably discharged or went AWOL.

More recently B. G. Burkett wrote a book called Stolen Valor in which he discovered a large number of people claiming to be veterans who were not. Using the Freedom of Information Act and military personnel records, he claimed to find these 'fake vets' in every walk of life, from VA hospitals to university professors.

POW Network
The POW Network is itself disputed. Mary Schantag, who holds herself out as a purported guardian of military matters, tried to run for the office of Adjutant General of the , a legitimate POW organization. Schantag herself had never been a POW or a member of the organization. She was not elected. Many veterans are outraged by the charges listed on their website, asserting them false.

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