TAH in the AJC on Ladner
The Shane Ladner discussion goes on in the pages of the Atlanta Journal Constitution where reporter Bill Torpy sat down with the Ladners and their lawyer the other day. Shane & Co. are still clinging to the lie that he was awarded a Purple Heart for some secret squirrel operation in Central America;
Now, he and his lawyers say that was all a cover story. They say he actually was wounded by shrapnel during a classified drug interdiction action in Honduras in 1991.
Ladner entered the Army in 1990 and by December, records provided by his lawyers show, was in Honduras. Three months later, those records show, he was granted “top secret” classification. Another document with his name, a “classified information nondisclosure agreement,” says he can be charged criminally if he discloses such information.
“We cannot go into detail where he was or what happened when he was wounded; he cannot discuss this publicly,” said Cook. The lawyer then paused to anticipate the disbelief generated by the “can’t-tell-you” story. “Why is a kid fresh out of boot camp given top secret clearance? Because they are exposed to things not to be discussed in public. That’s the oath he took. He can’t even discuss these things with me.”
Ladner said the medal was lost when he sent it home from Central America. His lawyers also say they cannot find the citation that says he got one.
So the medal and all of the documentation has disappeared, but somehow it shows up on his DD214? It reminds me of the mysterious Bronze Star that magically appeared on Paul Rieckhoff’s DD214 which also didn’t have any supporting documents, but somehow the clerk knew to type it into his DD214, I guess using a Vulcan mind meld with the subject. The thing is that the NPRC can’t find the DD214 that Ladner is flashing around, but the VA has a copy;
We don’t sleep, we can’t eat, this just hangs over us,” said Ladner.
Ladner’s lawyers say they are still pushing to get records and have received many from both the Department of Defense and the Veterans Health Administration. The V.A. records included a copy of the newest DD214 denoting a Purple Heart but the DOD has not released that copy.
Well, yeah, the VA has a copy because Ladner gave it to them. When I filed my claim with the VA I had to give them both of my DD214s because they didn’t have one.
I spent some time with Torpy on the phone the other night and told him what you guys told me;
The report of possible fraud and later arrest has stoked widespread anger among many vets. An Internet site called “This Ain’t Hell” looks to “out” vets claiming medals they didn’t earn. Jonn Lilyea, who said he served in the Gulf War and who runs the site, said it’s implausible that a green soldier like Ladner would have been sent overseas for a covert operation. He said the anger will subside if “he and his lawyers come clean. But if they keep clinging to his story where will be no sympathy.”
Category: Phony soldiers
He was “granted top secret classification?” What the flying hell does that even mean??
He was granted a clearance?
If he was a 96B or any one of the intel series, he could have been granted TS out of basic, because you need the clearance to go through AIT. But this smells.
Utter Bovine fecal matter. There are no classified missions he would have been on in Honduras, that have not since been Declassified.
jonn, you may rmemeber TCA-42 on P-net…. my Alien Mothership escapee partner in crime there. He was in Honduras, he was on classified duty there, but guess what? All that was declassified back soon after 2001. He got his CIB, Bronze Star… and as far as I know they come with certificates detailing for who, what, when and where.
That story his attorney is spewing is utter garbage. Does he think we are all so damned stupid? Ladner says he lost the medal and the certificate? Wait… a Certificate for a Purple heart would identify when and where too… His story has bigger holes in it than the Titanic.
As far as TS Clearances, I had one too as did just about every swinging richard in my Company. Most all lost them too, when the Army finnally figured out they were handing them out like candy. I also signed Non Disclosure Agreements when I ETSd the first time in 87, but I never went secret squirrel…
Here’s a clue: All mythical awards are top secret! Maybe even above top secret because no one besides the maker of the myth has access to the supporting documents which no not exist until forged.
As Jonn stated also, the VA does not get your DD-214 from the Army, you have to give them a copy of it. They can verify a persons service electronically but your DD-214 is not sent to the VA nor can it be requested by the VA.
That electronic verification only gives branch, dates of service, and Discharge Status, nothing more.
Remember his story changed from Panama to Honduras when he was confronted. Now he has dug his heels…and it is going to get worse.
The only facts and military records that any jury will believe are those that are procured from NRPC, and if Ladner has his lawyer introduce forged documents in a court of law, that will only add to his troubles. What is this JACKASS thinking; unless he is a truly pathological.
I hope they disbar the attorney for knowingly lying.
rb325th: that is precisely one of the major things wrong with the way the VA does business. There is no reason that the VA should not have direct access to the military personnel records of any individual applying for VA benefits. If I recall correctly, all services went to electronic official military personnel records some time in the early 2000s. So for anyone discharged in the last decade, direct electronic read-only access should be the norm.
Part of the VA application process should be signing an SF180 giving the VA direct and full access to your military personnel records. No signature on the SF180, and the next thing the VA should tell an applicant is, “Have a nice day. Come back when you’ve changed your mind.”
The whole secret squirrel shit is just that–shit. I’ve had interim TS clearance for ops, and they take it away administratively when no longer needed. Yes, we signed non-disclosure agreements, but in no way does that cover any awards earned, such as (in my case) a Navy Expeditionary Medal, etc.
Bottom line, Ladner–your MISSIONS might have been classified, your awards are NOT. But then again, you knew that and you’re just playing off the public ignorance to try to bullshit them.
@9 I agree, since we know it is pretty easy to forge a DD-214 to the point of being able to get it past some clerks at the VA who I hate to say it probably are not well read on what to look for beyond Discharge Status and does it match the name of the person presenting it to them.
When it comes to abusing the system, let’s face it the doctors here for the most part do not have a Military background and you could tell them just about anything and they will likely believe it, or at least they will not it in your file… so suddenly that MP has it in his “va medical record” that he got wounded on a secret squirrel mission in Honduras that he cannot talk about…
So, “official VA Medical Records” are only as good as what the veteran tells their doctors happened. Think we have seen a few cases where that is true for what happens on Active Duty too. Stories changing from the theatre to stateside on what happened to joe snuffy based on what he tells the Docs happened.
Is there a position open now for tailgunner on the USS Oblivion?
I want to apply for that. Where do I send my pink form stamped with hearts?
I like how people get pissed at TAH because THEY are full of shit.
I signed a non-disclosure agreement when we went to Iraq, but don’t remember any of our “covert” operations. Maybe we worked on some super secret helicopter. One so secret, that no one knew about it.
Bottom line folks, the only reason they’re clinging to the story as long as they can is that IMHO, they’re hoping they get their settlement from the railroad company BEFORE he has to get on the stand and admit under penalty of perjury that there was in fact NO PH.
YMMV.
Does he have a service award (BSM, ARCOM) annotating his service/tour in Honduras/Panama?
One would assume he would.
Um, WOW….just WOW. I see this at some point going VERY Badly and it is going to go Badly FAST.
At what point does this guy think that he’s going to just keep lying and ALL OF A SUDDEN we’re all supposed to go….Oh YEAH, it’s COOL and he’s RIGHT and forget about everything that went before this? Is his and his lawyer’s sticking to his BS just as firmly as they are going to give everyone collective amnesia?
/I just can’t brain this dumbness.
Chip–the reason they’re sticking to it is because they know the odds are on their side. What percentage of people in the jury pool where he lives are veterans? What percentage of them served anytime after 1980?
Yeah, that number kind of depresses me too. But you’ve got to realize that even if he has to go to trial first, he’s got an excellent chance of finding 12 non-vets he and his lawyer can bullshit and end up walking.
Green Thumb: I think that “Joint Service Commendation Medal with Valor Device” shown on his suspect DD214 (the one the Army can’t find in his records) was supposed to be his EOT award for that tour.
Why it’s not on his earlier DD214 – and why the orders and certificate don’t seem to be in his OMPF – are good questions. I guess he must have had really bad S1 and MILPO support when he was in Panama. (smile)
@17.
Usually w/V is given for a specific incident, action, etc.
(or so I thought).
A JCOM, ARCOM, etc. would be the tour award. How long did he claim his tour lasted (pick either country, I guess)?
I seem to be getting curls in my hair. Never had them before. Does that mean I’m supposed to actually curly hair and my hair has been lying to me all this time?
Do you see where I’m going with this?
The lawyer has to ‘believe’ his client — innocent until proven otherwise –because that’s the attorney’s job. It would be real nice if just once, someone like Ladner unknowingly tried to hire an attorney who knows how to get the real info and was told to go pound sand.
Wasn’t Ladner arrested recently for fraud, maybe a couple weeks ago? That’s why he has a lawyer working for him now.
This will play itself out. It’s just another tiresome display of ‘look at me, look at me’. This kind of thing has a life span, which is probably drawing to an end. Yes, the possiblity that they’re trying to get a settlement before it’s all over is what’s driving it now. However, the oppostion in the settlement can end it quickly.
I think Mrs. Ladner deserves something — like a divorce from that clown.
@Beretverde….if you are in the Atlanta area, then you have seen this POS purport to be in Panama, Somalia, Cuba, Iraq and Afghanistan. His real DD214 says only Honduras. So lets add that to the list! Anyone, who takes his military career that seriously and brags about it is going to have all his documentation no doubt! His DD214 says he was in Honduras for 1 year? Just curious out there. How many servicemen get there metals on site? Do they have to be approved? Do they get put on in the hospital? He sent them back home from Honduras? Hummm smells fishy?
Goggle every news station in the Atlanta area and reports are made for all of this including two Purple Hearts! Not One, but Two! Duffy Dixon with 11 Alive confirms this in a specific report. All of this done to raise funds for his wife injured due to his lies to get on a float. I say float loosely because really it appeared to be folding chairs strapped haphazardly to the bed of an 18 wheeler. How can the citizens of Atlanta stand by and let this idiot continue these lies? Shane and Co. should be prosecuted for defrauding the citizens of Atlanta with all these lies. Lies lies and more lies…..the VA has the same one Shane has because he gave them to the VA….
Don’t know much about the secret squirrel stuff, except you’re not supposed to be talking about it, much less bragging about it. In other words, if he was really a secret squirrel, all his medals and awards and documentation would probably be in perfect order, so that no secret squirrel status was even suspected.
Hey, that’s pretty good. Maybe I need to go write a spy novel now… 😉
I left Boot Camp with a Secret/NoForn Clearance because it was required for my Rating. I (and a couple others) spent the better part of two days being interviewed for that clearance. Like NHSparky, I was also granted TopSecret Clearance on an interim basis, depending upon the ops we were doing. Later it was again granted full-time for another position I was sent to, but it was withdrawn prior to my discharge when it was no longer required.
I have an award (Navy Unit Commendation) awarded for classified operations to my entire frikkin’ squadron. Guess what? It was awarded in public, to the entire squadron, and is on my DD-214, plus I have a copy of the award, some 30 years later. You just don’t “misplace” that sort of stuff.
I agree with exPH-2: This guy is trying to drag out the lies in hopes of getting a settlement from the railroad company and anyone else they can try and wring money out of.
As the old saying goes, “Money talks and bullshit walks.”. I just wonder how soon Shane Ladner & Co.’s lies are going to walk straight into a concrete wall?
Next thing you know this 4sshole will tell us how he was with LTC Barlow on the ground floor, planning ops in Sierra Leone…
Where do I sign up for this secret squirrel status? I had a Top Secret/Crypto/(Can’t divulge the rest) classification. I was in Vietnam on a secret new helo that didn’t use rotors to keep it secret, super quiet. But I didn’t think about that because I was getting my BFG9000 full charged as we hit the LZ. The whole unit got DSCs, ARCOMMs, and they gave us all Purple Hearts just for carrying all the gear we had and getting hand cuts on the elephant grass. I have divulged too much already. I better call my lawyer. 😀 Tongue in cheek.
I had a TS with a bunch of acronyms after it soon after I completed boot camp. It was required for my rating, but I never saw a TS document. NDAs were standard in the stack of paperwork that had to be signed during any in processing/out processing evolution. My only question would be why an MP would need a TS. The only reason that I can think of is that he was playing door guard to a SCIF. The key would be to see if he had any read-ons, or if it was just a vanilla TS.
Using Self-reported Medical Records As Proof Of Service? Lander Should As Tim Powe How That Worked Out.
An assclown working alongside another assclown. Peachy.
I was a 92Y who was sent to Armorer school after my AIT (yay, desk rangers). I was “granted” a Secret in the middle of AIT with the rest of my class. When I weny back for my -20 training, that was upgraded to a Top Secret. Does that make me a super dooper trooper like that ass weasel? No, that makes me one of many joes able to do battalion-level maintenance on night vision equipment and handle some other items. Big whoop.
This guy makes it sound like a TS clearance makes you James Bond. I’m pretty sure that to get to those levels of security, you go far beyond even TS level.
I GOT IT! 😀 Shane Ladner and his lawyer are holding out in hopes of Shane Ladner’s beating Phillip Dale Monkress in the Stolen Valor Competition! 😀
While there may be some truth to Ladner’s assertion he was stationed in Honduras at some point, I’m sure we can all agree he wasn’t in Panama for “Just Cause”. Because of his “drug interdiction” claims, I’ve been doing a little digging lately and found while the U.S. was conducting drug interdiction in Central America, it didn’t begin until May 1991 (Operation Cadence) and likely continues today in some fashion under JTF Bravo. As far as Army assignments go, I can only presume he may have been stationed there for a year (January 1991 – January 1992), and would have some knowledge of the drug interdiction operations going on, so maybe that’s where he latched onto the story from that experience. The only thing I found was that DoD is only mentioned to the extent of providing assistance in tracking aircraft departing South America and entering Central American airspace, and the USCG being used as assets to patrol Honduras’ coastline. There is some mention of how U.S. military advisors (specifically, Special Forces) were there in support of training the Honduran military in drug interdiction operations as Mobile Training Teams (MTT), likely based from the Enrique Soto Cano air base. If he was an MP, I suspect he went as a security augment in the MP role for 1 year – nothing else.
Too bad the guy who wrote this article John Lilyea does not have a CIB like he claims. I got his FOIA and it does not show a CIB oh John admit that you are a fraud. You should see john and hondo on their other website
Oh Psul or Phil,
Is that you??
/lmfao
“Hondo” in Comment #9 is absolutely correct.
I think his point can be carried much further than just how the VA does business. We know that a lot of records are on paper for the older vets, but for the last 15 years or so (maybe longer) everything is electronic. There should be publicly accessible databases that include name, MOS, awards, and chronological records.
If the vet received an honorable discharge then it should be standard that the discharge is included in the database. Everyone, including honorable discharges, should be given the ability to opt-out of having their discharge included.
This stuff should be a lot simpler. It is already all digitized, if I want to verify someone’s vet status / discharge / awards or if I want someone to know mine, it should be a lot easier than it is.
It should be as public as marriage records or land deed databases.
Chip, that wanker is a gay guy who wants people to look at his gay prujn. He has nothing to say worth answering.
ChipNASA: likely not. I’d guess just our most recent troll having what appears to be an obsession with what Google says is a gay/tranny shock porn site. (I’ll take Google’s word for that.)
His comments here actually seem more like something from Shakespeare:
“. . . . a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.”
Oh, it’s meatbeating! Clean-up on aisle 6!
@36 Ex-PH2,
Yeah well “meatspin” is just a tiny little CLUE…..
@39 – Chip, I gave a rather reserved answer on purpose. 🙂
Billy: technologically, that’s easy. The design would be fairly straightforward, once requirements were agreed to. The security aspect is solvable. And even with links to certificates/orders for decorations (if desired), the storage space required would be manageable.
The problem is getting the data. Current personnel systems probably aren’t set up well to export all of the necessary data – and if they can’t be made to do so, you’re looking at manually extracting the data from around 2.5-3.0 million sets of personnel records.
Further, that’s only the tip of the iceberg. For anything like that to be useable, you really would need data back to at least 1961 (the beginning of the Vietnam War), and preferably back to Korea. (Back to World War II would be great, but realistically that generation is now rapidly disappearing.) That means going through literally tens of millions of paper records from Korea/Vietnam/the Cold War and extracting huge amounts of data from them.
Correctness would be critical, if for no other reason than to avoid Uncle Sam getting sued. Getting that info correct will mean two people validating each data entry.
Completeness is also another problem. Many Korea-era and Vietnam-era records are simply not that complete. And with decentralized decoration authority (hell, during wartime the Purple Heart can be awarded in the Army by literally any Field-Grade HQ with orders issuing authority if PH award authority has been so delegated), you’re talking manual review of unit historical files to find stuff that never made it to people’s military personnel files. Add badges/tabs/MOS qualifications, and, well . . . .
Don’t get me wrong; such a system would indeed be of great utility for the general public. But with the Federal government’s current fiscal problems and coming fiscal crunch, I just don’t see anyone ponying up the $$$ required to do the job correctly – e.g., to 4 or 5 nines completeness and accuracy – anytime in the next decade.
@37 Or perhaps he is attempting to prove Einstein’s quote: Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I’m not sure about the former.
Of course too many of these 4ssclowns forget their Shakespeare such as this line from All’s Well That Ends Well :
No legacy is so rich as honesty.
Hondo – well said. One essential…. someone in the government would have to give a damn about veterans. That may be harder to find than the money to finance it.
David: I don’t think that’s the basic problem. The problem is that Uncle Sam has over-promised everything to literally everyone for the last 40+ years: free medical care for the elderly and poor (Medicare and Medicaid), paid retirement for everyone who works (Social Security), unemployment and disability compensation (Federal support for state-run unemployment insurance and Social Security), food assistance (food stamps), general housing assistance, and God only knows how many other programs designed to “help people”. But instead of making these programs supportable through fenced tangible investments, we did all of that by transferring income from those who earn it to those who did not via taxes. In essence, Uncle Sam ran Ponzi schemes.
Ponzi schemes work for a while. But the demographic trends over time have clearly shown that all of this is not supportable – and those facts have been routinely and blithely ignored. However, we’ve just about run out of time during which cold, hard reality can be ignored. The bills are all rapidly coming due, pretty much all at once.
Total all that up, and you’re already approaching 50% of the Federal government’s annual outlays – if not exceeding it. That leaves precious little for things like paying people who’ve actually earned something that which they’ve earned.
“That leaves precious little for things like paying people who’ve actually earned something that which they’ve earned.”
Well said, Hondo.
How long can Ladner and his hopefully soon to be disbarred attorney keep up this spin? Maybe the longer they do keep spinning maybe a Judge will decide enough is enough and throw the book at both of them. Do they think everyone is a stupid as they are? That every comment that comes from their mouth is not researched? These nuts have to face reality and give it up. His poor wife – does she have any idea where this is taking her?????
LOOK!! #33 Spin-On-My-Meat The Troll is back. And he’s posted the exact same thing he did last time. What does that tell you about his(?) intelligence?
Basically Ladner is just going to keep lying, hoping he avoids jailtime. “This is my story and I am sticking to it”, give him an A for committment and his wife sticking by his lies are a shock to be honest…
By the way, anyone wanna get an IP tracking on Meatspinner
Hondo,
Thanks for your thoughts — you are right, it would be a nightmare trying to corral records for the older generations. May the right answer is to move backwards from the present day.
One way to start is by allowing vets to maintain access to things like Marine Online even after they are separated. I know that the Army has Army Knowledge Online which is similar.
We are starting to rely so much on electronic databases. I am frankly not a fan of the DD214 system.