Tina Kersten; Weebles wobble and they lie about their service

ROS sends us link to the folks at Guardian of Valor who posted this story of Tina Kersten Lightfoot who tells the favorite story among POGs from Desert Storm about how they narrowly dodged a SCUD missile. Tina however takes the idiot story a step further and awards herself a Silver Star for her escapades as she tells the story to her local newspaper (.pdf);

Tina was just returning from the front lines of the “Desert Storm” assault on Kuwait when the Iraqi missile struck. She and her commanding officer, Captain Richard Walker, had just parked about 60 feet from the front door of the ill-fated building and exited the vehicle when they heard a whistling sound. The missile crashed into the roof and exploded, demolishing the building and knocking them both to the ground. To Tina’s horror, she saw that Captain Walker had been cut in two by flying shrapnel; he died in her arms.

Tina herself had been wounded, but she rushed into the ruined building three times to help wounded survivors escape before she lost consciousness and was Medevaced away from the carnage.

The folks at Guardian of Valor did the research and there was no Captain Richard Walker in the list of casualties for that singular, well-known incident. I noticed that she’s wearing an 82d Airborne Division combat patch, and I’m pretty certain that those Pennsylvania Reservists of the 14th Quartermaster Detachment who were killed that day weren’t wearing that patch on their shoulders that day. And, oh, by the way, she also claims she served in Grenada and Panama, of course. So she’s like the Forrest Gump of the end of the Cold War military.

I don’t know how many POGs from Desert Storm have told me the story that they were almost hit by a SCUD. You’d have thought the atmosphere over Saudi Arabia was thick with the things.

The Guardian of Valor folks claim that the author of the newspaper story about our little Weeble woman realized he had been been hoodwinked and retracted the fairy tale, but it would have been fairly easy to do it beforehand since there have been so few females who have been awarded a Silver Star and none of them were during Desert Storm.

I also have trouble picturing her in Air Assault school with that particular body type she’s sporting. And who taught her to wear a beret like a hairnet?

ADDED: Here are her records. She had been out of the Army for two years when Desert Storm kicked off;

Category: Phony soldiers