Waverly Reynar; a phony Vietnam veteran, phony Marine in Canada

Someone sent a link to this fellow, Waverly “Wave” Reynar who claimed to the Canadian Leduc Rep that he was a Marine and Vietnam veteran. It was the story of his enlistment that caught my attention;

Reynar didn’t set out to be a Marine, but a single phone call and a spur-of-the-moment decision made one night in a bar in Butte, Montana in 1962 changed the course of his life forever.

He and a friend had left their hometown of Leduc months earlier with a few hundred dollars between them and a one-way bus ticket to Montana.

“We thought we were going to be cowboys, but that didn’t work out too good,” Reynar recalled. “There was a big coal strike going on at that time so the jobs weren’t very plentiful.”

Reynar and his friend got jobs grilling burgers and washing dishes for 80 cents an hour at the bus depot to try to earn enough money to get home for Christmas.

“We were just kids,” Reynar said. “We were staying in a flophouse. We just couldn’t get enough money and we didn’t know how we were going to get home.”

Then one night the pair coaxed the bartender at a local dive to let them have a couple of beers, even though, at 17 and 18 respectively, they were considerably underage. Sitting by the back door in case they needed to make a hasty escape, they noticed that the bartender was on the phone.

A few minutes later, two uniformed men entered the bar and approached Reynar and his friend. They identified themselves as Marine Corps recruiters and promised to send the boys home for Christmas, no matter what.

“They gave us our green cards right away,” Reynar said. “I went into the Marine Corps in January.”

Reynar turned 18 in boot camp in San Diego.

On Aug. 14, 1965, at the age of 21, he landed on the shores of Chu Lai, Vietnam.

Yep, everyone knows that Marine Recruiters are trolling bars for Canadian teenagers that they can Shanghai into the Marine Corps, because they make the best Marines. And also, the recruiters walk around with Green Cards in their pockets for just such an encounter. By the way, Wave’s birth date was was in May 1943, that makes him 19 in 1962, not 17. That math gets ’em every time.

Reynar doesn’t like to talk about the war – partly because of the horrific memories it brings to the surface, and partly out of a habit picked up during his leave from the service as a way of deflecting negative attention.

ADDED; Wave wearing a Silver Star that doesn’t appear in the other pictures;

He claims that this is him supposedly proof that he was in Vietnam (but who can tell?) Are those pine trees behind him?

We went back for another whack at his records, and find out that he was Marine, but not to the extent that he claims. No valor awards, no war wounds. He spent 11 years in the Navy as a cook;

The Marines say he served 4 years and was discharged as a corporal, that’s almost the same as 20+ years he claimed and being a Gunny, after all whats 16 extra years of service and 3 pay grades between friends?

If you’re going to have a ridiculous story about your accidental enlistment, at least have the minimum amount of documentation to back it up. Of course, I messaged Mr. Reynar on Facebook to get his explanation and thus far, I’ve been treated to the full-throat sounds of crickets.

Category: Phony soldiers