Part II: Stolen Valor

In an on-the-record interview last month, in which one other person plus a digital recorder were present, Brandon Griffith described for this reporter the details of his service in the United States Navy. During the course of the 65-minute interview, the polite, 39-year-old Burlington native paid special attention to a day in September of 2016 when he claimed to have been shot in the abdomen by a Taliban sniper on a road outside Kabul, Afghanistan.
Griffith said he was employed as a chief warrant officer in the Navy’s Explosive Ordnance Disposal division at the time, after having worked his way up from an E1 — the lowest rank in the Navy — to an E9. His bomb dog, Phoenix, a Rottweiler-Lab mix, was by his side throughout the firefight.

During our interview, Griffith lifted his shirt and pointed to a scar just above his waist on his right side, which he claimed marked the bullet’s entry. He pointed to a second scar, a short vertical line running down the center of his abdomen, which he said was the legacy of the emergency surgery he underwent in a German hospital following the attack.

In the days immediately following the interview, I asked Griffith through text message to send me as many photos depicting his years in the Navy as possible, focusing primarily on photographs related to his combat tours, his dog, and his weeks of recovery. He said they would be difficult to locate, but that he would try.

On Friday morning, only hours before the article went to press, I texted Griffith again, asking for pictures. He responded with three photos: the first showed him as a younger man, seated at a table, in what appeared to be a service uniform. The second showed Griffith in civilian clothes, seated on a couch, next to a large black dog he claimed was Phoenix. The final photo was of two men in a desert landscape kneeling or sitting beside what appears to be an explosive device. The men’s faces are partially obscured by their hats and by shadow, and so I texted Griffith again to ask which of the two men was him. He wrote back: the one on the left.
Of the three photos Griffith sent, the only picture of sufficient resolution to print was this final photograph, the one showing the two men.

That picture appeared on page A4 of Saturday, September 29th’s newspaper. That picture was a hoax.

Griffith lifted the image from the internet and passed it off as his own. The man on the left is not Griffith. The photograph is of U.S. Navy Lt. Mike Runkle. Griffith does not appear in the image.
Thanks to a small crowdsourcing push that sprang up in the wake of the article on Griffith — a push which raised questions about other elements of Griffith’s tale, too — we were moved to investigate the credibility of each of his other claims.

 

THERE IS, at this point, sufficient evidence to doubt the veracity of nearly all of Griffith’s claims, and to conclude, on the basis of countermanding research, that the military story laid out by Griffith is, by its truest name, a parade of lies.

The occasion for the original, Sept. 29 article was a story we’d been told about Mr. Griffith’s involvement in a serious farm accident, for which we know that he received medical attention. This, too, appears to be a fabrication, at least in many of the details described by Mr. Griffith, who has long since stopped replying to my phone calls and texts.

BY MOST ACCOUNTS Griffith did serve in the U.S. Navy from 1997 to 2001, and has received in recent years, at least according to one close family member, a diagnosis of PTSD. (I was not able to confirm this diagnosis, but was told as much by Mr. Griffith’s youngest brother, who called me to rebut the truth of every one of Griffith’s other claims.)

The purpose of this article is not to embarrass Mr. Griffith or to invite additional scrutiny into his life. There are deep-seated, psychological reasons for chronic, grandiose lying that can only require compassion. And while military imposters certainly dishonor the real-life heroics of honest veterans, it is also the case that, as one active duty Naval master chief I interviewed for this article put it: “They’re the ones that have to look themselves in the mirror every day, not me.”

However, it will be necessary in correcting the account set down by Mr. Griffith to touch on certain disagreeable points in his biography — moments that contradict the military timeline he described to the Register, and moments that go some way toward establishing his occasional unreliability as a narrator.

The Register recently obtained records from the Burlington Police Department that show interactions with Griffith on dates that are at variance with the deployment calendar he described in the Sept. 29 article. These reports also hint at a different provenance concerning the scars on his abdomen.

For instance, on the afternoon of July 22, 2016, police were dispatched to Griffith’s home, where they found Griffith bent over in his shed with five or six homemade wire-hanger barbs embedded in his abdomen. Each bent barb was cut to a length of between four and six inches, and sharpened. The barbs were connected to a bungee cord, which Griffith claimed was part of a booby trap that someone had apparently planted against him in the dark hollow of his shed.

Griffith was transported by ambulance to the emergency room at Coffey County Hospital, where he was treated by the attending ER doctor, who then ordered Griffith transferred by air to Stormont Vail Hospital in Topeka, where he was to undergo exploratory surgery on his abdomen.

In the course of that afternoon, the attending EMT, the emergency room doctor, and the officer who was first to the scene all expressed their doubts regarding Griffith’s version of events.

Less than a year later, on Jan. 22, 2017 — which is to say, three months after he claimed to have been shot in Kabul and during the very time that he claimed still to be in recovery from his injuries — the Burlington police were again dispatched to the same address. Griffith had become trapped beneath his car after it had slipped from its jack.

This time, however, there was enough evidence on site to convince the officer on duty that Griffith had staged the accident and was falsifying the report. The officer, in the same set of notes, goes on to record his belief — a belief he said was based on extensive knowledge of the subject’s prior history — that Griffith had staged multiple scenes of self-injury in an effort to be administered prescription pain medication.

Here, too, the attending doctor — again, according to the police report — believed Griffith’s story of the fallen car was a fabrication.

In this case, the officer placed Griffith in handcuffs and escorted him to the Coffey County Jail, where he was processed for the felony offense of “giving a false alarm” and two misdemeanor offenses, attempting to unlawfully obtain a prescription-only drug and interference with law enforcement.

Incidents like these, of which there are more, cast a backward light on another call Griffith made in September of 2015. Here, he claimed to have been stabbed in the abdomen with a screwdriver by an unidentified black man who had unlawfully entered his property. An hours-long, multi-agency manhunt was set in motion. Coffey County emergency personnel sent text message alerts to the wider community. The culprit was never found.

 

I CORRESPONDED with or heard testimony from nearly two dozen individuals in connection with today’s story: certain members of Griffith’s family, former classmates, exes, fellow Burlington residents, a number of top law enforcement officials, doctors and other medical and emergency management personnel who have crossed paths with Griffith, plus a number of military veterans.

Each of these individuals was either entirely disbelieving or else suspicious of Griffith’s account. Many of these individuals say they can definitively place Griffith in Burlington, Kansas, both on Sept. 14, 2016, the day he says he was shot, as well as in the three months after, during which time he says he was recuperating in a German hospital.

In the weeks since the story was published, no one has come forward to defend Griffith’s claims.

 

STORIES OF “STOLEN VALOR,” as they’ve come to be called in the wake of the 1998 imposter-exposing book by the same name, are notoriously difficult to fact check and remain the scourge of both large and small media outlets, of publishing houses, even of veterans’ agencies themselves.

The bulk of military records are sealed from public view. The all-important DD Form 214 — the release or discharge from active duty certificate, which includes a menu of important information about the vet — is inaccessible except by the veteran him or herself or, in certain circumstances, by the veteran’s next of kin.

I have since filed a request through the Freedom of Information Act to obtain even the barest information — rank, dates of service, discharge info — on Brandon Griffith. But the National Archives requires three to six months to return its results.

After a certain point — and this is true in every story — a reporter is left to depend on the integrity of his source. The Register does not file a FOIA request for every veteran who describes for us his or her military experience. In fact, we’ve never filed a FOIA request for veterans’ records. I don’t know of a newspaper, of any size, that does, at least as a matter of protocol. Perhaps that’s a mistake.

The truth, though, is that even FOIA documentation is not enough to extinguish a practiced lie. An unreliable veteran might embellish the details of his combat record in ways that are impossible to verify.

Still, there was a failure of skepticism on my part in reporting the story, and I regret my role in abetting Griffith’s apparent fantasies. I would have done it differently this time, and I’ll be less trusting the next.

The saving grace, however, is this: the overwhelming majority of veterans are honest men and women, and when fraudulent claims surface there are veterans and upstanding civilians alike who will rally to help correct the record.

That was certainly the case here.

 

LAST THURSDAY, one important shaft of light intruded on the otherwise dismal task of having to call out a pretender.

I received an email from a 26-year veteran of the U.S. Navy named Jarrod Deines. A Kansas native currently living in Colorado, Deines served as an Explosive Ordnance Device Technician for 26 years, during which time he achieved the rank of Master Chief (E9) — the identical rank Griffith claimed to have achieved in his tenure with the Navy.

Deines, like so many, threw into question the legitimacy of Griffith’s military boasts, particularly his self-proclaimed E9 status. “There are only 66 EOD E9s in the Navy at any one time,” wrote Deines, “so we all know each other, or know of each other, and no one has ever heard of this guy.”

Deines then offered to put me in touch with EOD Master Chief Petty Officer (E9) Duane “Ollie” Oliveira, whom Deines recognized as probably one of the longest-serving EOD techs currently on active duty.

Oliveira, first in an email exchange and then in a phone conversation, expressed a similar disbelief, calling Griffith’s accounting of events “woefully inaccurate.”

Oliveira has been a member of the Navy EOD community for nearly 30 years. He was stationed in Coronado from Nov. 1996 until Nov. 2000, during the period that Griffith claimed to have received his Coronado-based EOD training. Oliveira doesn’t recall anyone named Brandon Griffith.

Oliveira was on the first San Diego-based Navy EOD team that entered Albania and Kosovo during the NATO advance in 1999, a combat zone Griffith claims to have been a part of in his capacity as an EOD tech. Again, Oliveira has no memory of Griffith.

Asked, however, to weigh in on the nearly fatal wound Griffith said he received on a mission in 2016, Oliveira is unequivocal, writing: “There was definitely NOT an active duty Navy EOD Master Chief or EOD Chief Warrant Officer named Brandon Griffith that was injured by sniper fire in September 2016.”

He continues: “I know every current active duty Navy EOD Master Chief (most of them are close personal friends of mine as well), and there is NOT one named Brandon Griffith; additionally, I do not recall ever hearing about or meeting an active duty Navy EOD Master Chief by that name.”

I invoked the scene of the shooting once more in my phone conversation with Oliveira. “I can guarantee you, 100 percent,” said the master chief, “that I would have known about it.”

After pointing out the glaring fact that EOD Techs do not work as dog handlers — a plangent strain in Griffith’s narrative — Oliveira then pointed me to a number of publicly available Navy-personnel links showing annual promotion-by-rank lists, among whose rolls I was never able to find a single “Brandon Griffith.”

Oliveira and Deines, while not able to provide any hard data that isn’t already publicly available,  have nearly 60 years of combined EOD experience and a wealth of shared memories.

And memory, said Oliveira, “can be a pretty accurate instrument in a small community such as Navy EOD.”

 

IT ISN’T the place of this article to decide who is the greatest victim of Griffith’s deceit. But among the dozens of individuals I’ve spoken with in connection to this story, none has been more forceful in contradicting Brandon’s claims, or more forceful in his insistence on public truth, than his youngest brother, Adam. Though at times, like now, made to suffer because of his brother’s offenses, he is also someone consistently at pains to see that his brother gets the help that he believes he needs.

 

IT’S THANKS to a number of actual veterans, true heroes, that the distortions in Griffith’s story were exposed. They put me in touch with fellow veterans and other active-duty personnel. They helped establish correct timelines and verify military details. It’s to them that I’m grateful, as are we all.

This story originally appeared in The Iola Register on October 12, 2018. See: Part I: A Close Call (hay, heroism & hooey)