Liars & cheaters

I read today that an Army Reserve Major was sentenced to five months in jail for falsifying his military award and achievement record, primarily to justify his promotion to Major. It seems like this sort of stuff has been happening a lot lately, but liars and cheaters have always been around in the military…unfortunately. I recall, for example, a time back during the Vietnam War when I was assigned to the cadre at Engineer OCS. A training company across the street from the one I was with had just received a well decorated first lieutenant tactical officer as part of their cadre. He had more ribbons on his uniform than most recently returned veterans (I was one), had a Combat Infantryman's Badge plus wore a Ranger Tab and Airborne wings. One night at the officer's club, one of the battalion commanders who had also just returned from the war, saw this officer wearing the combat patch of the 1st Cav Division. Since he also wore the same patch, he began to ask the lieutenant where he had been assigned, what he had done, etc. None of his answers added up, so the battalion commander started to do some checking. Turns out that the well decorated lieutenant was in fact, an E-5 personnel clerk who had created a totally new personnel file for himself before he left the war zone, and then used that as his "record" when he reported to Fort Belvoir. It was all "paper" then, and there were sometimes oversights in how carefully people checked the accuracy of documents. This was a tremendous embarrassment to the personnel folks at the Engineer School at the time, much less the fact all people pending assignment to the OCS cadre had to undergo special interviews and records checks before being actually assigned. OCS wanted only the best on their cadre, or so it seemed. As I recall, no charges were brought against the impostor, and he was quickly discharged from the Army, with his true service record in hand. I wonder what happened to the guy? Probably ran for political office and won.