Bogus
By lex, on February 14th, 2011
Another stolen valor case, this time in Louisiana:
While his story might have impressed the crowd, some in attendance had already begun to suspect that Bryson was a faker. Several students at Louisiana State University, where Bryson founded the Student Veterans of Louisiana State University, wondered about the stories he spun about combat and killing bad guys. Several student veterans didn’t buy his story either and, by late summer, had forced his resignation from the club. But suspicions remained.
Last week, a reader alerted Navy Times that his story may be bogus.
Bryson, in fact, had served in the Navy, but as an aviation electronics technician — not a Navy SEAL. In his eight years of service, he deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan and earned several medals, but, according to records kept by Navy Personnel Command, he did not receive a Purple Heart or Combat Action Ribbon.
For nearly a year, Bryson was silent on clarifying the record following the governor’s ceremony.
“I wasn’t a Navy SEAL,” he said, explaining how the governor’s office had sought veterans’ stories to recognize publicly with the state’s medal. “So I kind of just gave them a story.”
“I falsified a story to try to help out vets. It’s just grown into a massive (nightmare),” he said. “Almost every single month since this has happened, I’m not able to sleep a lot because of it.”
Poor Bryson.
The real tragedy here was that he actually served his country honorably, deployed forward, did his duty. And it still wasn’t good enough, he had to embellish. To “help out vets.”
And having been discovered – everyone gets discovered – he is irremediably diminished.
There’s something pathological to it.